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Nov. 9, 2007 - No Agenda
37:15
3: No Agenda 003
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Time Text
Well, everybody, once again, welcome to the show that has no format, no jingles, it has no music, it apparently has no talent, it has no agenda.
I'm Adam Curry at the Curry Condo in San Francisco.
And I'm John Dvorak out here in the Albany area of California.
John, it's been a long week, man.
For you.
I gotta tell you, I'm so incredibly tired.
This is about the last thing I can do.
I'm supposed to do a Friday show for Daily Source Code.
I just don't think I have it in me.
It's just been too much.
It really has been.
Well, yeah, you've been working, if anybody doesn't know, Adam comes out here, you know, he's like the president of Pod Show, and he shows up, and they just work him to death.
I mean, I load his calendar up as best I can, but I don't get that much in.
But everybody else does, and he's like going up and down the peninsula, driving around, and the traffic around here, especially this time of year, is dreadful.
It is horrible.
Actually, this morning was pretty good, around 8 a.m., but that was this morning.
Well, I was going to actually go over to the office at noon, and it was stopped dead.
I said, I guess I might as well just work here.
It was unbelievable how, and we talked about this the other day.
There's something screwy going on in the San Francisco Bay Area because the traffic going into San Francisco during the commute hour when you should be leaving San Francisco, in other words, in the evening when San Francisco is closing and everyone's leaving San Francisco, the traffic going into San Francisco at that time is usually worse than it is going out.
And is it because everyone's living in San Francisco and they're working in Union City?
I don't think so.
No, I know what it is.
I know what it is.
Those are all the people who live in the Tower of Death that I look at here.
The Tower of Death, nobody lives in there yet.
Not yet, but it's getting close, man.
I'm looking at it.
That thing's growing.
By the way, let's tell people what we're talking about.
I'm going to have this on the blog, by the way.
I've been taking pictures of this thing constantly.
They're building the tallest building in San Francisco, at least in terms of altitude, I believe.
Wait, it's the tallest building west of the Mississippi.
Okay, it's the tallest building west of the Mississippi.
It's an apartment building, condos, apartment, whatever.
And it's huge, and it's built right at the base of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
It is an accident just waiting to happen.
If there's any kind of an earthquake, even if it doesn't drop the building, if the building falls over, it's going to be horrible.
But any other situation where the glass in that building breaks and starts falling, the Bay Bridge will be closed for weeks because it will just cover it.
Yeah, and this is just one of two towers.
They're going to build a second one.
Right, they're going to have twin towers, which just invites somebody to fly.
Yeah, twin towers.
Really nice guys.
Thanks.
Unbelievable.
Anyway, it's a disaster.
I don't understand how the city could have approved it to begin with.
It used to be, but for people who come through San Francisco, it's sitting where the old Union Oil Building used to be, which was right when you get off the San Francisco Bay Bridge from Oakland.
It was on the right-hand side.
It had a clock on it.
Yeah, it was the Bank of America clock before they tore it down.
And they tore down the building and they built this atrocity.
Yeah.
And you're telling me that it has a bunch of water at the top.
Yeah, some guy, the guy who drove me from the airport when I came into town, he said that, and you can actually see it, there's a circular, you know, kind of like in Manhattan where they have those big water tanks on top, so it's about that size.
Of course, it doesn't look like Petticoat Junction the way it does in Manhattan.
But apparently there's some kind of honeycomb grid structure inside of it.
They filled it up with water, and that is intended to counterbalance any swaying that would take place by extremely high winds or indeed an earthquake.
I'm not quite sure how it works, but I guess someone thought about it.
It's like if you balance a baseball bat, if you put the heavy end up, it's usually good.
Could be.
But there's no big finger underneath moving around to keep it stable.
I think we should get some alligators into that water, some fish.
John, I'm sure you've thought about something for our No Agenda program today.
Yeah.
We're at the week where the American dollar is now worth less than the Canadian dollar.
