Muse

Hey, Grandma. Can you come get me from the rap battle? No, I didn't win. No, he saw you drop me off. It was pretty much over after that. He did a pretty devastating rhyme about it. TVTL!

I think the thing that we want to do now, the thing ideally that we would end this meeting with meeting with is just get everyone looped in circle the wagons to the point where we can sort of set a roadmap for a dialogue yeah going forward isn't that for techno geeks with spreadsheets i'm such

as a sucker for content do you just sit around all day thinking of nice things to say to people it's not necessarily during the day but i do like to be nice to people Life's a potty. Wipe your body.

All right. Hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Wednesday edition of TVTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. Got to do it again, right now. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. If you want to talk, I've got two ears, and they're tuned to the listening station. Coming to you from the Nest Broadcast Center high in the sky above Portland, Oregon, where we are looking at another day heading north of 90. I feel warm and I'm levitating. I tried to get out on the early side, get my little jog in before it got too warm. And gosh, even at, I don't know, like 8 in the morning, it was still, it was steamy out there, got very, very sweaty. Didn't know you like to get wet, though. uh and as i mean i have a lot of the listeners will agree a lot of just incredibly sexy qualities one of them at the top of the list is that after i've exercised and showered i will continue to sweat for a good three hours so uh that's the situation right now as we enter into episode 3436 in a collector series let the fun begin take a big swig of water out of my um giant thermo flask and then it just comes right out of my forehead like a cartoon character that got shot up and then is drinking water but anyway uh we got this everyone this is going to be a great show i can feel it because i've spent the last 24 hours carefully studying tiktok people of tiktok i'm going to bring you a new segment based just on events and stories that i saw by way of that fine fine social media platform including a bear in california that climbed onto a fence in a teenage a girl's backyard a bear who had no idea what world it just stepped into you may have seen this viral video uh on various platforms of this teenager named haley pushing this bear off of a fence as it's fighting with her dogs um so we'll uh we'll play you well this is this is what you turn to tbtl for there was the interview that hayley did on the today show and that was fine but then there's hayley's tiktok story and that's where your boy burbs does the extra step in the journalism of this whole thing we also have hayley's tiktok story about her account of what it was like to yeet that bear off of that fence so talk about that also another story that i saw on tiktok that's floating around literally floating around oh that wasn't planned but every once in a while you just get lucky um there were uh there was a family out in their boat on moses lake washington and they were flying a pride flag and some other people on the water

in a different boat did not appreciate that and they decided to come over and harass and be rude to the people with the pride flags flying they were circling the boat they were giving them the middle finger and then all of a sudden something amazing happened their boat caught completely on fire and they had to abandon ship i would say aha not my problem interestingly enough that's not what these folks who were being harassed did they actually saved these incredibly rude people uh we will tell you about that and then just not not too far from moses lake still keeping in the general central washington area the applets and cotlets company or whatever their name is but the people that make the applets and the cotlets candy the turkish delight based thing with apples and walnuts in it that everybody's grandmother if you're from this area would give you and you were always a little let down they were supposed to close up on june 1st but in fact they are They say they are in talks to sell the business, and so they are staying open, and they are going to continue making the candy nobody asked for in perpetuity, which is good news. We've got all that plus e-mails and v-mails, and we've got this guy, the longest-running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. I'll tell you, he's got two broken fingers, and that's maybe the least of his current physical maladies. I've got 14 bugs up my bottom. He is Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now from the Roosevelt neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. Good morning, my friend.

What kind of a deepfake was that? That sounded like my voice, but I know that those words have never come out of my mouth before, Luke. What is going on?

Honestly, we must—not that they're going to use that technology on this little project, but, I mean, considering the deepfakes that we can do with video, I feel like we actually just had this conversation a while ago. Do you think that they'll be able to deepfake audio easier than video? Or maybe actually, maybe the audio is tougher. When do you think we're going to have deepfake podcasts?

I think the audio is easier. And I feel like we did talk about this. I feel like somebody brought this up or somebody was experimenting with audio recently. I would say this, and this isn't necessarily where we wanted to start the show today, but if anybody wanted to do some sort of experimentation with deepfake audio based on hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of archived content, like, isn't TBTL the perfect candidate for that? Like, don't get me wrong. I don't want people deep faking my voice necessarily. That sounds problematic. But, like, there are other podcasts who have been around as long as TBTL, but daily podcasts that go, that, you know, release episodes as long as ours. It's like we just have so many words out there.

It's kind of like the project they were trying to do with Roger Ebert towards the end of his life where they were trying to construct his spoken language or, you know what I mean, like a voice for him because through his surgeries he had lost the ability to speak. But he had talked so much during Siskel and Ebert at the movies and in other places that they had. They thought every kind of syllable and phonetic sound that a person needed to make. They were there was a I don't know where they ended up on that. But the idea was to make Roger Ebert a voice made out of his own voice.

And again, while I'm not saying the content we release is better than Siskel's or Ebert's. No, but certainly not. But if they felt like there was a huge archive of those words coming from that man's voice, I mean, we must surpass it so much, eclipses it.

Just because of volume, just because of the number of days that we have done a show, which would be, at last count, 3,435 days leading up to this one. And the other question is, why would anyone want to do that with us? And it's because we obviously have amazing radio voices. That's very true. The content itself, the content of what we're saying is forgettable, but if you were to take our voices, these golden voices, and then if you were to have somebody who's actually interesting write out a script or something and then just kind of overlay our voices over someone else's genius thoughts, you'd really have something, Andrew.

It would be amazing to hear what I sounded like if I were smart. That would be something else, man. I'd pay decent money for that, which is proof that I'm not smart because I'd be handing over too much money just to hear my own voice coming back at me.

I don't know where my breaking news sounder is right now, Andrew, but if I could find it on the fly, here it is. Okay, I would be activating it. TVTL Breaking News. I am looking out at the platform of the Earl Blumenauer pedestrian and cycle bridge that one day will span I-84 here in Portland, Oregon. I think literally on day one of me doing the show from this room, so that would have been November maybe of 2020. I looked out and I saw this cool project and I said, oh, this is going to be amazing. And I can't wait to watch them finish this because at some point they're going to take this big section of bridge and they're going to, like, crane it up and drop it down over the freeway. And I went to the website and they said that it was going to be done in, like, a month or two, which, of course, never happened. And then every time I'd go to the website, I would never get an update. Andrew, I see people in orange safety colored outfits walking around looking at the crane.

Nice. So we're going to see that crane in action is the idea here. We're actually going to see this in place.

Or the company that owns the crane is repossessing it. Let's do the lack of payment.

We're never getting this project done. Forget about it.

And we're actually suing Earl Blumenauer directly, which seems mean. He's a nice dude. We've had him on Livewire. No, I mean, I don't know what they're doing.

Like, there's no work happening. It's not like the crane is in motion. But what there are, for the first time in the history of me doing the show from this room, there are human beings that are walking around out on the platform where one day the bridge will rest. So that seems like some kind of progress.

I'm going to pivot there, though, and tell you about something that I teased for you before the show, Luke, before we ever started dialing up.

Well, I asked you. Let me ask you this. what up with your mystery pack oh that's right i want to know about yesterday you were going to maybe go down to the place down on alaskan way and get this mail that had come from apm because they had tried to deliver it to your house and then decided uh that it couldn't be delivered and so now it was being held down there at the central processing center which we assume is something out of the hud sucker proxy exactly a whole series of pneumatic tubes with things

flying around and possibly paul newman there one of these days i got to play for you the the hudsucker proxy audio movie trailer i made for my college production class it was so long

that sounds like a great premium for it begins with that voice remember the voice in the factory

