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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: Good morning.

Alan: Good morning.

Stephen: So you were at prog stock. Did you see my post that Kevin J. Anderson was there also?

Alan: As a matter of fact, I talked to him multiple times. I already have multiple of his books, and so I didn’t, I, compared to everything else that I bought there, I did not patronize him. But it’s, he, they actually gave him a little bit of stage time to mention, Hey, what do I listen to while I’m writing these Mag Magnificent for those loyal [00:01:00] readers and listeners.

Kevin G. Anderson is the guy who, along with Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert’s son, has continued the Dune series and continued meaning he wrote a whole bunch of prequels. Dune is a, an amazing space opera has all these various different races, planets, technologies, et cetera, and they fleshed out.

So where did the Benet eRate come from? Where did the ai, all that kind of stuff and very well done, and. If you, as you might remember from the Dune books, they’re like tomes, they’re like, good 500 pages.

Stephen: Small print.

Alan: Exactly. Where I remember one of the, probably Dune was the first book that I read where they had a glossary.

There were so much new language introduced and stuff like that, that you had to page back and say, what’s the Gaja bar again? Oh, that’s the test thing. So it I really ad admired that they didn’t just continue the series. They really adopted what made them great. Frank Herbert really wrote the biggest world building literally type thing that [00:02:00] I think I still, that I’ve ever read.

And so he’s got a very cool new series called Tara Incognita and his crack, his comment was, it’s a lot like Game of Thrones except that it’s finished,

Stephen: Wow.

So he also helped work on the final Rush album, clockwork Angels,

Alan: He mentioned that too, that was the tie in especially to Prague, is that he mentioned, and more than not only Clockwork Angels where they wrote a book having to do with it, but that he had been friends with

Stephen: Neil for 35 years.

Alan: that. Neil Perton and that. So it’s very cool how these things tie together.

Annie Haslam, who is the voice from Renaissance, was there displaying her art the entire weekend. And it’s very cool to, to find out that they’re not only music people, but that they have all these other interests and all these other friends and connections and stuff like that. I’ve always been, and probably like you, the guy who you in the old days, you’d flip the album over, you’d open the gatefold and you’d read who’s [00:03:00] on it, and then when you’d see a band that looks interesting and say, oh here’s Phil Collins playing on something besides Genesis or the people.

There’s all kinds of. Incestuous stuff between gong and Hawk Wind and David Allen, all kinds of things. And I just, you follow those people around because, hey, if Steve Hillage is good over here, he’s probably doing good solo stuff or good news stuff. Dave Bainbridge is the guy that I really didn’t know that much about until I started attending Pro Stock, but now I’m finding out that he does his own great.

He’s a multi-instrumentalist, so he does keyboards, guitars, all kinds of stuff. And not only synthesized and very modern, but like going back to Celtic things. So that’s a lot of what he does with. Sally Nie and who is Sally Nie, the daughter of Kerry Nie, who was the keyboardist for Gentle Giant.

And it all I’m just, I always have the great time of making that new little connection discovery. And then when it pays off, it’s I’m glad that my mind retains all those little tiny threads. And then I was able to put [00:04:00] that mystery together. They, I really love them.

That is Dave Bainbridge is just, they his music is great and the fact that he can step into all these different worlds and capture the different atmosphere of like old honking yuan pipe type, get Celtic music. I, I. Boy did I spend money this weekend? As I’ve mentioned too many times, I used to, how do you accumulate a lot of CDs is if you like, buy ’em on the cheap.

And I used to have kind of a $7 limit, and now that I’ve opened the gates, oh boy. So I found a whole bunch of good stuff for 12 and 15, 16 going up to 20. If it’s a multi CD thing, that’s only $10 each. And so that’s still in the good range.

Stephen: Suddenly you’re like I only got 10 things, but oh man, that was 150 bucks and there’s 10 more I want.

Alan: honestly, I spent hundreds and what happened was, I, they have a two sections where these are all the people you’re gonna be hearing in the course of the festival. And so I tend to as soon as I hear a [00:05:00] band that I like, like funhouse mirrors, so very young, but very interesting. So I got their cd, but then you go here’s I re I really liked, dave Bainbridge. I really liked Tiger Moth Tales. A guy named Peter Jones who is, he’s just an, he’s also blind, like Rachel Flowers is that I’ve mentioned before, but just made of music. He’s so musical, beautiful voice, keyboards, guitar, et cetera.

Stephen: How can he hear the music if he’s blind?

Alan: Yeah, funny. I thought the same thing. No, it just it, I, so I bought a whole bunch of Tiger Moth tails. That’s his band name. That is really him. But, that kind of thing. And sometimes when you discover people, you find out they’ve been around for a long time, so I think I bought like 10, and on the way home, I’m listening in the car. I have my whole, rack of stuff and I’m like picking things out randomly so I don’t listen to all the Tiger Moth tales in a row. ’cause I wanted the variety and just. So good. And I’ve missed listening to him for [00:06:00] 20 years.

’cause I didn’t know about the storyteller’s album or the Turning of the World album or whatever else it might be. I had listened to a Dave Bainbridge one that was called like From Silence. That was him and a collaborator playing in a cathedral. Very old style music. Music and like I said, Yuan pipes and stuff, if that’s how you pronounce it, U ian pipes.

It was so ambiance. I’m like, this is not good driving music. This is me crashing into an abutment music. And so I had to stop that one. That’s something that I’ll listen to while I’m writing or something like that. I like having nonverbal and relatively gentle, that’s not true for azra tentacles, but that kind of music.

So all kinds of good discoveries and not only one loving them for the hour and a half that they were on stage. But now I have wonderful things to go home to and listen to and fall in love with and I’m always also thinking. Colleen might like this too. And especially, because she’s a Colleen, a Bonnie, Colleen, she’ll like the Celtic.

And I also had this big reaction. They had all a whole wide [00:07:00] variety of stuff. And I really, as I’ve gotten older, I guess I’m really appreciating beautiful more and more. When I was young, young man, pull a piss and vinegar, you’re like, gimme the aggressive, gimme Metallica.

Give me, where I just, I’m gonna go out there and I’m getting ready for the football game and let’s hear that UFO anthem. And now the contrast between Tiger Moss tales followed up by a band called Discipline that was they’re not quite like thrash metal, death metal where you’re being growled at, shouted at for an hour.

And the, but the themes were desolate, really doom and gloom. They had really great computer graphics running behind all the various different bands, but some bands also bring their own videos. And these were really disturbing. It was like, is that guy gonna get lynched? What’s going on here?

You know what I mean? And abandoned buildings and people are exploring and there was like a shadowy figure off to the side. It’s oh, please don’t get jumped. And all that kind stuff. And the guy, the lead singer for discipline, dressed like the joker that [00:08:00] is at least face made up like the joker clown makeup.

And he would actually like grin maniacally at some of the worst lines in their lyrics. It’s I don’t know that I’m liking having these things stay in my head when you remember everything and now they poisoned you with really awful images.

Stephen: I mean we had kiss, we had Alice Cooper all stage performance, stage rock, even Nirvana. I remember the one time that’s some reporter was disillusioned because he was like hanging out with them like in normal environment, not like backstage or at a press conference interview.

It was just a, and he’s they don’t talk the same, they don’t act the same. They dress normal. They and he was just very this doesn’t seem like Nirvana. ’cause they have the persona that they create. And Alice Cooper, I remember told a story several times in interviews where he’s it’s horrible to wake up.

I got my robe on, I go out with my coffee to get my paper and there’s people sleeping on my lawn, dressed in makeup, and they’re like, oh, we wanna see Alice Cooper, we wanna see Alice Cooper. He is can you get off my lawn? They’re like, no, we wanna see Alice [00:09:00] Cooper. He is I’m Alice Cooper. And no, you’re not.

