Transgender rats, UK riots, Nutella and Homer Simpson

Here is the transcript of my latest podcast. If you prefer a spoken word and don’t mind my thick accent, you can find it here

Episode 9. Transgender rats, UK riots, Nutella and Homer Simpson (castos.com)

 

Hello beautiful people, and welcome to the world of Gemini.

If this is the first time you’re listening to my podcast, I suggest … stop, go to the kitchen, make yourself a cup of coffee, and then come back and go to the very beginning of the podcast. Go to the introduction first.

Usually I’m trying to stick to the plan as much as I can. If I am led to talk without proper control, as my good friends from the band No Crows have learned recently, I start…wondering about.

I start talking about music, in five minutes it’s philosophy, then Third Reich, conspiracy theories and God knows what else.

That’s why if you come to the gig of No Crows, you’ll see that everyone has a microphone in front of them. All except of me. Last time when I was actually let speak on the gig, I was introducing my new piece called ‘A Broken Glass Blues’. The name of the tune came out of a tragic event. In two words – I ate a piece of glass. Don’t ask.

I got scared. And in order to not to bleed to death, I did the only thing you can do when you swallow something sharp, you put some honey on a cotton wool, you make a ball, and you swallow this ball. And so I did. The piece of glass was successfully contained by the wool and honey, and my life was saved. Now, where did I get the cotton wool?

A good question, this. It’s not something you would normally find in the modern Irish house.

I started to panic. I went through the shelves and boxes in our kitchen, and of course I found nothing. And then I found a pack of sanitary napkins my daughter left in a cupboard a couple of months ago.

Yes, I ate it.

I mean, I had to… Trust me, when you have a piece of glass moving through your digestive tract, you are not very much concerned about the origins of the cotton wool. Anyway, it saved my life.

A week later, my daughter came to visit, and at some point she asked me if I saw her ‘product’. ‘I ate it, my dear. All of it, I’m afraid. So sorry’.

And so, um, as it was such a dramatic experience, I wrote a tune and called it a ‘A Broken Glass Blues’. And, after I told this story to our audience, including all the details, the microphone has magically disappeared from the stage.

I usually try to make a plan and stick to it. But not today, though. Today there’s no plan. It’s more like a conversation we are about to have right now.

If you are one of my subscribers, you probably noticed that I published my last episode very long time ago. You know, somebody told me that in order to become a successful blogger, to have millions of followers and to earn lots of money, you have to produce those episodes one by one, at least twice a month, consistently. And I didn’t. It’s not that there’s nothing to talk about. Jesus Christ, you just go out every morning and there’s so many things going on in the world, so many dramatic events you can complain about. No, it’s not that. I had quite a lot of my own drama going on.

For example, a couple of months ago, I got a letter saying that I have to renew my driving license. Now, there were a couple of small problems. First is that I am 60, and the second is that I am blind. That’s a little secret, by the way, don’t tell anybody. So I had to go and to get myself an eyesight report. And I knew there’s absolutely no way I can pass an eye test. So I decided to be clever. I came up with a brilliant plan. But first, I have to explain to you what actually happened to my eyes, or rather to my right eye. I practically can’t see anything because my optic nerve is damaged. So what happened is that a few years ago, I got involved in an, uh, academic dispute with one of the locals. We were discussing certain ethical and moral points of the situation which has occurred in the takeaway restaurant at about 04:00 in the morning. And we ended up being, you know, emotional. You know how it goes. So we got emotional, I got lucky, and I managed to break my opponent’s nose. I have to tell you, I’m not a violent person, and I’m not a professional fighter. Not at all. I just got lucky. He also got lucky. He managed to hit me right in the middle of my right eye and so damaged my optic nerve.

One of the things I absolutely love about Irish is their sense of humor. It’s unique. A couple of days after our discussion, I was walking down the street, and guess who I saw walking towards me? Yes, it was my opponent.

He had a bandage on his face, and my eye was closed. It was resembling the pride flag, so we both looked, you know… colorful. I saw him and obviously tensed up. I wasn’t really ready for the second round of the debate, but still, I prepared to present my arguments in the best way I could. And we met in the middle of the street. He looked at me, raised his thumb up and said, ‘Nice one!!!’, and then walked away. How about that?