Yep.
This should be like front-page headline news.
No offense to you Canadians out there, but over time, this is humiliating.
It's not just humiliating.
Actually, in some ways, it's been good.
It's funny you brought this up as the first topic.
We've been working for quite a while now on a significant deal in Germany.
And we had a board of directors meeting.
I don't know.
Was that last Friday or Thursday or whatever?
And so the question was, you know, so what's the value of the deal?
And between the time when we started the negotiations, or actually started talking to them, And this board meeting, the value of that deal had actually increased by about a million dollars.
And the reason?
Because of the falling dollar.
Because of the falling dollar, yeah.
And that's a Euro deal.
In fact, I get a couple of emails from people that Gisela Bündchen, the supermodel, she has now requested that all of her modeling contracts be paid in Euros.
Oh, right.
I mean, when you're Gisela Bundchen asking for euros, we're just steps away from oil being traded in euros.
I'm sorry.
We're very, very close to that point.
And all these countries are making noise about it.
Boy, oh boy.
I don't know if it's just me, but I'm getting a little claustrophobic about this.
Well, you know, it doesn't really affect anyone who doesn't leave the country.
Well, that's not true, John.
That's absolutely untrue.
I remember...
Living in the New York metro area, we left in 2000, and the tunnel toll was $4.
And just two weeks ago, they raised it to $8.
I mean, I come loaded with experience of what stuff costs from seven or eight years ago, and lots of stuff is twice as expensive.
So you have to feel it.
It's just inflation that exists.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They jacked up the price on the bridge.
It used to be 50...
You know, the thing about the bridge over here that we've got, it's like I still have newspaper articles from the day that they proposed both the Golden Gate Bridge and then later the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
And I've got the original...
The original things that were sent out by the bridge commissions.
It's going to cost this much and then it's going to be free forever because it's going to pay for itself with gas tax and all the rest of it.
It's not going to be a toll bridge.
No, no, no.
It'll never happen.
Who was mayor then?
Was it Newsom then?
I don't know.
It's another scammer.
But yeah, the dollar is clearly in a form of, well, not really free fall.
In fact, it ticked up a little bit today, not that it's very significant.
You know, it's like three cents or something.
But it's definitely, I think it's really concerning.
And last, since the election of George W. Bush, we went from being, you know, I think the Canadian dollar was like 75 cents, and now this Canadian dollar is worth more than the American dollar.
All with one president.
I don't want to blame him.
It's interesting you said that this should be front-page news, because it probably should be.
I think you're right.
Americans really don't understand, particularly Americans who haven't been out of the country ever, don't really understand what it means for the euro to be at 147 or 142 or whatever it is right now.
It could hit two dollars.
I hate to think about that.
I really do.
You're all locked up in euros, aren't you?
You're Swiss francs.
Among many currencies, John.
Why just stop there?
I like to divest a little bit.
I have to go back to the article I did.
I did a blog article on this.
Bill Gates, about two years ago, said he was getting out of dollars.
There you go.
Way ahead of the game on this.
I've got to pay more attention to what Bill says.
This amongst a week where General Motors reported a $28 billion loss.
How do you do that?
I mean, it's like if you make no cars but have everybody still working.
I mean, I still don't think you can lose $28 billion.
It just makes no sense.
It's mystifying.
It's a lot of money to lose.
I know what it is.
I think it has to do – their money or their business is actually not even cars and I think their product shows that.
It's financing.
Financing is what the automobile business is about and so I'm sure that this is related to all kinds of financing problems in the financial world.
It has to be related to that.
So I'm pretty sure that's where it's coming from.
Maybe they're also part of the subprime problem.
Is subprime only for mortgages on homes?
Can it also be for car loans and leasing and stuff?
Well, the car loans, they don't have subprime necessarily, but they have these deals where you have to pay zero interest for 24 months and things like that.
It could have something to do with it.
