Muse

In the lee of a picturesque ridge lies a small, unpretentious winery, one that pampers its fruit like its own babies. Hi, I'm Moira Rose, and if you love fruit wine as much as I do, then you'll appreciate the craftsmanship and quality of a local vintner who brings the muskmelon goodness to his oak chardonnay and the dazzling peach crud bat pull to his Riesling Rioja. Come taste the difference good fruit can make in your wine. You'll remember the experience and you'll remember the name. Herb Erflinger. Bert Herngreif. Erf Herflinger. Bing Leifhanger. Leifling. Bert Herkern. Bert... Bingo Lingf***er. TBTL

Oh, look who decided to come in tardy Don't think it's okay to just roll in here at 100 kilometers per hour Like you're Joel Otto with the Calgary Flames This Canadian rap, jump man, jump man Them boys up to something I think I need some Robitussin

Do you believe that?

I do if you do

But it's absurd

Are you going to get out there? You're going to get out there? For what? Like just, yeah.

Actions speak louder than demonstrations. Let's get to some of the action right now.

All right, hello, good morning, and welcome everyone to a Tuesday edition of TVTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. Explaining how a show works means the show's already in trouble. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. I'm back, baby! Back at the Nest Broadcast Center, high in the sky above Portland, Oregon. Anything happen this weekend in Portland? Anything notable in the weather department? I wouldn't know. I was down in California. California got sunshine. Yeah, I really timed that pretty well. Went down to Napa this weekend, where it was like 95 degrees Sunday and Monday. So it wasn't, you know, wasn't freezing, but it was certainly nothing like what everyone was dealing with up here in the Northwest. It was lucky for me. It's your lucky day. I got to miss a lot of this. And I thought that I had sort of committed the, as you would, as you might say, the perfect crime. Fly back into Portland on Monday night, right when everything was cooling back down. But, of course, it turns out the airlines, they don't operate quite as smoothly when it's 115 degrees at Portland International Airport. And, well, my trip home, what should have been a, like, I don't know, hour and 10-minute flight home from Napa to Portland. Well, it was literally a major disaster. I will regale you with my stories of Sky Jinx and really Drive Jinx. Woo. Coming up on the program. I'll also get a full update from Andrew on what it was like here in the Pacific Northwest during this unbelievably hot weekend that they just suffered through.

Hey, what happened?

By the way, it's episode 3454 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. And we do have some top stories from other parts of the world, including one of our favorite places, Australia.

Australia is a wonderful island.

The story of a couple of nude sunbathers who have been fined $1,000 each. for violating the stay-at-home order. They're back in a stay-at-home order in a lot of Australia because of the Delta variant. And these nude sunbathers were lost. They got lost. They got separated. They were wandering a national park nude because they got spooked, they said, by a deer. And Australians are just as unique, both warm and direct. So we will bring you the latest on that, plus emails and V-mails. And this guy, speaking of clothing-optional co-bros...

Wet, naked, and I just spin around. I just spin, spin, spin until I dry.

He is the longest-running co-bro of the show, known for his drawings of the tall ships. He's Andrew Walsh. Joining me right now from the Roosevelt neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. Good morning, my friend.

It's 73. It's almost too cold. Uh-huh. I mean, honestly, I was looking down at my phone. It's like 73. It's not even supposed to hit 90 today. I thought it was going to stay in the 90s. It's just going to be a cool 86 today. That is honestly not bad. I mean, I'm sort of, obviously, I'm putting it on a little bit, but this is actual news to me that I just saw a moment ago because I could have sworn they were saying that today was going to hit the mid-90s again. This is great. It is supposed to be in the mid-90s here in Portland.

But that's more standard. One of the things I've noticed and commented on on the show is that Portland is a couple hundred miles from Seattle and it's further inland. And so it does tend to get warmer in the summer. Like, I feel like 95 around here, that feels warm, but in the normal range. That's still pretty spicy for Seattle, but I'm sure a great relief to a great many people. How are you, my friend? And how was it in your place? I know that you and Veeves, by the way, huge thanks, Andrew, to you and also to Genevieve for covering for me yesterday. But how are I know you guys talked about this on yesterday's edition of the show, but like just because I didn't hear it yet. How how was it for you guys?

Genevieve did a terrible job yesterday, by the way. I just want to say I was really disappointed. I haven't talked to her about that. I'm not angry, of course. But, you know, you ask somebody to co-host a podcast with you for free and you just expect more. So I apologize to the listeners for Genevieve, of course.

And also, you're welcome, everyone, that I'm back. I mean, I think it's only when you're down a burbs that you just realize just how wonderful and sparkling my conversations are.

I got to say, obviously, I'm being sarcastic. I woke up this morning and I saw some people on Slack talking about how just delightful Genevieve is. And I agree, man. She's so good. I honestly, like, this show, well, I've said it before, and why talk myself out of a job? But can you just imagine how good TV Gel would be if it was you and her every day? That would be something. But anyway, yeah, no, it was a lot of fun to do the show with Veeves, although it has been, it was rough, man. I mean, not the show. Maybe the show was rough at times, too. I didn't know what the Peloton was.

I mean, just doing the show in 105-degree temperatures when you guys don't have central air in your place. Like, I'm amazed that you were able to summon the gumption to talk into the microphone for an hour because even that probably felt like intense work. It was rough.

I've kept the, without retreading too many things, I've kept this office that I work in as cool as possible by keeping these blackout drapes. Just coincidentally, we had some drapes that I believe Genevieve crafted herself, I think. Maybe these were store-bought. It really doesn't matter, Walsh. But for some reason, they must have been old bedroom drapes, maybe from Los Angeles because they're more like blackout drapes. And they're in my studio now covering my one window. And, of course, usually I have those wide open during the show so I can stare at that beautiful roof of the nail salon next door with its air conditioner unit on top of it. But what I've been doing is just keeping these drapes closed, which kind of does block the flow of air from the window a little bit. But it's worth it because the sun doesn't come in. And this is kind of where the cats have been hanging out. And I didn't want any fans going during the show. But, I mean, whatever. It was fine. Veeves and I got through it. It really got worse. As you know, Luke, the intensity of the heat usually comes on much later in the days here on the West Coast. That was something that I had to get used to when I moved out here. You never really know what the day is going to be like until around 3 o'clock, I feel like. And so it was around 3, 4 o'clock where things were just getting, like, intense here, man. It was – so I did have a doctor's appointment. Oh, by the way, quick little congratulations to me. Today's a big day, by the way. I am all man, not machine for the first time in a long time. They pulled that final little pin out of my finger yesterday. Oh, wow. So that's good, yeah. But I was telling the Vives, like, so I had an appointment at 3.15 to go to the doctor. I wasn't sure if they were going to be pulling it out on the spot or not, but they did, and I'm glad to have it over with. But I was saying maybe I just get there. I pretend like I thought my appointment was at, like, 2, and I just get there super early. And I just set up my office in their waiting room and be like, well, guess I got here early. But it was, I mean, being outside in the heat, I mean, it felt like you're in a convection oven. And I got one kind of disturbing little tale to tell that I had to kind of clean up today. So if you're a little squeamish, maybe be warned. So I'm coming back from the doctor's office yesterday around 4.30, and we had gotten a text from our friend Anita who said, I need air conditioning and I need Wi-Fi. I'm going to the Eagles, and I'm going to do my work there. Anybody want to join? And I said, that sounds like a great idea. I'm leaving the doctors. I'm going to come home, grab my computer, and I'll meet you there. And Veeves joined us too. It was actually a really good setup because there's a lot of room to spread out there. anyway so it's in this window that I'm coming home between the doctors and the eagles that I see one of our little crow friends you know we have a lot of crows around here sitting on our roof kind of sitting on the edge of the roof and it was really kind of freaky it just had its beak wide open and was not moving hardly at all at one point I made a little noise and it sort of cocked its head a tiny bit towards me and it was standing up He was still standing, but he was just standing.

standing there dead still with its beak just wide open, staring into the middle distance. And it stood there for quite some time. I said, this is some Edgar Allen potion. It was disturbing to see. I said, Veeves, look at this bird. It must be too hot. She's like, yeah. She's like, you know, don't make any more noises at it. Just like let it. It obviously just needs to get as much air as possible right now. Just leave it be. So we left it be. And then we went to the Eagles where it was beautifully air conditioned. And they had fans all over, too. Maybe just to bolster the air conditioning It was actually quite frigid in there, which I needed Ended up staying there pretty late And late enough for us to walk home So things cooled down to, like, I think the low 90s By the time we were leaving the Eagles around midnight or something Maybe 11-ish A crisp 93 at midnight It was like, oh, it's only in the 90s We can walk home So, I don't know what it is, like a mile from here But it's mostly downhill Anyway, we come home And that – this house was at its worst when we came home at night because it had just been collecting all the heat of the day. Like it was just – it was impossible to be inside. It was awful. And, again, this is pretty deep into the night at this point. And so then I'm out – so I go outside. I'm just kind of sitting just like melting on the – on part of the roof. I didn't even walk all the way out on the roof, but Vives did. And we're out there for just a couple of minutes, like not even really talking, just like panting. and then she points out we see a shadow in the corner in a not a very well-lit part of the roof and it's like oh buddy we saw that guy in his that crow in his very last probably moments on earth and he was big there's something i mean you don't like to see dead animals i'm not great around dead animals anyway but crows are huge you know so now i'm like god we got this corpse on our roof i'm like i don't feel like dealing with it now i'll deal with it in the morning um and so we did you You know, went to bed, and then this morning I'd kind of forgotten about it. And then Genevieve said, oh, it's so sad that crow, which is now starting to collect a few flies, which is gross. It had – Genevieve thinks it might have been its mate, but certainly its buddy. She said there's like a crow funeral going on outside. She's like – she looked out the window, and there are several crows around it. And supposedly this is some behavior that crows will do when one of their friends die. I don't know if we use the word friends, but one of their –