’cause he didn’t have the makeup and stuff. He’s that’s my persona that’s on stage. And even Lucy, she was a smart business woman, but you get her in front of the camera and she’s a slapstick, goofball. It’s, I’m assuming it’s a lot performance and it made me think of a new band I discovered.

I’ll tell you in a minute. Go ahead and finish.

Alan: Yes. I guess I really understand that. We can start naming so many examples. Emo Phillips is not the shrill voice, like he, the all kinds of people, Bob Goldway does not talk like he does on stage, off stage and stuff

Stephen: He does Bigfoot movies now. Bigfoot Expeditions.

Alan: I was talking about that.

Exactly. I, so I, what I was trying to comment on is not so much, I guess the people, but the music was, like I said, disturbing and the images are disturbing and stuff, and so I’m just getting to this point of

I don’t. Cotton to that as much as I once did, I might’ve had my share of youthful alienation and go get ’em, that kind of stuff.

And now I just, [00:10:00] especially the contrast of one following the other, it was like, wow, I really like Tiger Mo’s tales even more now, because they’re just as talented. They’re just as complex a music. But I don’t feel like that all the topics were suicide and genocide and, whatever. So a band named Siberian, that same thing, really great music, but they really have desolate themes and stuff like that. And I, long ago, I remember I Nine Inch Nails, Trent Resner, I could listen to his CDs like once a year. They’re just so black. They’re so dark and distressing and.

I guess it’s an outlet, for people who really have that, that they, it’s better that they’re listening to this than living that a terrible life of, I wanna fuck you like an animal and stuff like that. But I’m realizing that I guess that’s, when you think of Sting doesn’t do the police anymore, he does stink music and it’s more mature and mature doesn’t have to mean always [00:11:00] like gentler and stuff like that, but it definitely is that there, the adult themes are not.

How do you kill someone? The adult themes are like, wow, I got my heart broken and I don’t see my kids anymore. You know what I mean? It’s very different. So hats off to the organizers. They continually get so many great bands to Rutherford, New Jersey. Steve Hogarth was there doing his first ever solo show in the United States.

He’s played with Meridian before, but and he was the featured act lasting on Sunday night and nobody wanted to go home. And of course, it’s, the Building Management Williams Center is like getting ready to pull the plug. It’s curfew time, that kind of thing. But it just the atmosphere, everybody there.

Is so happy to be there. And they’re sitting down during the show instead of getting standing up to get another beer. And nobody is rushing to stage except in appreciation and to get a picture as compared to the mosh pit and all that kind of stuff. So all the hysteria there seems to go with concerts or the uncaring, where people [00:12:00] are just, I’m gonna go see a show and I don’t really care what it is. None of that is here. Everybody that knows about it is there. It’s not totally sold out. So that’s a distressing thing is out of all the United States and Canada where real people come from, they’re, they have 2000 people, but not 5,000 people.

You know what I mean? So it’s, I hope that as word gets out and more tickets get sold and they’ll be able to continue to keep this going. I had, they had interviews, they had all kinds of things for sale. They had pumpkin carving where because it’s the month of Halloween, it’s really a, an and Rutherford itself, a very cool, like whenever you pop outside, you can go and get food at 20 different places within walking distance. And it’s not Burger King, McDonald’s and chain things. It’s like local. I don’t know. It’s just they really found actively or locked into this great venue and this great place and I just, I don’t think I’m ever gonna miss this, unless it provides exactly. With Halloween or something like that. But right now they didn’t [00:13:00] announce any of the bands for next year, but I’m like. Whoever you get, what your taste seems to really be good and run across the entire young and old and foreign and domestic and just every different style of Prague.

’cause there are many, there’s art rock and symphonic rock and you know that kind. It just, it’s a wonderful immersive weekend. And of course, you know my old ears, I kept my plugs in all the time and stuff like that. And I’m sitting there, I found a deli nearby that has Diet Dr. Pepper. So instead of only getting their generic coke selection, I was able to keep myself just so happy.

Just such a happy weekend for me.

Stephen: You mentioned Prague and Kevin J. Anderson. The big news from this past week was. Rush announced a new tour,

Alan: Yes. And that’s what a great segue because while I was outta town they went on presale in various different places. And for Cleveland it was Monday. And luckily, Scott, Robert, Jeff, they, we all want to go. And Scott and Robert were both able to get on, get the code through the presale, get in [00:14:00] line.

So we actually have unfortunately two sets of tickets, one on the main floor, one on the side there. Some places were going for 700, a thousand dollars, but we were able to get ’em in the hundreds, which is still a lot for a concert, but no rush for 10 years. Not sure if there’s gonna be any rush tour after this.

The cool new drummer and it Canis, I think, anika. Thank you. That’s funny. I would, I’ve never heard her name said out loud. So there we go. And she seems like of all the ways in which you might have to follow Neil Parrot, it’s, that’s not an easy act to follow a hundred fold and yet. It’s enough of a change.

She’s incredibly talented that the little sample videos that I’ve seen of her, like she might be able to pull this off. How cool is that?

Stephen: He he actually endorsed her in some interviews like years ago

Alan: he had discovered her? Yeah. Okay.

Stephen: that he knew of her, he liked her, he approved, something like that. So there’s an approval and Neil’s wife and daughter both are in full support of the tour and everything all the, because they knew immediately people would be [00:15:00] like, oh, you guys are sellouts.

Oh, you’re the, they’re not sellouts. Dear God Rush, I would never say they are sellouts and they’re only doing five stops. So Cleveland’s one of five.

Alan: Yeah. I think they went to the places that like broke ’em early on. They’ve

Stephen: WMMS broke ’em in the States. Their live, their one live tour from Clockwork Angels was recorded. The DVD was recorded in Cleveland, so they have a big connection with Cleveland. So you know, it, it was like, wow, they’re coming here and we don’t have to travel halfway across the country

Alan: I was so happy that the boys were able to get tickets for me. ’cause otherwise I would’ve been okay at noon. I gotta stop no matter where. Get good wifi hop online, that kind of stuff. It, from what I understand, they really did have like server freezes and they were deluge, a whole bunch of extra traffic compared to whatever Ticketmaster usually experiences. I think it was Ticketmaster. So I’m glad that it was all able to come together, and honestly, it’s not until September of next year, so we got pretty much a year to wait and here’s hoping that everybody stays healthy for another [00:16:00] year because you know what I mean, there. And it could be that Yeah we’re going to, oh God, don’t,

Stephen: It gonna get raided

Alan: I, I, yeah, because they got all that libertarian thought,

Stephen: god. You fascist, you

Alan: The opening act, by the way, on Thursday night was Fred Barta, because Russia has a long called Red barta, that’s about the, before they signed the motor laws and that guy. And so I just, it, I’m very happy that a thing like this exists, used to be that Proto Fest in also in October in Chicago was like, can’t you guys just coordinate?

So it’s every six months instead of exactly the same month. But then some part of it was if they’re gonna play at one, maybe they’ll play at the other. Because bands that are coming to the States to do a tour, there’s no guarantee that they could put together a tour without two anchors.

You know what I mean? So it all, it always is business. It always is. Hey, it costs money to bring everybody over, get the work visas, bring the equipment, that kind of stuff. It I understand that. And there’s so many of these bands [00:17:00] that really seem to be. They’re doing it outta love ’cause they sure can’t be doing it for money.

Mike Neely has been playing for a long time, since Zap and others and just has his band called Beer for Dolphins, BFD ha. And like he he just seems to be prolific and keep going, but his, he just wouldn’t sell out 20,000 seed auditoriums. He plays to the Beachland Ballroom and stuff like that, so I’m glad that working musicians can still do this.

And in fact, it’s funny. We just saw before I left on Wednesday night of last week, we went to see the California Guitar Trio at a place called the Mercury Music Lounge right here in Lakewood. And it’s a little place and it was like. They also first great as their music is, and as much as the inheritance from the Robert Phipps League of Crafty guitarists, the Guitar Craft School and stuff.

