Muse

Obviously, your kid needs a male role model. Because I'll be honest with you, he's soft. Weak and soft. Because he's four. Because he's your son. No. You spend all your time reading books and looking at numbers and letters like they mean something. They do. Do you know how to read? I get by, all right? What do you know? You know, like... Red means stop. Great. Green means go. Good. Yellow's the other one. TBTL! Well, you have found my flabbergast button, and guess what? You've pressed it.

Do you eat chocolate? Yes. Do you drink soda? Yes. Do you eat fatty foods?

Yes. And a lot of people ask me, are you eating cookies late at night? And I say, of course I am.

What we are dealing with here is a perfect engine, an eating machine.

It's really a miracle of evolution.

That must be weird for you, huh? Kimmel's now the new king of late night, and you're still doing a pod cart?

They say, you snooze, you lose. Well, we snozzed. And look what we lost.

All right, hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Wednesday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live.

We're getting medium play on three independent radio stations in Central Europe.

My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. You know, you gotta eat that microphone. Coming to you from the Nest Broadcast Center, high in the sky, Above Portland, Oregon, where, let's do a quick temperature check. I was going on and on yesterday about how much better it was here. Of course, the heat dome seems to be evaporating, maybe. And then I went outside after the show. It was still 95 degrees. It was hot. Today, though, as of right now, it is a mere 68 degrees, looking at a high of 84. A beautiful day here in the Rose City. And a beautiful show in store for you. Episode 3456. In a collector's series, I believe I had the number off yesterday. That's what I get for skipping out on the show on Monday. Threw off my entire numeric system. But we are back on track, my friends. And we are ready to go with this episode of TBTL.

Let the fun begin.

The Minnesota Fair is rolling out some new foods. Welcome to Food News Today. And we are going to go through those and tell you what you can expect this year if you do visit the fair. Also, the Sopranos prequel movie, The Many Saints of Newark, New Jersey.

Hey, where's the freaking gabagoo?

Is on the way, and I have watched the trailer, and I have thoughts, my friends. Also, I decided to go out on a limb yesterday and say that I was very excited that the mask policy ends today in the state of Oregon and that I am going to be able to go out maskless as of today. That wasn't really a limb. That wasn't the limb I was out on, I should say. The limb I was out on was saying that I tend to feel a little performative when wearing a mask. And I think I said something like there seems to be no scientific evidence that it's that it matters if you are vaccinated, that it matters that you wear a mask or don't wear a mask. And then, of course, today, a big story in The New York Times. You've got to be kidding me about how we should possibly go back to wearing masks because of the Delta variant. So we'll get into that. Also, I've been eyeing a pebble ice maker online. girl don't do it it's not worth it and i've been going around and around with it i kept moving it

in and out of my shopping cart i'm not gonna do it girl i was just thinking about it i'm not gonna

do it and then of course in a in a fit of consumerism i um went ahead i did it bought this pebble ice machine i have now been using it since yesterday afternoon i can give you a full review of the ge opal pebble ice maker both the pros and cons one of the cons it's terrifying so we'll get into that we'll do all that with the help of this guy the longest running cobra of the show may be best known for his depictions of the tall ships he wants to be very clear about something right here at the top of the show i am all man not machine he's andrew walsh and he's joining me right now from the roosevelt neighborhood of seattle washington good morning my friend good

morning of all the terrible things that i said on the show yesterday that could have been cut out and played to introduce me today that's a pretty good one i feel i feel comfortable with that i

like to give you a break some days there was a lot of i had a lot of scatological stuff that i

could have used i know i'm remembering one very specific that i said during the show that i thought for sure i'd be hearing today and i'm just very pleased it's really turning out to be a good morning for me i woke up the the temperatures are just nice

It feels nice and cool. It feels like life is returning to normal a little bit. And it's just nice to, you know, not be scorched with my own scatological words coming back at me in my ears.

Yeah, again, I don't That kind of stuff is fun But it's, you know, it's fun in small doses If I use it, if I deploy it all the time You're going to start to get In a sort of Pavlovian way You're going to instinctively sort of like Duck As I introduce you each day You're going to like kind of, you know Like in the Bruce Springsteen song Like a dog that's been beat too much Which is a, for a guy who says Feed a fed horse and feed two birds with one scone. I don't know why I'm quoting a line from Springsteen that involves animal abuse. But basically, I don't want to create an instinctive, a reflexive kind of like flinch from you when I welcome you to the show because I want this to be something you look forward to.

Can I actually, speaking of the feeding two birds with one scone, I just, like moments ago, got an email from listener Eric, formerly of Culver City, now road tripping around the country, according to his email, with just a few random thoughts on the show recently. And one of them is, don't you think the phrase should be thrilling two birds with one scone? Not only is it a better rhyme to the original, but it's more joyful and does a better job of centering the bird's experience.

It really does cause you to think of the birds as having distinct personalities. Like, Janice, get over here. You are not going to believe what's happening.