attention hudsucker employees attention hudsucker employees you saying that reminded me that i use that audio a lot like i it was supposed to be like i can't remember but i know that i did not get it in under the time allotted which would really set the stage for doing tbtls uh in the future but i remember it just being like this is so i was so into it at the time and then i would go back and listen to it later and be like why did i think this was an appropriate length for a radio commercial um that anyway this package that i don't know what it is it's a mysterious package that apparently is coming to me from american public media our employers um it apparently was The delivery person attempted to drop it off at our house while I was on the road, only made one attempt, and then the package just went back to this facility, the Hudsucker facility, and they weren't going to try to bring it back the next day. I didn't know why. And also with all of the cool digital do lops do hickeys, I don't understand why I can't easily just with a couple of clicks reschedule another attempt to drop off or have it rerouted to one of the FedEx centers near me. And I found out yesterday that there is a FedEx, you know, at the customer service station at the Safeway that is like less than a mile from my house. It's the Safeway I go to all the time and sometimes even walk to. So, you know, they send you the tracking number. You can follow it. You can click on the links. You can click a button that says manage this delivery. But none of that would actually take me to a place where I could reroute it. Or, I mean, there's a chance that I have to download the app in order to do that. And you can't do it via desktop. But that just does not seem to make sense. So anyway, I called FedEx, which that's always just a nightmare. You're calling a national number. You have to talk to a robot first. You have to get past the robots. Somehow, though, I wasn't trying to do this. I was just being honest with the robots. But they kicked me to a human pretty quickly. I was on hold for maybe five, ten minutes, which is amazing that that seems like good customer service in this day and age. and then a human being does pick up but it's a human being who just sounds like you know kind of reading a script kind of thing like you describe it sometimes it doesn't sound like somebody who's like really going to have your back you know like I'm just expecting kind of a negative answer here like yeah you have to go to the Hudsucker to pick it up but eventually they transferred me to an actual like dispatcher who is in charge of my region or something and this person really did just sound like i don't know just a normal person and he was like oh yeah well it says here he's like i just want to let you know like it says the the delivery person wrote on the back that it said gate was closed and locked business appeared to be closed no other options or something so it actually makes sense this wasn't one of those things where the delivery person made it past my gate and then

left the note on my front door because that's frustrating gate there is a locking gate and apparently it was closed that day usually if Genevieve and I are expecting a shipment of something we leave that gate open but this was a surprise package so it was closed so anyway it sounds like this is all really boring it sounds like they're going to reroute it now to the Safeway I'm going to pick it up there like it's fine but also I should let you know and this is what I was going to say a moment ago my gate is open right now so if any listeners want to sneak in the gate is open the reason the gate is open is because I am now expecting another package something that I ordered on Amazon.com yesterday. One is a new computer mouse, but the other, and I feel like you're already, like the fact that I use a mouse, I think seems like pretty hilarious to you, but I actually ordered Luke.

mouse pads i am having issues droppings i i mean are is there anybody out there who in the past 20 years has said i wish i had a mouse pad like these things yeah you when we were on our trip

this was one of your big complaints about the modern hotel movement oh that's right modern

hotels they have these little desks for you but often they they think i don't know if they think it's fancy or what but they'll have like a glass top desk or a mirror desk and mice don't work on that and for audio and video editing it's very helpful to have a mouse in fact that you know if you're doing more than scratching the surface with editing like you kind of need a mouse and mice don't work in those scenarios and also i'm just getting to a point i don't know if it's the heat in my office or what it is but the mouse that i've been using is just getting harder and harder to use with my audio software it's just like not precise and it's jumping around and i'm realizing I'm borrowing a newer mouse that Genevieve bought recently, and it seems a little bit better, but it's still not quite there. And I think Genevieve also uses a mouse.

So in this home, we believe Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ Lives Matter, and we should still be using mice.

I'll let Genevieve answer. I don't know what she's doing, why she needs the mouse. I know she's got like a two screen setup upstairs in her room. So she's like zipping back and forth.

More people than we realize, in fact, many of our listeners, I'm sure, are using a mouse. So I don't mean to – I don't know if I even fully buy the idea that it's antiquated. I don't use one. But, of course, I don't actually do very much computer stuff, believe it or not. I'm not joking either. Like I bet you that for people that are using dual screens, for people that are doing a lot of spreadsheet stuff, and for people that are doing a lot of editing like what you're doing, a mouse is probably pretty standard actually. So I don't want to shame anybody over that.

But a mouse pad even shocked me because I'm using this thing, and I'm like, it's just still not quite precise. I'm having some issues, and I'm like, you know what I think it is? I think it is this desktop I'm using in here. It's probably like in a little area on a desk where you use a mouse a lot, it'll start to, you know, you remember using my way back in the day. It'll start to accumulate, I think, maybe some crud and dust, and also it could be just the temperatures getting kind of hotter and muggier. So I went on Amazon. I'm like, can you even buy these things? I hate mouse pads. Please tell me you got one with the Mona Lisa on it. Right. No, I got one with the Windows symbol on it. Yes! It was from a conference, right?

Did you really?

No, but can you picture the ones that were foamy, and then they'd always start to peel up at the top, and they would get nasty.

Tell me the one that said Cosmo.com.

Right, exactly. And you always inherit them, and they're always a little bit grody, because you get a new job, and so you have to move into a new cubicle, And you're like, I guess that's the mouse pad because I never bought a mouse pad. They just were always there. And now here I am in the market for a mouse pad. But you'd be proud. I think, Luke, I got a I think I got kind of a nicer mouse pad. I got a set of three for about ten dollars. The reviews, Luke, are glowing. I mean, the people who have purchased this mouse pad, I'm not even joking. They are so excited to finally find a mouse pad that serves them well. Apparently, they are – I can't remember exactly what the material is, but it's also like kind of – it's sewn around the edges to avoid that weird fraying. That weird fraying, yeah, and there are three of them, and they're apparently pretty easy to wash, but one person says you might think use dish soap, but actually I found laundry soap to be better. So I'm not just – Spotless crossover. Yes. Sorry.

I'm not trying to cross over here, but I'm saying that'll give you – you could do an episode of Spotless on proper cleaning and care for your mouse pad.

That's a really good point. So anyway, the gate is open because I am expecting in the year of our Lord 2021, I am expecting my new mouse pads to show up at any moment.

And I'm actually excited. Now, of course, you've got me jealous because I want to go get a leather classic mouse pad personalized Father Day gift from Leatherology. Man, they really have actually. There's some great Belkin products out there. Yeah, this is the kind of thing I could geek out on Just because, you know, I love nothing more than Wiling away the hours Studying the absolute primo version Of something on Amazon Of some kind of weird little thing That, you know, one hour ago I didn't even know I needed And now I'm desperate to get the one that has the highest rating

Yeah, right

The one that says World's Best Dad on it Yes, well, see, that's the thing Were you tempted even a little bit to get one That had some kind of either ironic thing or was it a real full-on throwback? You just went like, they're just black, right, or whatever?

Yeah, they're black and, again, not junky looking. And, no, I was not tempted at all because I actually...

What about this 3M precise mouse pad enhances the precision of optical mice? It's very handsome. It's only $6.95.

I should have done more research. I'm unlike you in this way. I kind of hate shopping.

found these i typed in mouse pad into amazon this top one or it was in the top three certainly got the best it had really good reviews and to answer your question about um although man

precision is my problem i wonder did you go with the sci-tech mouse pad 10 by 8 by 5 economic gaming mouse pad waterproof waterproof cloth surface no i'm gonna look this up now i wish

it was here i could tell you another question real quick did you go because you know the thing

that I have bought three of in the last two years that's right there with the mouse pad, the gel wrist support pad.

What? That seems even more antiquated, honestly.

I mean, that's the cousin of the mouse pad, man.

I mean, yeah, it's usually attached to it.

When I go to Office Depot and I'm like, do you have any? I'm like Johnny Knoxville in Bad Grandpa, but there are no stunts about to happen. Do you have any gel wrist pads I can put near the edge of my laptop, but the thing is I've found that it really helps because otherwise there's a height difference between where my wrist will sort of rest and the typing on this particular laptop, and it's much nicer and much more comfortable and ergonomic when I have one of those little wrist pads. But those things also wear out pretty fast. I also think I still have one in Bellingham, so I had to go get a new one for Portland. But anyway, I was wondering, did you get a you didn't get a pad that had a built-in wrist support rest you know i don't

really like those things and also and to answer your question before about like the design of this i am a little bit you know luke honestly i'm a little vain about my office the real solution here and many people have told me this is if you're doing any kind of editing on audio you should just have a bigger screen like i should have my little laptop here which is i saw mine next to yours mine is not an apple product but it's exactly the same size as whatever you have and you have like a what an air is that what it is like a you mean the one i brought on the road yeah yeah just to give people yeah that's an that's a that's an air i think yeah so i love it this is my first small laptop in fact it's only my second laptop of my own the first laptop i got i was so scared to leave the world of you know um desktop pc computing behind that i got a huge one that i carried around for a long time and now this is my first like kind of manageable laptop that i love i love pulling it out of my bag and being able to like i was you know working literally on the road while you were driving and this is just so much more manageable but in this office setting that i have everybody says what you need is a bigger screen that you can just dock into right that's what makes sense but i don't want that i really like the way my office looks right now and it's kind of tidy and professional and everything is you know shades of gray or black and so i got I just sent you a link. 49, actually. But when these mouse pads arrive, I will get there. So I just sent you a link to the mouse pad that I bought. It's a GKU three-pack mouse pad with Stitch Dead. Sure, a classic GKU three situation. It's like it's a business person special, as Rick Rance has always said. You know, it's professional looking. No, I like it. No, this is good. Very subtle. And I like it.