Can you count those, how many there are out there real quick?

one of their colleagues dies um and then this morning when i actually went to go we went outside to actually go you know bag it up and throw it away genevieve thinks it was his mate or its mate was like up in the tree above it just cawing at us and as we're scooping it up it's like

yelling at us it broke my goddamn heart luke yeah man yeah that's like really really bums me out yeah i mean i i wonder how animals get through this kind of stuff you know i mean like we have all the resources we have and of course different folks have different resources and access to ac and cool water etc but like i wonder and so the crow was on the roof when you saw it in its kind of final moment i mean before it passed away it was on the roof because it also just seems like i wonder why instinctively it wasn't seeking shade i wonder if it had just at that point kind of lost

its mind you know that's a good point well you can kind of picture my roof although this doesn't help the listeners but you know how there's kind of a a little a very small ledge around the edge of the roof so we can have the regular kind of rough i don't know what you call that tar it's not tar paper but whatever you have the the the roof material which is kind of quasi flat but then we have a little ledge around a little metal ledge um and over in one corner that ledge is beneath a giant tree is that an oak tree out there but it's like kind of where you and i set up when we did some shows outside during the pandemic and we had to be outside and remember i kind of found some shade it's kind of on that part of the roof or whatever that's worth and so the crow was on the edge on that little green tin part kind of in the shade i think when i saw it doing its panting thing and then when we came home it had collapsed off of that apparently it was laying on the roof So anyway, that's all the grisly details I will give on that. But I will say, like, you know, I don't like doing that kind of stuff. I kind of I'm very I'm a very squeamish person. So I don't like dealing with that stuff anyway. I mean, it was fine. We took care of it in like two seconds. I just used a dustpan. But but but having it having the crow above me screaming or like, I know we're sorry. Yeah.

Were you tempted to put out water or something? I don't think that would have worked. But like when you saw the crow up there when it was still alive, I feel like I would have gone and gotten a thing of water and put it out there. I'm sure they wouldn't have. The crow would not have interacted with it for a variety of reasons. But like were you were you tempted to try to do some sort of intervention for the crow when it was up there looking not great? No.

You know, there's a bird bath like just feet away from it. I think if it needed that, it could have found it. I think that, you know.

It probably knows where Green Lake is. I'm not even being sarcastic. Yeah, absolutely. It probably knows where water is. It just was, I'm sure, in some state of overheating where it was just pretty close to not being functional. Yeah.

And, you know, I mean, the crow could find Green Lake as the crow flies, literally. Sure.

How far would you say that was?

As the crow flies. So, no, actually, I really – the funny thing is I think almost anybody – and I didn't ask Genevieve this specifically. it seemed like we were both surprised for a moment when we found the dead bird or we saw the dead bird last night because i think maybe a lot of people would have looked at that bird and said oh that bird is dying i just thought wow that bird is melting you know what i mean like boy

i wouldn't have thought it was dying i feel like most of the time animals figure shit out which is weird because as a human i can't figure anything out and i have so many resources yeah but animals tend to figure it out um when it comes to that kind of stuff there are exceptions obviously when weather is very extreme but yeah i wouldn't have thought that that this bird was not long for the world i would have just thought dude's bugging out probably because he's like super hot and uncomfortable and aren't we all and off to the eagles so you know i'm with you on that um that would have been my read on the situation but anyway i'm sorry that's intense and also um now

you've made a crow enemy yeah no i hope i mean we're trying to be as respectful as possible while using a hefty garbage bag um also speaking of and vives and i talked about this um uh quite a bit on the show so we don't have to get into it but like you know Theo is sitting here sleeping next to me right now and I was basically kind of doing the same thing for him that I was doing for that crow yesterday which is like just not putting him in a bag but just like not messing with him at all you know I that was my biggest concern remember I was a little bit I think on Friday's show I said boy everybody said it was going to be hot this weekend I wasn't really thinking much of it I had a pretty nonchalant nonchalant attitude about it and then on Friday it started to hit me like oh this is really going to be an event but i was like whatever we'll get through it i kind of had not at that point realized wow this could really be bad for my 20 year old cat with health conditions you know um and so you know there's a lot of stuff going on online about how to keep your pets cool and whatever like you know put a cool towel over them i did try that just once really briefly last night at the just peak of the heat but i knew he didn't want to do that and i just did not want to mess with him at all like cats you know can you know they they do what they need to do in these situations and what he needed to do was just shut down as much as possible so he'd been melting around the house like all day like mostly in my office just like kind of a finding a dark spot on the floor and just like just just expending zero energy at all so i was trying to just like kind of not mess with him the both cats were still hungry so i guess that's good i was kind of surprised by that but um aside from that like those cats did not move all day well um i am uh

i'm glad you guys made it through it and to the listeners in the pacific northwest i hope everybody was okay i was getting lots of texts from the hawk squad about what family members were doing uh to survive my brother david and his girlfriend alicia had decamped to my sister liz's place because they live on a river and this river it's the little white salmon it is so cold normally that like you can barely like you can be in it for like five seconds but i get the sense that they and their dog penny were just like just basking in this frigid glacial runoff because it was uh like the perfect place to be as it was you know it like a i think it got to might have gotten to 115 i think so yeah i mean just insanity um i was in napa as i've already mentioned and um i really was thinking boy i got lucky on this i was down there i was i was visiting some folks i was doing some wine tasting and i was thinking like oh this is this is ideal like i've although you know what's kind of funny andrew is i both felt like glad that i wasn't and this trip was i had this trip planned for a while it wasn't um like i saw that it was going to get hot and i was like get me out of here it just worked out that way but um i was both relieved i wasn't going to be here and i was also felt kind of um like i was missing out on something like this is you know knock wood and obviously climate change is real and we're seeing the effects of it in certain ways but also it doesn't mean that every single june for the next 20 junes is going to be this hot if not hotter and some part of me felt like oh i'm missing out on a once maybe in a 50 year weather event in portland and i felt almost a little bit like i can't say i can't tell people like where I was that one weekend in June of 2021 when it just was 115 in Portland like where were you at the Fairfield Springs suites in the industrial district of Napa California like I didn't get to go through it with everyone which I felt I'm sure that if I would have been here for 10 minutes I would have been like this sucks so I just wanted to be here for 10 minutes to experience it to be part of the collective experience around this I I get that with snowstorms sometimes. And for me, that's also tied to a nostalgic feeling of, you know, living in snowy places. I had never lived like I've been in hotter climates. Like, I think it was probably in the, you know, 110s when we were in Arizona, probably that last day right after the van broke down. Yeah. But we were, you know, going from the air conditioned hotel into an air conditioned car into an air conditioned home. And then we did do the show outside, of course, and my phone melted down. But I know. But like, you know, you always have there's all you know, because everything is everything is built for that. So you're never too far away from life saving air conditioning. Right. And so what I lived through yesterday, I don't think I've ever lived through that kind of intensity before. And I'm not, you know, especially with weather events, you and I talked about this.

Like, I really try not to be extra about it, but I'm just being honest. Like it was it was unreal. I understand the feeling that you're talking about. Like, I'll tell you this, especially now that it really does feel like we're more on the other side of it. I really am excited. I honestly thought it was going to be in the mid-90s today, and knowing it was just going to be in the mid-80s just feels like I just got a new lease on life. But the feeling that you're talking about or the feeling you crave did happen when we got to the Eagles because I've never been to the Eagles that early on a Monday afternoon, right? I got there a little bit before 5, and, again, I had work to do, so it was impossible to do work. Like, I don't even want to get into this whole thing, but I was getting new pings from the system saying that I had to do my next step of my self-review process in this system we were talking about the other day. I've opted out of that, by the way. Oh, my God, Luke. I follow the instructions. I go onto a website, and I'm pouring sweat. I had, like, a half hour between, I don't know, TBTL and my doctor's appointment or something, and I'm, like, pouring sweat, and I'm, like, this is the time I'm going to decide to crawl into the self-review system. And it is just incomprehensible. By the time I got to the page, like nothing is clickable. It just has a bunch of things with people's initials where various things were approved. But then a bunch of things are not done. But it doesn't say there's literally nowhere to click to do whatever the hell I'm supposed to do. It is just whatever. And in this moment, I picked the wrong moment to try to tackle that little chore. Because I was just like I could not. My brain would not work on top of me hating that kind of task anyway. Like, I just everything just seemed impossible. I just wanted to cancel the week. Like, I'm not usually I don't think I'm usually like that. But then, you know, take my laptop, roll into the Eagles. And it is super. I mean, not super crowded, but way busier than I thought it was going to be at, let's say, 445 on a Monday because everybody was, you know, leaving their hot domiciles so that they could get to the air conditioning of the Eagles. And then that one, you know, and Mike, the bartender, has like fans out everywhere, like big, you know, only fans. You finally started your only fans. No, Mike does. I can. I'll send you the link. But yeah. But anyway, just like fans, everything's blowing around. It's kind of funny. And that was the moment that I think that you're thinking of where like kind of the community finds a place to come together to defeat whatever, whatever the natural forces are. And there is some bonding. And that that was probably a special night. Then we left, and it was just awful again.

