Muse

Listen, I've got to give a clue here now. I don't want any more bulls**t any time during the day from anyone. That includes me. This is going to be very hot, going to be very uncomfortable for everybody. Want anybody yelling. We get anybody yelling around here anymore today, and then the s**t is going to hit the fan.

TBTL!

i cannot do this okay the lord need to delegate temperature and weather to somebody else where

the hell is moses why is this happening to me is this real life sometimes you just gotta you know grit your teeth and look life right in the face and you say stop it you know please stop please Why are you doing this to me? I haven't even done anything to you. Please stop.

Stop talking. Get off the phone. And let's do this. Let's do this immediately. Let's go.

All right, everybody. It's hot. It's really hot. It's hot outside. It's hot inside. Usually when Luke is out and I'm filling in I have a bunch of notes written down in front of me Things that I want to say in the intro Today I just have a note that says It's hot, very, very hot That's all I got By the way, Luke is out today Hi, I'm Andrew Luke's fine, by the way He did not, as far as I know, just melt like a crayon In the Portland heat By the way, I'm up here in Seattle The Roosevelt District of Seattle, Washington, of course Things are even hotter down in Portland Luke is on a little road trip, so I think it's merely in the high 90s where he is. Here in Seattle, it's supposed to hit 111, I think, potentially today. I don't even know. Portland, more than that, hotter than that. But we're getting by. I'm here with somebody who's very close to TBTL to help me do the show today. She's been a great friend to TBTL throughout the years. She's been a great friend to me throughout the years as well. In fact, we live together. Every morning, I wake up, and I turn to her, and I say this. You're born beautiful in Cinderella. You smell like pine needles, and you have a face like sunshine. Her name is Genevieve Haz. Hey, Veeves. Hi, Andrew. Thanks for doing this with me. Sure. These are not optimal. Where am I? What day is this? These are not optimal. What's happening? Circumstances. So let's set the scene here. Genevieve, of course, my, what does Luke call you, the longest-running co-bro of my life?

Yeah.

We are here in my studio where I always do the show and where you and I do, after these messages, every Tuesday, sign up. If you love commercials or hate commercials, but you like me and you like Genevieve, sign up for our podcast. But we're in my little studio here, as we often are, to record. I have the window cracked open a little bit using one of those, you know, we have those old wooden heavy windows. I think I was describing them on the show the other day because, well, this is the podcast where I describe my windows more than once in a three-day period. And we have those little kind of accordion screen things that you can prop your window open with and let some air in. However, I also have these heavy blackout curtains drawn in here. So it's not letting in much air from that window.

It's like, what's the lesser of two evils, the sunshine or the lack of airflow?

Our boy Theo, Theodore Murray the cat, 20 years old. That's the thing. I said last week, like, and I knew I was going to be wrong. I was kind of saying, I was saying it knowingly, that everybody I was talking to last week was freaking out about the weather. And it didn't really hit me until Friday that it was something I should actually pay attention to. I'm just like, when people are, like, freaking out about any weather event, I always tend to downplay it in my head. But this is serious. And I got to say, I mean, it's serious for a lot of people. You and I don't have air conditioning here, but we do have a roof over our heads. So let's start with that.

We've got a refrigerator that works, a freezer that works.

So far, yeah. I am worried about, I have a feeling, I am prepared for the power to go out at some point. I feel like that is likely to happen because everybody will be using air conditioners. It did go out in parts of Seattle and Portland, but I don't think we've had any really large blackouts yet. But I'm also worried about the cats, mostly the old guy. Theo's 20 years old.

Yeah, bananas can take care of herself.

Yeah, she's fine. So Theo is laying at your feet right now. He was sprawled out, just like laying on his side underneath the chair you needed to sit in. And so you just tried dragging him out of the way on the carpet. He didn't even move.

Dragged him about three feet.

He looked at you. He's alive.

Barely registered with him that this was happening.

Oh, my gosh. It's hard to watch. How are you dealing with?

It's a Tracy Jordan epic movie.

It's hard to watch.

Also, his veins are filled with root beer. How are you doing?

I'm good. I feel like I'm hallucinating, honestly. I'm sorry if I'm not making any sense. It is brutally hot, and I did not... You know, I grew up in the South, and kind of like you, I was like, well, it's going to be a hot day. and then like i got a note from um my my employer this morning saying hey if you need to take any you know extraordinary measures to not be in the heat for work if you need to change meetings or not be coming not be working today i'm still working from home obviously um you know do whatever you need to do and it kind of like for you i had the same kind of like oh whoa like maybe I maybe I'm not taking this seriously enough because like I'm just like sitting at my desk doing my work sweltering but but living you know yeah but I do feel like my brain is what's the phrase I'm looking for that that yeah I don't feel that sharp today

um I was a little jealous of I love my job of course I do miss going into a radio station sometimes you know that's been my career before doing tbtl from home um and i was thinking about our friend dur's today and i was like jealous that he gets to go in and he's got a job that he's got a really hard job he's got a much harder job than i do producing a daily news magazine um at kow but like he gets to go into work today where there's air conditioning i was almost thinking about texting him like hey do you need an intern for a day and i was thinking about like if i lived um you know near the mothership in uh saint paul like i would definitely go into work

today. If you hadn't made me be your co-host, I could be in an air-conditioned office building

today. Well, I was going to ask you, but you don't have air-conditioned in your office. Not in my

building, but there are other buildings on campus that I could set up shop in. We should be doing

the podcast from there. Yeah, they would love that. Yeah, the only respite we have is, you know, I was doing some driving yesterday, and I don't think it's good for anybody to just drive around in your car with the air-conditioning blasting. That's how we got into this fix. Yeah, exactly, right but let's just say i did take the slow way a few times yesterday and that's the thing when i'm thinking like that again my only real concern is theo i want him to be able to get through this he's actually got a vet appointment on thursday so i want him to get through this um so if worse comes to worse i can put him i can put him in the car also when we're done here then you could go to one of those air-conditioned buildings i didn't know there's a possibility one thing i've been thinking about is i have a doctor's appointment today at 3 30 and i'm actually thinking what if i Because I did this the other day I showed up like 15 minutes early Because they schedule on the 15 minute blocks And I showed up at like 3.15 for a 3.30 And they're like oh do you know you're early What if I go in and pretend I thought My appointment was at 2.30

That's a real Curb Your Enthusiasm move

Really?