I love that it's a three-pack. See, this speaks to me because to me it's like if it's worth buying a mouse pad, why not set yourself, Andrew, and really your children and your children's children up with mouse pads? Like no need – I mean don't keep ordering them every three years. Just get three of them now and you're set for life.

Well, the problem is if I want to leave these three mouse pads to my children, of course, the government is going to take two of them. I mean that's the death tax right there. Luke, do you want –

You can start giving them 20% of each mouse pad over the years, and it'll fly under the radar. My college roommate – this is when I understood the difference between generational wealth and whatever the Burbanks are working with. Yeah. My college – he was not in my – he was not actually in my – I didn't share a tiny room with him. I shared a cluster with him, which was like four rooms that all shared a same little living area. And he was like, something was going on, and somehow the subject came up, and he was like, my dad gave me $20,000. I was like, wow, that's pretty awesome. He goes, yeah, he's been doing that every year for the last 15 years, so that by the time he dies, he will have given me all of the money, but none of it will be taxable. Nice, great. And I was like, cool. My dad fixed my mountain bike the other day, which was actually helpful because I didn't have any money to take it to Aurora Cycle. My specialized mountain bike with rock shocks that I was currently using as transportation had a flat tire, and Walt B. stepped into the breach. So that's kind of like $20,000.

He also rebuilt a scooter for you, I believe, using parts of another scooter, right?

Got me out of a real—well, I mean, got me and Liz out of a real situation, but really me out of a situation because—

It was not our scooter. It was Peter's. It's always in India. It was always Peter's, Andrew. It was always Peter's to be the name of my memoir. By the way, I have in the market for a mouse pad as a possible show title. But I also feel like there's something else with mouse. The house of mouse pads. The house of mouse pads. Mouse and the house pad.

Was that a joke I had with you? Because I used to get Variety magazine or Variety newspapers. That's the industry one. They always call Disney the house of mouse.

Yes, the house of mouse pad. Yeah, right. Mouse in the house pad. What? That doesn't even make sense. Actually, that's what we used to say in basketball. So this is, you know, the NBA playoffs are in full swing. And so when, if in the switching of a, like, basketball defense, not unlike football where sometimes you play a zone defense. So let's say that the receiver, they run past the cornerback, but the cornerback is really responsible for an area of space on the field, not a specific other player. And then that receiver enters the airspace of like maybe the linebacker or the safety or whatever. Similar things happen in basketball where you switch off. But sometimes if in the switching off of different players, you end up with one of your tall people being guarded by a small person like a guard. You yell mouse in the house. And that is the indication to fire the ball into the big man or big person so that they can then turn around and make a layup because there is, in fact, a mouse in the house.

That's so sad for the short person. They're always the mouse in the house.

I never even thought about that, but that's just like a given throughout – even in Pick Up Basketball, you'd just be like, mouse in the house. I do find it delightful. It is very kind of – it's almost from a Disney film or something.

It really is, yeah. Well, you mean a film from the House of Mouse.

Thank you. Prexy, Ankles, House of Mouse Project. That's my go-to line when I'm trying to do that kind of speak because I love how they would never say – they didn't have time to say the president of the studio. They'd call him a prexy. And then they would never say That they had gotten rid of a Like that they had basically shut down A project that would be ankled Which is also just like I don't even know if ankled is faster

And it is variety that I'm thinking of Right? I think so It's a real industry insider

Yeah I think it was variety And they used to get those when I worked at NPR West You know we used to get God this is what I miss there's a lot i don't miss about working you know in a building or at a radio station but one thing i miss particularly at the npr level was just how much free news and magazine showed up every day like you just walk in and there was this big table and it would have like every single kind of newspaper every random like la magazine and industry magazine they just signed up for all of it and i would sometimes yeah just like read variety even though i had no idea what they were talking about me too totally irrelevant to my life i have i'm looking up some old articles

I think they have different language now. I think with the Internet, it's kind of like I think variety is probably just more accessible. It's less like that old-timey industry insider speak. But I'm going back, and I'm looking for – I'm looking – oh, none of the actual links are working. New house. Can I just say Disney is shorter than House of Mouse. Yes, I know. I don't think it was to save time. I think it was just flair. And I have a distinct memory. I'll stop going through this now looking for good headlines. But I have a distinct memory of reading the varieties when I was new at New Hampshire Public Radio. They were coming in, of course. Of course, people who work at New Hampshire Public Radio on a show called The Exchange or The Front Porch need to have the latest variety so they know what's going on in Hollywood. Absolutely. And I would take them home and I would read them in my very first apartment in New Hampshire, which was a humble affair in like a, you know, it was like a apartment building. I think I was on the third floor, the second or third floor. And I would sit on my porch. In fact, I think I remember doing this after getting my teeth pulled. If I was bad at work, they would pull my teeth, Luke. No, I had my wisdom teeth pulled, and I have a vague memory of coming home with some pain pills, popping some of those, and sitting out on the porch next to my bonsai tree, which was still alive back then, and reading about the house of mouse. Like, it is such a distinct memory. And, yes, it felt – it goes back to a little bit of what we were saying yesterday. Like, I was just so young. You know, I thought, like, well, I'm an adult now. i'm pulling down a salary i have a full-time job i've moved across the country like what could be more adult than sitting on my balcony i have dental insurance pocket full of perks it turns out did not cover that was my first of course it did yes i went to the like the wrong place or wasn't in network that was my first lesson of that oh that scarred you bro it really did my very first that's i didn't have a credit card at this point so what i had to do is take a loan out no you know what it was is i had to get a special some sort of a special dental credit card and it was my first like kind of credit situation that I was paying to pay it off yes exactly and it wasn't like it wasn't like a regular credit card it was some sort of a it wasn't like an HSA thing either

But I got it, like, kind of through the medical community somehow. But anyway, it's just so funny how – what a kid I was. But I thought I was an adult. But it just sort of felt – looking back now, like, I was just so young and figuring shit out.

I've had a really nice time talking to you before we go to the break and have been interested in your mouse purchases. I'm not being sarcastic, by the way. The listeners don't know how much they appreciate this conversation because what it ended up leaving us without enough time for, Andrew, is the story of me trying to get dog poop off my shoe today for, like, 20 minutes. You don't live in a place where there's just, like, sticks laying around, like, in the country. Boy, oh, boy, are you ever right. Maybe I'll just try to do the less gross version when we come back from this break because now I've sort of – I've whetted the appetite of at least some of the listeners. So we'll talk about that and a whole bunch of other stuff in a moment here on TBTL.

Luke, do you know what you just didn't hear there? What? You didn't hear the little click of my mouse as I started this bump in music. because this mouse that is Genevieve's, but I have the same one coming now because I tested hers out. I like it. It's a silent mouse. Listen to this. I'm clicking all over the place. You can't hear it.

I guess that's better, but also we get so... When you're used to a certain experience, particularly a tactile experience, then something different... In other words, for a while, were you wondering if it was working or did it feel weird to you that you weren't getting to hear that click?

No, I loved it. But that's been another problem because sometimes, like, when we're talking, I've told you, I've admitted that I play this janky old Flash game called Hex Empire. It just sort of settles my mind. And you can sometimes hear me clicking in the background. No more, man. I'm going to be clicking all over the place. Boy, I'm not paying attention. This has been a bad development. I'm not paying attention to anything going forward.

I know. As soon as I get a silent keyboard then, because that's the thing you can hear me doing here is if I'm ever, like, typing, looking for something, or maybe every once in a while returning an email to like our work or something that's audible i can't hear it here that's the funny part so i i think i'm being all sly and typing like tell me let's see here okay i'm actually going to look for a piece of audio tell me if you can hear me

typing this right now do you hear that yeah a little bit in the background a little bit it's

not not super bad yeah because i always feel like i'm being super sly but then later you tell me like oh what are you typing right now I did that to you

once only because I remember I was telling a story and it was just going on I remember I finally was like wow that's going on for a long time so I

I was transcribing what you were saying in the story so I could go back and look at it later you don't do that too I keep notes on everything you say on the show and then usually afterwards I spend four to five hours reviewing the conversation making some notes to myself about how to do a better job

the next day how you can respond better

yeah it's a constantly evolving

process what I do here sometimes is when you're firing audio especially like and the listeners might not hear this i'm going to move this microphone for a second so you can hear something it'll be so i heard that beep that

was a clock that was me restarting my clock i had stopped it for the break uh-huh and then what usually happens is i stopped the clock at the break and then we chat for a second about what the next move is and then we come back and then i forget to restart my clock and then i have no

idea how long we've been doing the show so one thing that well i often hear and sometimes i leave it in as an easter egg and sometimes i cut it out is when we take these breaks and listeners have asked this before like what happens during the break it's like we hear two two minute commercials you guys going to get coffee or what well no we're not sitting around we're actually just pausing for a moment and then the system later on will insert those those commercials that you hear so you and I just pause for a second maybe we'll have a very quick conversation about what's coming up and then I'll cut that out of the show later and then when it's time for us to bump back in whether it's something like emails and emails which you play or the top story I'll hear this can you hear that That was the sound of you clicking your mouse pad a couple of times.