I'm glad that it sounds like mostly – I saw our friend Roden was tweeting that there was a brownout in his neighborhood. But from what I was reading, it looked like most of the power grid in the northwest held up, which I'm really relieved about. Me too. I think for the people that had AC, like, you know, that obviously – I was just wondering if everyone running their AC at max and all of the businesses – Like here in Portland, there's this mall that is just so close to just fully being turned back over to nature. It's called the Lloyd Center Mall. I can actually see it from this window that I'm looking at right now. I think it has like one store left in it or two stores.

Didn't you have to walk through it when you first moved in and you're trying to get to a Bed Bath & Beyond or something? Or am I conflating stories? That was a different mall.

That was, I think, called the Gateway Mall or the 205 Mall. That one was was close to where this Lloyd Center mall is. I mean, you know, it's been well documented, but the sort of the demise of the American mall is here. And Lloyd Center is just especially kind of more abundant at this point. But I guess the AC still works. So what I'd heard was that people were just chilling in there. You just basically had this giant, I don't know, 100,000 square foot space with nothing in it but cold air. So I think people were were there. Like I got the sense that in Portland, people were, you know, just going anywhere if they didn't have air conditioning, going anywhere where there was air conditioning. And I'm glad that that all held up because I was a bit worried that if if you had a if you had a sort of a blackout or brownout situation, it could have been even worse for folks.

Amen. I was convinced it was going to go out. For me, it was just a matter of when it was going to go out. So I was telling Vives, I was trying to stock up like the the grocery stores around here were pretty apocalyptic again, at least the couple that I had gone to, because like all of the all of the meats were in like kind of dairy and all that stuff. Anything that was in the refrigerated section that wasn't behind a closed door, if you can picture it, had been pulled from the shelves. I don't know if things were malfunctioning. I think it was just a precaution. And then and just like that, it triggered all those feelings of kind of early pandemic scarcity that I did not like. And like, you know, there was no ice anywhere in the city. And I saw, you know, I on Friday, I almost bought a couple of bags of ice, but I didn't want to hoard it. But I'm like, that'll be my last opportunity. And then sure as shit. by I think Sunday that you're just like walking into grocery stores and there's like these frantic handwritten signs by overworked employees that just say no ice don't ask about the ice you know like it just had that the grocery stores which are often my happy place and an air conditioned place were not a refuge for me I wonder what people were this sounds dumb but I wonder what people were using the ice for well it was also during the weekend too so I mean I think was a combination of people just wanting to have ice because they were scared about what was going to happen. And as Viv said, just picnickers and people, everybody was going to the beach. Everybody was, everybody during the, well, during the weekend. Yeah. I mean, that's what all the stories were. People were like going to watering holes around the city, you know, whether you're Green Lake, like Genevieve said Green Lake, where she was spent a lot of the weekend trying to cool off was just like packed. Like everybody was just, because a lot of people don't have air conditioners. So they were, you know, packing up their floaties and their coolers full of ice and and heading out and probably a lot of barbecue. I mean, I went to a – we had an outdoor barbecue at our friend's house on Saturday night, I think. And, you know, once the sun went down, it was nice enough.

Yeah. Well, like I said, I was thinking that I had really played this one pretty perfectly until yesterday afternoon when I got a text from the airline that will remain nameless that I love very much, Although, I'll tell you what, the last two times I've traveled on our favorite airline has not been their strongest performance, Andrew. I get a text from them that says, your flight has been canceled. I was flying out of Santa Rosa. I was flying out of Charles Schultz, the creator of Peanuts, Charles Schultz Airport in Santa Rosa, California. And I get this message from the airline saying, your flight is canceled, not your flight is delayed. your flight is canceled and i jump on the app immediately first i call and they're like we're experiencing a longer than average hold time uh hit one and we'll call you back so i was like okay so i'm now on the list to be called back and i start furiously frantically trying to find other ways home and i'm trying to see if there's a flight out of because that was there were no flights out of santa rosa on any airline frankly i was trying to see if i could fly out of sfo or oakland or sacramento because oddly enough the town of napa california is kind of equidistant from a bunch of different airports and it was like it really felt planes trains and automobiles because i got on the line with the finally with the person from alaska she was very helpful or she was trying to be but it was this kind of thing where every time she'd look up a flight she'd be like oh that one just booked because everybody was being displaced from their flights And so everybody was trying to rebook and get on a different flight. And I was just like one. I was like 20 seconds behind the wave of other people getting on all these flights. This is pretty hilarious. So Santa Rosa to Portland. That's like I said, like an hour. And they block out like an hour and 45 minutes. But you're really in the air for probably an hour and 10 minutes or something, if that. The computer at some point, the lady on the phone started laughing. And she said, well, this is crazy. It's trying to send you all over. I said, what do you mean? The computer had rerouted my ticket to be fly out of Santa. First of all, it was fly out of Santa Rosa the next day to Los Angeles, to Salt Lake City, to Denver, to Portland, Oregon, arriving on the 30th, which is tomorrow. Oh, my gosh. That was the computer's solution to my problem. Or you could walk. Honestly, it would have been a coin toss. So it just became obvious to me that the best thing to do, or at least the best of the many not bad options, or not great choices, I should say, was to just drive home.

So I drove home, which was like 10 hours, basically, when it was all said and done, if not a little bit more. So I cruised in here at about 1.30 or 2 last night and hit the hay. and here we are. So I made it, but now here's the thing.

I am, I'm going to be honest with you, I am still carrying around some real frustration at my favorite airline, Andrew, because I knew this when the woman on the phone said, and I knew it was going to be declared weather because of the heat, but what I also know was lots of planes were still landing at PDX, including planes from my favorite airline. Lots of flights were canceled, but lots of flights were also landing. In other words, it was not illegal to land at PDX. So what that means, and this is my most common harangue about corporate America, what that means is my favorite airline looked at the math and decided it is more financially advantageous to us to just cancel this flight because it will either free up more crew or an extra plane or whatever. Or because maybe the ground crew in Portland Maybe you couldn't have the ground crew out On the tarmac for as long of a time Because it was unsafe That's one thing I was thinking about During this epically long drive Had a lot of time to ruminate And so maybe it's a thing where Normally somebody who's working on the ground crew Can be out for four hours And then they take a break And then they come back out for another four hours Or what have you I'm sure those times were drastically cut down They probably needed to triple up on their staff They probably could have tripled up on their staff If they offered everybody double time, they chose not to like this was a financial decision at its most basic component, even though it's about the quote unquote weather. What it's really about is them looking at the chessboard of all of their planes and crews and then also looking at what the money was going to be around all of this. And then them or maybe the computer making the decision that exposed them to the least amount of financial harm.

Well, yeah, and in this case, I want to be sensitive to the incredibly severe conditions, which were real, and like you said, the people out there. But generally speaking, and this goes back to long before I had a podcast, but just my earliest adventures in flying. Keep in mind, I did not fly in an airplane. I guess I flew in an airplane once when I was two years old. I don't remember it. Apparently, I shit my pants. Really? Wait, was I two? Yeah, maybe I was younger than two. I was a baby. All I know is when I finally flew on an airplane as a young adult, which was right as I was graduating college, I told people I'm nervous to fly because the last time I flew, I shit my pants.

You've had a pants shitting story on a plane this whole time and you've been holding out on us?

I only know because my parents said I was a baby and I pooped my pants. It was kind of a joke. But, you know, like it was a family joke. But anyway, yeah, so I didn't have experience flying until I was a young adult. And I immediately, after a couple of flights, was like, what the hell is this system? Like, what other industry do you just sort of hand over all of your money and then you hope that they're not going to change everything on you and you hope that they're going to deliver? Like, I just never, I was just astounded by it. And I understand, like, it is an industry unlike others because of, well, just, it's a very complicated industry. And I do understand that on some level. But like you say, I am I'm very dubious about a lot of airlines motives when they when they're making decisions like this. And, you know, Genevieve could tell this better, but she's been on TBTL too much this week. So I will not bring her down here to say it. But I think she was telling you this recently. You know, she has this this kind of hiking adventure that she's going on. A friend here from Seattle and her are flying out to Maine where she's going to meet her sister. and maybe they're meeting up in New Hampshire and then driving to Maine for some hiking thing. And this has been on the books for a long time. Genevieve booked her flight a long time ago and she did use a third-party app to do it, like Travelocity or something like that. Can't remember the airline. It's not your favorite airline. And then suddenly, like she had it booked for a few weeks and then suddenly out of the blue, she just got a note like yours that said, your flight has been canceled. Your flight in September has been canceled. And and then she's trying to kind of rebook it. And she's, you know, contacting her friend here who she's flying out with. And her friend's flight was not canceled or the flight is not canceled. Genevieve's just been. They didn't cancel you. You canceled them. I guess the flight wasn't canceled. Genevieve just got bumped off a flight. They overbooked it. And they said, yeah, you know how you gave me all that money. We're not going to do that. But guess what? We're giving you credit back. Credit for the airline that just did this. And then she couldn't get the credit because she had done it through a third party. But it messed up everybody's plans for this thing Like they're supposed to fly out together And one person is allowed to go And the other one isn't Even though they both paid their monies Like how is that okay