I mean there's a Curb Your Enthusiasm where They don't want to go to a party So they decide to deliberately show up I think like on the wrong day

Yes, yes, yes

And that way they get credit for having wanted to attend but they wrongly think that it will get them out of the social engagement.

I mean, they would know I was lying, right? If I showed up at 2.30 and I said, hey, I'm here for my 3.30 with Dr. Weil, and they say, oh, that's not until 3.30. I'm like, okay, well, I'll just hunker down here, and then I pull out my laptop and start working.

Yeah, you unpack a bag full of snacks, and you sort of set up a whole situation. Like, gosh, lucky me, I brought all this stuff.

I pull out my mug of coffee that says I hate Mondays. I was reading, you know, I've been following the heat updates in the Seattle Times, and one thing irked me today, and it shouldn't have. Listen, we're all cranky. I shouldn't even bring this up because I don't remember the details that well, but remember you and I were moving somewhere, and we were living in Concord, New Hampshire at the time, or I was. Maybe I was just moving. I don't think we lived together at this point. And I had to pick up a U-Haul van or truck that I needed.

One of the hottest days of the summer.

Yes, and I don't think I'd ever rented a U-Haul before. I was probably a little nervous or anxious anyway because everybody's really nervous when they go to rent a U-Haul. I don't know what's wrong with me. But anyway, it was a really hot day, and I remember there was one guy running this place, and there's a long line, and he's just like offering terrible customer service. It's not like, hey, listen, we're all in this together. He was just offering terrible customer service. The line wasn't moving. Whatever was going on, I remember at some point kind of saying, I don't know if I said something or if he just looked at my face or what it was

I think he yelled at me yeah he were you there no I've heard the story many times and my memory of it of hearing it told is that when you got up to the front at some point you interacted with this guy and it was unclear in the moment if he was going to honor your reservation as scheduled right he was messing up my reservation and it was it was one of those things where you are like you said like it's very stressful to rent a u-haul and it's not negotiable it's not like oh i'll just do this tomorrow right

you're moving you're moving thank you for remembering you have to move when you say

you're gonna move you need the rental van like it's it's a high stakes rental um and just giving someone the yelp review of a lifetime isn't gonna cut it if they get it wrong right and so as you

once famously shouted at a car rental

impotently shouted at a car rental employee yeah so like it was starting to look like you might be kind of screwed out of your reservation and you started to get a little shirty with him as one does and he said to you take it easy

it's hot out there like how are you yelling at me how are you not giving me the thing that I paid money for and then you're yelling at me and telling me that is hot outside when i'm moving

on this hot summer day always go on the offense that's the best defense so anyway everybody's a little bit as i've been in customer service that's the best way to handle um even the possibility of a difficult customer it's just like you go to 11 first and that then they bring it down and

ladies and gentlemen that's why she no longer has a job at pier one imports

that was your job right in high school my very first job was um pier one i applied for two jobs i applied to work at the victoria's secret in the mall and the pier one i got both jobs but pier one paid like 15 cents more an hour or something yeah chase that cheddar you gotta get i gotta get paid i gotta get and it was like these are the the i mean minimum wage is still the bad old days but this was like the real bad minimum wage days and um i remember i i got the job at pier one and i got the job at victoria's secret and then i was young you know i was 17 years old and i'd never applied for a job before and when i decided to accept the pier one job i just like never responded to the victoria's secret offer and when my parents found out they were like incensed that you didn't that i had been so unprofessional as to not like and you know did

you tell your parents take it easy it's hot out there yeah i that's probably like would have been

one of the nicer things i said to them at that point in my life um i was kind of like whatever the thing is like we were both right like who cares if i if the victoria's secret hiring manager like never heard back from me but also if that's the right thing to do is like be professional

yeah and to and to you know kind of have those habits early on exactly what it doesn't matter

for Victoria's Secret but it will matter when you're applying for like you know a professional

job after college I love the idea of just like there's now like right now I don't know they're probably like 65 years old they're still what was the Townley Circle Mall what was the mall

yeah the the mall was named after the street I lived on sorry if anybody wants to stalk Genevieve No, it was Northlake.

Okay, so somebody's at the Northlake Mall right now, just still like just staring at the phone. Just waiting, hoping. Just waiting, like nothing. Is she ever going to call? Is she going to show up or not? I'm short-staffed. But I was going to say, so all of that is to say, maybe I was just feeling cranky because it's hot out there today, but I'm reading the Seattle Times heat coverage, right? And they're just giving a bunch of updates. It's not really a lot of news that we don't know. You looked at, oh, by the way, I was supposed to tell you, I think it's, right now it's 93. 93 degrees yeah did I already say that yes 93 right now um and like I said I think it's supposed

to go up to 110 or something but my computer says it's 94 and sunny as if I couldn't tell and it's got a little picture of the sun like oh that's what this is what it looks like um

but uh you know you read these these updates the newspaper wants to be present which is good but there's not a lot of information in there that you don't really have yeah it hot one of them was One of them was they're just sending all their reporters out, just roaming around the city, going to like beaches and cooling centers and that kind of thing. One headline even just said, Texas couple not phased by Seattle. Or like Texas tourists not phased by Seattle. We're just like, OK, that's a headline, I guess.

Texas tourists say Seattleites are wimps.