Oh, you hear it right before the sound starts playing.

And what I try to do in post is I try to, because I have to trim up that little break anyway, I try to take out the sound.

Oh, I love it.

Yeah, but what attention to detail. Well, guess what, Andrew?

Note this time code because it's about to happen again.

Oh, I laughed. Oh, again.

Let's hear the clicks. Hello, and welcome to Top Story. I mean, I really could. It could just be this.

There it was. I heard it. It was sweet. It's as good as I imagined it. Sure. Sorry, I'm all wound up.

Ooh, that's the good stuff right there. Is there somebody who's ASMR? I have also turned the microphone up to, like, the highest level, so I'm trying to not blow out everybody's ears. But is there somebody who's ASR is hearing someone double-click a trackpad on an Apple laptop?

because if so, buckle up. Oh, that's the stuff right there. I wonder if there is ASMR for technological stuff, like keyboard typing and mouse clicking.

Oh, I'm sure. I actually don't find typing, the sound of typing, to be a particularly unpleasant sound.

It depends who's typing, man.

Really?

Can I say something here? You know someone who's typing sounds bad to you? I live with someone who's typing sounds bad to me. depending on what she's typing so you know you know that I love Genevieve I have very few negative things to say about her or our relationship together or the fact that she was a roof over my head no but for real um I don't complain about her and this is not really a

complaint you really don't like we just spent you and I just spent like six or seven days in just total immersion with each other and at no time did you say one negative thing about about the person you live with i mean so yeah no definitely i just want the listeners to know that when you say that that's the true story this is a decide and i tried to get you to go there yeah you were just constantly setting all kinds of conversational traps forging one to two text messages just to see how you would react and just you didn't take the bait on any of it and some of that language you

use was rough man really trying to give you to take the bait no but genevieve when she's stressed out or working on a project and i can sort of tell there are times when she's kind of like you know we're all like this with our work sometimes like somebody isn't responding or somebody's maybe being more demanding you know of her time and so she has to wake up keep in mind her office is in our bedroom um and we have pretty i'm not bragging but just so if you can picture it we are renters but we have a relatively large bedroom bigger than we've ever had it's almost like kind of two rooms without a wall between it so she you know we're not on top of each other when she's working at her desk and if i'm if i'm still like in bed better not be that's an hr violation i know i was I was trying to choose my language carefully after I said we're not on top of each other in the bedroom. Not inside each other. We're trying to have work meetings. It's kind of weird. Anyway, let's try to get off of that conversation if possible. But I will just say there have been times when I'm still in bed. Maybe it's like 730 in the morning, but Genevieve has to get up to deal with something. And if she has to get up to deal with something, she's probably angry typing anyway. And it is loud, my friend, and aggressive. You do not want to be in that room anymore. It's a good way to get me out of bed and be like, okay, it's typing time. Maybe it's time for me to take a shower.

Well, it's also a lot of it has to do with the keyboard, right? Is she typing on the keyboard on her laptop, or does she have an external keyboard?

She's all about docking life, Luke. She's got her two screens. She's got a keyboard. She's got a mouse. And then she just plugs her computer into something that talks to those things. In fact, the computer she has is the exact one that I have. Her work issued her this little Dell that I have, and I love how small it is and all this stuff. She's like, nope, I don't even like it. I just plug it in, and I use my giant screens and my clackety mouse or my clackety keyboard.

See, that's the thing. The kind of keyboard that you get that you have at your place of work, your office, is almost always going to have more clack to it than a laptop keyboard, which, first of all, by design has to be flat, more flat, and usually has some kind of sound cushioning in there or whatever. So I'm sure some of that is Viv's natural typing style and also a bit of a frustration around maybe being up at six in the morning trying to tweak a speech or something. But then also some of it is probably the equipment. I was absolutely floored by the behavior, the heroic behavior of a teenager in the San Gabriel Valley of California over the weekend. Her name is Haley Morinico, and she actually lives in a town called Bradbury, California. And I actually saw the TikTok that I saw was, look at my cousin yeet this bear off of a fence. So it was not Haley who put up the TikTok that I saw. It was the cousin of Haley who put it up. Of course, extra points for proper use of yeet. Is that the proper use? I didn't even know that. Yeah, yeet is to, like, push or throw something. Okay. Like, I yeeted that. Like, for instance, the guy who threw the bobcat, remember the guy that came out of his house? Yeah. And a feral bobcat attacked his wife, and then he grabbed the bobcat? Yep. He essentially yeeted that bobcat. Okay. So, anyway, this video is incredible. I don't know if you had a chance to see it, Andrew. But, I mean, the thing I'll start by saying is I also am very happy that no major harm befell the bear. not to center the bear in the story because Haley is a human being and if I have to choose Haley or the bear I'm choosing Haley thankfully it's not left up to me but the bear is got it's like two or three of the

most adorable bear cubs you will ever see in your life with it so it's obviously a mama bear do we

know what kind of bear it looked like a big brown bear maybe but i'm not yeah i'm gonna go with brown

bear um uh because it's brown and it was a bear but i don't i mean it wasn't a grizzly we're down in california it's probably a brown bear so this bear this mama bear and her cubs are just trying to kind of like they're just looking for food or whatever but they're they're not really like You'll see these videos around where bears are trying to get into people's back, you know, sliding glass doors or they're bouncing on the trampoline or they're sitting in the hot tub or they're doing all kinds of stuff they're not supposed to be doing. These bears just look like they were kind of just trying to get from point A to point B. So the mama bear and her cubs climb up on this fence. And this is a kind of a standard backyard. So it's, you know, like a normal like the kind of side side or backyard that you would have in a sort of a typical city, I guess. And the bear's crawling along the fence And the cubs are behind it And all of a sudden The dogs that live in the house Which appears to be about seven different dogs Different sizes Notice, yeah, it's a real menagerie Notice the bear and run over I don't know, Andrew, if you have the tape Now here's the thing, the TikTok video I saw Had this TikTok meme sound under it So it's not very helpful Because it's just got a song going And then all the other versions of the video that I saw had been repurposed for different news websites where they put their own music under it. So I haven't yet seen one that just has the raw audio. This was all caught, by the way, by a security camera.

I don't think, if you were going to ask, I don't think I have the raw audio either. I only watched this with the sound down, but it appears to be like it's a news site where it's just like some sort of, you know, trinkly music in the background and they are just like kind of like narrating it with text on the screen. So basically

what happens is the dogs come out, they start barking at the bear and then the most amazing thing happens which is this young woman in a sundress which i don't know why that adds to it but it just of all the outfits to fight a bear low on my list if you're like luke you've got to go fight a bear i'm like can i get pants can i at least have pants she runs out yeets the bear off the fence just basically takes both of her hands and just shoves the bear in the chest the bear apparently according to Haley had one of the dogs a little hard to tell in the video but had one of her smaller dogs in its clutches the bear drops the dog kind of falls off the fence but not like to a degree that it's bad gravely injured just falls off the fence climbs back up and then and then skeedaddles and then Haley is like chasing the bigger dogs back and then just like with one arm just like grabs her smaller dog and picks it up the one that had been in the bear's clutches and just runs back in the house it is the most amazing heroic thing i've seen in a long time it's incredible i just don't

think i have that in me we've talked about this before like how one acts in an emergency and i

just i think you do i don't know man if if it were your dog or one of your cats i think something in

you would would would activate maybe i just what i what i'm most impressed with is that her very very first act as she comes tearing into the screen again dress not unlike and i mean it's a cute dress but it does have like you know it could be it's just like a very traditional like powder blue dress just when i heard tiktok person like i just assumed that i don't know i don't know how young people dress these days but i wasn't expecting such a kind of a classic

cute look it's almost like a milkmaid thing it's almost got puffed sleeves it's like a very it's

kind of a retro look it just comes and she comes blazing into the screen and just the very first thing is push the bear the bear is on this wall push the bear to give herself a little bit of cover then start hurting the dogs away and then grab the small dog and run away like i could see myself if one of my cats are in this situation of course cats are different than dogs too like i don't know that they would be as you know these dogs are reacting to the bear and and protecting their territory and going up to the bear and barking I don't think a cat would necessarily act that way so the analogy breaks down but you know just like yeah my pet is in that scenario I might try to like get as close as possible but I'll bet you I would be more like slow about it and be like come here come here Fido come on come on and then maybe slowly get close to Fido and then hopefully reach out and grab Fido's collar and maybe pull him away or something but like in this like she's her instincts are absolutely right like the bear is going to be caught off guard just come tearing the bears also surprised by the outfit yes exactly the bear was like that

is so cute like billy eilish probably like you know some kind of janko jeans or whatever the kids are into now again the bear was like damn that's like very that's not what i was expecting and now i'm on the defensive just prairie vibes coming at me um and so anyway Yeah.

