The main topic focuses on a new addition to House Siracusa. No spoilers, but it’s a pee-poop-nipping machine and a sweet precious angel.

This week kicks off with some discussion of Yakov Smirnoff’s beard, why Merlin wants to buy a drill, and how John feels a little vindicated about his read of Fight Club.

In follow-up, John catches us up on how things went after his wife listened to the house duties episode. Merlin just wants to be loved, and John just isn’t sold on the benefits of being a no-shoe household.

This week’s mini-topic concerns John’s fraught relationship with a noisy summer appliance. You just need to get something meaty in there.

John admits to an awkward expression of casual doggie racism, and Merlin apparently measures difficulty with barre chords.

(Recorded on Tuesday, June 20, 2017.)

Today’s tough-guy posturing seems rooted, paradoxically, in threat and fear: fear of defeat, fear of lost status and fear that society is growing increasingly ill suited to tough-guy posturing in the first place. The narrator of “Fight Club,” source of that “snowflake” mantra, was a delusional man coping with modernity by inventing a hypermasculine alter-ego, imagining himself as the man-cult leader Tyler Durden. But making an entire alternate masculine identity is a lot of work. It’s always much easier to just call other people wimps and snowflakes — and hope they’ll be intimidated enough to melt away.