And then I'm reading this and this is where I'm going to get a little shirty and probably a little ungenerous here. But they're just talking to all these people at watering holes and what have you, and they're quoting some couple who's at this, I don't know, I think, again, like a beach somewhere, and they say, like, let's just say the name is Sarah Smith. Sarah Smith says they do have two air-conditioned rooms in their house, but they're still having trouble sleeping. And I'm just like, really, Sarah Smith? Like, really, Seattle Times? This is the person we're in?

interviewing like this city it's full of houses that don't have air conditioning the vast majority

of satellites do not have air conditioning at all let alone two rooms again whatever they're just out there they're just trying to fill like the times is just trying to fill uh but yeah cry me a river two rooms but i'm just kind of like can okay well you're at the beach now can i sit in one of your rooms they sound nice yeah is there a tv in there i like tv um what's your wi-fi password it's two cool rooms two cool rooms but it's both the z rooms um the one cool rooms and a pizza shop i will say that not to get um overly serious about it here but i had a little bit of a um well it didn't feel good yesterday when i went into the grocery store so i you know me i'm obsessed with ice in this house anyway i don't even know how much i want to normal week It's true, like I am.

In the dead of winter, you're obsessed with whether or not the ice situation is sufficient.

Like, and I'm sure I've talked about this on TBTL because it's so boring and so tedious, so why wouldn't I?

That's what the T stands for. Too beautiful, tedious, live?

No, that doesn't work.

Have a sip of water. but yeah i like i eased myself into like basically replacing all of our ice trays with these little boutique kind of um silicone ice trays that make round ice cubes yes your craft ice cube yes which means they're not cubes as somebody pointed out to me they're spheres but whatever so you can picture that like they make they're not like the big ice cubes like the size of a small baseball that you just put um you know in a whiskey glass they're they're small and They're about maybe 14, I think, per tray.

Yeah, they're like a shooter marble size.

Yeah, and they're a real pain to make, but I don't mind.

Because I'm from the 1900s. Yeah, exactly.

Vise and I are going to cool off and play some Jack Slater, too. Yeah. But I just get into my puttering routine every evening, and I make these round. I fill up these round ice cube trays. It's a total pain in the ass. Nobody would do this day in and day out, but I just like to putter around and listen to my podcast. Everybody knows that.

You could create a system for making ice that took more time. I would probably.

That's the only thing that would get you off of these round ice cubes.

Well, also, if I had an automatic ice maker. I do love the idea of an automatic ice maker. They're dirty. But then you know what I would be doing. They're dirty AF. I would be constantly taking the ice that's made and moving into other containers so I could continue to collect ice. So I do that on a good day, and I've been worried about our ice situation. Also, during the summertime, I keep a cooler full of ice and beer and, of course, White claws uh outside now so we're so that stuff isn't in the fridge during the summertime and i've been trying to keep that iced down all summer so i'm buying one or two bags of ice every couple of days anyway um all of that is to say i realized earlier this weekend that oh there's going to be a run on ice now i didn't take part in that run on ice because i was actually in decent shape at that moment and we don't have i couldn't really hoard ice if i wanted to we don't have a lot of room

in our little freezer. You put your ice piracy

on hold. Exactly. But I was thinking, well, the cooler is going to go away pretty soon because I won't be able to keep that cold. And I definitely just, also because I'm concerned about the power going out, I want to make sure that I have a good amount of ice in the freezer. And I'm trying to not open and close the freezer too much and just kind of create

some storage in there. So my method of cooling off by just standing in front of the open freezer

is not do that? Let's put a pause on that. Okay. So yesterday I figured I had a little bit of extra time and I'm like okay I just want to see if they are already out of ice at the grocery store I figured they must be but yesterday was already Sunday and I was like because not only are people freaking out about stuff people are also going out and they're filling up their coolers like and so I went into the Safeway my grocery store

everyone's either in apocalypse mode or vacation mode

exactly right yeah so that's the Venn diagram where the two circles go perfectly over and it just says ice and it looks exactly like one of my ice spheres it's perfect um so i go to the safeway that we go to which is you know it's not a fancy grocery store but it's not a nasty grocery store either it's a fine just fine grocery store um and uh i just want to see if they have ice i beeline it to the ice area and there's just a sad sign that says we're limiting bags of ice to 10 per customer and of course it was totally empty at that point but then i start to take a look around and i realize wait a second for some reason i don't know if they were having a malfunction or if they were just taking precautions but if you can picture the frozen food aisle those are all behind like all the frozen foods are kind of behind doors right like see-through refrigerator style doors but then you have the refrigerated section where you have the butter and the hot dogs and the sour creams what have you and pickles and what have you and those are just sort of out right there's a refrigerated section but they're not behind doors everything and those shelves were gone. I don't know what they did with it.

It was specific. it had been cleared it wasn't that it was sold out it had been cleared like there was no remnants of anything it was just cleared out like so they must have been either worried about their refrigeration unit not being able to handle the heat even though the grocery store is air conditioned it didn't seem hot i didn't go into the grocery store and it wasn't like but ultimately it all takes more energy but it all takes more energy so and i also saw that they had removed everything from um the dairy section so that's the kind of section where you open up a glass door and you can grab your like jug of milk all the milk was gone so i could see into their refrigerated back room where there were crates of ice by the way but they but they weren't selling it anymore i don't know what that was doing back there but were they the bagged ice yeah like crates of the bagged ice that hadn't been opened up yet but i was like either way if they made if they had sold those they probably would have been gone before i got here anyway i just had to tell myself like whatever's going on with that ice back there it's not for me right and i get to the front and they have these signs that say like no ice and it's clearly like scrawled by just an employee who has had enough yeah you know and it wasn't like they didn't do like an angry emoji or anything but you could just tell it's just handwritten and it just gave me those flashbacks to the early pandemic and i hated it i really it just always reminds me how my life has been plentiful and and it wasn't until the beginning beginning of the pandemic where we saw certain products of course the toilet paper but a lot of other things too like you'd get to a section of the grocery store and everything would just be picked over or empty and it gives you that