Yeah. So I just think that that was really smart. And I don't know that I would have I would have some sort of reaction, obviously, and I would want to protect my animals. But I don't think that I would be that bold. And her move is just it's right. Like, you got it. You got to strike quickly.

I think it might be wrong. Technically, it worked. But one of the one of the interviews with her, she said, I wouldn't recommend anyone do this. She was like, I don't kind of know what I would. I don't know why I thought to do this. It worked. But this is probably a bad idea. I think I would have – I think where my brain would go would be grab something in the yard and get as close to the bear as I can and then try to bonk the bear with it or throw it at the bear. What she did that's just next level was using just her bare hands made physical contact with the bear. That seems scary because –

Yeah, they're really bare hands.

Ayo, because that thing could really – I mean, you know, you don't want to get swiped by that thing. And, again, I don't know why I feel the need to repeat this because, like, nobody – this is not interesting information. But I also feel terrible for the bear in this situation because there's a real desperation in the beginning of the video of the bear is now scared. It's on this fence. There's some pretty big dogs, too, that are jumping up at it, and it's swiping at the dogs. It's basically just being like, leave me alone. Leave me and my children alone. Please, my son. He's very sick. So, like, I just feel bad for the bear, too, because the bear is in self-defense mode. And it seems very plausible that had she run up and shoved the bear and the bear had been 5% less distracted, it would have just swiped her with its paw, which would be a very bad situation indeed. Anyway, here is Haley talking to the Today Show about the whole experience.

We were hanging out. We were working on our garden, trying to do some improvements. And then all of a sudden, our dogs start barking. And, of course, like any dog, they just bark at other dogs or any other animals they see. So I go to tell them to stop. And I literally, like, frolicked over there. And by the time I...

Great use of frolick. I frolicked over there. The dress makes way more sense. That's a dress that you do some frolicking in.

I got to where they were. I was like, oh, my God. There's a bear, and it is taking my dog. It is lifting her up off the ground. And if I don't do something about it, who knows what might happen to her. So I sprint. You can see in the video, I sprint towards her. And in that split second, I decide to push the bear. like it was nothing apparently and when i push the bear she falls back and that's when my the dog she grabbed runs away and i pick up my other dog and i scram scram my two favorite words in

that interview are frolic and scram yeah absolutely um god i had a thought during that oh um she sounds surprised by her own actions i like that that seems very real to me yes now that's the the

today show interview this is her tiktok story uh because so many people this video has gone so viral and it was so uh so many views on tiktok that people are then asking her to tell her version of the story now this audio might be five percent confusing because in typical tiktok fashion she's intercutting what she's saying with pictures and meme-ified pictures of like her dogs and things like that there's one picture of like one of her dogs but they have like like their eyes are blacked out which i don't which i think is a joke about the idea that she wants to protect her dog's identities like there's just a lot going on that's not part of the audio but just so you can have a sense of like you know i don't know if this is i don't know if code shifting only applies to if you're if you're shifting how you are behaving based on you know like sort of racial dynamics or if this is if you can code shift in terms of just like age but like and there was we just heard her talking to the today show and then this is her on tiktok talking to people presumably more

her own age and then me i'm the person who fought up a bear to protect my kids okay i'll have to preface this i live in the mountains so this is like actually like really normal and it's summer so that they always come now so so this is like our garden backyard every year and we were there and they start barking our dogs and i thought they were just barking at a dog because they always bark at dogs or like squirrels or whatever because they're dumb but i go to tell them to stop you know and when i go over there to see what they're barking at i'm like that's a funny looking dog and by the time i get there the bear is literally like picking up one of my dogs this dog her name is valentina she is the baby and as her slave i have to protect her so i go over to the bear i look it in the eyes and the first thing i think to do is push it push a bear push an apex predator man and to be honest i don't think i like push her that hard i just push her enough to make her like lose her balance so she drops my dog and i run out of there i grab my other dog i sprained my finger and screwed my knee but we're all okay we're over here so that's the tiktok version of

how the story went i love it she was she sprained her finger she has a finger splint on and she's Holding it up, and that's, I think, what the ending noise is. But anyway.

uh i mean full full marks to old haley down there in um bradbury california for pulling off a heroic move um but uh yeah apparently that's not the greatest idea i i really do think though that like if i were to see like rudy or olive i mean it's happened nothing nearly that extreme but certainly pets i've had that have gotten into really intense scraps at the dog park like my first dog that i had was a boxer which we had named flea and i remember being at the dog park the genesee dog park in in like kind of south seattle and a really big dog just getting into it with my dog and just being it was pretty ferocious the whole thing that was happening and my dog was losing and i remember running over and i don't know if this was the best way to handle it and we probably have dog trainers and dog lovers in the audience but let's just say I pushed that dog off of my dog very firmly with my foot like it was just a it was just like a reaction like my child was being attacked and I well I think I would have I don't know I don't know how large the maybe bear is so large that some part of my brain would just switch and go nope sorry flea you had a good run yeah I don't know I've never been in that situation but I can say at a slightly lower level I definitely that like you know mom is about to lift a car off of her children kind of instinct has kicked in for me yeah yeah i don't know i haven't been in that

situation and i do think that dogs are different um you know than cats so i don't know i have no

experience there um the other story that i saw on tiktok that has made its way into a bunch of other places now is and i think even listener michael in spokane might have sent us this this is definitely making the rounds the story of this family in moses lake washington that were out on a boat um and they were flying a pride flag i think they might have been flying a few different flags that indicated pride and things like that and this other boat took exception to that and started circling them and uh and like giving them the middle finger and just being super rude and unnecessary and then all of a sudden that boat caught on fire and i don't mean a small fire Andrew I mean fully engulfed and the people the jerks had to jump out of the boat and then they're in the water and then the people this this pride family that wasn't doing I don't know if they like being called the pride family but whatever this family that was doing nothing but minding their own business went and saved the people who had been flipping them off and what they wrote on TikTok was we treated them better than they would have treated us and I know Andrew that this is how we should be in life but considering that the people in the boat that considering the homophobes they had life jackets on i would have been like deuces there is no universe i mean if no one's life is in danger there is no universe in which i'm going to pick people up who have just been denigrating me and my family over nothing if i don't think they're going to die they can float in the water and get saved by the moses lake coast guard which isn't even a thing but whatever would you say let's say that somebody came and did that to you and then their boat sank

would you save them andrew that's a really really tough question i don't think so i'm a petty person i'm an angry person would you write them a note and put it in a bottle and floated towards them right um i don't think i would it's ironic i'm talking slowly here because there's what i'm about to say is going to be inarticulate and um unnecessary as you just said and i really don't think it's worth saying but like there is something that i'm trying to unravel in my head here about how when you hear stories or back when i was on the radio you have to talk about these stories about people who have christian values feeling like i can't make a wedding cake for a gay couple because that's what christianity is and meanwhile and i don't know the religion of anybody um or the philosophies of anybody involved here but like is there anything that is more like from the new testament like capital c christian than literally helping people who have hurt you

Like, I mean, that is turning the other cheek, turning the other cheek, the whole thing.

Exactly. And it's just. And so I guess I'll let that stand as it is. Like, again, I don't know the backgrounds of any of these people, but it is just the world has certainly turned on its head.