This scone. I don't know what this is, but this pastry is thrilling me right now.

You must have some. Yeah, this is a thrilling event in our life, my friends. This is like not something that happens.

This is special. This is special.

Thrilling two birds with one scone. All right, I'll try to remember to do that. Yeah, me too. Eric, thank you for the tip. I say this often when the topic comes up of these replacement phrases that PETA suggested that I read on the show, I guess sort of half as a joke, but they have fully taken root now in my personal lexicon. And I would argue that a lot of people now who listen to the show are saying feed a fed horse instead of beat a dead horse and feed two birds with one scone or thrill two birds with one scone.

Yeah, I'm also thinking, well, no, I would assume that birds don't like drones because we could have to we could have, you know, feed two birds with one scone. But we could also have thrill two birds with one drone where maybe like you're sending a drone up there to say hello to the birds and give them a thrill. But that starts to sound like you're harassing them a little bit. And I think that works against what we're trying to do here.

I wonder what birds make of a drone. I mean, we are now increasingly living in a world where there are a lot of drones up in the sky. And birds must see them. And what do they think? I bet you they don't like them. I'll tell you that much. I can't imagine that they're like, oh, this seems good. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I wonder when we're actually going to run into that being an issue in terms of just like air traffic and airspace. And also, I wonder if it's one of those things like jetpacks that is never going to be fully realized. I will tell you this. as of right now the drone technology that carries people the sort of personal flight technology is so loud it would make it so that i was not interested in flying over the city if i had to listen to the noise that has to be created in order to lift a human being of my weight and fly me around i see a lot of videos on tiktok of of people on these you know kind of drone platforms that you can stand on and fly around and it it does not seem fun or relaxing it seems very stressful very loud like what's the battery life on this thing basically we're not there yet yeah

yeah i do think though of the technologies of the futuristic technologies i do feel like the drone one is the one that has kind of advanced i mean i guess putting aside our communication technologies and internet technologies i mean it has advanced the furthest you know what i mean as opposed i I guess you're saying the jetpack angle of it has not. But the drone technology itself has come a really long way. And our reliance on drones in various industries, I think, is just pretty phenomenal.

Right. I'm reminded of, certainly in making television, drones really help out. I'm reminded of the time when I was doing a story about that boat race in Port Townsend. And this would have been, I guess, just before drone technology, at least before we started using it at CBS. In fact, it's now in every piece. I had this story air over the weekend about farm workers in Oregon. And the best shots in the whole piece are all drone shots. Yeah. Of the farm and of this, like, mesmerizing shot.

like a million onions in sort of an onion storage a climate controlled storage shed and the drone is just kind of going up this mountain of onions it's actually pretty mesmerizing but i'm reminded of when we had to use a helicopter to try to get a shot and our camera guy henry whose whose english could only be described as limited and the helicopter pilot whose english could be described as non-existent and they didn't speak the same language the helicopter pilot was originally from japan henry's originally from gibraltar so there wasn't really a lingua franca for them and so through hand signals and other things they ended up flying so low that they were below the line like the masts of a number of these sailboats that were in this race and of course the police were called on the helicopter which created the amazing scene of a police car driving back and forth on the shore with its lights on, flashing, trying to pull over a helicopter that was hovering over the water.

The fact that that was even attempted with a helicopter that recently seems so antiquated to me. Don't you feel the same way?

Well, I don't know if you've seen CBS Sunday Morning.

Right, yes.

We rely on the old hits for as long as we possibly can. I know it's surprising. I wonder if it was... Well, also, it depends on the camera person. like uh the the cameraman that named paul who's actually based out of portland here who we used for that farm shoot and who we use on a lot of these things now in this part of the country he's super adept with a drone and so i don't know maybe henry is henry's a cbs staff guy i don't know why i'm getting into the specifics of people's job status with cbs but uh i don't i don't see the staff guys really running a lot of drones it's not really their deal but then the freelancers are all really into the technology and into the drones, I guess, is what it comes down to? Oh, I was

confused. I thought you were saying that this staff guy, I already forgot his name. You just said it a moment ago. I thought you were saying that he... Henry. Henry, he is a... I thought you said he is a drone guy. He's not much of a drone guy.

I think, no. I mean, what it is, this probably happens in a lot of industries. You've got the staff folks who are, I think, kind of... Think about it like in the NPR context and like the longest tenured audio engineers who kind of have their way of doing things and like to you know probably stick with some analog technologies and approaches because it's what they've done for years and then you've got some new you know maybe younger person who comes in or somebody who's who you rent a studio from they're freelancing and they've got all this whiz bang technology it's kind of that sort of thing like the folks uh who have been doing the camera work for cbs television for years and years they just kind of have their way of doing it they tend to be very methodical about it and they're not into all kinds of new they're not

like on the bleeding edge of the technology. Right, right, right. No, that makes a lot of sense. And now I'm sort of worried about Henry's self-evaluation. Has he filled that out yet? Is he thriving? Oh, believe you me.