apocalyptic feeling because someone tweeted like there's not going to be like there's closing down all the meat processing plants so everyone would go buy like 50 states right right exactly they're

hiding nfts in the paper towels and so all the paper towels are gone um and anyway it just it did sort of trigger me a little bit i walked into this grocery store and you know also for me i love grocery stores like they're kind of my happy place going to my local grocery store uh brings me joy for whatever reason and just like going in and seeing this scene again where everybody's just like everybody's just like dealing with it you know what i mean the employees especially and seeing the bare shells and just like having that apocalyptic feeling and we are still in a pandemic like not let's not gloss over that either and it just i just had this anxiety that lasted with me for a while that's just like it really just felt like end times you know i saw somebody um oh again it was in the seattle times another quote from somebody somebody who didn't have two air conditioned rooms at their house they said um you know i didn't think i needed a an air conditioner when my husband asked me if I wanted one earlier this fall or whatever so we don't have one and now here it is 110 it's only June and the fire season hasn't even begun yet and then I'm like oh the goddamn fire season is going to begin like how is it not feeling like the end times

well I also think that after the last year and a half and I also just personally the whole Trump administration I feel like i'm primed to feel like end times are coming because it's because it was so there were a lot of really frightening things happening but i don't know that was really if we're real that was really that much more you know are we really is like is the doomsday clock advanced really that

much farther i don't know i don't know let me check my copy of the watchman yeah right yeah and again i know i'm being a little bit i'm being extra here and so i'm just saying that it gave me

bad feelings yeah and it as it should i mean no one looks at an empty grocery store and goes

well this is a good sign yeah and i think that i might have maybe i think in a different era i might have been more just sort of i don't know bemused is the right term or sort of like excited to see the change of norm like it would seem more novel to me yeah but having lived through what we just lived through with the pandemic and seeing the shortages and knowing what that represented and not knowing what the end game was. Like, you know, not being able to get box fans in the summertime and not being able to get snow shovels when a storm is coming. Like, you're kind of used to those things. But I think this time it just hit a little bit different because of everything. And then again, I'm not saying that, hey, the Doomsday Clock has moved forward in a minute. I'm just saying I had a real moment yesterday.

Yeah, I do think we're a little bit more on edge after the times we've lived through. But this, too, shall pass. You know, we are, you and I are, thank God, healthy enough to survive even very hot temperatures without air conditioning. We have access, like you said, we have access to a roof. We have access to cold food. We have access to air conditioned buildings if it gets really, really bad. I'm a little worried about the old cat.

Yeah, you saw me sneaking a peep. Is he still breathing? You see his chest moving up and down?

Yeah, I see his chest moving up and down.

He's just, I really do think that cats, he's just conserving energy. He knows what he needs to do right now, which is not moving.

them right no i mean they they are built to live outside and it gets hot outside and their fur is built to insulate them from cool and hot so you know he'll live through it and he's unhappy and

are we aren't we all yeah all right let's take a quick break here you know i said we're going to keep it really short today or at least i said that before the show started i don't know if i said that on the show or not um because it is really hot and luke is out and you know you have better things to do than talk to me about my anxiety at the grocery store um but uh let's take a little break now and then we come back i do have one quick top story i want to share with you there's a worldwide hunt going on for a woman who caused a major crash at the tour de france like this is one of those crashes just like it's the footage is astounding and so you won't see the footage coming up i'll tell you about it um also a little game we're going to call five questions with genevieve has i asked listeners if they had any questions for you vives they responded so uh you will answer some questions about uh i don't know birds and commercials and sports and whatnot. So stay tuned for all that. We'll be back in just a second here on TBTL. Hello and welcome to Top Story. The images coming out of France. I almost made a joke and asked you where the Tour de France happens, but I figured I'd get a response like this, so I didn't. I would say that was a smart move on my part. Yeah, good job. Good job, Everybody, the images coming out of France where there was a huge, I guess, crash involving dozens and dozens of cyclists this weekend are astounding. I was showing this to you this morning, Genevieve. There's aerial footage of this. And I guess the Peloton is the group of bikes, right? When bikes are all grouped together like that, that's the Peloton. And so what happened was you had a woman, she was a German woman, who was holding out a sign. and this is like

Does anyone know what the sign said?

Well I was going to ask you that so the thing about this is the bikes are coming right and she's not holding the sign to the cyclists she's clearly holding a sign to the camera so she kind of turns her back to the cyclists that are coming at her or kind of coming her way because the cameras are facing the oncoming bikes so she kind of leans over and holds off just a cardboard sign and a biker sort of hits her hand from behind and the sign says because you speak german right although this doesn't look like german to me alez api omi a l l e z o p i dash o m i well la sounds like french

yeah this sounds like french so even though she was german la would be go it says go api omi i

don't know api omi it says the message is saying hello to the person's grandparents so maybe that's

like a you know like a grandma type of thing oh oh yeah actually that is uh that does sound like

german okay um so maybe it's a lay as french possibly anyway we're not really probably homing in on the most interesting part but yeah she's basically holding a cardboard sign up saying uh hello to her grandparents and uh this is like this is a an ongoing complaint of the cyclists right i almost get the impression and i don't know this i do not follow this sport at all But I almost got the impression from some quotes I was reading today that the cyclists kind of miss last year when you didn't have crowds along the sides of the road because of COVID. They could just ride their bikes in peace. I don't know if that's accurate. I just sort of got that impression. And you could just tell that people are basically fed up with this, I'm going to say, boorish behavior. I always think of that guy we interviewed in New Hampshire about garage sales. Remember, we went on a we went on a day long adventure with some guy who considered himself like a garage sale king in New Hampshire. And he kept describing other people's behavior as boorish. And every time he said it, I thought he was being boorish somehow. Like he said it in this very affected way. And now it sticks in my head. Anyway, a lay opie. Oh, me. That was the more interesting part of the story, as it turns out. Anyway, so, yeah, people are furious at this woman, but they can't find her. And that surprises me. So apparently the officials with the Tour de France want to sue her, which I don't even know what the I don't know what that looks like legally. Maybe lawyer Danny in New Hampshire can get at me with that information. She's my personal lawyer, Genevieve.