So many years later, here I am, partially blind. Now back to our story and to the eye test.

As I told you, I’m smart. I’m very smart. So I came up with a brilliant plan. I went to my usual eye appointment, and while I was there, I did something. You know this thing when you look at the screen and they tell you to read those letters, QBCD and so on. I’m usually stuck with the first letter, which is about as big as my head. So what I did, I made a picture when nobody was looking. And then I came home and I memorized all those letters. And then I went to SpecSavers. So the very nice Chinese lady put me in front of the screen and told me to read everything. And I just recited everything up to the last line. She looked at me in a kind of funny way and said, ‘Ok, mister Oleg, would you mind doing this again?’

 ‘Sure’, I said, and recited the whole thing again.

And then she said something I didn’t quite understand, maybe because of the accent. There were two words I did understand though. She said something about Homer Simpson, and I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ And then it transpired that I was not the first one to come up with this brilliant idea. Apparently there’s one of the Simpsons episodes where he did exactly the same thing.

 

So copyrights to this idea belong to Homer Simpson, not to me. Anyway, I failed. I failed miserably because I assumed that all those screens are exactly the same everywhere, and it turned out they are different. My brilliant plan backfired.

I just wanted to explain why I didn’t have time to publish more episodes. But during the last three, four weeks, two people said something to me, which actually gave me a reason to sit down and switch on my recording software. And so I dedicate this episode to my good and dear friends, Christine from Bern and Steve. I’ll tell you what they said one by one. We will start with Steve, I think. Two months ago, we went touring with No Crows. And by the way, if you don’t know who No Crows are, you should get out more often. They are a band from Sligo, Ireland and that’s all I’m going to tell you. Google is your friend and YouTube is your life source. Find them, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. So we went to UK with Crows, and usually every Crows gig is worth a separate episode, but II will only mention two events.

The first actually is not funny at all. As you know, something horrific happened in Southport, UK recently. A young, uh, boy, 17 years old ,walked into the venue where little girls were having a dance lesson, and he stabbed three beautiful little girls to death, and he injured many others. I don’t want to make any comments except of one. This man, this piece of shit, he was arrested and probably will spend some time locked up. He will receive some counseling for psychological trauma, and then he will be relocated somewhere else safe, given a house, new name, a job, you know, the usual. But for now, everyone is trying to understand how come this young boy turned monster.

Psychologists, journalists, politicians, and all this crowd, they are having a field day. They’re trying to analyze his life and events which led to this horror. One of them democratically inclined journalists suggested that this young radicalized man has a genetic memory of his people being oppressed by the white people, so he should not be judged harshly. Sounds familiar? Black Lives Matter anyone? Well, I’m not a person of democratic persuasion. If it was up to me, he would be skinned alive and left to rot. Anyway, you probably heard about what happened after the murders. Protests started. And as usual, protesters, they forgot immediately about the main reason for the protests. They forgot about three murdered girls. They came in and they didn’t even have the dignity to give the locals a chance to mourn those girls in peace. They came and they started to trash the place, demand to stop emigration and all of this. For most of them, it seems it was just an opportunity to let the steam out. It wasn’t about the girls anymore. It was about immigration politics. Far Left, Far Right, and all this rubbish. Also, it was about having some fun, burning cars, smashing shop windows and getting a new iPhone or a pair of new runners. All as usual, Black Lives Matter style protests. It was bizarre, really bizarre. You have white nationalists beating up Muslims. And then few streets away it’s Muslims beating up white people. Another few streets away it’s police beating up everyone else. Even this bizarre group of degenerates called ‘Queers for Palestine’, even they somehow decided that it was a good idea to have their own little demonstration. So basically it was a circus.

 

It was like a Samuel Beckett’s Theater of Absurd. And of course, it was a main topic of conversation in UK at the time. So we came into this little south UK town, very rich. I forgot the name of the town, I’m sorry. We had a conversation before the gig with some locals and a couple of musicians, and one of the musicians asked, ‘So which side do the people support here? Is it more like left or right?’. And the answer was priceless. Just listen to this. ‘The people here are quite rich, so they can afford to support Labor’. Whoa. That’s Samuel Beckett for you.