They’ve never made it big, but they have, 15 albums out and they really seemed to be able to between, like their cool thing was they were recording the show that night and then where you could buy the [00:18:00] UBS drive with that show like right after the show.

Stephen: wondered why more people don’t do that. I when they had the things as kiosks that would write movies to disks, so you order the movie, it writes at the disk in five minutes. I’m like, why aren’t they doing that at theaters? I go to a theater, I see a movie, I pay 15 bucks. For 25 I get this.

The DVD as I walk out the door,

Alan: exactly. I remember it’s like Jaro Tall, Ian Anderson was one of the first ones to do it, that when they did the tour, they also had the Aqua Long Reimagined album and it was part of the price of the ticket. You know what I mean? They using it included. And so that was already a pre-made album, if you will.

And I really did think, they gotta be able to record these things right from the soundboard, high fidelity, it’s not gonna be that they have a chance to mix it or fix mistakes, but that’s part of having a live recording is the spontaneity and the, for every bit of Unquality, there’s also never heard that before.

How fantastic. ’cause that’s solo and now I’m the only guy on the planet that has it.

Stephen: Back in the day you’d get kicked out if [00:19:00] you had a recording thing and now they’re taking advantage of it. Unless you went to see The Dead. The Dead had a section that you could bring recording stuff to.

Alan: Exactly that. There’s ney used to do that. Some of his early success was that he would say, bootleggers roll those tapes. You know what I mean? He just, he knew that the, before we called it going viral, people knew that the way of getting their music out was not only having to ring every dollar out of every then vinyl, then cd, et cetera.

It was these people are playing this music all the time and their friends are hearing it, and that’s how it’s getting out. You know what I

Stephen: and weird, Al was asked, once, how he feels about because he wrote the song, don’t Steal this song, and it makes fun of what was going on at the time with what’s his name from Sticks and Lars from Metallica and

Alan: Exactly.

Stephen: But they asked him.

Alan: He’ll tell

Stephen: but they asked him, does it upset him that people are, stealing his music and giving it around for free and stuff?

And he says, no, that actually doesn’t upset me a lot. What upsets [00:20:00] me is when all these pirate places have really bad parody songs and they say it’s mine. I don’t wanna be associated with the songs that aren’t mine.

Alan: Ho Honestly, I was, I’m a big believer in intellectual property, and I didn’t buy a single bootleg for the longest time. And then I at a place in Champaign or bandana called Vinyl Madness, as I recall, I found a 10 record Zappa box set, and it really was like a labor of love by whoever did it.

There must have been, I don’t know, a thousand, maybe a hundred copies of this made nine, 10, 10 vinyl with liner notes and things about the shows and the music and all that kind of stuff. And it wasn’t pristine quality because you still had to be taping on the slide, but it was I get to hear things that I’ve never heard from anywhere else.

And I, that’s the one time I sinned that I really like. And then I, because I, it’s funny. I bought, I, I bought everything else that Zappa has. It’s not like I didn’t buy Zappa stuff and got this instead. So I [00:21:00] alleviated my guilt by saying this is an addition to, instead of a substitute for the real marking.

Stephen: there’s a difference between owning his full catalog and getting some bootleg stuff on the side after you’ve gone to a dozen concerts yourself and bought shirts and stuff, as opposed to the guy who just grabs all the catalog to download and never paid for one, never went to a concert, or, there is a difference.

But now like my one buddy said he buys the CDs of bands that still have ’em, some don’t nowadays, but he goes and buys the cd, but then he’ll sit and stream ’em on Spotify. He’s I gave him money from that and now I’m giving him money from this. So he does both.

Alan: It, so he gets some money from putting it on Spotify

Stephen: No, he doesn’t. He listens to Spotify. So the band gets paid from.

Alan: it

Stephen: No. He doesn’t upload it. He just listens to ’em. Like Rush. If Rush comes out with a new cd, he buys the cd, so he has it. But then instead of listening to only the cd, he listens to ’em on Spotify. So they’re still [00:22:00] getting paid for all

Alan: Yeah, it’s funny, I have such an extensive CD collection that I still am not regularly on Spotify or Apple Music or anywhere. And there’s certain things I’ve thought particular and maybe YouTube seems to have all kinds of things when I want to hear intergalactic touring band. And indeed, someone has uploaded a whole bunch of the cuts, if not the full album.

And then I feel stupid and guilty because I have it, but it’s on vinyl instead of a cd. So I own it, but I don’t have it right here where I can just click on my machine. And so I regularly do look for is that finally gonna get reissued, that I’ve had CDs that I’ve been hungry for forever.

Interesting. Derek Schulman was one of the guests there. He’s the guy that was the lead singer for Gentle Giant. And obviously they all. Sang and did played every instrument and stuff like that. But he, after finishing with Gentle Giant, went on to become a huge record executive for Warner Brothers Atco.

All different kinds of things. And he was, their gentle giant was very musical, so he [00:23:00] could tell that they really knew what they were doing. He ended up, he was the guy that discovered Bon Jovi, discovered Pantera and like he started naming all these bands that he broke, managed, et cetera.

And it’s cool that, for you, having been General Giant was never big. They never had like radio hits and stuff like that, but their musical of high quality, it’s cool that his sense of this is good music. It could be shifted towards it’s not as esoteric as Gentle Giant was, but the kids will love this.

And he was right. You know what I mean? He, about how many different things? So his talks about the. Trajectory of gentle. In fact, and I have to say this with Pride, I got a chance to ask him a question and I, so as I host Pretentious Drinking in Chicago. We get together and sample all these different liqueurs and

Stephen: I always remember when that starts, but I never remember the ending of that.

Alan: So what I mentioned to him was that I hosted this event. And the reason that I mentioned is because where does the title Pretentious [00:24:00] Drinking come from? Because they used to tour with a big banner behind them saying pretentious. Because at one point a critic had said, these guys are like pretentious for its own sake.

And they actually didn’t feel this. They embraced that. And so I said, that inspir, that’s where I got that you inspired me to have this Pinkies out event that we host and stuff. And he was very tickled by it. So it’s okay, me and Derek now had a moment. We had a very nice little thing. So that was cool.

A lot of what goes on is not only do they have the bands, but they have the meet and greets afterwards. And you really get, I don’t like to get in the line, and I’m like, just, oh, please sign these 30 things. It’s just you wanna say, man, I’ve listened to your museum museum your music all my life, and I just thank you.

You know what I mean? When you talk to, it doesn’t matter who it’s like, and like you if you shake the hand, you’re like, I promise I’m not gonna hurt your drumming hand. You know what I mean? It’s because some of them are very defensive about that. They do fist bumps nowadays because they’ve had fans grab em or something like that, how weird is that?

Stephen: a [00:25:00] little too entitled sometimes.

Alan: Yeah. But overall from 10 in the morning until midnight every day, good stuff. Lots of friends share. Hello. Shout out to Robert and Sharon, who are friends that I’ve made just from this, and we’ve gotten to know each other and they also go to the cruise to the edge that’s coming up.

And so a lot of people have that, the. The cross pollination of that cruise’s t-shirts and this events t-shirts, and they all talk about what have you seen lately? And it’s very cool to, I love being a steel hair that gets to say, I saw electric light orchestra with Steve Hillage back in 1976, so 50 years almost ago.

And that, that, these groups have been around for a long time and that’s how long I’ve been a fan. These guys have been absolutely a part of my life. So very fun. It’s fun to, once in a while, just pull out the pipe. Oh, back in my, of course, we only hadrons we didn’t have any of this.