I mean, but these bankers, even though they do the car loan, they do a lot more than that.
I mean, these guys are doing cross-deals all the time.
They say, once you get in our deal, we could use a couple billion from you.
I mean, who knows?
I mean, I'd like to see somebody out there or have a friend.
I've got a lot of bookkeeper friends.
To have somebody actually look What happened?
Where did they lose that money?
Because that, of course, is almost not to be found anywhere in any reporting, unless, I guess, you go look on a Bloomberg terminal.
The story is, GM lost $28 billion.
That's all.
No one's doing any reporting anymore.
No, the reporting is over.
It really is.
Reporting is just over.
It's all about headlines and opinion.
Well, the reason it's over, I have to tell you this, is that it's not cost-effective anymore.
To do real news reporting?
No, because nobody pays you to do it.
If you can't write a headline, I'm not interested in your news.
Essentially, the reporters are underpaid.
They have too much to do.
And then the ones that are real productive, they don't get extra money.
I mean, there's all kinds of problems with the whole scene.
It's just they don't know what's important.
A lot of people can't.
It's also difficult to do reporting if you're starting from square zero.
In other words, you don't know anything about the topic.
And the way the J schools have cranked out journalists over the years is to keep them from being specialists.
They tend to be generalists.
Wasn't that supposed to be, you're supposed to have a beat and you're supposed to be on the beat and know everything about the beat?
The beat thing, yeah, but the beats aren't as specific as they once were.
I mean, in the olden days, if you were an AP reporter and you had a police beat, say you were in Albuquerque, you'd actually be in the police station.
I mean, people were actually hanging out with the cops.
I mean, they would really know a lot of stuff in great detail.
Or if somebody has a technology beat, it's a little better if they actually know something about technology.
But what they'll do now is take some guy out of J school and he knows how to report.
He can write.
And they give him a technology story, or a technology beat, and he's down in Silicon Valley and basically being bamboozled every time he turns around, because he doesn't know the games that these jokers play.
And I was actually going to say that in particular, I'm really getting down, yourself of course excluded, John, I'm really getting down on tech reporting.
It's really, it's just all so speculative, full of opinion, lots of lack of knowledge, particular technical knowledge.
If I read one more story about, you know, like, open social, you know, show me the API already, you know.
Stop, you know, the story is now about...
Well, that's actually kind of what, that kind of bothers me.
I mean, I am an opinion writer, so you're going to get a lot of opinions from me, but I try not to, like...
I don't get on a bandwagon of vaporware.
Somebody says they're going to do this, that, and the other thing, and they say it'll be out in 2009.
Why am I getting excited?
This sounds like they don't know what they're doing.
It's going to get out in 2009.
If they knew what they were up to, why isn't it out now?
Actually, I had a discussion with Ron earlier today.
I said the marketplace is so fucking crazy.
It's so stupid.
News reporting is so stupid.
I suggested...
I think actually Richard Brewer-Hay has taken it to the PR firm.
I said, why don't we put out a release?
Because there's a couple of things going on here.
First of all, Reuters reported two days ago that they expect online advertising revenue to double by 2010.
2011.
2011.
And I think it actually probably could be more.
But let's just say it doubles.
I think it's going to triple.
Okay, triple.
And it's Reuters, so hey, of course it's true.
Then you have the writer's strike, and there's lots of people going, endless, complete nincompoop discussion and non-knowledge of what is really going on and just not understanding anything about it.
All people talking about is television industry will come crashing down.
It may very well, but that's beside the point.
I think...
That it's a perfect time for us to do a press release and say, hey, wow, you know, it's really true what Reuters is saying, because now with the writer's strike, we're seeing the value of RFPs from media buying companies almost double, which, by the way, is true.
I don't know if it's related, but I bet you I could get some real serious ink with a story like that.
If you have the right public relations agency, you could make a lot of hay with that concept.
Let's try that.
Let's try it next week.
I think we should really go for it.
Well, it's doable.