This is what I've always said Is it's like you know Like Arby's they have the meats The airlines they have the planes And this is the essential problem Is that At the end of the day they can kind of do whatever they want Because most of us don't have our own planes And so we're just a bit at their

Thank you.

mercy and i i you know i do complain about this a lot but when i was thinking about this on the drive i was like this being considered weather related which it was i mean i don't think it was like they just the airline was sitting around going how do we disappoint thousands of people on this sunday uh for no reason like i know that the heat had an effect but i also know there was a financial solution or there was a prioritization of flights that had been made because again it wasn't like snow there's three feet of snow at pdx and no planes are landing and no planes are taking off i'm looking at a flight tracker app planes are landing and taking off all the time from the airport in extreme heat so it could happen it was just the airline making the decision around what is going to you know what's going to cost they probably lost a bunch of money yesterday i'm not saying they made money but but they're doing the calculation of what is going to what's going to expose us to the least amount of financial loss and um uh you know and so i get i get frustrated because the oh the thing i was going to say is this weather thing the difference between this being weather or being mechanical it's probably like 10 million dollars for that airline on one day because if it's mechanical if it's their bad if they're running late or if their planes are breaking down they got to pay for hotels they got to pay for food they've got a book i because i asked i was like can you put me on a different flight like a different airline And the woman, who was nice but pretty firm, she was like, no, because this is weather-related. I'm not allowed to. So in other words, had it been deemed their fault, I could have just strong-armed them and been like, can you put me on a – basically have my favorite airline, buy me a ticket on a different airline so I can fly home. But so so that's the kind of thing where they're, of course, going to do whatever they can to make sure that this is deemed weather related, because that's that massively reduces their financial exposure on these things.

So can I let me say one more thing here, too, because I just I don't know why I'm concerned about this. I think most people would agree with us that this is frustrating and the airlines can be very frustrating. And I'm also thinking, OK, but like they're an industry that was especially hit hard by the pandemic. Like there's in there. Yeah, we are still in a pandemic. And these are like these are two incredible events overlapping. And so there are those considerations. But all I will say is just look at the CEO pay, though. You know what I mean? Like there are margins like there. There are places where there are margins. And, you know, I don't I don't want people to think that you and I are mad because we didn't make lower. we didn't we didn't make like people who are not making a lot of money you know in the airline system be out on tarmacs like practically dying like i'm there right that's not my argument and so i just want to make very clear that you and i are not saying that like that's conditions were very severe but with enough money like that you can solve a lot of these issues but you're right they choose not to and again if you look at the industry and maybe what their margins are coming out of the pandemic it's not great as an industry but if you look at where that money is allocated in the you know upper echelons of that company and you see the people who are making a lot of money running this company that takes away the thing you gave them money for yeah it was uh it

was a bit frustrating and then of course the whole drive home i'm just like in my mind going was this the right call because i could have this is where we finally landed i could have gone to oakland stayed overnight in oakland tonight or last night on my own dime and then caught a flight at like 11 a.m which would have thrown this whole recording into chaos for us i would have to been like can we record way early or way late which would have screwed up your day i would have been in a hotel room which is like never my favorite way to do the show so uh you know it just i did get to vibe out on a new true crime podcast andrew that i thought was actually pretty well done Called Cousins by Blood So for people that Listen to that kind of stuff You know I would say It's pretty intriguing it definitely was entertaining On the drive you know what I was Thinking as well on the drive Andrew as I was Driving along some of the very Roads you and I drove on A few weeks ago In the Delica I thought You know what this is karma For us not driving the Delica all the way home yeah I was like this is right this is just sure three weeks later i'm doing the same route andrew i'm driving around the greater sacramento valley i was literally on whatever that road was that we took when we came down i guess it was probably from fortuna to sacramento when we dropped down and we came through williams california i'm like driving through williams california i'm like boy this feels familiar this is exactly what i would have been doing if we would have made it all the way home on the delica so i got up this morning i thought well you know what that's my karma uh we ran that van a little hot through the desert we had it towed home maybe we could have limped it back maybe we're just not being

adventurous enough and this was the universe punishing me and then andrew i got a text literally as we were starting the show i'm not kidding or maybe we were even five minutes into it the owner of the delica texting me and saying oh hey would you mind leaving a review for the interstellar which is tech which is the technical name of the delica that we were driving and i said oh yeah of course i mean we loved the van it didn't it didn't end great but the van itself was awesome and i i have very positive feelings about the whole thing believe it or not yeah and the owner she said oh yeah it's all fixed all it needed was a new radiator oh a full new rate what

do you mean all it needed was she being sarcastic i think she was being a little sarcastic the point is it needed a new radiator so it wasn't crazy okay because yeah because some people were saying like some of the mechanics and various people were talking to were speculating that it might have just been like the thermostat right is that the right word the thing that kind of right yeah Some little thing that would regulate the radiator and the cooling system, but if it's the entire – well, I don't know if the radiator is the entire cooling system, but that seems like a bigger – actually, though, I don't know. Is replacing a radiator a big deal? Yes. It is.

Well, it's not something we were going to be able to do in Sentinel, Arizona at the middle of nowhere gas station or even in Phoenix because I took it to a Japanese auto repair place where they had no parts for it. They were stumped by the entire, you know, the entire operation as far as this being a 1993 right side drive diesel Japanese van. So, no, I take this to actually be while it's a bummer for the owner of the van that there was more money that had to be spent. I feel in a sense relieved that there was a legitimate problem going on. So I don't think now I was being karmically punished for sending the van home on the back of a truck instead of driving it home because it had a bad radiator at that point.

Well, let me ask you this. Do they need any help replacing it? Because I did just find a 45-minute video removing and replacing the radiator in a Mitsubishi Delica.

The bolt had just snapped off. So I'm going to have to cut mine off. It might be worth bearing in mind you could need a couple of hose clips.

So you just need a couple of hose clips, Luke. Also, this has the engine under the hood. so I don't think this would do us much good, actually.

Yeah, it's probably not even the same model. We were sitting on the engine of that thing. No, I took that to be – I actually felt quite relieved when I saw that because I just thought, okay, good. We didn't like – because, of course, there was a moment where it's like, it's really hot, we're really tired, we've already gone and visited all these wonderful, beautiful listeners. We're kind of ready to get home. Grinding this thing through the desert is going to be a little bit of a hassle. Was some part of my brain relieved that we weren't going to have to drive the van? Sure. But then that also made me feel like a bad person. But I now feel a new sense of relief knowing that there was a legitimate situation going on. We weren't just we weren't just trying to, you know, not be brave by driving a van with a bad radiator through what would have been, again, about 2000 miles of desert.

Yeah, right. Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah, if we had tried limping it along without replacing the part, oh, my gosh. Yeah, that would have been terrible. So, okay, well, it sounds like the right decisions were made there. We were cautious, and we were not wimpy. And your ride yesterday was in a more probably comfortable, and this is not a bad review of the Delica. We love that thing. But, you know, it was probably a more comfortable ride than driving the Delica that same route, Wondering if it was going to break down at any moment And potentially not having the air conditioning on

Yes I was in a Subaru Outback A rental And that thought did occur to me Andrew As I was running the AC and looking at the Because it was warm in California Don't get me wrong Particularly as you get up through the northern part Of like Redding and stuff I mean it was going to be I was listening to the public radio station up there It was going to be like 108 today in Redding So it's like, you know, it wasn't like it was frigid down there, but as I was enjoying air conditioning and looking at the temperature on the engine and seeing absolutely no change on the temperature gauge, as I was, you know, buzzing around slower traffic, I thought, yeah, no, this is definitely a much easier situation than it would have been driving the Delica. I guess all's well that ends well, Andrew. Here I am doing the show with you once again, back to it. So let's take a quick break, and then when we come back, we'll get into what's going on in Australia with naked sunbathers and do some e-mails and v-mails. Stay with us. It's TBTL. Hello, and welcome to Top Story. One last funny thing, Andrew, from me being gone. i came home and i was happy that my uh system of of setting the temperature in here at like when i left i basically put it on like 85 so i was like if it gets north of that my big concern was that all of this sound dampening kind of foam that i

have like taped up to the walls was all just going to fall down if it became like a hundred degrees in this apartment um i'm happy to say my system worked it was all still intact when i got back here um and the apartment was warm but not like you know not like your house um on on monday night but uh i did things were weirdly out of place like stuff was pushed around i had this a couple of boxes that i was going to take down to the recycling that were sitting by the front door that had been moved what and like how do we not start with this this bathroom my bat the there's two bathrooms in this apartment and one of them the one in the hallway was open and like the rug was out of place and i was like wtf and then i realized oh that was just randy randy randy that is randy going ham yesterday morning just just screwing everything up my skateboard was

moved everything was moved i was like what i was i was on the edge of my seat i was like what happened i'm like i know is this the revenge of thomas is somebody looking for your money belt

i assume you have a money belt um it was randy it was freaking randy of course and what i usually do is i close the door to that bathroom because i know randy has a long-running feud with the bath mat in that bathroom and like i don't that bathroom doesn't need to be vacuumed every day because like no one ever goes in there so i i have a whole system when it's like when it's randy o'clock i shut the door to that bathroom because it's just like i don't want him to waste his energy on that and so um that was but i think the door i had been ironing a shirt in there before i went to napa so i think the door was a jar enough so that he could push it open and then get in there and then try to clean it and thus mess up the bath mat so and then he had pushed the cardboard boxes around and the skateboard and everything, but it took me like five seconds. I just had this genuine moment of like, wait a second, what? Somebody was in here?