Stephen: the Moog. That, you mentioned that [00:26:00] so one of the things interesting for the Rush concert is they actually have a full-time keyboard is coming along with them also, because Getty wanted to have more freedom on the stage, he didn’t wanna have to be stuck to that one spot because he had to play 50 instruments.

Alan: I hear you. Fred Barta actually had that, the bassist also played the keyboards and a number of times he was kinda like doing things with three, three hands if you’ll, because he had so much going on. You it I get

Stephen: And here we have well endowed Fred playing instruments.

Alan: Exactly. I think a lumber bands have done that. They supplement now to make sure that their sound is as rich as it is in the studio. But it’s not just the three guys in the studio. They overlay that.

Stephen: Or like some of these guys, they’re in their seventies. When we saw Willie Nelson last year he was arthritic and he was playing, but he had somebody with him that was playing and there were a couple times Willie would kinda stop, but he kept his warbling singing going and he’d start strumming again.

But you could tell it wasn’t always right on. [00:27:00] For all I know, they could have had his guitar completely turned off,

Alan: and they really had that, Ian Anderson has had that, he now has a backup vocalist that does all of what used to. He used to have a great range and really have fidelity throughout the range, and I think now that’s much smaller. So he has a guy that can handle the soaring parts and the growling parts and whatever would strain the voice.

If you’re gonna do a tour of 50 shows, you can cash your voice out after two or three of them by straining too much. You know what I mean? So

Stephen: S So I got two new ones I’ve been following. So the first one, I don’t know if you’ve heard about Youngblood. Have you heard everything going on with that?

Alan: Nope. Okay.

Stephen: At the Ozzy tribute concert, Youngblood played, nobody knew who he was at all. He was just basically a kid that did YouTube videos and singing.

But Ozzy was his idol. So he made himself dress and looked like Ozzy used to when he was younger.

Alan: Okay.

Stephen: Sharon, this is the story I’ve heard. [00:28:00] Sharon actually saw these videos and showed him the Ozzy and Ozzy’s this kid is me. That was me 25 years

So when he was doing the final concert, Ozzy asked this kid to be to come and sing and play and was saying, this is my protege.

He’s going to, carry on the music into the next generation and this, so if you go watch some of those videos, he’s in there, you’ll see ’em and he’s just, living large. But then afterwards, at whatever tribute for all the people that didn’t get on the Aussie concert Aerosmith and stuff, he sang with Stephen Tyler on stage from, Stephen Tyler from Aerosmith.

Alan: so good young Ozzy. That’s

Stephen: All these people were like, who the hell is Youngblood? And then suddenly he’s everywhere. And everybody that was an Ozzy fan knew him, which essentially is, most of the music industry knows Ozzy

Alan: Yeah. Yeah.

Stephen: So there you go. From literal nothing to a week later, one of the big [00:29:00] stars.

Alan: things in his bedroom and posting them on YouTube or whatever like that, and then, wow.

Stephen: The kid’s got a good voice. He’s got good stage presence. He is got a little cockiness and shit going on, but I’m God, he is like 25. You know what music, what good musician in the rock era like that doesn’t have some cockiness to go on stage. That’s just part of the persona like we were talking

Alan: Yeah, exactly. It’s very cool with social media with everything. TikTok, Instagram, there’s so many ways of things getting out there and that now they’re very aware of that, that you don’t have to sell record albums in the stores. That doesn’t matter anymore. You look for who’s got like a million followers and 300,000 likes for their latest release and all that kind of stuff, and that’s what generates, getting a tour and he wanted people to see him live.

Okay.

Stephen: yeah, look up the Ozzy tribute with Young Blood. And it’s Young Blood with no o just ud. And look that up. But the other one I’ve found, when I was at the Sinister Horror Fest, I saw a bunch of guys walking around t-shirts that said, ice nine [00:30:00] Kills. And I’m like, what is this?

Alan: So it’s a reference to Kurt Vonnegut and, anyway. Okay.

Stephen: it’s a band, it’s a performance type band.

It’s a very heavy metal. I listen to their stuff, their oldest stuff is, eh, it’s Screamo. I was like, eh, it’s okay. But they found their niche and they’re all about writing horror, rock and roll. It’s all referenced of horror movies in a tongue in cheek kinda way, but very heavy metal stuff. Not like weird owl type parodies.

But the newest one is based on the Joker. It’s called The Last Laugh or something like that. And then they did one previously based on the Matrix. But not just the song is good, it’s fun, it’s typical metal, whatever. But it’s metal with a little catchiness to it. I liked it. But their videos are like 12 minute long mini movies with a beginning acting part, an end acting part, and then recreating various, like the matrix one, recreating some of the [00:31:00] scenes from the matrix, the

Alan: bullet time where the guy

Stephen: They do.

Alan: Yeah.

Stephen: And running on the, so it’s very, I told Colin, I said, Hey, at least listen to the Joker one, the newest one, I think The Last Laugh soundtrack or something like that. And then the

Alan: graphic novel with Brian Boland Art. That’s fantastic. Anyway, okay.

Stephen: yeah, I heard that too. So Ice Nine Kills. It’s just fun. I don’t think they’re like, oh my God, I love them. I’m go get everything. They, but I appreciate what they do and it’s fun to listen to a little bit.

Alan: Okay. If I ice Nine is a reference to, I think it’s Kat’s Cradle, right? A Kurt Vonnegut novel where, the way the world works is because the exact angle of water H2O is such that it stays fluid and so forth, and then someone in invents finds a way to make it so that it crystallizes instead of stays fluid and someone drops it into one of the world’s oceans.

And the whole world grinds to a halt because water doesn’t work like water does [00:32:00] anymore.

Stephen: Yeah, that must be where, so it’s a very deep reference for this. But it’s fun. You should look it up and look at the videos. At least those couple I, I’d recommend. So again, not go be my all-time favorite band, but the couple songs based on comic books and horror movies were fun.

Alan: It’s very cool if you, especially we’ve seen and heard and read so much that to have something stand out amongst all the stuff that we investigate. It’s very cool to have wow, these guys like I said, whatever bands I discovered this weekend, like I said, Funhouse mirrors quirky, interesting.

Very young. I’m just like, what are they gonna do next? You know what I mean? They got their whole lives ahead of them compared to a lot of the kind of tribute acts that older progress have become because they’ve been doing what they’ve been doing for 50 years, that kind of thing. So very, it ice nine and Youngblood.

Exactly. Okay.

Stephen: Very fun. Yeah.

Alan: I gotta make some notes. Yeah. What pen and paper? Yes. That’s still the guy. I’m okay.

Stephen: I, that’s funny you say that. [00:33:00] I still take a lot of notes, especially when I’m getting my to-do list of things to do because it comes very fluid. I do use an app called Todoist and I try and schedule and thing, but the problem then becomes is any particular day, there might be five other things.

I, oh, I gotta do this. It’s just a quick added thing so I don’t put ’em into do it. So then I’m not in the habit of going back to check things off. And then things don’t get done. And I’m working on different projects, so I have to rearrange things. So it ends up be the management ends up becoming almost as much as doing all the work and projects.

Alan: I hear you.

Stephen: I really should do it more. The Todoist app is great. It even integrates with the Google Android. So I can just say, Hey, Google, add this, and, think of

Alan: And it appears on exactly. I have for a long time done, like that a certain amount of capturing things, prioritizing them, making sure that I don’t lose track of them. And I have massive big lists and it’s very nice actually to be able to go back and look at I really did get a lot done this [00:34:00] year because look at all the X’s that I have, but it’s also I am still in the habit of at the end of the day or the start of the day, you pull out a little piece of paper and say, what are the top three things that you don’t wanna worry about?

20. You wanna say, if I get these three things done, I will have moved the most important stuff forward. And as a lot of that, hey, rank everything A, B, and C when you rank anything as C, you might as well say, I’ll never get to it. You know what I mean? There’s always enough really importance or there’s a trade off as to how, when it has to get done, being able to assign a due date to things really helps.