Henry is thriving. Okay, good. He is like, he is this like very debonair. I didn't even know that Gibraltar was a country. I think it's adjacent to Spain. It may be one of those things where it actually is Spain, But people from Gibraltar are sort of very – they find – they want to represent for Gibraltar. And so if you ask him where he's from, he'll say Gibraltar. But he's – live in La Vida Loca, man. He's got this amazing place there like on the – like right on the straight of Gibraltar. Oh, wow. And he goes back and forth between his New York place and his Gibraltar place. And he's a silver fox. Everything is coming up, Henry. Okay, good. So don't you worry about him. Although, like me, he does not do his self-evaluations. And he's also getting away with it. So, hey, speaking of the bleeding edge of technology, let me tell you about this ice maker that I got, Andrew. I have been talking on the show for a long time about good ice or pebble ice, I tend to call it. It's that kind of softer ice that I think like Sonic has it. Definitely Taco Time in the state of Washington. The Taco Times have it.

Although, do you know that supposedly, I don't know if this is true or not. If you don't mind me interrupting for one second, because I know you love that Taco Time ice. A listener emailed in, like, several weeks ago, and I meant to get another source on this, but supposedly there's a rumor that Taco Time is going to change its ice, and there are petitions going around to stop this change. Have you caught wind of this? I haven't, but I would be shocked if they did that.

I would be absolutely shocked. I mean, along with their ranch dressing, which is not ranch dressing. It's some just odd thing that they make that's mostly sour cream. By the way, I'm already getting excited for this weekend. to come visit with you and Camaro Kev and the whole crew. We're going to do some 4th of July celebrating, but I'm going to start the celebration early when I stop off in Kelso, Washington, Andrew, and hit the first proper taco time on my route to Seattle. But, um...

The ice is, like, up there as far as the things that are the difference maker of this particular place. So I would be – that seems like something that somebody, you know, started as an online rumor just to kind of, like, troll people and get some attention. There would be – I can't see any upside to that company abandoning their much-loved ice.

And a very, very quick – Google here would seem to support what you're saying. I'm not even catching a whiff of anything like this. So my apologies for interrupting you. I think we know the type of ice you're talking about, and I think we know your fascination with it.

It's just that it's softer. It's small pellets of ice, and it is softer so you can chew it. And it just makes any, like, and I know, Andrew, you actually spend a lot of time thinking about ice yourself. You've got your good ice cubes, and you've got your everyday ice cubes. Take me through, briefly, take me through the system there at Walsh Walsh and Dormat.

This is so funny. We just talked about this on Monday's show, too, because ice has played a big role in this heat wave we just had because the grocery stores were all out of ice yesterday, Luke. Nature is healing. I was able to go to the store and buy two bags of ice and a six-pack of beer and some White Claws, fill up our outside cooler again, and cool it all down with the two bags of ice. It felt like a return to normalcy that I think we all needed. Somehow, most of the White Claw is gone already. Nobody can figure out where it went. We're going to catch these guys. Anyway, yeah, so my routine is, you're right, I used to have like kind of just like a janky old ice tray in my fridge. Actually, two of them that made the kind of big, ugly, squarish ice cubes that are not really worth mentioning. And then I started to get these silicone ice trays that you fill them up and you cap them off. And they make about 14 per tray little round ice cubes, which I know are not cubes, about the size of a shooter marble, as Genevieve mentioned the other day, because she's from the 1916s. I got an Aggie with your name on it. And so anyway, we're just re-hitting all the jokes that we made on Monday. Anyway, so yeah, I realize I really love these round ice cubes, and I love puttering, and these things are the most inefficient ice cubes. you can possibly imagine. I have four of these silicone ones now. I've gotten rid of, for the most part, the ones that make the ugly ice cubes. We're basically only using guest ice in this house now, except for when the heat wave hit. You put out the good ice. Yeah, I started making some of the bad ice again when the heat wave hit because I just wanted as much ice as possible. But yeah, so I have four of these silicone ice trays, and I'll tell you what, this is the detail that I think I haven't really explained to people is I have to take a beach towel, like a really thick beach towel and lay it down on the counter every night when i'm filling these things up because what you do is you fill up the bottom of it and then you put the cap on it and and the cap which is like you know the top of the round ice cube has little holes at the top for so the ice can expand um and you have to kind of let it overflow so when you're pushing the the cap down on this ice tray water will pop up through these little holes on each ice cube and kind of flood the counter. But you need to do it that way because if you underfill it, then you don't have round ice cubes. You have half moon ice cubes like from a Star Wars movie. Does that make sense? Can you picture that? Totally. Okay, cool. You have to get full. You have to fill up the little round pocket, as it were. Exactly, and by definition, it's going to overflow on you. So every night, usually I do these two processes where I grind coffee beans and prepare coffee for the next morning And I make my round ice cubes and try to get a good accumulation of them because we're using a lot of ice this summer. And I'll tell you what, Luke, I mean, let's get back to your storyline because I'm pretty jealous right now.