Yeah, I'd be curious, like what the rules are for spectators. I mean, it sounds like she didn't like she could have put her hand out that far into the road.

It's enough, though. I mean, it's a game of inches. It is a game of inches.

And the Peloton is very.

Everybody's crowded together And just one tiny thing And one cyclist Hits her hand And the whole thing Just goes down Like that The video is Yeah it really is

Especially the overhead Yeah Looking at it from head on You start to see these bikes cascading and flipping over everything but from the from the overhead like

whatever that drone footage is it is it's absolute carnage it to be near the back of the path and to see that in front of you but you can't stop yourself oh my god that's a nightmare it's an absolute nightmare and it looked almost like you know with the cgi now there will be um like i don't know like kind of monster movies or zombie movies or something where they just create hordes of of like i don't know again zombies there's a brad pitt movie where yeah world war z exactly kind of picture that so all of the i didn't mention before that all of these cyclists are the undead i'm sorry i forgot to mention that no but when you just see a huge amount of of human forms all together like that and it's just like inevitable that they're all just crashing like that it seems to happen so quickly and in slow motion at the same time uh pretty astounding but i am astounded that they can't find this woman i feel like we can find anybody this only happened what yesterday saturday they said that she bore there's one line in one of

these stories that i read that said you know they were looking for her if they know what plane she got on yeah she cannot hide for long her only hope was to have been anonymized in the chaos and get

way that way if they already know that's what seems to be because i don't think this lady is

like good luck good luck going to ground because but they don't have a name for her it would have

to be so how do they know that she got on a plane then um i think they believe that she got on a plane let me see if i have that in this particular piece but somebody said they believe that she was already out of the country uh but they don't have a name on her or anything interesting i don't

know how you could possibly know if someone left the country if you don't know what name you're

looking for on a flight manifest yeah you know I'm not that's not in this piece that I'm reading right now so I can't quote it but oh by the way people are probably wondering what you know what injuries occurred for the most part it sounds like you know it sounds scary and very painful but it looks like the worst was somebody went to the hospital with a major contusion so it doesn't sound like any broken any broken bones hopefully no concussions I know they're all wearing helmets everything like that but it'll be very interesting for me to see if they end up finding this person

because somebody's gonna rat her out right i mean i hope and assume that's how they'll find her

somebody will say hey i know that person who i've seen the thing is it's not a close shot of her she's so far away and it's just like such a complicated shot they should they should like stake out her grandparents house opiate oh yes they should find every grandparent in germany and stake out their house all right i should have put together some fanfare for this next segment genevieve i did not but let's just here i'll do it here it's time for five questions with genevieve i regret making that sound already i do not want to hear that coming back at me which guarantees that you will please um i have five questions from five listeners who want to know something about you and your life okay and your loves jennifer says which birds make you

smile when you head out birding genevieve um well uh what the bird that makes me smile the most is the bird that i haven't seen before so like i was over at um the urban bay uh landfill area over

there by the university and i saw not a garbage landfill which was something you had to explain

i had to explain you it's more like a uh creating a wetland right um but it's it's a bird sanctuary or it's like a there's a lot of good birds there and i saw a goldfinch uh when i was there last time are those rare um not especially but i hadn't seen one before um but the bird that reliably makes me smile is the one i have the tattoo of which is the cedar waxwing and you see

the cedar waxwing often yeah they're pretty common around here around here i am um i'm double checking to make sure that i'm not off my rocker but yeah we grew up seeing goldfinch all the time that was the most common bird that i saw growing up because my mom liked birds and she would put out bird feeders and they eat something called thistle which is a hard word for me to say um and i was i was often in charge of refilling the thistle in the tube feeder and the and the um

goldfinches would just flock they just don't happen to come to my feeders but um uh they're beautiful they're so beautiful and they're such a they're so distinctive they're so bright when you

spot one um it's very exciting yes um okay are you ready for question number two yes oh my bell the only sound effect i had and the bell didn't even work god grief i'm gonna start over laura in orlando says oh this was actually a question submitted for a hey dummies video which i thought maybe we could actually address this again this week in video form if you're up for it vives but let's start here on the podcast laura said i'm interested in birding and i'd love to see your Rooftop

bird feeding setup does it change seasonally any really cool bird sightings so obviously we can't take a tour right now but what do you got going on out there you just actually kind of rearranged them and thinned them out a little bit right some of the dangling things you have for birds like

you had a fluff ball out there i had a lot of things that were sort of bird feeder adjacent i had a this ball that's sort of like a wicker ball that was filled with like um soft white fluffy material that i'd gotten some number of years ago as a gift that was supposed to be like for birds to use for their nests but it was really turning no one no birds ever seemed into it and it was getting increasingly kind of like ratty and it looked like it was trying to look like um you know the the scene at the end of uh true detective where they like find all the like stick creations oh right right right yes um so it's looking a little bit like that and

what's that thing called it's driving me carcosa yes right yes and then so i took that down i also

like redid our porch a little bit i put up some different lights um and i had like a bird house um that is cute but like the birds just never took up residence in it so i put that away if

we need affordable bird housing why are you eliminating the supply i mean how bird density

is i'm a pro bird density so anyway here's no parking here's what i have that remains downstairs so our floor our house is two stories and we can access like the raft you know both both stories to hang things downstairs i have um a tower feeder that's pretty pretty wide around and i fill that with a seed like a no waste seed mixture and that attracts um mostly uh house finches which are like a red song like a red and gray red and brown songbird uh they're very pretty i love the house finches they really look like little dinosaurs something about their little faces they're very dinosaur-like um and a lot of dark-eyed juncos