And so often I’ll throw those into the calendar and I don’t know that I only use one tool. I do whatever of those things works together so that it’s very uncommon for me to really miss something or miss the date or something like that because I got 66 worth good habits. You know what I mean? And once in a while it’s wow, I’ve had that on the list for 10 days and I thought I was really gonna jump on that, but I’m realizing it’s always gonna be a B, [00:35:00] maybe even a C.

And so I wanna put it out there and when I get to it, I will, but it’s not so critical. Other things all seem to push it out. And so that’s like my aspirational list as compared to my real to-do list. You know what I mean?

Stephen: Yes. And I have plenty of those myself. What I found and I’ve learned a bit that this is a common trait against, like you say, the smarties. It seems to be a common thing where you get so much, many ideas and so many things you want to do that you almost get paralysis.

It’s I don’t know what to do, or I can’t do this, and you end up doom scrolling or reading or something completely up, I really need to do all this, but I’m going to go scrub the walls because they need done first. That’ll make me feel better. And then, so I really, especially with the books and stuff, have, I’ve got multiple projects I want to do with the books and things, but what happens is I start working on one and then I’m like, oh, I’ll just work on this one a little bit.

So I got, oh, I’ll do this other one. I’ll jump on this because I need it now. And then I get [00:36:00] oh, I’ve got all these things that need done and none of them are getting done. So I really have started to focus on one project to get done at a time and then move it. And it seems in my head, it’s oh my God, you’re not doing enough things.

There’s all sorts of stuff to do. But I can look back on three or four months and say instead of going ah, and nothing getting done, I actually got these three or four things completed and done. So I’ve had to train myself.

Alan: Yeah. I really understand, Colleen and I often talk about, say, what’s our plans for today? What did we get done? And often I’ll be like I made incremental progress on six to 10 things that I care about, but did I ship, did I get anything in particular done? Not always. One of the things I often do is I time box things.

I say what I wanna do is spend four hours, eight hours on this, and that’s all that I’m gonna spend. So I’ll focus on it for four hours and do the best job that I can. And it’s I have to be done, I have to be done with this so I can move on to this next important thing. And you just do the best you can [00:37:00] and and it’s amazing getting something done as compared to making it perfect is often what’s important, free. Perfect. And now you can have two out of three, as they say, that kind of thing.

Stephen: I do that a lot too, for things that aren’t like business vital or anything like that. For example, after Colin moved out, I wanted to clean the pantry. The pantry had been a disaster for quite a while. Needed clean, wiped down good and things organized, things gotten rid of. But it was like a massive project.

Our life is quite good because there’s nothing really in the pantry anymore except storage crap.

Alan: Okay.

Stephen: So I was like, eh. So it always kept put getting put off. So then I said, you know what? I am right here each day for this week, I’m taking 10 minutes to just take some of that stuff out, go through it, throw things away, and I moved things into the spare bedroom so I could clean the whole pantry and then put things back more organized.

I’m like, I’m, I don’t care if it gets done. I’m just gonna do 10 minutes a day. And then actually took me a couple months, ’cause I’d [00:38:00] go, a couple days or a week, wouldn’t do anything ’cause of other stuff. But then I’d be, oh, 10 minutes, that’s all I’m gonna do. And the pantry’s done it. It’s mostly organized, mostly clean.

But now I don’t have to worry about it and really pushing myself to not mess it up again. I don’t wanna spend that time.

Alan: I, to again very much understand Colleen and I often laugh about, when something is organized, it’s hard. To okay, I’m just gonna put this down over here instead of putting it back where it goes, because it makes it look messy. It’s the next step towards being messy. Again, if you get everything organized, you don’t have to be obsessive about it, but it’s just, it’s easy and more natural to put things with the things they go with, where it belongs, that kind of thing.

Stephen: I would argue, I wouldn’t say it’s natural.

Alan: Honestly, it really is for me, I’m one of those guys that recently I have not been perfect about it, but when, if you had collections for any length of time, it’s gotta be alphabetized, it’s gotta be sorted by type or chronologically or however you do it. [00:39:00] But the fact that I have so many CDs that I bought recently, eventually they will get melded into the collection.

So it’s once again, A to Z and I can find something quickly or online. I really do have things where I regularly clean up so that I know that it’s the right track name and all that kind of stuff. So the penalty for not keeping things that way is to me. Very high, even for small disturbances. ’cause I just hate it.

I just like Bings being where it’s just right. You know what I mean? I like symmetry, I like order, I like things are in alphabetical or whatever order and I get some kind of whatever istic satisfaction out of it. So it’s natural for me. Colleen mentioned that you know much more for me than her, so I will often, after I get things organized, I said, so what I was thinking while I was doing it was this and this and this, and if you don’t totally adopt that system you might, some of that might have stuck and then it’ll be easy for both of us.

And once in a while it’s like instead of doing it every six months, maybe [00:40:00] every week I’ll just take a look and say, that doesn’t go there and I’ll just move things around. And instead of getting. Pissy about it. You’re just like, I’ll take 10 minutes, I’ll take 10 minutes to make so that this doesn’t, ’cause we’ve had things that, like when we did the kitchen and moved everything out and then moved everything back in, we had a whole box of stuff going to like Herman’s House of Hospitality, because it might be past its expiration date, but it’s pasta, so it doesn’t really expire.

But we, how did that happen? Because it got pushed back and once something is second or third row back in a cabinet it’s gone. Only once in a while when you’re saying, I could swear I had some C in the house, and then you go looking for it. You know what I mean?

Stephen: And that’s the biggest thing I’m really trying to stop, is looking and spending so much time to find things again. My, so my big example is like my glasses my work glasses, my reading glasses. I have a bad habit flipping ’em up on my head and then doing something and they’re just setting them down as I’m doing something else,

Alan: right. Wherever you were at the time. Exactly.

Stephen: Gina always pointed out, it’s that’s like a very [00:41:00] strong symptom of A DHD. That’s just, one of those things. I, since Colin left I like, look, this is the year I’m organizing all this shit. And it’s goes stay that way because I’m done not reading or not playing video games or not watching a movie because I’m cleaning I’m organizing.

I’m doing it once and so far I’ve been better. It varies, sometimes I’m like, okay, I’m like 95% organized and I’ve slipped. I’m in the eighties now. I’ll go get Ray back organized and I spend a little bit of time, but like my comics, like you said, I’ve been the newest ones. I haven’t gone back to everything old yet.

Slowly I’m working on it, but I’m like, this is Spider-Man, this is Star Wars, this is other stuff. And after I get ’em and read ’em, I’m putting ’em right where they go in the right order. So I know. So I’m trying.

Alan: I hear you. Another thing that, that, again, natural, like if every time that you’ve had something where, okay, we’re going to the show and we need to make sure we have our glasses and our earphones and our, that kind of stuff, and you can’t find ’em right away and you’re [00:42:00] pissed about it, it’s already kinda hurt the event a little bit.

That’s what I often will say is, let’s not have this feeling again. We really will make a point of when you walk in the keys go here, the glasses go here, the earplugs go here. If it turns out that we have some in the car and some in a bag and some in the house, then once in a while we’ll go through and say, okay, if we’re gonna do that, that we have redundant systems, let’s make sure that not all three of those end up in the car.

Let’s put those things back in the places that we thought. And it really has helped to just it isn’t only about getting it done, it’s so remember how pissed we were? Don’t let that happen again.

Stephen: So Colin, we’ve been picking on him, me and Eli quite a bit because for the wedding he, they had gone, they spent a whole Sunday going to all these parks to find the right park they wanted, and then Colin texted everybody the night before, here’s the address of the park. We’ll all meet there at this time.