I've had my eye on some standalone ice machines for some time now. Vives and I have litigated this on various podcasts before why I'm not allowed to have a standalone ice maker. The reasoning is fair. We don't have a lot of counter space for unit. Nor do I, by the way, which I a couple of things.

When this thing showed up I actually got a text from the front desk Of the apartment building while I was in Napa And they said you have an oversized box here Sir Oversized package and we put it under the table In the mail room because it was too big to go In any of the lockers Uh oh So that should have been a tip This thing is humongous Uh oh I don't like that It's the GE Opel Ice Maker Yes it is so much larger Than you would think looking at the video or or looking at online i mean i'm sure the dimensions are listed but i'm you know i'm not a guy who submits his thrive report and i'm not a guy who looks at the dimensions of things i guess i thought it'd be about the size of a coffee maker yeah that's kind of what i was hoping it is not it is really big it has now disappointed replaced it's also very heavy came in a weird box the box had wood built it was a cardboard box with wood built into the bottom and top of it wow because it's a fairly delicate piece of machinery if you think about it i mean this is i just don't i just never anticipate things in their real sort of realistic way like it didn't even occur to me yeah making ice is it's something that refrigerates water very quickly i think you can make like a pound of ice an hour or something oh god something The thing that refrigerates water very quickly is going to need, you know, there's some machinery involved, and so it's delicate, it's also very heavy, and it's very big.

Yeah, I'm looking at photos, and you can see, you know, they have photos of people scooping ice out of it, and yeah, this thing is pretty big because you can compare it to people's hands. I also see that it does make three different styles of ice, your pebbled ice being one of them, but also it looks like a kind of a ring ice, if people can picture that, the kind of ice that has a hole in the middle. Did you know that, Luke, you can make three different kinds? I did not.

How do you know more about this ice maker than I do?

Well, I've, you know, applying a critical eye.

I haven't fully explored all of the, I guess, all of the possibilities. with the thing. What I can tell you, though, is that it was one of the more complicated things I've ever set up in my life. When you get it out of the box and you hoist it at the risk of herniating yourself, when you hoist it up onto the counter and you get it all set up, then you have to basically run a cleaning cycle on it a whole bunch to clean out all the inner workings of it before you start using it to make ice. And then when I went online, it turns out that they sell a special cleaning solution for it. And there's all these videos on YouTube about how to clean your machine there are people like you andrew who i think enjoy puttering more than i do and they like do this every week which seems excessive to me um there's like drain hoses in the back it was like a whole thing just it took me most of the afternoon to get this thing

up and running yeah i will say can i just mention here because i i'm looking now comparing this one to the ones that i had my eye on i had my eye on this and i think it was listener lauren in florida who hit me to this thing and we've gone back and forth about it several times over the years They also make a much smaller, cute little igloo ice maker that is probably like maybe like a third of the size of this thing. So, yeah, I don't think, honestly, looking at the size of this, and I'm excited for you to have this. And if I had tons more space, maybe I'd be tempted by this. But, yeah, this is too big for my practical use, I would say.

It's like owning a boat, Andrew. You don't want to own the ice maker. You want a friend who owns the ice maker. I'm bringing it up to the 4th of July. Oh, yes. Please do. That's one of the things they tell you in the instructional video. This is not meant for outdoor use. Oh, yeah. I guess because people would put it outside and, you know, roast it in the sun or whatever. Probably couldn't keep up with it. That's the other thing. Is it thermodynamics? I feel like I've been throwing around the term thermodynamics a lot the last few days, and I don't even know if I'm using it correctly. When you talk about this idea of, like, if you're going to generate cool air, you're also going to generate hot air. Like, that's how it works, basically. in order to make the air cool you've got to remove heat that heat's got to go somewhere like the way

if you pull your refrigerator away from the wall during an especially hot day you might feel it's

working over time and throwing off more heat i'm just wondering if thermodynamics is the term for that kind of thing the branch of the physical sciences that deals with the relations between heat and other forms of energy okay i think it's i think i can get away with calling this thermodynamics the thermodynamics of this thing are interesting Andrew it is it is a heater like I had it underneath this it's under this shelf where I had some bottles of wine and stuff and once I got it working I realized it was going to heat all like this wine up and stuff because in order to make this ice it has to you know it has to generate a lot of heat to do that cooling work and so that's another thing I hadn't thought of is like it actually in the summertime it's It's going to make the kitchen area, I guess, a bit warmer.

It's also going to ruin your wine. Did you move the wine or did you move the ice machine?