which you always make fun of their name it just sounds like a bad thing to say about a bird like there has to be a nicer name for these things uh i got some chickadees there um see that's a beautiful that's a nice name birds should have names like chickadee right that's so cute not dark-eyed junco i mean it definitely sounds like something that somebody's writing about on next door like oh there was some dark-eyed juncos on the block lock the doors so those that feeder

mostly attracts those birds i also have a bird bath down there oh yeah you're keeping that are you keeping that well watered i keep it freshly watered i have a little rock in it so that doesn't blow away um so and also for perching and then i also have down there a um a glass hummingbird feeder and just a tip make your own hummingbird food because the pinks i learned this the i learned this from someone else because i was using the pink pre-made stuff it's like to you know you give the pink you get the pink liquid when you make it but the dye is bad for their little livers

oh really so you got it's just it just do that for us humans they put that dye in there to make

it more like palatable to our eye yeah but all you need to do is do a four to one mixture of sugar and water and make a simple syrup and that's what they like during the summer um i usually take my hummingbird feeder down because there's just so much natural food for hummingbirds that they won't really bother with it but they immediately like you can tell when it's winter because it is it is absolutely like covered during the winter and they get very territorial over it so that's downstairs the hummingbird feeder the tower feeder and the um and the birdbath then you go

upstairs and this is where your little office is so these are these are bird feeders now that you

can see outside your office window upstairs right when i'm not covered in blackout shades as i am today upstairs i have another tower feeder that's more like a cylinder like a plastic cylinder that's tall and it has a very small little hole so you have to use like a teeny kind of food so i use thistle in that sometimes right now i have like a really small seed mixture in it and sometimes

those um what are those giant birds that come and they try to eat off that thing and it's bigger

than the feeder it's crazy yeah so it really is built for more like chickadees with their little beaks they were like juncos like it too but the uh flickers which are late these um uh northern flickers are like a kind of um i guess a woodpecker type of bird they have very long skinny beaks for getting into holes drilling holes and in wood but they're lazy and they will this one flicker uh routinely crashes into this little the cylinder feeder and tries to use its long beak to get into the little hole and get some seed out it seems like such a i don't know like a lot of work for a little payoff um but it's always funny when it does it because it's

so much bigger than the other birds and it's like swinging on that thing yeah and then i have against

like with the suction cups on the actual window this sort of like plastic bowl that fits up against the window you know that's just like uh held to the window with suction cups and i put seed mixture in that and that really attracts a lot of like same thing kind of basically chickadees finches and the juncos it's like one little community of birds that are kind of living there and then i also have a a suet feeder which is you know what suet is the that's the cakey stuff like a cake of stuff and that's considered more of a winter feeder but they seem to like it in the

summer too chickadees really like that i think i've probably said this on the show before i know i've said it to you before i think that's the because i don't you know i glean some bird knowledge off of you just by osmosis just by being around you a lot um but i think the big thing that i never truly got until we were living in wallingford and we had a very green kind of lush backyard was that it's not just a bird you're seeing it's the birds like it's the same bird over and over and you would tell me about oh there's some drama going on between these two bird families

over here and we had some stellar jays that were that were nesting i think in our backyard and they would raise a family there right and you get to know them you really get to know them and they're those birds are extremely um smart and aggressive and fearless and so they really and they're territorial so you really saw a lot of like bird drama okay enough about the birds let's move on

to question number three by the way it is now 97 degrees we started it was 94 degrees or 93 rather so it's gone up four degrees it's now 97 degrees here in seattle and climbing we aren't even anywhere We're near the peak, by the way. The peak will be around 3 o'clock, 4 o'clock this afternoon. It's still morning here, by the way. It's not even noon yet. Jason wants to know, what's one of your favorite commercials airing right now that brings you joy? This, of course, you are co-host of one of the most popular podcasts to come out of this house called After These Messages.

One of the world's best podcasts solely about TV commercials, I would say. I'm loving this kayak commercial. And kayak is one of those travel services, you know, like Expedia or Travelocity or whatever. Helps you book, like check a bunch of different flights and hotels and stuff for booking. And it just really speaks to me. You have these, and I think it's quick. It might even be just, maybe it's not even 30 seconds. No, it is a 30 seconder.

Yeah, you gave this to me before the show so I could get it prepped.

The story is very simple. a woman comes into a kitchen and says to someone who i read as her partner her romantic partner but it could just be a friend but anyway a friend comes in and tells her that um that she's booked a vacation she's got insurance and the one who's standing in the kitchen is like she's tenderizing some meat with one of those little hammers and when she hears that they might you know that they're prepared to cancel it she kind of goes crazy and says like we cannot cancel this vacation Because I haven't been anywhere in a year

And while she's Getting more and more angry as she says those words She starts pounding the meat harder And then she Takes her hammer and she starts hitting An iPad that is sitting next to it And she starts smashing her Own iPad while she Says this and then things calm down At the end and it's super cute Like that's the really winning moment too at the end Right? Yeah

I booked our hotel on kayak It's flexible if we need to cancel Cancel. I haven't been anywhere in over a year. And nothing will stop me from vacation.

And then she goes back to tenderizing the meat with a satisfied little look on her face.

No canceling.

Flexible canceling. The way she says no canceling. So self-satisfied. No canceling. And then she just gives the shattered iPad one more hit with her hammer. Are there any – Jason didn't ask this, but are there any commercials that are driving you crazy right now? And it's hot, so we can just move on if you don't feel like thinking of something on the fly.

Nothing's especially bugging me. Yeah, no, I think – I think, yeah.

Let's keep it positive.

Let's keep it positive, yeah.

Linda says, did you play any sports in school? Do you play any now? Do you want to join my dodgeball club?