It's a media hack.
I think we can do it.
I think people will jump for it.
Anything to jump on the writer's strike story, a new angle.
They need a new angle for the writer's strike story.
The writer's strike story needs a new angle so badly that the story is already dead.
And I'm watching the YouTube channel.
Less and less writers are picketing by the day.
They start off and everyone's there.
And the showrunners, that's Hollywood speak for the producers.
And it's dwindling.
And I feel bad because this is, I think it's going to be, well, we talked about it last week.
But it's going to be a long haul.
It's really, you know, Jack Myers.
Do you ever read Jack Myers?
Do you know who he is?
Yeah.
Okay.
So he's writing about this almost every single day.
And in one of his today or yesterday's email column, which I guess you can find at jackmeyers.com, he really breaks it down as to how impossible this is because it's not about a percentage of a physical sale of something.
It's about this really smoky business called advertising.
And where is the cost and where is the profit?
When you have a DVD, it's kind of clear.
It costs $0.10.
Sell it for $24.
Give the writer $0.05.
But when it comes to advertising, I don't know.
If they want a percentage of something, they'll wind up with nothing.
That's the Hollywood system.
Yeah, no, they'll get screwed.
That's the reason I kind of was against this strike.
I was thinking that until you see solid numbers that you can actually play with and work with and see where you're getting screwed, as opposed to this nebulous, we're getting screwed, but we're not absolutely sure how.
Yeah.
I don't blame them for being a little paranoid because they've been getting screwed left and right every chance you get.
But at the same time, doing something like this prematurely I think is going to leave them open for kind of a scam.
Jack Myers had a pretty interesting suggestion.
He said all of the advertising agencies who – the advertising agency business is pretty – Pretty spectacular.
Client comes in, they say, how much do you want to spend on advertising?
We're going to spend $100 million.
Okay, so standard practice is the agency takes 15%, so that's $150 million, and all the rest they pass through to the media outlets, and they buy the spots.
And from that $150 million, they have to come up with the creative.
Well, big fucking deal.
There's enough money there to come up with the creative.
The idea was for the media purchasing agencies to actually put together a fund of 1% of their 15 to pay and then divvy that up amongst the writers.
At least you'll have a finite amount of money.
Something that you can actually look at and say, all right, we're going to divvy this up in this manner and not some smoky number of what...
What the advertising is being sold for because it's unaccountable almost.
And I thought that was a pretty interesting idea.
It'll never happen, of course, but it would be a way out.
Yeah, well, it won't happen.
You're right.
Now, the one thing that I sent you some email about this, one of our...
In fact, my little blogging community got...
I guess one of the subtext gossip pieces floating around the net suggests that the producers and the networks don't want the writer's strike to end because the season this year is such a disaster that they can just let the season get killed by the writers and then they can blame them.
Which they will.
They totally will.
Ah, well, whatever.
I'm sick of this story.
Well, it's like, yeah, you're right.
It's a dead story already.
It's a dead story.
I'm sorry.
I'm just sick of it.
So I watched Letterman last night, which, you know, I guess is not really on the air.
That must have been a repeat.
I'm thinking it was.
I never saw it before, though, and it was fine.
Remember we talked two weeks ago about Linda Stein, ex-wife of Seymour Stein, the manager to the Ramones, who got bludgeoned to death?
Yeah.
Well, turns out it was her assistant.
Oh.
She was...
This is a great story.
I'm glad you're following this story.
Wow.
It pops up on my news radar.
So she's 62, this Linda Stein, and she's still got the same attitude she had when she was managing the Ramones.
And so she comes in and she's yelling at her assistant as usual and blows apparently a big cloud of reefer smoke into her face.
And then this assistant, this girl, picked up what they're calling a yoga stick.
I'm not quite sure what a yoga stick is.
And she thinks that she basically hit her six or seven times.
And that will do it!
Well, she was defending herself.
I think she has a case, certainly for temporary insanity.