The next day, we had to drive to the next gig. We thought it would take us about two, three hours, but something happened on the motorway. Some kind of accident. We hit a heavy traffic and ended up sitting in the car for nine hours. Imagine five musicians sitting in the car for nine hours. What do you do for entertainment? You know, usually we have something like Felip, for example, cursing and swearing at ‘Katie the GPs lady’, calling her a stupid cow and trying to prove that her directions are all wrong. But it was a motorway all the way, so there was no need for GPS. What else? Me. I couldn’t really talk as Anna told me she cannot listen to me talking rubbish anymore.

Okay, so what do you do? We started to play word games. You know this game where someone comes up with the first part of the phrase, and then the next person has to memorize it and add his own part, and so on and so on. A highly intellectual game, this.

I recorded a little bit of the game for your entertainment. So here it is.

[00:15:20] Speaker B: ‘Okay. I went on holiday, and I packed my pink speedos, a blue tent, 75 condoms filled with chili powder, an elephant, a mobile phone, and Ray’s doctor’.

[00:15:38] Speaker A: So where do you go after this? Where do you go after 75 condoms filled with a chili powder? Uh, at some point, someone suggested to put on one of my podcast episodes. It was the one where I talk about the diet, nutrition, and about the horrors of the stuff we put on our skin and in our bellies. Quite depressing, I have to admit. Steve put it on and we listened in silence. That was a conversation killer. So when it finished, suddenly everyone decided to have a coffee break. So we stopped at the petrol station and went out separately. Then I saw Steve in the queue in the coffee shop. So I came in and said, ‘Steve, what do you think about my podcast? Honestly?’.

Steve is a gentleman, and Steve is a very kind person. So he thought for a moment and carefully said, ‘It’s interesting, but, uh, can I make a suggestion? Why don’t you make it a little bit more positive?’.

So Steve is the first person responsible for this episode. Then a couple of weeks later, we had a gig in Sligo. Only four of us. Ray, Felip, Steve, and me. It was an outdoor gig, right beside the sea. The view was spectacular, the people were beautiful, everyone was wearing very cool shades. Everyone except of me. So Ray, God bless his heart, took off his own shades and put them on me during one of my solos. But before, when we just came in to, uh, this place, I saw our dear friend, beautiful Christine, who came from Switzerland, and one of the first things she said was. ‘Oleg, what about your podcast? We are all waiting. Where is it?’.

So, here you go, Christine. And greetings to all of you beautiful Bern people.

So what do we talk about next? Yep, drama. Of course, drama. You know, I’m very lucky. I don’t work in the office, and I don’t work with adults or grownups. I teach young children and I play music. That’s all I do. And, uh, as you know, musicians don’t really qualify as grownups. So, you know, musicians and kids, they are my people. Adults, they all have their dramas, problems, strategies. But adults usually think that their dramas are real deal. And what kids have, it’s like, nonsense. My God, how wrong they are!!!

I have a lot of kids coming to our house for the lessons, and usually it works like this – a parent brings her or his little treasure to the house, and then we get rid of the parent as quickly as possible, because they are very much not needed. They actually make everything much more difficult. So we just tell them to go away and do something adults do, like shopping, phone calls, etc. And then we start our lesson. It’s all very relaxed. We play C Major scale, then we play a D minor scale, some arpeggios, and then we take a little break. We get some tea cakes, chocolate and we go out to the garden. There are lots of things to do in the garden. There are two robins who usually try to force their way in the kitchen every time when I open the door, there’s a sparrow who just comes to get a bit of food, then there’s a pet rat who comes for a little chat. She lives in a shed, and she loves raw chicken, which she eats with the grace of a Duchess. She’s a real aristocrat. Now, if you listened to all my podcasts, you know that we already had a pet rat. His name was Jerome.