They got there a little late because they had gone to the correct park. He had looked it up and there’s similar name parked and email to everybody, the wrong address. And I’m [00:43:00] like, that’s something I would do. And Eli’s yep, I already told him. But, so he said yesterday he had off because it was Columbus Day Bank holiday and libraries were

So he had off, and him and a friend were going out to some comic stores and he had not put his keys in the same spot. And he gets out the door and it goes click, and he goes. I forgot my keys in the apartment. And he told me this and I said did you check the cabin? Because that’s the joke around here.

I’ve left things up at the cabin and insisted I didn’t have them in the cabin. Insisted I wasn’t at the cabin with them. And then we find him in the cabin. So that’s the joke. And I asked him and he said he was laughing. He like, ready to cry. So he’s channeling me even though he is much better at organizing and keeping his stuff more organized.

Alan: Yeah. Another thing just it really is, this is not an old us. There’s how many books in the, self-help section about how to get organized, how to use your time wisely, that kind of stuff. Some of those things I [00:44:00] really did adopt from the first time that I ever heard them, like this and I know that not only do I keep to-do lists, but like I’m a good trip planner. I really try to say, okay, we’re gonna be going cross country. We’re gonna stop here and here’s the things we might do. And most of the time that really works. And once in a while, like you said, it’s I could swear I made that reservation.

So why am I not finding it? Because I was at Prague stock, I had Jimmy car tickets for Saturday night, and like usually I go find the ticket thing, the receipt that I got online, or I go to the website and they have it that you can add it to the Apple wallet. All those things were failing. I have no idea why.

All my usual tricks, like when the stuff you’ve learned how to do stops working once in a while. It’s i’m not, I know I did this. I’m not going crazy. And so I got so desperate that I actually called Playhouse Square. They work only open Monday to Friday. So I got the Saturday thing and I, it’s like, Hey, if you’re still having a problem, send something to sales and service@playhousesquare.org.

Dot org, not.com. And so [00:45:00] ho honestly, totally wonderfully miraculously, somebody was checking that account and they said, we do indeed see that you have Jimmy car tickets and because you didn’t get a chance to transfer ’em to Colleen or we’ll have them printed off waiting for you at the box office. And it was just like I felt such relief, but it was also, so how did this happen?

I have every other show that I have that we’re going to lined up all of the Broadway series and we’re gonna go see what, whatever other tickets I bought. And they didn’t know. They couldn’t say why this wasn’t online In your usual by month you can open it. And so it’s not, I don’t know how to say.

A little bit satisfying to say. Even if you do everything just right and play the game by the rules, once in a while there’s sunspot activity and the world just goes weird and all the stuff that you do work,

Stephen: activity nowadays.

Alan: but so I hate that. I really want it to be that I don’t do this three days in advance.

I did it like the day of the event because it’s always worked and I’ll just take [00:46:00] care of it. Huh? Where is that? And then you get a little bit frantic when you’re like, am I not using, am I spelling Jimmy Carr wrong? Am I not going

Stephen: That’s so difficult to spell, damnit, what am I doing wrong?

Alan: honestly and like after a while you’re like I don’t know what else to try. All my usual, not only first level, but fifth level tricks aren’t working. Yes. I just, I can’t believe I’m running into this. What you wanna do is go listen to Derek Schulman talk. You know what I mean?

Stephen: So those books about, all the self-help, the organizing and stuff I did get some of those. I just can’t find them. I know what I did.

Alan: Exactly. I got five books in a stack somewhere.

Stephen: Somewhere. Yeah. I I found, especially with doing the books and the soaps and stuff, setting up all these craft shows and these Bigfoot events and stuff, and I started getting overwhelmed because I’d be. I’d send information or to, sign up for one. But then three days later they’d finally reply.

And then there’s another one where I’d fill out the form online, but I had to wait [00:47:00] for a payment. And then there’s another one where I’d fill, I’d send them the info, but I have to send them payment. And another one, they took the payment right away and I had to send it in the mail. And it got to the point because some would be for books, some would be for soap, some were both.

And I got started getting confused, and then I was trying to keep track of possible shows and things on my calendar that happened yearly to remind me. And then I’m looking at, it’s oh God, there’s seven shows on this day. And they’re all light blue, which is the one I’m actually signed up for this year.

Alan: Right,

Stephen: So I’ve had to work on some system, and putting in notes. It’s here’s the web address, here’s the email, keeping the emails all in a separate folder so when I get ’em right away, shove ’em in that folder. And

Alan: I hear you.

Stephen: it was necessity. Drove me to it.

Alan: I, we get very similar, I have folder for various different things and sometimes it’s the name of a person. Sometimes it’s the event. I also have ticklers where if I’m gonna go to the there’s always a comedy festival, seemingly in Toronto in September, [00:48:00] but the dates change. But I put something out there that just says, how about seven to 17?

And then I’ll adjust it when I find the real dates, but I don’t have that blank, so I don’t put something on the 10th right in the middle of it and say now we can’t head out of town because I just got rush tickets. That’s actually a fear. The rush tickets gets in Leveland or the 19th, and I was trying to make sure a point of our anniversary is the 21st, and it’s that weekend, right near it is the 19th.

And often we’ve done a getaway weekend to go see something in particular. It can’t be rushed this year because cuing doesn’t care for them enough to have that be the big thing

Stephen: should get rid of her.

Alan: yeah. He’s got so many other redeeming qualities that if you can’t have the Guinea voice, just I can’t handle the Neil Young voice, it’s okay to have one or two things.

You know what I mean? Now I’m like I actually, in talking with the boys, it was like, if we can do it the 17th, which is Thursday and they were gonna remember they had a single date and then they announced multiple dates and, but the day that we got the tickets where it turned out to be 19, so now we’ll do something [00:49:00] on Tuesday night.

One of the joys of being retired is, it doesn’t have to be on the weekend. ’cause that’s when you have time. We can go have lunch on the 21st, and sit there in our retired mode and just click glasses and say hey, we’re still married. You know that kind.

Stephen: right.

Alan: All of those things. Like for doing, we’re doing a, we’re probably gonna do Route 66 next year.

It’s the hundredth anniversary. And so I’ve already started to put together, hey, I wanna do about 300 miles a day and take five days to get out to the west coast. Then what’s about 300 miles from Chicago to the next thing? And we’re not, I don’t wanna stay in St. Louis, I wanna stay in a small town outside of St.

Louis. ’cause if there’s a Route 66 there, it’s really gonna be like authentic. That’s gonna be the weird diner. It’s

Stephen: get the better

Alan: silo house. Yeah. So we really, we stayed, made a point of staying in Ogallala and, Elko and all the and when I. I always do that. I really like that if the city’s big enough to have multiple hotels, so it’s not just the one rundown one.

And by having [00:50:00] multiple, there’s actually a little bit of price competition. So prices will not be ridiculous. But I don’t wanna be, why would I wanna fight traffic first thing in the morning, stay in a nice place two miles off the expressway, go to the city park, the city cemetery if that’s what they got.

Almost always, there’s something to be found in a city. If you just take a nice walk in a small town, it’s so restful. You know what I mean? So I like organizing things like that. And then as I think I mentioned, you just start looking around and saying, while we’re there, we can also stop by at the biggest moose statue in the world, or whatever else it might

Stephen: Made of butter.

Alan: Made of butter. Exactly. So we have, we’ve had such great success with, on a whim, on a on a little bit of luck, finding all these things along the way that are like here’s a cool dam. This dam is the only one that has this hydraulic feature, and nobody else cares about that. But we love that kind of stuff and it just makes part the thing I’ve read, so much of doing these kinds of plans is it’s not just doing it.

It’s that is going on the trip. It’s all the [00:51:00] planning of it. It’s the anticipation of it. It’s the, what else could we add here? How much are we willing to do? We just love all of that. And then the aftermath, we go through our photos and look where we were. How cool was this?