Everyone knows how crazy Linda was.
A blast of dope smoke and boom, anything can happen.
You've seen it in the movies.
So this is kind of interesting.
I was just looking at AOL news.
So everything that's going on in the world, the top stories right now, cop named suspect in Weiss vanishing.
Stocks plunge again on credit worries.
Whose face was behind the mask?
Musical code found in Da Vinci painting.
Arrest and realtor to the stars slaying.
What the hell is going on, people?
This isn't news.
It's Entertainment Tonight, except for that one story.
Yeah, about the dollar.
No, about the art.
What was that again?
Oh, you mean about the Da Vinci painting that the guy mirrored the Da Vinci painting?
Is that it?
Was there a painting underneath a painting somebody got?
I mean, there's always the stories about some guy goes to a flea market and buys a painting for ten bucks, and underneath it there's like a Monet.
Well, no, there's a couple stories.
The one that caught my eye was, so you have The Last Supper, and someone by accident superimposed the same painting, a picture obviously, Well,
he did like to do a lot of stuff backwards so that it's possible.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But that painting's been so beat up over the years that it's like the original is so gone.
Yeah.
There's a lot of good documentaries about that thing.
In fact, I don't even let you see it anymore.
What do you mean they don't let you see it?
You know, it's in the hold up on this wall someplace and they've been trying to fix it or they're trying to protect it.
I don't know.
Can you go see it anymore?
I don't know if they let the public see it anymore, do they?
Isn't that in the Louvre?
No, the thing's still on the wall in some church.
Oh, no, that's right.
No, no, no.
Of course, the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre.
Yeah, yeah, right.
Yeah, and there was, you're right, they did think there was something behind it or some fresco that might have been put in place.
I don't know.
No, actually, Gallery HD had one of my favorite channels.
I've talked to you about this before.
Anyone who has the Dish Network should check it out.
It's on that Voom HD that they bought.
Anyway, they have a special on the whole story of this painting and how they're trying to keep it from deteriorating because it was a fresco and it wasn't really built to last.
It was built to last 100 years maybe, but not forever.
It's very interesting, but the thing has just apparently been worked on and screwed up.
It's just a mess.
Anyway.
I was under the impression that they're not letting people see it for a while for some reason.
Well, I remember they had that with the night watch.
Rembrandt's night watch, which hangs in the Rijksmuseum in Holland.
I think I was probably like 12 or 13 and someone hopped over the velvet rope and slashed it with a knife and it took years to repair.
I remember that being quite shocking as a child.
Like, wow, why would anyone do something fucked up like that?
Well, you know, the Mona Lisa, when I first saw it in the Louvre in 1973...
It not only didn't have a crowd, but it didn't have any guards, and it was just there.
It was like it wasn't covered in glass or bulletproof glass like it is.
Now, if you go there now, there's a big crowd around it, and it's got the thing behind bulletproof glass or something like that.
Nice.
It's kind of taken a lot of the charm away.
And I remember also that same year, again, 1973.
I'm in England, floating around, and I went to Stonehenge.
And back then, there was nobody at Stonehenge, and you could go sit on the Stonehenge.
I remember that.
When I was 11, my dad took me to London, and then we took a trip out to Stonehenge.
Indeed?
And I didn't even know that you couldn't sit there anymore.
It's all blocked off, right?
Yeah, you can't even touch him.
You can't even get close to him.
It's all blocked off.
That's not right.
And what's weird about it, though, here's what's weird about it.
This always reminds me of the Antonioni movie, Blow Up.
And the one scene in that movie, which is always really kind of, I think, one of the more interesting scenes, there's a guitar scene.
The guy playing this guitar and this crazy audience is going nuts.
And the guy throws the guitar into the audience and everybody goes crazy trying to grab the guitar.
One guy gets, he starts running and running and running.
People are running, running, running, running after him, trying to grab the guitar.
He finally outraces everybody and they all disappear in the back.