It’s actually quite a tragic story. Jerome used to live in our kitchen. He was a good listener. Never demanded food, never bothered anyone. He ate our kitchen brush once. Well, that was not a good thing and he was trying to eat his way through the kitchen wall, but otherwise, he was very well behaved person. Now, the problem was that we had a professional psychologist in our house. And, being a psychologist, he hated Jerome. He was convinced that Jerome one day will come up the stairs, open his bedroom door, and violate him in some way. So, he called our landlady. And one day, a big dude, a professional exterminator, a contract killer came in. He was from the Czech Republic. He brought five or six of those devices which can easily cut a middle-sized dog in two. He armed those devices and left them in our kitchen. I had to disarm each one of them every evening, only to find them armed again in the morning by our friend, the Psychologist. It worked for a while. Jerome was safe. But you see, the problem is that I’m away quite a lot. Concerts, rehearsals, recordings. And so I couldn’t be there all the time, and I couldn’t make sure that those killing devices are disarmed all the time. So the day came when Jerome walked into one of those traps.

Jerome was no more.

And then our exterminator friend came. He looked under the sink, under the corners, and finally said, ‘Good news, my friends. There is no life here anymore’.

That was the end of Jerome the Rat. But…. you cannot stop life.

And now we have another rat. But as I said, it lives in the shed, so there’s no danger of another murder. I give names to all my pets. For example, we used to have a pet spider, and his name was Adolf.

Adolf was accidentally painted over by someone over enthusiastic. Again, quite a tragic event that was. Jesus. You know what? I was trying to make a podcast which is full of positive news and positive ideas, and look again, the drama and tragedy. I’m sorry. Now, I don’t have a name for the rat yet because I can’t understand if it’s a male or female. It’s difficult to say just by observing its behavior. For example, Jerome was a boy. Absolutely no questions there. I wouldn’t put my new friend through the indignity of checking what kind of genitalia it has. But even if I did, you know perfectly well that in our politically correct society, having a pair of testicles and penis doesn’t mean anything. A gentleman who decides to call himself a lady can come to a little girls bathroom or changing room, even if he has a pair of hairy balls and a penis size of a cucumber. I mean, who is there to stop him from watching little girls to undress? What, teachers? Yeah, right. Teachers are scared to death to go against the official policy. And if a parent gets uncomfortable knowing that someone with penis is allowed to watch his eight years old daughter to undress, he will be accused of being transphobic or even might be arrested for hate speech. That’s a world we live in. For example, I can be arrested for things I say right now.

You know, I’m very glad that I work with little kids, as they have pure and uncorrupted minds, and so they still know the difference between mommy and daddy or girls and boys. But I just know that some of them will become victims of this insanity one day, and there’s nothing can be done about this.

Me, I’m m a simple creature. If I see a crocodile, I will always treat him as a crocodile, even if he declares himself a cat and demands that I let him sleep in my bed. No way. But in saying so, you know, the people who have gender changes for whatever reasons they might have, but don’t demand anything of me, I will treat them with respect and compassion, and I will call them whatever they want to be called. Now, if they demand that I call them what they want, I will tell them to go and play with themselves. My new rat doesn’t demand anything, and I don’t want to offend it by misgendering him or her or whatever the case might be. I’m not sure yet. It’s a middle sized creature, very delicate. So I don’t really know. Maybe it is a transgender rat. What do you think? I shall find a neutral name which can work with both genders. Uh, Charlie. Charlie. Yeah. Charlie is a very delicate creature, well behaved and absolutely harmless. I would not want to offend Charlie. Anyway, let’s go back. We were talking about our lessons, and as I said, parents really are not needed at our lessons, because we are doing very well, thank you. Kids are getting their Distinction diplomas, they play concerts, they make videos, and everyone is so, so happy. If someone has a problem, we discuss it. If there’s a drama, we talk about it in detail.

Now, here’s a little story I want to tell you. It’s a very dramatic situation which occurred with one of my little ladies. As a teacher, obviously, I can’t give you any real names, so we shall call our little lady ‘Rosie’.