And can I just let everybody know that Randy O'Clock means something different in Luke's house than maybe a lot of our homes.

Well, Andrew, you know what? It's not your place to tell me who I get to love. Maybe there could be multiple meetings for Randy O'Clock. Speaking of getting Randy, or at least getting naked uh this is a crazy story out of new south wales australia um well the first thing is that there's some bad news in australia which at the delta variant seems to be uh really expanding uh quickly there and so they're back in stay-at-home orders in a lot of different places in australia i didn't realize this andrew not that this is the well this might be the most interesting part of the story but not this is really our place to get into but i didn't realize less than five percent of australians are vaccinated i was about to ask

you that and i was going to say i know this isn't where you want to take the story but i hadn't read this and i have i've heard various news stories you know i i had heard that it is running kind of ravage that's not the expression i heard that it was pretty bad that the delta variant was bad in australia and causing you know rollbacks of various of various like kind of openings of society um but i also keep reading everywhere that the vaccines so far have been showing that they can you know they can they can work against the various variants and so i was confused so it

is a low vaccinated place australia huh my guess is this is because not not necessarily because australians uh are i mean although we do we do know this australia is a wonderful island And Australians are just as unique, both warm and direct. I don't think it's because necessarily Australians are anti-vax. I think what it is is Australia was a huge success story around this thing. Australia has been back open and functioning while much of the world has been shut down. It was because, of course, they took a hugely proactive approach to quarantining people who'd come into the country and to like testing. and just they basically did they got it under control early and because it never got out of control they've been able to live a somewhat normal existence there um probably helps that it's an island um so anyway i think probably what happened was people are australia is not prioritizing the vaccine the way other places are because they haven't sort of had to but now the problem is when the delta variant hits and you got a bunch of people not vaccinated it it is unfortunately and the delta variant as we now know is is is more contagious and and and certainly more dangerous in a lot of ways it's weird to think about the u.s approach this this is just like so united states of us we're just like you know what we're gonna do a really bad job of uh of of shutting things down we're gonna be very uneven about it and we're gonna just have like certain states where they just are like eff it Thank you. And we're just going to go with the approach of let's try to vaccinate everybody because we have no ability to actually control people's behavior. We have no ability to, like, run any kind of like, you know, nationwide programs where people are actually taking this shit seriously. We're going to go with the everybody go out to the bars and get drunk and visit the kissing booth. But we're also going to be vaccinated at like hopefully 70, 80 percent by the end of it. And Australia, it would appear, took a different approach, which is everybody be very disciplined. Let's keep this thing under control. And then we don't have to focus on the vaccine element. Well, unfortunately, the Delta variant seems to have thrown that plan into disarray.

Well, I hope our Australian listeners are doing OK. I mean, we do have a handful of them there and we know them from our various Zoom meetups and what have you. So the chickens are all right. Yeah, exactly.

So almost almost more importantly. So Australia, New South Wales is back under like a very, very strict stay at home order. These two guys have been fined $1,000 Australian after they had to call, one of them had to call the rescue folks to come get him in a helicopter because he was lost in a national, a royal national park. This is a little bit south of Sydney. He and somebody else had been apparently naked sunbathing. They said a deer jumped out of the brush and scared them, and they went tearing off in different directions, and both got lost. And the fine is because they were not supposed to be sunbathing, whether nude or otherwise, because I guess that was considered non-essential behavior. And so they are, I guess, they're safe but in trouble. One guy was found walking nude, wearing just a backpack. The other guy was found, they said, partially clothed. But they were both cited for breaking the stay-at-home order and both fined a bunch of money. I hope they had shoes on.

When they say just a backpack, I hope that means a backpack and shoes.

You know, that's a good point. That show, Naked and Afraid, the number one thing that happens to people that sort of ends up, I guess, making it impossible for them to go on, well, one thing is hunger. But the other thing is Their feet just get destroyed We are generally speaking In 2021 Most of us are not ready to walk around in the wilderness Without shoes on Yeah, I'm not I feel like something else was going on here I don't know what that something else is But the story is just I do have to give credit to I think it was The Guardian That said, talk about Buck naked That's a pretty good spoof

Oh, Buck, like a deer

But something about this story doesn't quite add up to me right like naked in the woods a deer scares them or naked on the beach

and a deer scares them and then like the deer scaring does seem yeah you're right that does you have a good you have a good nose for that not as like it's funny like i have a reputation which i'm losing the reputation because we've been we've fallen for too many hoax stories on the show since i developed this reputation of being of being um kind of dubious of things but you have a pretty good sense we've sometimes talked about it on the show but there have been other kind of more serious stories that we don't have to get into right now um where we have private the jesse smollett story yeah you just want to say it yeah okay i wasn't sure if you wanted to get into it

but like i think history has proven that i was when the jesse smollett story he was the guy on empire who said that he was menaced in chicago by a couple of maga folks and this was at like really late at night on a an extremely freezing cold night in chicago and there was just so much about the story that didn't seem to make sense like who would be out in that weather and would these guys know about Empire the show and just a bunch of stuff like that that I texted I think you and a couple of our friends and I said gosh this story sure does seem weird to me the details of it and this was at the moment when everybody was standing with Jussie and was very worried about him and I was like I just I would be really surprised if this if these events unfolded in the way that that this story was initially told and it would appear that you know that was in fact the case that this was not what happened and you know everybody knows the rest of the story there yeah

and i i do feel i could be wrong i have a vague sense that you've you've kind of put your finger on these like when stories just kind of don't quite come together i feel like you have a pretty good nose for that so you're right i mean i was just kind of taking this at face value quirky little story but um yeah like scared by a deer it sort of sounds like the type of thing and now am i slandering people here i mean we'll see it's also not that important of a thing i don't know what they're gonna have a little fine or something for for breaking whatever rules and naked sunbathing but um yeah uh i was scared by a deer it just sort of sounds like something that you've sort of made

up in the moment doesn't it right like i have to say deers are deer are of the animals that would scare me. I feel like I might get if I was lying nude

somewhere sunning myself and I heard something in the woods rustling or I keep thinking that they were on the beach but I actually don't know that I just know they were sunbathing I always associate sunbathing with being near a body of water but it doesn't always have to be but if I just heard something in the bush I might be like oh what's that but then like literally the second I saw it was a deer it would it would immediately change my sense of fear like deer and cows are two animals that at no time am I ever at all afraid of um I did say I went on a jog in Napa and I jogged past a bunch of cows and they all just kind of came over to the fence because they're very curious animals and I um it had me thinking like god I wish I could be friends with a cow so then I wrote a tweet this weekend that I want to become friends with a cow and I couldn't understand why that tweet was getting so much hashtag engagement and then it was because this I very popular Twitter account called Devin Nunes's cow that I think Devin Nunes, the truly deplorable congressman from California, Devin Nunes, who's just absolutely on a short list of some of the worst of the worst in Congress. I think he tried to sue this Devin Nunes cow account because it was like making fun of him so much that he or he tried to he tried to investigate in some way. I know that this account was particularly troublesome to him, which made me, of course, love it even more and i guess the devin nunez cow account like tweeted at me a gif of a cow like looking at my tweet or something and so that made it get all kinds of attention but anyway a cow or a deer coming out of the woods would be the two animals least likely to scare me i'd be more scared of like a giant rat or a raccoon i've been scared of deer and i'm not i'm

out lying um because i you see deer often like you know my parents still live in a very heavily suburban area outside cleveland and so there are places where there was a lot of land not all that long ago and there's a lot of development going on so like you know there's a lot of deers even in their little like kind of uh little condo area you know like i don't know how to describe it you know it's like a little housing association area that they live in like it's not unusual for them to come home and find deer kind of like eating their flowers or something and that does not scare me but one time when I did not have a a car door between me and several deers it was intimidating I was in ocean shores the only time I've ever been there like my friend's family had a little cabin there or something and uh I think there were maybe six or eight of us there a few couples were just like kind of hanging out for the weekend and we were outside grilling and then these deer came by and this was years ago now this is like 10 years ago so i can't remember the details all that well but i remember we were like pretty mesmerized by them until they got close i think everybody maintained their mesmeration uh except me as i got more and more nervous as these little guys not little guys these big glass eyed deer like the deer's eyes are scary man you ever look

directly into a deer's eyes i have because in bellingham the whole thing was even though we lived in a you know a neighborhood like very residential we were near all these parks that these deer lived in and they just would regularly migrate around our neighborhood and it was i mean it was a daily occurrence that I'd be out with Rudy or I'd be jogging and there would be a bunch of deer. And I was generally chill with it. The only, there were a couple of times where there'd be like a young buck as it were, or a buck that had like a big set of horns on it that I thought, I don't want this deer to get the wrong idea. And, or, and, or if, um, if there were like little, um, you know, fawns or does a little baby deer and, and they were across the street, but their mom was still on the far side of the street, I would try to make sure that she didn't get the idea that I was getting between her and her youngins. So, I mean, there was a couple times where I was like, I just want to be careful I don't send the wrong message.