He's got the guitar, looks around, nobody's there, throws the thing away.
Of course.
Right.
And, you know, Stonehand, when I went to see it the first time, there was nobody there.
I mean, it was like me, a couple of cows and a couple of guys I was with.
And some druids.
And it was nothing.
And then...
If you go now, it's huge.
There's a big parking lot.
There's a million people because now that they made it precious, it's crowded.
Not really crowded, but it's crowded enough that it's different.
And then the Mona Lisa was the same way.
You could just go by, casually look at it.
It was kind of neat.
But now there's a big crowd around it.
The public is crazy.
Here it is.
GM attributed the third quarter loss to a 38.6 billion non-cash charge largely related to establishing a valuation allowance against accumulated deferred tax credits in the US, Canada and Germany as well as mortgage losses at GM's former financial arm, GMAC Financial Services.
Ah, there's that mortgage.
But accounting rules require that companies expecting to keep losing money cannot keep carrying deferred tax credits indefinitely and must write down their values.
So what they did is they just decided to take the hit now and they think the dollar's at the lowest it can possibly be.
It probably could have been a lot more, I guess.
Well, that's actually a pretty good move.
It's funny.
It says, what might be considered more troubling for GM, though, is continuing losses in its home market.
So here's the real losses.
It reported a net loss from continuing operations of $247 million without the charge for the latest quarter.
That compares with a net loss of $667 million in the year ago.
So, operationally, they actually did better.
Huh.
Crazy.
But the headline, and now this is the first time I'm really digging into it, and by the way, what normal fucking human being can understand what all that means?
Bean counter.
Yeah.
I have a friend who could get it.
But the headline is, GM loses money!
Wow, yeah, that's a good idea.
What?
Yeah, the headline just goes for the juggler.
All right, you got something else for us, John?
No, the only other thing is that I did this column in MarketWatch this week, and I wrote – I talked about this on the Tech5 podcast, tech5.podcast.com for anyone who doesn't listen to that.
Podshow.com.
Bob, sorry, podshow.
What a faux pas.
Thanks.
Don't make me edit this out.
Yeah, tech5.podshow.com.
Anyway, about – I just find it peculiar that the U.S. Congress is pounding on Yahoo over this Chinese guy.
Yeah.
While AT&T is like essentially giving up the farm and giving everybody's email and everything they've got, and now apparently all email can get used by the intelligence agencies to spy on us, which would probably result in some sort of...
I'm sure a few people will get busted over one thing or another over time.
And it just seems to me that the US Congress is concerned more about protecting a Chinese citizen than they are about protecting American citizens.
It's just weird.
Of course, I boiled it down to the fact that as far as I can really tell, I mean, what this is really all about, Tom Lantos obviously didn't get a big campaign contribution from Yahoo.
And now he's fucking with them.
Yeah, he's screwing with them.
So, you know, why not?
He can do it.
There's a story.
But the Yahoo guys, you know, they shouldn't have even been, they should have just said, we refuse to even talk to you guys.
You know, make them do more.
Yeah, I'm right.
But you're right about the AT&T thing.
And I have an AT&T cell phone.
And I figure the best thing to do is just spam their Echelon system with all kinds of information.
Take all of my information.
Just please organize it for me and send it back.
Yeah, that would be nice.
Could you please help me with my life?
Yeah, really.
Since Windows Vista can't do it.
There's a story that someone sent me that was in a respected newspaper in the Netherlands, if you can speak of one, about two young kids, two Dutch kids, not young, 24, and they went on a backpacking tour of the States, and they planned to spend a couple months, and they were on their way down to Mexico hitchhiking, and because I think one of them became sick, and so they stayed a little longer than they expected to, so actually their tourist visa had expired.
And a state trooper pulls over and says, hey, where are you guys going?
Oh, we want to just go down to the border.
And he says, hey, no problem.
But then Border Patrol showed up, and they got thrown into jail for six weeks.