Rosie is a chatterbox. Happy, positive, full of life and full of ideas. When her mom brings Rosie in, we usually have a little chat, and then she goes away to do, you know, important things, grownup things. A couple weeks ago, Rosie was late for a lesson. Nearly 15 minutes late, which was very, very strange. So I was outside the door smoking, waiting and wondering if everything is all right, then I saw the car. Then both of them came out looking stressed out of their minds. Rosie’s mom barely said ‘Hi’. Then she went back to the car and drove away. I said, ‘OK Rosie, come in’. I saw that definitely there was something wrong. So, I let her in and said, ‘OK, my dear, what’s happening? Tell me’.

And so she went.

[00:28:01] Speaker B: well, Oleg you know, we went away for three days to see my Gran, and my mom didn’t let me take Pinky with us.

 

[00:28:05] Speaker A: Now, Pinky is a hamster. And by the way, Pinky is not his real name.

 

[00:28:11] Speaker B: So we went away, and I was very worried that Pinky is all alone and he’s sad and maybe he’s angry with me. We came home and I went to check on Pinky, and he was very, very, very sad. So I took him out and I took him for a walk. We went to the garden, and then we came to the sitting room and Daddy was sleeping on the couch.

[00:28:32] Speaker A: Now, uh, there’s something I have to explain about daddy. Daddy is my hero. He is a kind of person I want to be when I grow up. He does only two things in his life. He lies on a couch for the whole day, reading newspapers and watching TV. He doesn’t disturb anyone. Mom changes his newspapers twice a day and that’s all he requires. And once a week he has this burst of activity. He goes shopping and comes back and starts cooking. Now, he can do only one thing – pancakes.

And being a proper male human, when he does pancakes, he goes all the way. So he cooks like 500 pancakes and the whole family, relatives, neighbors, uh, they eat those pancakes for the whole week. And they eat pancakes with honey, with sour cream, with jam, and Nutella. Now, this is a very important detail. Nutella! Both Rosie and her dad, they love Nutella. And Rosie told me that they have a little secret. When Rosie comes to the kitchen at five in the morning, she usually finds her dad sitting there in his underwear with his finger stuck in a Nutella jar. They have like 50 Nutella jars in their house. They sit down and have one jar each and they eat with their fingers. Rosie says it tastes much better with a finger. And I know exactly what she’s talking about. I agree completely.

So, back to the story.

Rosie brought pinkie into the room, went up to the couch and put Pinkie on daddy’s head. You know, as a friendly gesture. And, according to Rosie,

[00:30:32] Speaker B: Pinky did a little poo on daddy’s head.

[00:30:35] Speaker A: Daddy woke up, felt the stuff on his head, and automatically put a finger in his mouth. He thought it was Nutella.

And then he realized that it was not.

Rosie was already hiding behind the door, and daddy assumed that it was their cat’s evil deed. So he went to find the cat and to sort it out. Mommy heard screaming and cursing. She ran into the room and saw Daddy trying to strangle the cat. So she grabbed the book and hit Daddy on the head. At that time Rosie realized that the end is near and she is in trouble. She ran to her room and hid Pinky. And then, her mom ran up the stairs and started to shout at Rosie. ‘We’re late for the violin lesson. Come on, come on. Let’s go. Get ready!!!’.

So Rosie grabbed the violin and the rest you know. At this moment, I had to stop Rosie. I was really, really struggling to keep a straight face. I just said, ‘Ok, ok. It’s all over now. All good. Calm down. And by the way, there’s only ten minutes left, so grab your violin and let’s play some music’.

So, Rosie opened the violin case, and what do you think we found there?

Yes, Rosie, in panic, put Pinky in the violin case, and then she forgot. So Pinky was inside the violin case, totally traumatized, and everything was covered in, uh, ‘Nutella’, shall we say?

It looks like Pinky had a serious case of diarrhea.

At that moment, I did something horrible. I did something only the stupid grownup will do.

I cracked up.

Rosie was very much offended. She said, ‘You are not my friend anymore!!!’.

Well, this story has a good ending. We agreed that we tell mom everything. And it actually was the best ending because mom cracked up as well. And we all had a good laugh, so they went home happy. Dad is okay now, and Pinky is fine. The cat is scandalized, but she’ll get over it. And as to me, I think I will finish now. I’ll get out for a little smoke and little chat with Charlie The Rat.

As to you, my dear people, I wish you all love, light, and happiness. Goodbye.