Hasn't it? Like, well, Andrew, I serve a vengeful God. Yeah. I'm telling you what, as long as and by the way, they're not far from the shore. These are all adults So like More context It's not like They're in You know In the Pacific Ocean Somewhere out Shark infested waters 20 miles off the shore it's moses lake it might even be like a reservoir that backs up somewhere i've been on moses lake by the way my dad and i have been fishing on moses lake uh i'm happy to say we harassed zero people while we were out there fishing but weirdly an old testament name for such a new testament analogy i know right it's like yeah it's it's it's like um it's not a huge lake and you can see the shore and everybody had life jackets on and some other By the way, the other thing – now, we're also going off of the account of the family, the group of people who say they were flying the pride flags, were harassed. The boat caught on fire, unless it's the world's best Photoshop. I think there's no arguing the boat caught on fire. And there's no arguing that a woman in this boat was flipping the people off who were minding their own business. Those are all things that are photographically 100 percent verified. Now, I mean, I am going with one person's account of this, so I guess it's possible that they made up some part of this. But the other thing they said was that when they picked the people up, they got them into, like, the boat, and the people continued to be rude to them, including vaping. Vaping, Andrew, and not wearing masks, obviously, even though there were people on board, the boat that saved the people, the boat that turned the other cheek. there were people on board that had asthma and things and did not want the people who just got saved to vape apparently they somehow kept their vape pen with them and then got in the boat of the people they'd been harassing and then acted rude this is the account of the people who picked them up but if that's true that is next level that is what we call boorish behavior Luke I mean wouldn't you just think I guess what I was hoping was and this is you want to know how my brain works I think I could turn the other cheek as long as the person who I then picked out of the water had a major Saul on the road to Tarsus. I'm just going to keep, I'm leaning into this biblical stuff.

We got to have a segment on the show, right?

I don't think it's on the road to Tarsus. I think I always mess this up. They called him Saul of Tarsus, but on the road to Damascus. Saul on the road to Damascus. When does he fall off of his donkey? I think it's Saul on the road to Damascus. Okay, so anyway, I would be okay with pulling these people who'd been mean to me out of the water if they, once upon getting into the boat, they said, we are so sorry. Thank you so much for saving us, and we were so wrong. As long as I'm going to get that satisfaction, then I'll be, you know, I'll be the hero all day. But I swear to God, they get into the boat and they start vaping. Someone's getting headbutted. I am pulling the pride flag down and I am using it as some kind of bayonet you're walking the plank you're leaving my boat you're going back in the water please because that is too much I am the captain now I mean seriously

I don't know if that really applies

no I'm kind of I mean we'll see

maybe if the vapor had taken over the boat then they say I'm the captain now

yeah which would be an even worse outcome so I guess the end of the story Is again as far as well one thing The police are apparently looking into it to decide if a crime Was committed which I don't know Flipping someone off because of their Pride flag is a crime I think That's probably pretty hard to prove But the Folks in the boat who did the saving who were minding their Own business they apparently went back Out the next day and had more pictures on the water Flying their flags and they were like we're not Going anywhere like they're not going to let them ruin Our time which of course is an Amazing way to be like If you you know if you can't Somebody said, you know, like revenge or what was it? Withholding forgiveness from someone is like taking a poison and hoping it kills them. You know, like if I were in this boat that was being harassed, I'd be so full of anger and so traumatized and triggered. And I would just want those people in the other boat. Believe me, I'd take a break for a week from fantasizing about beating up Donald Trump. I'd have a new group of people I was fantasizing about beating up. And that's how you're falling asleep these days still? No, I've actually been – no, I haven't even had to break the trump card out lately. Oh, really? Good. That's good.

I was doing alphabetizing. I was doing the alphabet of movies, but the movies have to have an animal in the title. Anaconda, Bad News Bears, Catwoman, Dog Day Afternoon, Elephant Man, and then Fantastic Mr. Fox. That's as far as I'm up to. Gee. I feel like something about G. And again, the first word does not have to be the animal. It just has to. The title has to begin with that. Like Bad News Bears covers a B because the bears at the end.

Is there any movie that has gopher?

in the title. Gopher plays a huge role in Caddyshack, but it's not called. There's nothing about it. Because G gets a little bit hard. What else starts with a G? Oh, Gorilla's

in the Mist. But keep in mind, the first... Oh, okay, good. Perfect, Gorilla in the Mist. But keep in mind, by these rules, the first word does not have to be the animal, though. You know what I mean? If there was a movie called Good Boy Doggo, that would also be the G.

I am... Now I'm just trying... Now I want to kind of do this, but I don't think that the listeners don't have time. We've done it once.

Yeah, let's not do it.

I thought that was a great show. I did, too. For one, I think it was a good show.

I don't know if they want us to do it again. Anyway, though.

Yeah. Yeah. So good on the folks that did the rescuing and took the high road. Oh, the thing I was going to say is it's got to be so much better to just know that these other people are defective. Oh, one of the things that washed up to the boat that did the saving was a koozie, right? Like one of those things that keeps your drink cold that was charred, and inside it was what looked like some kind of raspberry-flavored Truly Hard Seltzer. Yeah, I saw that. Which I don't know why. Like nothing against people that drink that. I mean, I've had many a White Claw in my life. But there was just something about the charred remnants of somebody who was shotgunning Truly's and then decided to flip off people for no reason. It all sort of worked. Even the kind of boat they were in, Andrew, it was one of those like ski, nautique, like giant-ass motor off the back. whatever you call that kind of metal frame that you can like ski you know you it was just like it was just also the most to me kind of i don't know certain kind of it was like the lifted truck of boats and it was like of course that's the boat the people that were doing the flipping off and were drinking the trulies were in like of course it was genevieve i luke i think it's okay

to and we don't have to like actually we don't have to go deep on this and i i can cut it out to because i'm going to repeat a private conversation that you and i had but for those who follow mariners news and mariners woes one of the reasons the team has been frustrating as of late has been not just what happens on the field but some organizational decisions and stuff that goes on with the organization as a whole one of which is um we're like the least vaccinated team in baseball and because of that there was a vaccination protocol there's some sort of an Outbreaks protocols were put into motion. And so we are now even worse than usual now because a bunch of players on our pitching staff can't pitch because, you know, even if they haven't contracted it, they were around somebody who has. So anyway, Genevieve yesterday asked me, do we know the players who have contracted it or who are the players who are not vaccinated? And I said, no. But I was talking with Luke about it. I think this is our first dinner we had on our road trip while while the wind was stealing while the wind was stealing our signs. I said, I don't know that I can guess which players are vaccinated, which are not. But if you showed me the vehicles that these players drive and this is like, I think, like some sort of a weird classism of me. but like if you show me their vehicles then I can start guessing which ones are vaccinated and which ones are not

I think it started with yeah us speculating and us saying what do they look like out of uniform right that would be a big start like because it would be like if you're wearing a Punisher t-shirt like not the you know I don't know if that's Marvel or DC but whatever not like that but like one of those weird copified ones where it's like blue and white or some shit like if you're wearing that probably you're suspicious on the vax and then it migrated to well let's just see their cars and then it was like let's do a double blind we don't even want to know the player yeah show me the car i'll show me nine vehicles and i will tell you based on the vehicle if that person is the one of the people that didn't get the vax and then we can figure out who's then you can tell me whose car it was so that way you know we're not like just mad at someone because they've been hitting 120 like i'm not taking it out on uh you know evan white or something like or rewarding a jp crawford because he had a decent game last night which he did uh at least at the beginning when things were going well um but yeah there is i do think that that i do i mean all that stuff there are certainly exceptions but that stuff is a way of representing in the world you know and i'll tell you this when i go to chelan and we get into the chelanigans we're riding in a boat like that and you know the person who whose boat it is and who i like is a person who is much farther to the right on the spectrum than i am as far as politics go and i don't think that's a total coincidence you know i'm out there trying to get my little my little old school wood boat that's all twee so that i can drive around playing my French pop music from the 60s. That's where I'm living when I'm not crashing it into other boats. And then there's like the ski nautique, you know, thing with the giant ass speakers. And by the way, if if I don't know if she lands going to happen this summer or not, like for this group of people that I go back with on the occasion. But if it does, we'll be out on that boat. We will not be harassing anyone, thankfully, but we will be out on that boat. We'll be playing shitty country music and drinking alcohol, and it will be delightful for what it is. You know, so there's, I guess, a time and place for everything. That's my, what, sixth biblical reference of the show? There's a time and a season for everything under heaven? Oh, is that a psalm, I believe? I believe there's a, well, there's the song, right? I think there's the song to everything turn, turn, turn. But I also, but there's a.

Isn't that based on the psalms, though?

I believe that's based on something in the Bible. You know what's the thing that's time has not yet come, Andrew? Applets and cotlets. we reported this story a while ago. I love reported like we report anything. We read a story off the internet about this candy that Luke didn't like as a kid called Applets and Cotlets. They're made actually by a company called Liberty Orchards over there in Kashmir, Washington. Speaking of the Shalanigans trip, we always make a stop in Kashmir, Washington because there's a mini-mart that has like what, I forget what Camaro and Newman R.I.P. would call it, but it's like, you know, it's like the kind of food that you get in a gas station, but they have it's heat lamp food. That's what they love to call it. And they had a whole like ranking system of the heat lamp food between like Issaquah and Chelan. And we always stop off of this one gas station in Kashmir, literally across the highway from where the applets and cotlets are made and go get heat lamp food. But anyway, this company, Liberty Orchards, was going to go out of business after like 100 years of making this candy. And they just announced that they are actually going to be able to stay in business. They're being purchased by somebody. They are like in the negotiation process, and so they are not closing. So if you're somebody who loves applets and cotlets or if you love giving them to people who don't want them, which was my experience as a kid, rejoice because they will continue to make them. That sounded biblical again. Rejoice. Yeah, the word rejoice is rarely used outside of a Christmas song.