You don't want them to think that it's randy o'clock.

Exactly. I want to make sure that there's absolutely no misunderstanding about that. This was the part of the story, by the way, this deer allegedly that scared these two people in New South Wales. This was the part of the story that was extra crazy in just very 2021 so they are asking this like police commissioner uh about the story and about what happened and you know australians are having a good laugh at this uh which they probably need right now so the police commissioner is doing the press conference and somebody asks the police commissioner hey is nude sunbathing actually a violation of the stay-at-home order and he is about to answer that question and he can't andrew because at that moment um somebody he was interrupted by a guy who issued the police commissioner a notice of cease and desist because the guy claimed he was the prime creator of this earth. Wait, what? It's just a...

in the middle of the press conference let's just throw this lanyard of 2021 on top of things do you want to hear this sure yeah we have i haven't i haven't actually previewed this i'm just playing it it's in the guardian article that i was reading somebody called health nerd tweeted out what happens when the police commissioner of new south wales comes face to face with a self-appointed prime creator of this earth pandemics are a wild ride so here we go i'm just going to play this

short clip of tape i don't know if it'll pay off i have a question for you so did you receive my notice of cease and desist it's like your uh time i understand this sorry sorry no no you were sir last year and i captioned everything i am the prime creator of this earth i am the okay well

you know it's kind of that's that's not funny because it's a guy who's probably mentally ill What is funny is, and nobody can see this because this is an audio medium, but that's a clip from a local newscast, and what you could see is they cut back to the anchor in the studio, so they've been at the location of the press conference. They cut back too soon to the anchor in the studio who's furiously miming with his hands, come back to me, cut that, come back to me, don't show the prime creator anymore.

And then they come back to him, and he's, yeah, well, he got what he wanted, I guess.

He's in the middle of basically, yeah, you could see he's basically like, get it off the prime creator, don't, which, I mean, as far as things that could happen at a live press conference, it's not the craziest thing. Well, it might literally be the most mentally ill thing, but it's not like, there are worse things that happen all the time on news television. That was fairly mild, but clearly this guy in the studio was like, get it back to me right now. And anyway, so that's what's happening in Australia right now. Like you said, Andrew, hopefully our our listeners out there are doing OK. Hope everybody is safe and not, you know, I mean, I was going to say, I don't know if this is better or worse. It's winter in Australia, which is also weird to think about. Not sure if it's better to be locked down during the winter or the summer. Probably. Probably the winter is worse because there's less availability to gather outside, which is at least something in the summertime. It's also just annoying that we have to do the math on when is the best time of year to be locked at home because of a pandemic.

Andrew, you know, I was going to say I was having a thought about how this pandemic were in a strange phase of it. I mean, obviously, the whole thing has been strange, but seeing it impact different places so why wildly differently now, you know, like in the in the real heart of the pandemic, it was truly global. It was truly inescapable. You couldn't say, boy, I'm sick of this pandemic. I want to take a I'm going to go on a vacation to Europe to get away. Right. It was truly global. And now we're in this phase where, OK, like you already gave all the back the background on this. Australia had things locked down pretty well early on. And now we're in this weird upside down world, which is interesting because they're in the upside down part of the world where toilets flush the wrong way, et cetera.

which we never tested I mean I flushed many a toilet in Australia and at no time did I take a moment to observe the direction the Coriolis effect was going which I am so mad at myself

I swear people have said it's not actually the Coriolis effect it's actually just the way they are made they do flush the other way they actually just they make them in a way that the water flows in a different way I think I could be wrong about that but what I was going to say is And this is already too long and too rambly. But I think maybe tomorrow on the show, we should take a moment to kind of like maybe acknowledge where we are. I'm realizing that tomorrow is the last day in Washington state of the kind of lockdown rules being in effect. And I assume it's the same for Oregon as well. Now, I did not realize until a couple of weeks ago that we were one of only five states or I guess Washington and Oregon were two of only five states that hadn't gone back to basically being completely open and not having a lot of specific, you know, COVID era rules about wearing masks and stuff. So I guess a lot of the country is already there. But like me, emotionally, I just suddenly like while you're talking about this, I'm having this thought about how sad it is that Australia is now going through this again. And then I look down at my calendar. I'm like, wow, tomorrow could be the last day, assuming that no other news comes out before whatever. Like we're just maskless and sitting at bars again and what have you. Not going into bars, but sitting at bars, you know, that that's that Thursday.

the first could be a real moment i am assuming that tomorrow that today is the last mask day because here in oregon kate brown said

It expires the 30th, which I'm taking. Oh, interesting. OK. Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life. And let me tell you something, Andrew. The mask mandate has been relaxed in California, meaning if you're vaccinated, which, again, it's the honor system, which is kind of a ridiculous thing because somebody who doesn't believe in the vaccine, I would imagine doesn't believe in being truthful about if they've had the vaccine, if it means they can go into a TGI Friday maskless. but i cannot tell you how wonderful it was to i almost couldn't believe it at first i went to a trader joe's and a whole foods on saturday morning and i had the mask and the sign said hey if you're vaccinated you don't have to wear a mask in here and i was like at first it felt just kind of strange like is this okay i mean i've been vaccinated for a good long while now but it still felt like i was getting away with something i saw that some people did have their masks on and i don't even think it was because they weren't vaccinated i think it was because everyone's kind of just at a different in a different place with this stuff um but i went maskless and i just kept the mask on my wrist so like if somebody expressed they were uncomfortable to me or if i if i went into a different store with a different rule which didn't make sense because it's a statewide policy which i figured out by towards the end of the trip just basically i could go anywhere in the hotel i didn't have to wear a mask it was wonderful i had i did not realize how much just little mental energy with each trip outside of my house my apartment going into any restaurant getting out of the car getting gas even in portland you know they pump your gas but i don't want the person pumping the gas to come over and have me sitting in my car without a mask so i'm like where's the mask this guy's getting close to ask me what i want to fill the car with let me get the mask on just a thousand of those events a day and to not have to i mean like two days into it in california i had just like fully just fully like settled into like oh i just don't have to worry about masks anymore and it was just absolutely wonderful so i am so ready and again we're lucky that we live in a part of the world where there's been a lot of vaccine availability and a lot of people haven't had that access and privilege so i want to i want to acknowledge that But man, oh, man, am I freaking excited to not have to be bringing a mask everywhere.

This is interesting. So you are right that Wednesday, which is tomorrow, is the date that the state is expected to lift covid-19 restrictions, according to The Seattle Times, which is why I said it that way. I was reading directly. But I think it's notable that it says is expected to. So assuming that the governor doesn't make any proclamations, which I don't think he will at this point. But what's interesting is actually here in King County, as of today, the mask requirement is lifted because back on June 15th, and I remember this now, I'd sort of forgotten about it. Back on June 15th, the county had reached its goal of 70 percent of eligible residents being fully vaccinated, which triggered a two week countdown or something. So, yeah. And so coincidentally, the county's mask mandate ends because we reached this goal. But it's only we only earned one extra day of not having to wear a mask inside. But the thing is, it's also going to.

Wait, that means today?

That means today.

Today you can walk to the grocery store sans mask and stroll in.

Supposedly. Now, here's the deal. I think I will still continue to take a mask everywhere because I still think it's up to individual establishments. Like, for example, my local watering hole Teddy's. Right. Like, I know some of the people there, some of the people who work there are, you know, are much more concerned about the rules than others. Specifically, like I think there might be one person there who is not too psyched about having customers sit at the rail again, sit at the bar again. And so I would assume that establishments like Teddy's can make whatever rules work for them so that their that their staff feels safe. My guess is Teddy's will go back to opening back to normal soon. But anyway, the point is, I will still have a mask with me because there's a chance that you could walk into establishment like, I don't know, I need a haircut this week. And if the people at Rudy's are like, hey, listen, I know the mask mandate isn't a law anymore, but I am inches from you cutting your hair. Do you mind wearing a mask? I would, of course, do it.

i guess i would too but man it is amazing andrew how quickly i have gone not just from the trip to california but just generally like how quickly i've gone from being like we all have to do our part we all have to mask up everybody please get vaxxed let's err on the side of caution it's amazing how quickly i've gone from that to being mildly put off at times by the performative nature of all of the prophylactic stuff that we're still doing like because there is at its core and I'm sure listeners are going to send me some examples to the counter um but like what based on what i think we know about the science which good change tomorrow you never know based on the latest on the science people who are fully vaxxed being around each other without masks poses a very very very small danger an infinitesimally small danger the danger is people who are not vaccinated congregating and passing around things like the delta variant and then it more mutating and becoming even more dangerous that's the danger so like when i get into my elevator as a fully vaxxed person when i get into my elevator and i wear a mask every time because that's still the rule in this building and i don't make people uncomfortable but there's something inside me andrew that is just dying when i put a mask on to get in the elevator when i know i'm fully vaxxed and therefore cannot i almost by scientific definition am not endangering anyone were i to not be wearing a mask you know but i'm doing it because i it's not that big of a deal and also i don't want other people to feel uncomfortable but you know me i had do very poorly with like when i felt like us wearing masks was the number one thing we could do to try to keep this thing under control and get back to normal life nobody was more pro mask than i was but now that i know that based on the current science me wearing a mask is 100 just so i everyone knows that i'm not a maga person i it's so i i struggle with it i really do if i'm being honest not to bring it back to this but i

I was glad I had a mask today. Somehow it made me feel better when I was taking care of the crow. I put a mask on.