I moved the wine because the ice machine was huge and it can only go in one place on the counter. I will tell you this, though, Andrew. After all the complaining, I have consumed more ice in the last 18 hours or however long I've had this thing. I have consumed more ice. Watching the baseball game last night, which was a very frustrating experience, As you could tell, based on my angry texts I was sending the criminals, it was just get up from the couch every time the Mariners relievers gave up a three-run home run, walk to the ice machine, get that little scoop, scoop some more ice into my glass, fill it with either water or Coke Zero, depending on how I was feeling in that moment, and then consume the liquid and chew on the ice. And I have to say, it was absolutely wonderful, except for the fact that I'm not used to this. sound of ice being made yeah because my refrigerator here yes i wrote on twitter uh refrigerator ice makers need to come with a non-terrifying setting because i guess you get used to it but like i the refrigerator i have in this apartment doesn't make ice in fact it's very small which is part of why i justified doing this with the ice maker because the freezer itself is like the size of like a camping like an rv freezer or something it's it's it's tiny so it's not great for making ice anyway there's just not a lot of space um but uh yeah so i'm sitting there and there's about every 10 minutes there's just this like noise that i'm not used to when it decides to like dump a new you know bunch of ice into the little uh whatever you call it bucket there uh hopefully i will eventually get used to it but for now it's like it freaks me out every single

time it happens but does it freak you out for a second and then does it give you a sense of

pleasure knowing that you have an ice machine yes that's exactly the that's exactly the the

phenomenon that i've experienced on the occasion we growing up i mean not to brag but growing up in valley city ohio we did have a fancy freezer with an ice maker in it now it wasn't the kind this was the 80s still and i guess going into the early 90s we did not have the kind of ice maker in a refrigerator where you could access it without opening the door you know we didn't have the little spout on the outside of the refrigerator door inside you'd still have to open up the freezer, grab the ice, which were like they were like kind of I said half moon shapes before when I was talking about spheres, but in this case these ice cubes were the ones that were like kind of Cheshire half moon shapes, if you can picture it. Do you know those old school ice maker things? I do. Because I was out of words. If that didn't, if you didn't know what I was talking about with that, I did not know how I was going to describe this shape. Roughly the shape of like

a lemon wedge. Yeah, okay

next time this comes up, if I'm ever on password And I have to describe That would be my game show right Like Password Ice You know what we would kill it at

The newlywed game Yeah I think so You and I as a couple I feel like I mean obviously Genevieve knows you very well But I would say that just based on us doing this together For this long I think we would really If that ever comes back Would you consider marrying me Would you consider making me the happiest podcast co-host on earth And going and trying to win that thing because I feel like we could do it.

Maybe. What's your track record with marriages? Before I get into this, I feel like we should talk about that. Sorry. Strong to medium strong? All right. I'm going to back away from that because you can make those jokes. I feel uncomfortable making them. Yet, somehow I couldn't stop myself in that instance. So anyway, yeah, growing up we had one of those ice makers. And so I think my point is that gives me kind of a comforting feeling, I'm hearing the sound of the ice tumbling after a batch is done. Call me to tumble in ice. And, like, sometimes I'll be at somebody's house maybe, somebody who's got a nicer house than me, and for some reason I'm just picturing me playing a board game with friends and then you hear the ice in the freezer kind of, you know, shoot out another batch. I find it very comforting.

I totally hear that. I mean, we didn't grow up with that kind of refrigerator, but I know what you mean. I'd be at some rich kid's house, and it'd be like they had good snacks, probably cable tv and you just hear yeah the comforting uh whatever you call it sound of the ice maker doing its thing in that kitchen yeah that was a that's a fun like childhood memory so um well i look forward to having you in veeves over and um having you sample my very very expensive ice that's the other thing i gotta figure out how much of this ice i have to consume for this to

actually pay for itself well one thing you could do is when you're coming up for our gathering this weekend you could you don't have to bring the ice machine but you could just start filling up coolers right now get yourself some good coolers this is how obsessed i am by the way here's a here's a thought that just popped in my head the other day and genevieve weirdly almost broke up with me over it because we talk about my obsession with ice which really is like i told you i was at the eagles on monday and um we're trying to because there were some friends we're trying to get some work done because it's the only place with air conditioning and um i saw mike the bartender walk by out of the kitchen to the area behind the bar carrying one of those huge bar buckets full of ice and I don't know exactly what I said but my eyes lit up and I said something like oh my god look at all that ice and my friend Anita looked at me and just said you really have an obsession like I wasn't I wasn't putting it on I was just suddenly like I just saw ice I knew I couldn't get ice I've been obsessed with ice and the other day um I was looking at the cooler that we have out on our porch that I keep iced down as much as possible during the summer. And I told Vives, you know what, we should probably look at getting a better cooler. I'll bet you cooler technology has come a long way. This is just a typical, you know, this is just a typical blue and white plastic cooler that we probably got, I don't know, five to 10 years ago. There's nothing wrong with it. I just had this thought that, well, cooler technology.

probably come a long way in that time and we should invest in a better cooler and genevieve said you don't even know that that's a fact like there's nothing indicating oh it's a fact yeah it's got to be a fact right people are always improving things like coolers yeah yeti that's

like a billion dollar company at this point like that is uh yeah the cooler technology is is is you could conceivably like put some ice like these these some of these new coolers you could put some ice in there and they could be good all summer see like that's what i'm saying this weekend so

you've already made an investment in this ice maker just throw a little bit more good money after good and um that's my plan for the casino yes and uh and buy some of these yeti coolers start filling them up right now we have like two or three days and then you can just come up here to seattle just being our ice king or have we used ice ice maybe as a show title i I almost think we've used it twice. Or no, you know what? I think it was a spotless.