I did play soccer in high school. I was just terrible. My dad once described seeing me on the field in this way, which is, you're not the fastest, you don't have the best ball handling skills, not the most, you know, talented receiver, not really accurate, but you are not afraid to Mix it up You are an aggressive player So yeah

That was like kind of the only thing I had going for me, which was that I was not afraid to run at somebody.

Sometimes your own teammates.

I mean, it just like it was just I was just terrible. But I was not. But I was I've always been strong.

Yeah. Weren't you on a cheer squad? Didn't you?

I was a cheerleader. I don't know if that counts as a sport. It's the only thing I've ever won a trophy in. I was one of two white cheerleaders on a mostly black squad. My high school was very diverse. and so it was kind of fun because the most of the black cheerleaders on our squad were kind of like in the same friend group and I wouldn't say that I was in their friend group generally speaking but because that we were all cheerleaders together I got invited to some things and it was a little bit you know so and but and I was always a little bit like you know I was something of a fish out of water but I was I think well liked and you know we got along really well And then at the end of the year, because these women, these girls really were also, they were extremely small and very light and they were good flyers, the people who go up in the pyramid. And I've always been.

You were in the bottom of the pyramid.

Very strong, bottom of the pyramid type of person. And so I was like their main person who like, we didn't have a co-ed squad. So I was the lifter. I was the base and I could lift anyone. As you know, I've always been good at lifting people. And so I think because I was a good teammate in that way and was good at the stunts, the rest of the cheerleaders got together and awarded me the most valuable trophy. So I still have that.

I remembered that you had a trophy, but I thought it was just a team trophy. I didn't know it was MVP.

No, no, it was special for me for being a strong lifter.

Strong like bull.

Strong like bull.

Strong like Vives.

But anyway, I was bad at soccer, and I did once score a goal by accident. where one of the better players bounced it off of me into the goal, which technically you do get the credit for that if it bounces off of you. So that was my only point that I ever scored in soccer.

Congratulations all around. Yes. Okay, one last question here, and then we'll check some emails and get out of here. But Carolyn says, did Genevieve ever achieve her dream of lucid dreaming? Did she keep trying or just give up?

Well, I did give up. which i'm pretty good at but i actually did have some lucid dreams and your process was you kept

the dream diary right and you would do some sort of not mantra but some sort of exercise before

you went to bed um yeah it was it wasn't yeah i mean there's some there's this thing you're supposed to do it so it's a way of like um i don't know how to put it but like you you acclimate yourself to constantly checking in with yourself am i dreaming am i dreaming and you have a like an app on your phone that can help you remind you just throughout the day sometimes you'll hear my phone go like make a little chime and that's my phone telling me to ask myself if i'm dreaming and the idea is if you do that enough and you're so routinized and you're so accustomed to it that your sleeping brain will hear that and it will you'll ask yourself that and the answer will

be amazing does your phone chime at night while you're sleeping doing it really yeah oh i never

hear it chime at night it's not frequent it's not like every 15 minutes or something once in once in a while huh anyway so i i never quite i do find that when i write down my dreams um and think about them more that i tend to be i i was able to get into a place where i would have a couple of lucid dreams i probably i probably trained myself to have two or three lucid dreams and what would typically happen would be i'd be in the dream and i would start to realize it was a dream and just the realization of it would be enough to pretty much wake me up so you're excited Well, it's like once you know you're asleep, I don't know, your brain wants to wake up or you can't be that deeply asleep. But I did have enough sort of wherewithal or awareness in the dream to make some decisions. So like I had to cross a river in this dream because I was being chased and I needed to get away and cross this river. and in the dream I realized oh I I can control things so I can walk I can bounce across this water like it's a trampoline like what a weird solution right like why not just turn around and like the thing isn't chasing me but I had enough sort of agency to take some actions in the dream

but not fully control my reality I had a very similar dream recently and when I got to the river It said, do you want to ford the river? Caulk your trailer and float it or wait for a ferry.

I did have a terrifying dream recently that I told you about.

Oh, yeah.

We're so worried about Theo. He's so old and he's got some health problems. And I think I'm just, I've got Theo.

Theo on the brain yeah some friends of ours lost their very elderly cat recently and we're you know kind of grieving with them a little bit and um and watching Theo kind of go through some of the same he's just on the same train yeah and it's really hard to know know all of that so I had this dream that you and I lived on top of like a mountaintop but it was like a flat green sort of circle and then everything built around that circle was just like a sheer drop off but everything we needed was up there like our house was there we had like neighbors up there was like a big big area and for some reason our neighbors had a pet rabbit and the rabbit wanted to be and wanted to was curious about theo and theo was curious about the rabbit and they start nosing at each other but this rabbit was like the size of like a like a very big dog or like a fully grown pig or something it was huge you know like but not as big as a horse but maybe like a Shetland pony and it was misshapen uh in a scary way it had an oversized head and its teeth were very like brown and broken and sharp kind of Donnie Darko there was a Donnie Darko quality to it I mean it was rabbit shaped not human shaped but yeah it was scary and I watched Theo and this rabbit nose up to each other and kind of the way animals do like sniff each other out and I was probably 10 feet away in this dream and before I could get there this rabbit opened its mouth and just clamped down on Theo's head and then just continued to just chomp him into like nothing and i was in that dream where you run i mean always in dreams when i'm trying to run i can't run fast it's horrifying and i'm running and screaming to you know to try to stop this but in the dream i'm already like making my peace with the fact that like theo's gone oh it was very

very sad were you able to fall asleep after that that sounds like a real terror it was kind of a

night terror yeah i don't remember if i was able to get any more sleep um i love the fact that we

are the podcast where a lot of our listeners who live here in the pacific northwest are going through some real dire heat conditions right now and we're trying to make everything better by telling them our dreams it sort of feels like this is literally a room in hell for those listeners so my apologies i will um let's leave it there for now vives take a quick break when we come back we will check in on some emails and then wrap this up oh also we got to figure out what song we're gonna go out with today maybe you can think about that all right we'll be back in just a sec

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 one quick email then let's get out of here uh this comes from mora in philadelphia We were talking on the show, Genevieve, I think just on Friday, about the design of modern ketchup bottles. You know, you can picture like a classic, not a classic, but like a modern Heinz squeeze bottle. It's got the big fat and flat white cap so that you can store it. It sits upside down. It sits upside down, essentially. But the hole in that cap is pretty wide. Luke was saying, and he got this from something he was reading. But if you think about, like, going to maybe a ball game and they have those little red canisters with a tiny little point on top.