And we're interrogated.
We're put in isolation cells.
We're not allowed to call a lawyer or any type of legal representation.
Completely nuts.
Where did this take place?
Near Mexico.
Hold on.
Let me see if I can find the...
I'm on my other computer here, of course, which makes it hard to find.
Hold on.
Hopefully this will hit some U.S. newspapers because this is a really good story.
Here, horrific backpacking story in the U.S. Let me see.
So what would I look it up in if I was going to go to Google?
This is bloggable.
Well, hold on.
I'll Skype you the link right now.
Hold on.
Here it comes.
How do I do that here?
How do I use Skype?
I've clearly forgotten.
Wait a minute, I have...
I don't know how to fucking do this.
So I want to mention to people out there, I was calling you earlier, and you have...
I don't know, maybe you can't use Skype, you say, but you have call forwarding on Skype.
So when I called you using Skype, it called your cell phone.
Yeah, that was pretty trippy.
Are you paying for that?
Yeah, you have to use Skype out.
So it's just a forward.
Okay, this happened...
Wait, I'm sorry.
Miriam, she's 35, he's 29.
They're both from Amsterdam.
September 2nd, 2006, they came to the States.
Wait, I'm going to explain to people out there who are listening.
There's a photo here in this newspaper of the two of them.
She's like a white blonde.
She's a MILF. She's a MILF. Yeah.
And he's just a normal looking character.
He's a MILF seeker, John.
MILF seeker.
Okay.
But it's not like they are a couple of Arabs.
No.
Hold on.
Let me see.
Where the hell did it happen?
I'm just reading through this.
Oh, Texas, of course.
They were on their way to Mexico.
I'm just translating on the fly.
A Texas sheriff...
Stopped us because we're hitchhiking.
The girl says the sheriff was really nice.
He asked us where we wanted to go, wanted to drop us off.
Just at that very moment that we were putting our backpacks in the back of his car, a border control agent came up and they were taken away to what they call is a heavily armed jail in the middle of the desert.
Four months they were there.
I'm sorry.
Four months.
Oh, no.
Wait a minute.
No, hold on a second.
Hold on.
They told them they would be there for four months.
I'm sorry.
I'm translating on the fly, John.
That's kind of hard.
How long was it?
Let me just translate it for you.
I can do this.
Okay.
So the girl says, how long is it going to take?
They said four months.
Of course, that shocked us.
Just before we were separated, Wesley said, don't worry, I'll get a lawyer.
But Wesley landed half-naked in an isolation cell of two by three meters after he had undergone a psychological test, which he had answered incorrectly.
That's what it says.
He answered incorrectly.
That's what it says.
After...
After a couple of days, he got a t-shirt and after a week, a book.
Once in a while, they'd let him take a shower while shackled.
During the day, he tried to sleep because the guards would spend their nights yelling and screaming, keeping everybody up.
Wesley was in the ISO cell for four weeks because they had forgotten him.
The two never received a lawyer or legal help.
No one ever read them their rights.
They were not even allowed to make a phone call.
They got basically jail clothing, a piece of toilet paper and a toothbrush, which combined with a compass and a rubber knife.
I mean, let's be honest.
What else do you need?
Miriam shared a cell with more than 80 women.
The bathrooms and showers were open and cameras were hanging everywhere.
They were not allowed to go into fresh air.
The first couple of days, Miriam was just sobbing uncontrollably.
Later, she really wanted to be in an isolation cell because it was so crazy in the cell she was in.
After six weeks, Wesley got out A miracle, he says.
Through friends in the States, he was able to also get Miriam out and to the Netherlands.
They will not be visiting the States anytime soon.
Here it is.
Wesley says, we love the nature, but the American society makes me want to puke.
Everywhere that American flag, it looks like Nazi Germany.
Right.
There you go, ladies and gentlemen.
And this is coming from people from fucking Amsterdam, okay?