Okay. Well, I'm saying just consider it. Or I can also just drive by the Taco Time in Kelso and say, please, sir, can we have more? And just have them give me 10 pounds of that good pebble ice. Okay. We should take a break. We've talked about ice, I think probably sufficient for the rest of this show's existence. I'm just getting started. Would you say this is the tip of the iceberg?

That I would. How about the tip of the ice blurg? Okay, there we go. Yeah, I just looked it up. Did we get that? We did have a show called Ice Ice maybe on Spotless, so I don't want to be phantom mad.

Tip of the ice blurg.

I like that a lot, yeah.

Okay, quick break and then back with more TVTL in just a moment. Hello and welcome to Top Story. Our top story today, the Minnesota State Fair has released its list of some of the new foods that it's going to feature this summer. I know that – I think it was listener Chad in Minnesota sent this to us, but you'd also been tracking this, Andrew.

Well, this is – can I – go ahead. Go ahead. No, please. Give the context. Well, I'd like to start with the absolute most boring and tedious part of this, and I want your opinion on something. And maybe I'm just doing it wrong, but it's about paywalls, Luke, because I'm confused about something. A few days ago, listener Nick, newly of Minnesota, sent me an article he wanted me to read that was in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. It's the Minneapolis Star Tribune, right? It's not the Twin Cities Star Tribune. Nope. Okay. And it seemed like it was behind a paywall and I couldn't read it. Then I realized, oh, it's not a paywall. It just says I can read this article if I sign up for their newsletter. Well, hey, listen, I'm in the newsletter game. I know how it goes, bro. So I'm like, sure, I'll sign up for the newsletter and maybe once a day get a digest of news coming out of the Twin Cities. That actually interests me. So I sign up for the newsletter, and then I have access to this article. It's not the article we're talking about now. It's actually something about garbage collection, which was also interesting, but we don't have to get into right now. And then the next day, I got my first digest. I got my first newsletter from the Star Tribune. Yay. I click on the first link, and it's this story that we're going to talk about right now. No problem. I'm in. The quarterback is toast. Now, today, I go back to that article, and I can't read it anymore. Now, thanks to Chad for sending in another version of this from NPR News, which I can read. But is it weird that the Star Tribune said, hey, want to read this article? Just sign up for our newsletter. Then I signed up for the newsletter, and I was only allowed to read, I guess, two articles all told. The first one I wanted to read and then the first one in the newsletter, and now I'm just locked out forever again?

Yeah, I guess it was too good to be true. Because you literally told me about this yesterday. This is how excited you were about this newsletter situation, that that was going to be sufficient to give you access to this publication. But it sounds like what you got was a couple of free reads. I guess so. Lookin' is free, but touchin' will cost you. Yeah.

Now, am I going to continue to get a digest of links to articles that I can't read? I don't know. Anyway, I just wanted to get that off my chest. Go on.

Okay, so this article is in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

That's where it was. Can't get that one.

So now this one's mprnews.org. Okay, hopefully it's the same information because I have actually not looked at either of these articles. I wanted to leave this one to you. I wanted you to lay it on me. What are the new foods at the Minnesota State Fair? I'm also a little – I'm pleasantly surprised, although maybe less so once we get to story number three about the masks. and the fact that we may need to go back to masking. I'm pleasantly surprised to hear that the Minnesota State Fair is actually happening.

Yeah, and I'm not sure. I assume that there might be some different, I don't know, rules around it or restrictions, but the articles I read didn't get into that, but yeah.