While we were there, we were just a GOG over, this is just the prettiest scene and we captured the rainbow over it. How cool is that?

Stephen: I love when Colin was in high school, and then now he’s out in Baltimore. He would tell his friends stories of things we did or went or whatever, and they were, especially high school, they’re always like, we’ve never done anything like that in my family. My parents don’t do that at all.

Literally when they were juniors, there were some kids that came over that had never been to the house, and I was walking through oh, hey guys. And Colin’s oh, hey this is so and here’s my dad. And they’re like, you’re Colin’s dad? Yes. What’s wrong?

Alan: The guy that

Stephen: Yeah, they’re like, we’ve heard stories. So he’s out in Baltimore now and he tells all these stories to his friends out there, and he just had a birthday party this [00:52:00] past weekend. They played games and watched some offbeat movies and stuff. And he said, yeah, I told him this story and that story. And they were like, no, that you guys really didn’t, no, that can’t be true.

Really, it’s I so weird to me that people don’t do stuff like that.

Alan: honestly, and to geek this up because that’s what Relentless Gee is all about. It’s not all that. I’ve always been like that. It’s that everybody can do that if they want to. It used to be that I got like the AA books and the Triptychs that would take you all over the United States and find you a cool place to stay and find you the cool attraction.

But nowadays, you really can get not only books of all kinds about that. I just got here’s my latest. This is a book for people who love the national parks. Bebe, a friend that visited us in town, recommended this because it was one of those books that hadn’t been checked out enough from her library and was being taken off the shelves.

And it’s only, it’s a slim little volume. And yet like people that have done a lot of national parks, you trust their taste, their judgment, ’cause they’ve done so many and they can say, [00:53:00] you don’t wanna miss the Enbrel pools at Zion. It might be that everybody else goes to these five attractions, but this was really.

Perfect. And the fact that you can do that so easily nowadays with using your mapping software and just like putting in, Hey, is points of interest, is there a clown thing nearby? Is there a puzzle thing nearby? All my interests, we always look for Laura’s Laura, les’s Wilder stuff, the little house on the prairie stuff where Colleen, we’ve actually been to so many of them now that I don’t think we have any left to go to.

And that’s its own cool feeling of, we really have seen every little house site, every place that a book was set in. But it’s so easy and to find you’ll find out don’t go there on Tuesday. ’cause that’s when they’re closed. Once in a while I get caught like the Rosetta Museum, but most of the time it’s, if we’re gonna go to this presidential site and it’s not open all the time, let’s make a point of not stopping on the day that it’s closed and whatever else.

It’s just so easy to not only plan, but plan like successfully. And Detailedly and Colleen would do the same thing. She will like, sing my praises to her friends al such a master trip [00:54:00] planner. And I hope that they don’t think of that as being on Zvi. Go at 10 30 to this place and we must be out by 1130.

It’s not being regimented and crazy about doing it. It’s like we had the big spreadsheet, like if anything, if there’s any key phrase to today’s discussion, let’s make a spreadsheet. That’s where you get organized, that’s where you put things and you don’t lose them. And you put ’em in order and you attach a date in a whatever it might be.

I have various different categories for is there a national park, is there a cool museum, is there a fun restaurant, is there a, all the different things you might, and then you kinda use those as your spurs for where to look for the various different places.

And so we have found for literary and historical and scientific and all kinds of things you just look for, it’s oh, that’s where they had the first test of not the ABO, but the HBO or whatever else it might be. We’ve had such great success doing that. And then once in a while I’ll tell these stories and Nick and Kelly adopted our spreadsheet of how to get to the Dakotas and back and the [00:55:00] weather wasn’t as good for them, so they didn’t have as wonderful a time.

But sometimes when I tell these stories, people are like, eh. Like you just said they don’t even want to do it. Don’t you want to see how wonderful the world is? How beautiful, how interesting, how everything, it’s not just going to the next Denny’s. It’s not. You know what I mean? So we’ve had not only our state capitals thing, but all the other things that we’ve put together in terms of doing that and the national parks and all the oddities.

We have stories forever. We have all of our, as coming up on Christmas ornaments that every time we put an ornament on the tree, we’re reminded of, yeah, we were in Sedona and our ornament is a little cactus with lights on it. And it, they, because we have good memories, they bring all those wonderful memories flooding back.

And we have the joy of talking about, remember the pink Jeep tour? Remember where we saw a coyote? That, and all that stuff. It really. It sure lets you know you’ve lived a pretty good life and that you want more of that, that you wanna keep [00:56:00] that going. So we’re going to Hawaii. We’re not just gonna go, where can I lay on the beach and have a pineapple drink?

It’s don’t you wanna see a volcano? Don’t you wanna see the black sand beach? I wanna see dolphins covert out in the water. It like, maybe I’ve always been like that, that I have a lot of thoughts and why don’t you make some of them real, instead of just hoping to providence that maybe we’ll be there exactly at the time that the snakes are running or something like that.

No, find out when the snakes run and go there and do that.

Stephen: Yeah. Playing your time and Colin enjoys doing that, which I’m glad about. That seeing that they, I still get that fun and wanna go do those things,

Alan: yeah I’ll tell you, one of my biggest regrets about not having kids is not having the chance to transfer that on like my father did to me when we went on family vacations. He made a point of staying like in best westerns, ’cause they were each unique compared to the cookie cutter, more Holiday Inn and stuff like that.

And we did, we went to, in Europe and here, all these various let’s go to where the Indians had their biggest place that [00:57:00] they made peace pipes. It’s called Pipestone National Monument. And here’s, it was the, every time that he found something like that, it was like, my dad is too cool.

Even when I talk about, let’s go to the corn palace, let’s go to the biggest outhouse. What, and for him being relatively. Stoic. He had a wonderful sense of whimsy and wonder and curiosity and shared that with the kids. And we sure got that wanderlust of let’s go exploring and let’s, even if we don’t get to the hotel until nine o’clock at night, it’s ’cause we did such cool things during the day that it was worth every side trip, every delay.

You know what I mean?

Stephen: Yeah. I know my mother, she’s getting ready next week to go on a trip with my aunt down to visit my uncle. And they she loves going with my aunt that traveling and stuff, but she sometimes gets exasperated ’cause the, they’ll stop at, the welcome center from wherever.

And she’s picking up these brochures and my aunt Sue’s like, why would you wanna go there? And, Annie’s oh look, we could go visit this. It’s [00:58:00] like, why? What would we do there? And then it’s okay, so what do we go do? I saw this little shop over here that had these gifts and blah, and then we could go to this shop.

And, when she went with my other aunt and uncle years ago, that’s all my aunt wanted to do was shop.

Alan: Yeah.

Stephen: literally would have to send boxes of stuff she bought through the mail. ’cause they couldn’t take it all on the plane or whatever, and that’s what that’s, that was vacation. Going shopping, but then there’s other people. So what you do on vacation? Oh, I am just going to go to the beach and relax for seven days on the beach. I’m like, oh my God. I would blow my brains out. That would be the most boring vacation ever. Yeah. That, I’m like, no, I’m done. Okay. I’ve been at the beach for an hour.

Let’s go do something else.

Alan: It, for a certain kind of person, and when I’ve given the, we, Colleen and I have given the occasional talk about our travels, and I want to like make a series out of it. Now. We did one thing, we were compressed 48 outta 50 state capitals. And really what I should do is multiple things about [00:59:00] here’s if you’re ever gonna go to the Dakotas, here’s our map and here’s what we found along the way.

And just to inspire people to do that, to, to have to share the stories that they’ve had about Yeah.

Stephen: YouTube videos,

Alan: That honestly, we aren’t, that, we haven’t really been self-documenting. Many of our things are just, here’s the beautiful place we found, but it’s not the selfie of me and the Eiffel Tower.