Well, that's, I'll tell you, I'm still going to have a mask in case I have to go in a men's bathroom at an airport. Yeah, right. Like, I've talked about that experience at the Pittsburgh airport where I wanted to throw a business card under each stall that said, see a doctor. Like, there are times when having that mask is actually quite useful. Whether it's, you know, a day when you're just not feeling maybe you're most beautiful and you'd like to cover as much of that real estate as possible. If you're dealing with a dead animal situation, if you're in a restroom that doesn't smell great. I mean, there is a lot of and also just I wonder if if people are going to mask up on flights now just as a given because it's like who wants to get sick? You know, yeah, I don't know how much is going to stick around.

Yeah, I don't know. Like, is it still a federal mandate? I believe that you have to wear masks on airplanes, right? Which is interesting, because it kind of makes the most sense that that would be the last kind of bastion of mask wearing when you consider the circumstances everybody is in on a plane. I mean, even before this pandemic, people would always just talk about, yeah, you get on an airplane, there's a good chance you're going to walk away with a cold or a flu or something just because of the way airplanes are set up. Yet it's also, and I know this having only taken one flight since the pandemic, and that was back from Phoenix because you're too wimpy to drive the van back. It was uncomfortable, man. Like it was like I've gotten very used to mask wearing and there are very few times when I'm wearing it and I'm irritated by it. I guess like sort of like in the in the in these last few weeks of going to restaurants and bars and and being in the restaurant or bar and talking to people and having the mask off all the time, but then having to put it on just to walk across the room to use the restroom like that seems very performative to me and sort of annoying. But again, I did it. I don't think I ever complained about it. I mean, I think here is the first time I've even mentioned that little thing. Like, but I would prefer not to not to have that. But it was the only time that it was really like, oh, get me out of this mask was when I was on that air that on that airplane. And what was the flight like? It wasn't that long. Was it even five hours? I don't think it was even five hours. No, Phoenix. No, Seattle.

I think you're like two and a half, two and a half, three.

But yeah, by the end, I was like, I just the air was getting stuffy. I was hot. We're seeing the tarmac. I wanted out of that thing.

Yeah. I mean, flying is I might be one of the first people to point this out, but flying can be a bit tedious anyway. And you throw the mask on. That is the most that's the most tedious mask experience that I've had throughout the pandemic, because also the rule is like they'll give you a bottle of water or something. And it's like, take a sip, but then put the mask back up. But even that's a little bit like, well, we took the mask down for the sip. Like, but now now it's back up. Like, heaven forbid somebody exhale during their sip. I mean, I do think airplanes were surprisingly not dangerous, it turns out, based on the air recirculation and the adherence to the rules. I don't think there was ever any evidence that airplanes were some sort of major vector for this stuff, which is ironic because they actually do use the term vector for their flight path. What's your vector, Victor? But, yeah, there's just something about sitting on a plane and just already being, like, ready to be off the plane. And then you've got this mass that's probably kind of itching or you've just been – I think what it is is when we wear a mask under normal circumstances, we're taking it off more than we realize. Yeah. You're walking to the grocery store. Maybe you have it around your wrist because you're outside.

or maybe you're pulling it down occasionally to just refresh your air supply. You go into the store. You're there for a few minutes. Maybe you're on the frozen food aisle and you have an itch on your nose, so you pull it down a little bit to itch your nose. You put it back up. We're just probably actually demasking or unmasking a bunch more than we realize. But when you're on the plane, it feels like, okay, we are in an aluminum bullet trying to fly to Seattle and not kill each other. Everyone is on their most strict mask adherence. And only then do you realize, God, this is uncomfortable to do for three hours.

Yep, yep. And it's very obvious if you try to, like, take it off for a moment or something. Like, you know, and, again, it's like the – I mean, I actually can sort of – we should probably move on. Welcome back, Luke. Luke takes one day off, and then, of course, we're just going to have, like, a three-hour show.

Can I say something really quick to that topic? Yesterday, I really wanted to be on the show with you. Yeah, right? I woke up in Napa and I was like, man, I wish I could like check in with Andrew and see how he's doing in this weather because it's wild. I'm like monitoring it all on my phone and I was like going to tell you about my trip and all this stuff. So like it's funny because we're very lucky to have this as a job. Like it's incredibly – we're incredibly fortunate that the tens of listeners financially support this thing as a job for us and yet it's a job. And so, like, some part of me was like, oh, sweet, I'm going to wake up and just kind of, like, chill and do my thing in the morning. And it's, like, no pressure. And then I'm literally up for an hour, and I'm like, man, I wish I could talk to Andrew about all this shit.

I always think about that time, and I know I raise this a lot, but it was, like, a rare day off for me during this time because I was moving. And, you know, moving, I believe, from L.A. to Seattle, and I had a bunch of prep stuff to do. And one of the things was to go to the mall to drop off my cable box or something. And I was like, oh, I'm not doing TBTL today. and then I was the very first person to use a freshly cleaned bathroom because it was like the mall hadn't opened yet. And I was like, I got to get on the horn. I got to talk about this with someone. Where do I put this story about pooping in a clean toilet? Exactly. That's coming back to get me, isn't it?

Here I go once again with the email. Every week I hope that it's from a female. Oh, man, it's not from a female.

All right-ly. Sorry, I turned my mic down there instead of the... I was wondering what was going on. ...Doug music. Yeah, I'm still... I'm reacquainting myself with this audio setup here in my house. It's been three days. It's been a few days, yeah. It's been a weekend plus one. The mind atrophies. All right.

Any emails or emails that we should do? Yeah, here's a quickie that I thought was charming. Ben from Pittsburgh says... And I believe we've heard from Ben before. I believe Ben... Yeah, the firefighter. Oh, did you already see this?

No, but I just remember Ben calling in maybe during the Van-a-versary show or something.

That sounds right. Or could it have even been maybe last summer when we were in the undisclosed location? I don't know. But, yes, we have heard from Ben before. And Ben says, hi, guys. I was at work doing the normal morning chit-chat. And a member of the crew of our fire boat was talking about the maintenance of the boat. And he said that the guy who came out to look at it was Jerry. There are boat Jerrys everywhere. There are dozens of them. Dozens! Why isn't everybody associated with boats named Jerry? I don't know.

For folks that are relatively new to the show, the marina, I used to have a boat. In fact, it turns out it created the greatest moment in TBTL history when I crashed it. But of the, like, I don't know, maybe seven people that lived in the marina that lived on their boats, I swear to God, like five of them were named Jerry. It was the weirdest thing. So I guess that's – maybe that's a thing. with maybe if your name Jerry you just something about the maritime life calls to you or maybe you

have to change your name to Jerry once the maritime life calls to you all right I'm gonna read another email here this one is a real stemwinder and I love it okay this is from Aaron in Woodinville Luke the other day on the show this is not Aaron talking this is me I did that in the wrong order hey Luke this is Andrew the other day on the show I don't know why this came up but i think i said to you is there any grosser substance than the water that people keep the ice cream scoops in at an ice cream parlor right and weren't we like going i was

asking you how much it would i'd have to pay you for you to just like chug yes that little kind of you know steel container it's often stainless steel that the ice cream thing is sitting in the scoop is sitting it's full of that dirty ice creamy water and i think i said

It's certainly no less than $5,000 for me, I think. I'm not doing it for a grand. I'm just not. I'm not a rich man, but I'm not drinking that for a grand. Anyway. You have standards. Aaron in Woodinville says, I was listening to the story about drinking ice cream scoop water, and I had to let you know that I know exactly how much money you'd have to pay someone to drink water like that. On Easter, my family had dinner at my mom's house. She makes a homemade. cheesecake that everyone loves she slices each piece she dips the knife into a pint cup full of warm water this enables the knife to easily slide through the cake leaving perfect slices she uh as she nears the end the clear glass pint glass takes on a milkier and milkier look with small bits of cheesecake floating in the water my brother this is your living nightmare andrew my brother always the instigator said he would bet my 18-year-old son Isaac that he couldn't drink the pint of glass or he couldn't drink the pint glass of cheesecake water. He said he'd give him 50 bucks if he drank the entire glass. Did I mention that the water is warm and that my 18-year-old had already had about two servings of dinner and two slices of cake? Isaac is getting ready to move away to college so it is extremely so he's extremely motivated to earn money and fifty dollars is no small amount to him half of the family was goading him on the other half was disgusted isaac was weighing the pros and cons of drinking the water psyching himself up but he took a little too long and my sister who was a bit tired and emotional by this point in the evening reached across the table grabbed the cheesecake water ran to the kitchen and dumped it down the drain claiming herself a savior for the evening no $50 was given to Isaac and he went home feeling mad and cheated by his aunt I wonder hold on oh I'm sorry where's the wine the stem is still winding this stem is still winding cut to high school graduation dinner last week the same players at my mom's house minus my sister the aunt who dumped the water she's not there this time Add Isaac's girlfriend, who had never met my brother before. Again, the brother would be Isaac's uncle, right? So this time, Isaac's girlfriend is there, too. She's never met the uncle. Once again, my mom had made her famous cheesecake, and once again, she had the warm pint of glass water for her knife. After all the pieces had been sliced and the cheesecake had been eaten, my brother holds up a hundo and asks Isaac if he'd drink the water. Zero hesitation. With his girlfriend looking on, Isaac grabbed the water and drank the entire glass. When done, he said, that actually wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. I believe he is sufficiently prepped for college life. Also, maybe that ice cream water isn't as bad as you imagine it. Power out. That's from Aaron in Woodinville.