Where there's a lot of Sodom and Gomorrah going on.
Well, the whole story is weird.
This story has to be, somebody's got to do this story.
Well, that's okay.
There you go.
It just doesn't make any sense.
The whole story doesn't make any sense.
What do you mean?
It's an accounting of what happened to them.
No, but I mean, but there's no rationale for it.
This is like cost of taxpayers money to even do this.
I mean, what's the point of it?
Well, and it sounds like there's a lot of people in these jails in the desert, whatever it is, where you get no lawyer.
That's pretty messed up.
Well, the whole thing is fishy.
Well, it's from the Allgemeen Dagblad, and I have been interviewed by them many, many times.
I have to say they're reasonable in the reporting.
It doesn't mean that they did the research or checked it out, but I'm sure that this is the story these two told.
They reported it exactly like that.
But I think it's a big one.
I think that's a big story.
Yeah, it's a damn good story, and it hasn't picked up over here at all.
I haven't seen it.
I'll blog it, and then it's worth looking into because it's unique.
Because you have to assume that this is not their deal.
I mean, these are just a blonde girl in a backpacker.
Well, he looks kind of Asian.
I think that's fishy.
You think he looks a little Asian?
Don't you think so?
Don't you think he looks a little Asian?
Maybe Suriname or something?
Let me blow up the picture.
I'm blowing it up here, too.
Let me see.
Oh, and now they're suing.
They want to sue America, of course.
Oh, they should sue.
Yeah.
That's one thing we got going here.
First, they have to...
Oh, before they could...
They should just be suing the local authorities, whoever it was, that let this happen.
Well, here's what the story says.
The guy's goofy looking.
Yeah, I'd throw him in the cell, too.
Fuck him.
Well, what I would say, I mean, what's he doing with his...
The blonde's kind of cute.
Yeah, she's kind of cute.
So he said they first have to sue the Dutch state for negligence of letting them rot without...
I'm sure that...
There's a lot of backstory that's not in here, dude, that's for sure.
Yeah, it'd probably be a good story to uncover.
And if it's full of shit, then there goes my...
There goes the status of this newspaper.
But it sounds...
It's a legit paper.
I read this paper.
That's how I came up with this.
You know who would know that if this actually happened, it would be that sheriff that let him get picked up by the other agency?
That's the key.
Maybe that was his deal all along.
I mean, all of a sudden, he's putting them in the car, and then all of a sudden, the Border Patrol shows up.
I mean, honestly...
Honestly.
When would that happen?
How many sheriffs would say, hey, you're hitchhiking?
You know, that's illegal.
Don't worry.
I'll drop you off.
Where do you want to go?
I just get a short picture of that.
Well, actually, hitchhiking is not illegal.
But there's a lot.
I've noticed this over in the Berkeley area.
There's been a lot more hitchhiking.
Not a lot more.
I've seen two.
But there's been two hitchhikers I've seen recently who are just women.
And they look.
And they're those tall, Dutch-looking women.
I think Dutch come over here and they just think they can hitchhike.
Yeah, what the fuck?
Don't hitchhike here, you Dutchies.
Get out of here.
Are you nuts?
Don't stand near that building hitchhiking.
You can fall on you any moment now.
You know, it doesn't cost that much for a bus ticket.
Yeah.
All right.
I think we're done.
Yeah, I think we're done, too.
All right.
Well, hey, John, it was good seeing you this week.
I'm glad we didn't eat once, but twice.
That's a big deal.
Yeah.
Okay.
I didn't get to do the freebie stuff, but it was okay.
No, that's all right.
No, this was good.
You've got an excellent talent, my friend.
I like following it.
I like following it around.
Well, there it goes now.
Hey!
All right.
Okay, that's it for No Agenda.
I'm sure we'll do another one somewhere around next Friday.
From the Curry Condo in San Francisco, I'm Adam Curry.
And I'm John C. Dvorak.
We'll talk to you next week.
Bye-bye.
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