What are we doing?

Here I go once again with the email. Every week, I hope that it's from a female. No, man, it's not from a female.

All right, emails or V-mails, sir?

I got actually a lot of good stuff. But the first one is an email that I am currently writing to myself about something that I just said in the last segment, which is about the lyrics of the Pete Seeger song Turn, Turn, Turn, of course, later popified and popularized by the birds. It is not from the Psalms. I thought for sure it was from the Book of Psalms, but no, it was from the Book of Ecclesiastes. That's where most of those lyrics come from. To everything, there's a season and a time to every purpose under heaven. So there's your first email. What else have we got going on? Oh, I was telling you about this before the show, Luke. This is fun. Speaking of mysterious packages from American public media, like the one that is currently en route to my local grocery store so I can pick it up, apparently. Listener Ann, who's in Washington. Why am I forgetting where her yarn shop is? I was just texting with her about it earlier.

I believe it's in, like, it's in Ellensburg. Ellensburg. Thank you. I knew it started with an E. Everything about today's show, Andrew, almost everything occurs in central Washington. The Applets and Cotlets, Moses Lake, Listener Ann, and the Yarnfolk. Yarnfolk, exactly. Great. We don't care about the Yarnfolk. Check it out. I assume that's on the TENS Helping TENS website, by the way.

Quick shout out to the TENS. Go to TENS Helping TENS or just Google TENS Helping TENS because I can't remember if it's a dot or whatever. But if you want to see what the update is as far as everybody who's in the TBTL community kind of sharing their wares and their services, if you're looking for, you know, a mug that is handmade by Jeremy Ayers or anything along those lines, that community is vibrant and apparently has been kind of blowing up. So check that out. Anyway, I think Anne's yarn shop is represented there. and sent me a text to tell me that I recently received an unexpected package from American Public Media which contained a three ounce bottle of spray on hand sanitizer shrug emoji thinking emoji and so I've been texting back and forth with her I'm like what and it's not even APM branded it actually has the little Minnesota Public Radio logo on it and I asked her I'm like you know are you contributing

to or involved with any of the other APM or Minnesota Public Radio shows? And she said no. So I am running this up. We have top people on this. I'm running this up the chain at American Public Media. I have a whole Slack dedicated to this now. So we will get to the bottom of why a TBTL listener in central Washington with no note or explanation received a little spray bottle of hand sanitizer from our parent company that is that just has to be a glitch in our fulfillment matrix yes i'm assuming it is let's see i have somebody who says um i'm checking with the regional membership team that is from our friend emily and membership uh oh here i got some answers actually i would like to drag this out over more shows but let's uh let's not withhold these were a bonus gift for minnesota public radio's february drive and were shipped out months ago according to Lindsay, I'll leave the last name off of that Still a mystery of how a TVTL donor Ended up with one Can you DM me the donor's name So I will do that off air I'll say, you know, it's Ann in Ellensburg

Ann, we need you to send the sanitizer back Yeah That's sort of where this story ends

Ann sent me a photo, it does look like she has used some of it And Ann, I would just say, like, you're just using this Before you're kind of checking I guess we'll need to probably prorate that

So whatever if you can just figure out kind of we'll figure out the value of the bottle of sanitizer and then if you can figure out what percentage of it you use then we'll get to kind of a number that works for both of us so we can just get this all kind of squared away financially are you still using you know what I found like I know we're probably all have places to be including the listeners maybe even more than you and I Andrew but I think the whole thing about sanitizer now and the fact that it's now ubiquitous still and the fact that i'm in the habit of using it but also the fact that i just saw an article the other day about sort of like performance sterilizing now performative sterilizing performative cleaning and the fact that the the era of performative cleaning may it may be time to bring that to an end when it comes to like restaurants and stuff like a lot of what's going on in places is because of the the rules when we just didn't know how how the virus really tended to be transmitted you know you just have like people whose whole job it is all day to just disinfect like the tray at a mcdonald's like above and beyond how it was in the before times and that a lot of these steps that we're taking it turns out we they're they're not probably lowering the chances of getting the virus by an amount that's worth the time investment and um anyway it's interesting because like i'm just in the habit of disinfecting my hands constantly now and anytime i'm standing somewhere it's like it's it's my new checking my cell phone in line at the grocery store if i'm waiting for something if i go and if i pick up an order to go and they've just got one of those big things of hand sanitizer i'm always going to squeeze some of my hands who wouldn't want their hands to be a little more sanitized that's interesting i guess

me because i don't really like that stuff and i never fell into the habit um you know when we were much earlier on in the pandemic and it was highly recommended i was definitely using it a lot I kept a little, you know, I kept little bottles of it in my car, in my knapsack, what have you. After leaving the grocery store, I would sanitize right away. Then I think I told you about this experience, right? I went to, when things first reopened, still takeout only, I think, but things were like, this is early on. I went to one of my favorite Asian noodle places that's on the Ave, in the university district here. And usually in the normal times, I would just go there and, you know, it's like one of those little luncheonette places. That's not very fancy. Right. But the food is really good. And I would usually just, you know, take a table, my newspaper and just like read. But of course, that was no longer an option. So I went to get some takeout there and they had there like a lot of establishments. They really rearranged things to really, you know, provide safety to the employees. They had like they moved all their tables to the front so you couldn't walk very far into the store. And then there was some plastic sheeting up and like you could like sign for your food at one little table and then grab your food at another. And, you know, they're being very careful and good. But they also had like three random bottles, kind of big bottles of hand sanitizer. And in the kind of situation you just described, without really thinking about it much, I just took a squirt of one. And it was like. It was like KY jelly or something. I've had that happen before. so nasty and i took a viscosity of it and i'm just like suddenly my hands are just like soaking in this yes in in in this just gross liquid that would not come off and i could i kind of maybe overreact a little bit i'm like i need some napkins give me some napkins i'm like trying to like wipe this gunk off my hands and ever since then i have been a

Much more dubious about taking strange hand sanitizer. I think in that case, what happened with some of them was the amount of whatever the non-alcohol, because the alcohol just evaporates really fast. It's part of its kind of chemical makeup or nature anyway. But then there's something else in there that's not alcohol. And if they had the ratio out of whack, so it was too much of the, as you call it, glub glub. If it's too much glub glub and not enough glug glug, then it would just like stay on your hand indefinitely. because that stuff does not evaporate at the same rate. But anyway, I don't know. I wonder if we're just, if we're going to, for the foreseeable future, if it's going to be standard that any time you're standing at a counter ordering something or talking to the retailer, there's going to be ready hand sanitizer. And if you're me, I guess you'll just keep taking it because it's like, why not? Why not sanitize your hands? But we'll see.

You know, and I like having clean hands. I like washing my hands with soap, But I've never enjoyed hand sanitizer because I know the idea is it's killing the germs. But it doesn't like if you have actual dirty hands, it doesn't feel like, oh, I've cleaned my hands. It feels like I've just sort of moved things around and made a mess. But, hey, I want to read another. Yeah, I have another. Oh, wait, I have a great voicemail, a great email and a great voicemail. Let me save the voicemail for tomorrow. And I'll read this email because I've had it for a while now since before the phone. Listener Harper wrote in, you and I were talking about how there are several women on the SNL cast now who often play male figures, like actual people in the news or what have you. You could probably toss out some examples of that.

Kate McKinnon will play like Jeff Sessions or Aidy Bryant was playing both of the coaches from the Super Bowl, Andy Reid and Bruce Arian. Or there was one in particular that I saw that spurred this conversation, and I forget. It was Heidi Gardner, I think, portraying – oh, you know, it was Heidi Gardner playing the Chicago Bulls security guard who was losing in the game of quarters against the Michael Jordan character. And it had us talking about how hilarious that is as a device to me. And then we started talking a little bit about also the kind of tradition, somewhat problematic tradition of men sort of impersonating women.