I love, I'm wondering, did he bring the hundo? Because a lot of people don't just carry around $100 bills.

Oh, that's interesting.

I wonder if the hundo was like in his pocket in anticipation of this moment. I wonder. I love that the price doubled, which is great. That's inflation for you, although Janet Yellen tells us it's temporary. So just heads up on that. I also I was thinking about as you were telling the story, I was thinking about like, you know, it seems gross cheesecake and water. But, of course, I would eat cheesecake. My sister Liz makes an unbelievably good cheesecake. And we always have it at Thanksgiving. I would eat a piece of cheesecake, and then I would be thirsty, and then I would drink some water. So it's like, eh, it's all kind of, these are things that do get mixed together. Actually, same thing with ice cream. I would eat an ice cream cone and feel very thirsty, and then go to the water fountain, which I remember Baskin-Robbins always had the worst. They would never give you, like, a decent-sized cup, at least the ones that I would go to. Like, I'd go there, the one by Green Lake, which is now some bar called Shelter. Have you ever seen that joint Across from the swimming pool That used to be And there's a Starbucks And a place called Shelter

Okay I haven't I think Veeves has maybe Had lunch there one time But I have not Yeah okay

That used to be a Baskin Robbins Where actually my sister Liz Of the cheesecake making Used to work And You'd go to that Baskin Robbins And you'd get an ice cream cone Which was great And then you'd be so thirsty afterwards And it'd say Can I get a cup for some water And for some reason Their policy was to give you A Dixie cup Oh yeah Which was just like so unsatisfying to fill a Dixie cup up with water at the water fountain. My point being, I've eaten ice cream and consumed water shortly thereafter. So I don't know why these things mixing together is so gross to me because they are things that I have consumed adjacent to each other hundreds of times in my life.

Yeah. Like, I mean, listen, I'm a picky eater. There's all kinds of things I won't eat. So it's not surprising to me that this turns my stomach to think about. yeah, there are foods that you eat that don't go well together, but you're saying these are two foods or beverages that you would have no problem eating right next to each other. So why is there a problem here, right?

Mm-hmm. We've now gone almost an hour and a half, and it's still going to be 95 degrees today. Oh, yeah, let's do a heat check. So let's conserve our energy.

It is a little bit warm here. It's definitely warmer than when we started. It started, it was 73 when we started the show. It is now 79. So it's still. 81 here in Portland, and it's looking like it's going to be 93 at its warmest. Can I say one last thing as we wrap this up? You were talking about the afternoon sun being more intense on the West Coast. I had the most interesting conversation with a winemaker, and I guess vintner. I went to this place in Napa called Tres Sabores, which if you're down in Napa, I would recommend it. It's just this, it's a vineyard, and then they have a winery, too, that's kind of, it's very, very casual. It's not like a fancy place. It's like little picnic tables that they've set up, like, kind of in the vineyard. In the Lee. In the Lee of Napa, California. If you like fruit wine the way I do, anyway, I was talking to, it's, the people that own it, they, their house is also there. And so they're just kind of like running this little, you know, operation where you can try some wine and also like going back and forth their house. Their dogs are just wandering around. I mean, it's like the best. And so the winemaker slash guy who co-owns the vineyard came over and we were chatting. And he was saying that some friend of his had invented this system, which had never been thought of before, where they trim the grape. So imagine a grape like you've seen, obviously, what a vineyard looks like. you've got these these these grape vines that are trellised up right because i guess this is a thing also wouldn't have occurred to me if we didn't as humans modify the way we have grapes growing like we didn't have them grow up that like stake and then on to those little wires and stuff and get trellised out like you think of a vineyard they would just be on the ground like a watermelon plant and then the grapes would just be down there and then of course you'd have like a whole bunch of problems like they'd get rotten more easily they'd be exposed to groundwater and all kinds of things so we humans for now probably thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years have been trellising them up we've been making them grow up and then on to these little support systems so we can pick them easier so that they're healthier so they get exposed to more sunlight etc but basically what they figured out was the afternoon sun is way hotter than the morning sun and so what they have to do is give these grape vines one side the the morning side they trim the leaves back more so it's basically like imagine that they like it's basically like business in the front party in the back because the side of the grapevine that's getting exposed to the afternoon sun it's too intense so they leave the vines and the leaves and the sort of protective foliage they leave that longer on that side oh yeah that makes sense and they cut it shorter on the morning side so that the morning sun is more direct because it's cooler and then the afternoon sun is a little bit,

they're a little more shaded because it's more intense.

Huh, that is interesting. I like it. You know, I think about, I have an aloe plant. That is one of the things I'm most proud about. I've had this thing for a few years now. It was a gift from Genevieve and it's really big now and I keep it inside. But I've gone through various phases with aloe plants. Like I had an aloe plant that I really liked and when I moved down to LA, I was like, this is going to be great for the aloe plant it's a desert plant it's a desert succulent it'll want direct light so in my very first place i was staying down there i immediately took the took my aloe plant i put it outside i'm like you're home now drink in the direct sunlight and it died like pretty fast and it turns out that like just because something is a desert plant it doesn't mean that it's not a plant that lives under the shade of a bigger plant you know what i mean like i don't know exactly what's going on and maybe people know more about um aloe than i do All I know is whenever I put my aloe plant in the direct sunlight, which it sort of seems like it would like, it does not do as well. So I now make sure it only has that kind of filtered light and it's not directly in the window anymore. And I think about it every time I water it. I think if you were in the wild, would you be living under a big cactus? What do you want, little guy, big guy? I love my I love my aloe plant.

And Addie got me a really cool plant for my birthday, and she knows all about this stuff now because she's a millennial, and they basically, what they do, if you're her age, is you read the New York Times cooking section, and you make elaborate meals, and you also study plants. This is big with that generation. And essentially, the thing that I think I've been, this plant is thriving amazingly because she said, you water it like once every two months, Dad. Like, don't go crazy with it. And my thing is, my love language, Andrew, is overwatering things, whether it's people or plants, because I see that plant and I think, you must be thirsty, little guy. And maybe water is hard to come by in your normal life if you were out in the wilderness. But guess what? You're going to be like a feral cat that I adopt. And you no longer have to hunt for everything. I'm just going to give you food. You're just going to be the luckiest little plant on planet Earth. And then I overwater. them and then they die they're like please stop doing that so i have been very very careful about not over watering this plant and it's doing great oh good what's it called again what's the actual i don't know what kind of plant it is but it's it's very beautiful and it's thriving and it makes

me think of my kid every time i look at it so nice yeah i like that too when you have something like that like and when you do water it you will think of adelaide right like that's i love stuff like

that you know that that plant and randy are basically my two friends exactly all right

what are we going to go out with luke i was looking for songs about plants about what about

aloe black i'm the man aloe black okay remember that song this this was like the seahawks i swear to god this song and the seahawks like going to their last super bowl seem to all fall in the same era where like i think that like this might have been like a russell wilson's theme song or

something look up aloe black i'm the man yeah there's a song called the man uh by aloe black and it was 2014 so this song this song was a big mood back in the day so anyway i don't remember

that uh that's that's how we're gonna go out i bet you you'll recognize it once it starts going all right thanks for listening everybody we're gonna be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you we're gonna do the show maskless tomorrow so i hope you're all comfortable with that we'll see you then until then have a great tuesday stay safe take care of yourselves and Please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

Everybody, go ahead and tell everybody. I'm the man, I'm the man, I'm the man. Yes, I am, yes, I am, yes, I am. I'm the man, I'm the man, I'm the man. I believe every lie that I ever told. Paid for every heart that I ever stole. I played my cards and I didn't fall. Well, it ain't that hard when you got sold.

This is my world.

Somewhere I heard that life is a test. I've been through the words, but I still get my best. God made my mold different from the rest. Then he broke that mold, so I know I'm blessed. Stand up now and face the sun. Won't hide my tail or turn and run. It's time to do what must be done. Be a king when kingdom comes. Well, you can tell everybody, yeah, you can tell everybody, go ahead and tell everybody, I'm the man, I'm the man, I'm the man, yes I am, yes I am, yes I am, I'm the man, I'm the man, I got all the answers to you.

Power out.