Yeah, the what do they call it? The great get together. No, that's not what they call it. Something like that is returning. Let's see here. It is returning this summer and they have 27 new food items that they're unveiling. Now, this is interesting. By the way, you were right. It's the great Minnesota get together. OK, it is the great Minnesota get together. OK, yeah. Give yourself some credit, bro. So what I'm looking at here is Luke and I'm trying to take in information while I'm talking, which is bad news but apparently it looks like it's a much shorter event officials announced earlier this month that the 12-day event will return on august 26th and run through labor day isn't the minnesota state fair usually longer than 12 days boy you're asking the wrong person who once did a radio show from there yeah yeah i will say this is making me jealous my guess would be yes i was actually telling veves i was thinking because you know i did a um another little project recently with our friend brandy brown who we met at the minnesota state fair and she did the show with us and i'm a huge fan of hers and then that around that same time i was getting notes from the stew bot about related things um and i i was actually and i still am contemplating maybe taking a quick non-work related trip to minnesota just to bounce into the fair and uh and see our buds i'm actually thinking about doing that that is the draw of the minnesota state fair wow wow and anyway so what they did was they announced that they have 27 new foods this is a very typical thing of course the fair foods are always over the top weird combinations of foods brought together fusiony things um you know kind of reminds me of the beginning of baseball season i feel like stadiums always release hey we have a bunch of new food items they try to get some press about it but the state fair is even you know these types of foods are even more over the top which is this will be interesting luke because you and i are not really over the top food guys right when we were at the fair i think i had i don't know i think as exotic as i went was a was maybe a sausage on a stick and i eat sausage all the time it's just the fact it was on a stick was what was exotic about it like you don't really go in for over the top like kind of um novelty foods right

not really and some of that's attributable to the my dietary preferences now because a lot of fair food is pretty meat forward but yeah also just kind of like uh the world's you know largest uh elephant ear or something like it's just not usually the stuff that i go i mean i'll have a bite of it and certainly it's all delicious but it's not yeah i'm not like obsessed with fair food and and and almost like you said stunt food yeah well these are kind of stunt foods let me

share some of these with you uh how about and a lot of these are meat-based luke so i know that you're not going to be interested in in actually eating them they have something called bison bites That they're introducing this year A Northwoods spin on ravioli With ground bison, braised fennel Portobello mushrooms and fresh basil Wrapped in classic egg dough And deep fried

Hmm The portobello mushroom part of that Doesn't sound very appealing to me Bison, I don't know if I've ever had bison Is it gamey? Is it gamier than Regular cow meat?

I feel like it probably is and potentially Yeah, probably Maybe even a little bit leaner You know, have we talked about this before, Luke? You don't like mushrooms. You've never liked mushrooms. I feel like for a while, I may be way out of the loop on this, but I feel like mushrooms are kind of a vegetarian's best friend in some ways, right? Have we talked about this on the show and I just don't remember? Is this a major complaint of yours? Because I feel like you must go to a place and there's some vegetarian options and so many of them must be mushroom based.

It literally just happened to me in – it wasn't Napa. It was somewhere else I was where really the only decent vegetarian offering on the menu was a big portobello mushroom or something. So, yeah, it's not the greatest strategy to both not like mushrooms and also not eat meat because it is often used as – in fact, even one of the fake burgers, I think it's the Beyond Burger, is I guess technically mushroom-based. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like that might be the thing. And it doesn't taste like overly like mushrooms. I think they just use it as like, you know, something that they grind up and then kind of reflavor. But I feel like I can taste when someone told me that now I feel like I can kind of taste it. So that's why I try to go towards impossible stuff if possible. But anyway, yeah, not a fan of mushrooms. And so these bison bites are really kind of over three on for me.

Yeah, I would think so. You're not going to be into this either. This is a waffle burger. It's your general quarter pound bacon cheeseburger served between two maple infused candied sweet crunch waffles with a side of maple syrup. I would try that. That's the perfect example. I mean, minus the cheese for me. That's the type of thing where I'd have a bite of it. It doesn't sound bad. It sounds interesting, but I probably wouldn't be like craving it. Although Luke, this does remind me a little bit when we were doing our special hot dog.

show and we had that over-the-top hot dog that was served with um it was served with syrup no no yeah peanut butter and syrup right and i think bacon maybe do you remember that thing yeah why did we do that who did francis lamb tell us to do that no this was one that we got outside the ballpark it was that guy oh yeah that guy that like makes all like seattle dogs or something right exactly and i he's come up in other conversations he's kind of i guess well known in the people who like hot dogs outside the stadium. But, you know, I went back to the stadium later that season and actually got one of those again after it was so delicious. Like, I would never think I'd be the type of guy to get a hot dog with peanut butter and syrup on it. It does not scan with me at all. But that taste we had of that thing stuck with me. I did go back for a second. So maybe I'd be into this waffle burger.

I am just generally not that into sweet things and savory things at the same time, which I know is, like, very on trend, like, and has been for a long time, this idea of sweet and savory being pretty close together. But, like, for instance, Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles in L.A., the famous place, I love that place. But what I would do when I would go there is I would eat a piece of chicken, which was delicious. I would eat the grits, which were delicious. And then I would have a waffle to close it out. I wouldn't like put syrup on the chicken and have it dribble down onto the waffle. Like the idea, whatever that McDonald's breakfast sandwich is where you're holding two pancakes apparently, that's also even in my meeting days, not really for me. Like I don't – burgers are delicious. I don't want to be eating a burger that's inside of a waffle.