Me and Mount Rushmore. And so our. Christmas letters are often, we make a point while we’re on the trip to say we gotta get something for the Christmas letters. We have to have something that proves we were there. And then we’ll take an sie, the two of us, or gonna take a picture. But we have all kinds of things that just really you think I’m gonna fake having been at Di Devil’s Tower by posting a, picture?

No, we were really there. Some people do.

Stephen: could make it like Sheldon’s fun with flags from Big Bang Theory, if you ever

Alan: Exactly. And we have never done the, I got a gnome or I got a squirrel, or what people bring with them to say, this is my traveling companion. Colleen has probably been in two thirds, three quarters of our [01:00:00] photos because I’m often the one taking the pictures. I’ll be like, Hey Pook, this is a really good picture.

You know what I mean? And just, so she might be the featured performer.

Stephen: I I love that you used the thing when was the last time you actually did that to a shutter?

Alan: Exactly. That’s a perfect observation that there’s some improv wise, people still they don’t hold a gun. Like you hold a gun. They have a gun. They have a shooter.

Stephen: Or nurses with the nursing cap and gown. When was the last time you actually saw a nurse with a white cap and gown on? My mother. My mother, the day she retired was the last nurse I saw. Like that.

Alan: That’s very fun. I guess they, they evoke the stereotype or whatever you’re trying to do, so when I took improv classes and they talked about object reality, you really wanna make it, when you’re drinking you want to have it be that it has weight and that it sloshes towards you and stuff.

But like still, sometimes people pick up a phone as if it’s like the modern phone. A lot of times people still do this, et cetera, et cetera, because it evokes what they’ve seen in movies or whatever, and [01:01:00] everybody gets right away what’s going on. But things are changing, that, that

So anyway, and it, I.

Part of going to a festival like this is I love the fact that there really are these geeky festivals. You’re finding your cool horror stuff. I’m finding my prog rock, or my pinball or my comic book, or whatever else it might be. And if you just put your head up and look around, you’d be amazed at, wow, there’s one writing like Fort Wayne, Indiana.

You know what I mean? There are things that are worth a little bit of driving a little bit of money to stay someplace, to just go and do that thing for two days. We love those odd little museums. Where’s the Mustard Museum? Where’s the Doll Museum? It’s always worth an hour just to see someone was so passionate that they collected enough to put ’em in a museum that they got like a four bedroom house or whatever like that, that they’ve converted this house into all more Shirley Temples than I’ve ever seen and things like that.

So I, I think that’s, I hope that for those who are curious, those things are out there [01:02:00] nowadays. And I’m sure not only Hey, let’s hop on Google nowadays. You can just talk at chat GPT and say, within 200 miles of my house, what’s the coolest oddity? The coolest geology, the coolest restaurant.

And it’ll start spitting things at you that you might see something and go, oh, I love Pierogis. They got the best pierogis two, two counties away that I never knew about. So

Stephen: Doing travel and events or locations is really good practice for modifying your prompts because just saying we would talk, Hey, can you go find me along this route? Some really cool stuff to do. You would understand that. But you do that with your Gen AI stuff, you get way off the wall stuff. And I was trying to okay, I wanna go from here to here and I want to hit book stops in between with the shortest route possible, that type of thing.

And it had me going, boop, b boop. I’m like, that is not the shortest route, and I said, within [01:03:00] five miles you’re taking me like 40 miles that way. And so it’s really good practice to precisely get what you want from,

Alan: Exactly. I used to call that like when it was first search engines, you learned Google fu you learn how to phrase a good search query. So the, and they even talked about, remember there’s a phrase called Google whacking where if you could give a phrase that gave you a single return, a single item returned to, it’s that’s amazingly good on your part at how specific that the world doesn’t have more than one combination coffee house and comedy club or whatever else it might be.

And so nowadays it’s probably impossible to get to that. But we’re relearning that some of that AI wise to, to learn how to phrase your query so that it gives you what you want, not what its idiot savant thinks is what you want,

Stephen: other problem with the Google search thing is that it also has to do with how good the web developer was for the SEO stuff, or if they’ve paid for [01:04:00] ads or, there’s various other things that affect that. You may have gotten one result, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only result or the best result.

There may be one even better. They just don’t have the right SEO going on.

Alan: Yeah, for a while I actually thought ISEO by the way, everybody geeky standing for search engine optimization. I thought that I should take a job in that. I’m really great at. What are the key words that people would associate with this thing? Because you can approach it from, like I mentioned earlier, the historical, the political, the scientific, all the ways in which people might wanna find out where was McKinley’s birth and death site and maybe a presidential library and how to make sure that you get it, they find it, but there’s not a lot of false positives from other things so that people don’t get passed over.

I thought I was coming to a McKinley site, but this is McKinley cookery, not McKinley, the president. And I really thought that I’d be great at that because I’m kinda like enough of a, geek enough, I have good language facilities, that kind of stuff. And I didn’t pursue that, but I always thought that I’d be good at [01:05:00] that.

You know what I mean? How to do, high quality re returns for various different search queries and stuff

Stephen: The thing I’m working on now is the hashtags because Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok and Instagram. All use hashtags, instead of categories or whatever. So you use hashtags to get the right thing. So my goal now is to get myself known within the local area, northeast Ohio as a local author and a kid’s local author, so that teachers, libraries, school librarians homeschool parents that, oh, I need a book for a kid.

Oh, I know this guy. Oh, I’ve seen this guy. You know that.

Alan: I want someone to talk about it during National Book week and that you’re the top result. Return, for the geographic area and that kind of stuff. That’s a great

Stephen: With the hashtags, like I was at the Camp Flea market and when I posted a video that day, I was putting in slightly different hashtags to attract Kent [01:06:00] Middle School, Kent Roosevelt that as opposed to just general parents or teachers. So I, that’s my big thing now that I’m working on, and it can be very overwhelming.

Like it’s always been for SEO and whatever,

Alan: it really is true. It, when you try to anticipate how people might try to find you, it can be combinatorial explosion really quickly, and then you’re like how do I capture a lot, but narrow it down at the same time, I know what you’re saying. There’s a precision to it and as, as much as I’m sure AI will soon be generating exactly the right hashtags for now, there’s enough art to it that if you want to bring people to let this gee.com, you know it, that it we really do have ways that we can extoll what we do without it.

It’s not a sales site for geek t-shirt quite yet. You know what I mean? That kind of stuff.

Stephen: and taking this or the horror lasagna, transcripts or whatever and asking the AI to pull out important keywords or whatever to use, they don’t always get the best keywords. They don’t always [01:07:00] narrow in on what the topic is, and that should be the key word. But it has gotten better, I must say.

And depending on how you word it, sometimes it definitely gets, has gotten better,

Alan: Very good.

Stephen: Alright. Yep.

Alan: As usual. A little bit over, ’cause that’s what we get to talking, but what we share is important. It’s cool. It’s like hard fought knowledge. It’s good to share this with the world,

Stephen: it’s a interesting time of year with the holidays. I’ve got three events lined up for this week alone, and I think between now and Christmas I’ve got eight more with one or two that I’m still trying to figure out. Busy time, obviously for everybody,

Alan: We actually, I think we, we actually looked at the calendar like kind of December 15th and thereafter. We don’t have a lot going on and we really are looking forward to that. Let’s do the cabin thing. Let’s let’s get snowed in. Let’s read our Christmas gift books. Let’s play some games.

Let’s binge watch something. Let’s ev all that stuff that isn’t always running out to do the next thing. We love being busy, but it’s really good to take a breather [01:08:00] once in a while and relax in bed, so

Stephen: got, I’m trying to find those times also, but there’s so many things I could go do with the books and stuff at this time of

Alan: Striking while air is hot during Christmas, sales season is important. I hear you. Okay.

Stephen: All right, man.

Alan: It was a pleasure. Take care, Steven. Okay.

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.