Right, because I said, yeah, there's a long tradition of that, because I thought right away of the kids in the hall, which I just adored growing up in the 90s, and then also Monty Python, which I was less into, and I just thought, yeah, I mean, these were like kind of troops, so in this case, the men in those troops wanted to play as many characters as possible, so they just played the female parts. Got this note from Harper, who says, as a trans woman, pretty much every time a cis man is playing a woman on screen, it's offensive to me. Mrs. Doubtfire is a huge example of this, as well as Monty Python, the Three Stooges, so many times on Arrested Development or any of that stuff. If it started as a joke, which people or I'm sorry, Harper says it started as a joke, which people would laugh at. But the joke is that the man looks funny trying to portray a woman. And there are so many trans women out there, including myself, who struggle every day to look the way society wants a woman to look. And these TV shows and movies only give people a reason to laugh at us and invalidate our existence. And they still do. People find it funny and comedic, but to us, it's extremely offensive and brutal to see our lives made into a joke. If you or other listeners haven't yet, check out the Netflix documentary about this called Disclosure. Very informative and eye-opening. I've heard good things about that, too. They were talking about that on the Levitard show several months ago. Harper says, I do not know how trans men feel about cis women playing men on SNL in recent years, but I can't imagine it's great either. I actually want to hear from other trans slash gender nonconforming tens about this and anything else. If they want my email, feel free to share my email address on the show. I'm not going to feel I'm not going to share it on the show. But if anybody wants to get in touch with Harper, you can email me at andrew at tbtl.net, and I'll connect you. Here's the real eye-opener for me. A lot of eye-openers in here, Luke. But Harper says, I've been listening for 10 years, so you both have accompanied much of my life, and I'm so grateful for the content you make. Harper's how old? Harper is, I believe, 22. I'm not seeing it in this email, but I wrote back. I said, wait a second. A lot of good stuff here. But yes, I think Harper has been listening since he was 12 years old and is now 22. At 22, you're significantly younger than me and Luke and most of our audience. I got it. I'm not going to even lie about it. I love all of our listeners. But when I find out that a 22-year-old is listening to the show, I'm like, wait, is there still a little bit of coolness in us, Luke?

Is there a tiny bit of coolness? No, not even a tiny bit. But my guess would be that Harper's mom or dad was playing TBTL. This is how we do. We have a few young listeners, and a lot of times they've been listening for a long time. It started with their parents.

Parents would play it in the car, and then it kind of just got—it became somehow comfort radio for them. I don't know if that's Harper's experience, but that seems to be one of the, like, ways that people have listened for, say, like 10 years to this show starting at a very young age. Also, I'm very interested in the content of Harper's email as well. I wonder if there's—I mean, I think Harper's pretty clear about it. She's saying that it never—it sort of never feels okay to her. Because the thing you had said about the kids in the hall kind of resonated with me, which was if you have a comedy troupe that is comprised just of men, but you want to have sketches that involve female characters, what should you do about that? And maybe the answer, maybe in Harper's mind, is, well, then have some women join the cast. Yes, yes. And then have them play the mom. And then it won't be, you know. So it sounds like Harper's experience. What it feels like to Harper is that there's never a time where a man portraying himself as a woman feels like it's not based on the joke of get a load of this. And then also the thing that Harper raises, which is I'd be very curious to hear about any of our listeners who are trans men. Do they get the same feeling off of seeing Heidi Gardner playing a man from a Michael Jordan documentary? Or is there something about the power dynamic or the tradition behind it that makes it feel different to people? So, yeah, I would love to get some feedback on that so that I can kind of like just have a better sense of how people are feeling on it.

Yeah, definitely. And the kids in the hall thing is like what I'm thinking about most here. And by the way, I'm not pushing back. It's not my place to push back on this, but it's the thing I've been thinking about the most because I think Monty Python, Doubtfire, I've never actually seen Doubtfire, but I can definitely see how. Oh, yeah, there's no argument that that's what the joke, but Kids in the Hall was, to me, and again, keep in mind, this is a show that I watched 25 years ago when I was in high school in a very conservative place and, like, just didn't consider these issues a lot. Kids in the Hall, to me, was kind of one of my first kind of exposures to queer culture on TV, you know? I know that Scott Thompson, I'm pretty sure Scott Thompson is gay, and because they were so fluid with them bopping in and out of female characters, I just thought that it was my understanding that it was actually inclusive in a way. That's just the way I saw it. I didn't have the language for that, but I thought, oh, this is actually kind of transgressive. Is that the right word there? I never know how to use transgressive properly. Right. But meaning that it was like I thought that it was more progressive, maybe, you know, and that they weren't hung up on these things. Now, I bet you I go back and I watch that I might think about it differently. But it was my hope that because they were inclusive as a group, that when Dave Foley, who, you know, would, you know, play a female character, it didn't seem mocking. It didn't seem to me to be funny. Oh, look at Dave Foley. He just inhabited the character. But again, I'm not saying that to push back. I'm just saying that this is what's kind of going on in my head as I'm reevaluating something that I saw that was produced literally in 1992, you know.

Well, and I would also say that it's probably, you know, a lot of things can be true, right? I think it can be true that the kids in the hall maybe weren't setting out to do anything with malice in their heart or wanting to make anybody feel othered. And it's also can be true that listener Harper has a totally different experience of this as a trans woman and watches, sees things like that. And it – like she said in her email, it really brings up a lot of feelings around her lived experience and her current experience in the world of wanting to look the way that society has decided, broadly speaking, that women look. I put a lot of that in quotes because there's a lot of layers to everything we're talking about right now. but you know that that's I mean I think that's one of the things and I'll admit to being a lot being tetchy at times if somebody's correcting me on something where it's like I'm just not describing something in the most inclusive way or my take on something is not taking into account somebody else's experience and like I I think that sometimes my first reaction is to think well if you're saying this hurt your feelings and that means that I did it out of malice and it's not it can be like oh that is something that i didn't appreciate or i there's a better way to to talk about that and it can also be a thing where i didn't know or i wasn't doing like you know the way it's not an indictment it's not always an indictment of the person who is being as we now say andrew called in on the particular topic you know so harper can be calling in the kids in the hall in a way that doesn't mean that they're they're bad people are transphobic but just in a way that says yeah that makes me feel a certain way and a lot of other trans women feel

a certain way yeah because of our lived experience yeah exactly and that's what with the kids in the hall thing and that's where it's you know the other ones harper is just so obviously right and there's no no need for me to actually turn that over and the kids in the hall and again saying this not being defensive like that's what's interesting to me because it makes me reevaluate it not that i was hateful for enjoying the kids in the hall and you don't take it that way it's like oh yeah you know i should revisit that like through 2021 lenses and kind of see if i'm learning something

here by the way we do officially have a definition on transgressive yeah transgressive involving a violation of accepted or imposed boundaries especially those of social acceptability Her experiences of transgressive love With both sexes is an example they give So I actually think you were Using it right in terms of how you perceived What the kids in the hall were doing As being a way of kind of saying we're going to Do something that violates the common norm At this moment but in a way Then causes people to have to like Take a moment to consider kind of where They're at with this topic boom once again

I use the perfect word another And never even stumbled over it

Can classic Walsh W be a show title? I feel like you pick so many self-inflicted L's, and you often snatch L's from the jaws of W's. You don't even do anything wrong, and you're calling it an L. I want to celebrate that you nailed transgressive as at least the definition of it. How about snatching L's from the jaws of W's? God, that was a real Hail Mary. It was like no time left on the clock. We're out of timeouts, and we just chucked it downfield, and we got there with a show title.

I also have the House of Mouse pad, but I think I like snatching L's from the jaws of W's better. All right, Words by Doves, what do you say? Yes. All right, let's do this.

Yes, indeed. You know, the very last piece of music on Mayor of Easttown sounded to me for all the world like a piano reworking of Words by Doves. Really? Yes, and it was killing me. I actually had to, like, use Shazam and hold it up to the TV screen to try to figure out what it was. And, of course, it wasn't that. It was a piece of classical music by a guy named Jan Tiersen. But you know what else has happened now, Andrew? Because of the vagaries of the cloud. First of all, when I want some music that I own and have paid for or am renting, it never seems to be available on my various devices. But, you know, today when I went for my little jog, you know what music is now living on my Apple Watch? The one that you Shazammed, the piece of classical music. P.O.S. music that was playing at that restaurant we went to in Sacramento. That you recorded. Freak by something called Skepsis and TS7. Oh, my God. And then that one, Barry White by Zero, which was the one that I literally played on the show. So it's like my watch is now prioritizing that music that I only wanted to Shazam so I could make sure I never have to hear it again. It's now living on my watch. So thanks. Nice. Congratulations. you want to go out with one of those or just no I never want to hear it again alright thanks for listening everybody we're going to be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for ya until then have a great Wednesday stay safe take care of yourselves and please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all Power out. Out!