It focuses it.

It focuses it. And you can shoot a much smaller amount of ketchup on your hot dog if you want.

I have always found the one, the upside down one with the big hole difficulties. It's very hard to get the last, like, ounce and a half of ketchup out of there. Oh, yeah, because it kind of clumps up around the edges. It just clumps up around it.

Yeah. But Luke said that the reasoning behind that is more people are using more ketchup for French fries and hamburgers. Oh, they want a pile of dogs. And they want more. And also, if you think about it, I guess it's in the company's best interest to use more of the product. Right. Like having having a something that functions as more of a governor. So you're not using as much ketchup might not work in Heinz's favor there.

Yeah, but now it makes me want to go and order a traditional ballpark hot dog or a ketchup squeeze bottle.

Well, that's what Luke and I were talking about, and that's why I wanted to read this email to you. So Maura in Philly says, OXO, you know that brand of kitchenware. OXO makes great squeeze bottles. My favorite use for them is olive oil and canola oil. She sent a picture of these things or a link to them. She says they make them in different sizes. These are six-ounce bottles I'm looking at here. She says, I keep those by my stove. waiting tables i noticed these are used in lots of stuff by cooks like oils and condiments like ketchup as you guys were describing i love them in my kitchen and they are like these are season through bottles and they're all the same i mean i kind of like the idea of the classic you know red and orange uh squeeze bottles but these oxo bottles do look pretty cool and then i do like the idea of putting like olive oil and stuff in there but here's my because like that's one thing when sometimes you watch somebody like kind of um oiling up the skillet in a restaurant they just squeeze it directly on i love that vibe i'm tempted to do it vives let's do it here's the thing don't you think that we'll end up like buying these bottles and then like because you know i love puttering right but what's going to happen is I'm going to buy a bottle of ketchup and it's going to have I don't know 12 ounces in it and this thing is six ounces and so I'm always going to like have like extra ketchup I feel like we're going to lose refrigerator space if I can't get my new bottle of ketchup to all fit in the old ketchup bottle and once it's open it has to be refrigerated yeah it part like the puttering side of me loves this as a project but I feel like and you might be sensitive to this too that it might end up like just being another one of my puttering things that makes life a nightmare for you well the refrigerator space is a legit issue

but i do think we keep a giant soy sauce refiller um that doesn't we don't normal we don't need it every day it sits at the back of the refrigerator and when we need to refill up our little you know six ounce soy sauce bottle we just refill it yeah and it's not bothering anybody i think if we could get a ketchup container that is more of a bulk not huge but you know more than can fit in this squeeze bottle we put that somewhere at the back where it's not bothering anybody and because to me the thing that's frustrating about the refrigerator is like i'm constantly shifting

things around to try to get to something yes if i don't have nightmare our refrigerator is a god

it's not great it's not great but i think that that problem is solvable with just like giving it some real estate in the back where we don't need to reach it every day yeah or i you could

go the opposite you just get really small bottles of ketchup at the stores so you make sure that you're always filling it yeah you're using it all up I'm gonna investigate this let's talk about it I am kind of surprised I thought you were gonna have a very opposite um reaction I know I hate

that it's funny like it's a little a little thing that bothers me but I just had to switch out the old ketchup for the new one and I had to leave like a I would say an ounce of ketchup in there which really bugs me yeah um because there's no easy way to get it out without unscrewing the whole white cap and like you know tapping it out into a jar or something yeah yeah all right there

you go that's that's the family plans that's the has walsh family plans um that's what we call family planning that's absolutely right what else does it mean nothing what does it mean for other couples no that's what it means you said you had a song that you'd like to go out with i've been so

into this song i'm usually the i usually listen to my my mix uh that i that i leave on you that lives on your spotify but it's like my mix and it's i'm just like so unadventurous when it comes to music i just listen to the same like 30 songs over and over again but the other day i let it ride like i just put on a song that i like and let it you know come up with suggestions and i stumbled upon this song by a band called hound's mouth which i've never heard of hound mouth Hound Mouth, excuse me. Somehow that's worse. It is somehow worse. Hound Mouth, and it's a song called Sedona, and I just absolutely love it.

Awesome. Well, we'll go out with that. Thanks for being in this hot studio here. Let's do one last check on the temperature outside. It started at 93, then it went up to 97. Right now it is at 99, according to my phone, and it's exactly noon. So it hasn't even peaked yet. So I hope that everybody is staying cool, as cool as they can. I hope everybody is staying as safe as they can in dealing with the heat. Take care of yourselves. Take care of your pets. And I guess I'll just close out. Vives, can you do the second part of our closeout? We didn't discuss this.

I know it.

Do you know it?

I know it.

Do I know it? Do I know the first part is the question? Can you say the first part and I'll say the second part? That's usually my role. Suddenly I did just forget it. See, right?

No mountain too tall.

And good luck to all.

Well, John Ford said, won't you hop on into the stagecoach, baby, gonna take you for a spin, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa

Well, hey, little Hollywood, you're gone, but you're not forgotten

I got the cash, but your credit's no good. You flipped the script, you shot the plot. And I remember, I remember when your neon used to burn so bright and pink.

Saturday night.

Power out.