You know, usually it's funny because I would say I agree with you. I don't like mixing sweet and savory either. Like I dislike chocolate-covered pretzels. I think that's what about the sexual and the sacred I enjoy the music of Hozier I think it does ruin chocolate and I think it ruins pretzels like give me one or the other however both of those examples that you just gave I realized no I'm actually on the other side of those because I think unless you're talking about something else you might be describing the the McGriddle at McDonald's yes isn't a pancake but it's just like a their usual biscuit but it's like maple syrup infused and I actually do like that and I love I don't remember exactly how I manage things on my plate at roscoe's but roscoe's is just a treat it's got to be my top five food experiences so all right let me move on here because i think there might be something here this one might not have meat although i'm not sure that you're into it how about the spuffle puff that's all that's the house that's the house i think that i got when we did that potter quiz mashed sweet potatoes blended with sweetened cream cheese then wrapped in dough and fried no sweet potatoes for old

I don't like I don't like sweet potatoes and I don't like what sweet. No sweet cream cheese.

Yeah. I'm not going in for anything that is no thank cream cheese either. They have sashimi taco tuna tacos. That sounds good. Oh, here's one. Oh, yeah. This is kind of something that we've discussed on the show before. This is called the pizza Lucy. Of course, like a juicy Lucy kind of juicy Lucy. And that is a Midwestern thing, right? Is that a Minnesota original?

I think it's pretty Minnesota-focused. At least that might be where it started, the Juicy Lucy, where you get basically a ball of cheese inside the patty of your burger. And then they cook it, and then the cheese melts, and then you have a whole delicious thing going.

See, now this looks like instead of having cheese in the middle, this is turning it on its head where it's actually the meat patty is in the middle of this thing. Now, this is a sausage patty that is topped with pizza sauce, pepperoni, and mozzarella cheese, then stuffed in a homemade green mill pizza dough pocket and topped with Italian seasonings. Is that called a calzone? Well, it's not. I mean, but it's a full patty in there inside. So I think you would eat it almost like it's probably like a finger food sort of, and you'd bite into it, and there's like a hamburger patty, only it's made of sausage. This looks good to me. This is the thing that I would probably gravitate towards the most, I think.

I've had one Juicy Lucy in my life. I was so excited about it. I was staying with our former boss, El Ropo, Steve Nelson. And he lived down the street from that place, The Nook, that we have now frequented many times with the Ran Ham bowling alley underneath it. And he said, you've got to try a Juicy Lucy. And I went up there, and I was all excited about it because I like cheese. And at that time, I ate burgers. The thing is, I don't like burgers to be rare. And what happened to mine And what I think is typical is If you have this cheese cooking in the middle It's actually keeping the core temperature of the burger patty Kind of low So I ended up with a very rare burger I see, yeah And I was not into that

Yeah, yeah I'm clicking through here Oh, here's another weird one And then maybe we can wrap it up here Buffalo chicken Dosekit I don't know.

Now, let me explain this word to you, this portmanteau. It seems to be the word dough, D-O-U-G-H, then skit, like the back half of a biscuit, S-C-U-I-T. It's not hyphenated. It's a buffalo chicken dough skit, I think. Fluffy biscuit-style donuts stuffed with shredded chicken, glazed with sweet and spicy buffalo icing, topped with bacon bits. Find it at the Blue Barn.

or don't so it's like a donut so it's like see i don't know if i need i love by the way the taste of buffalo sauce uh-huh um like frank's red hot or whatever you know that stuff is great i mean i love eating it i am reminded that i ate it the next day if you know what i mean it's definitely um something that you experience twice um but i do really like that flavor and actually as a person doesn't eat meat it's great because there's a whole trend of putting that on like cauliflower like you know they'll like deep fry cauliflower and and soak it in that stuff and honestly it's like delicious it's it's as good as any like buffalo chicken type of deal to me i believe it so i like that but i don't want it to be sweet no thank you yeah did you hear on the

baseball game last night did you watch it on tv or listen on the radio or engage with it at all here's how much i engage with it i got done recording a podcast with genevieve and i saw that we were in I think maybe the fifth or sixth inning and it was a tied game I think that Mariners had just tied it three to three I'm like I'm gonna get into this and then immediately Toronto just got a three-run homer and I saw it was six to three and I had a bunch of podcasts to catch up on and I said you're not doing this to me today Mariners I'm listening to my podcast I'm sticking with my original plan I'm not gonna get sucked into this because I know you're not coming back from this and i hate toronto sorry toronto uh sorry bill and others in toronto i don't hate

the city of toronto i really hate the blue jays well uh i uh because i was you know standing by the ice machine and looking for something to do i watched most of that game and i watched on tv it was funny because the announcers so some of them had been to the anchor bar because they're playing i i'm assuming that the blue jays are playing in buffalo this season because they can't play in canada because of probably stricter rules around covid yes and so um they had been to the anchor bar in buffalo which is literally the home of buffalo wings it's where they got started and i think it was mike blowers was asking aaron uh goldsmith what he thought of the wings and you could tell that aaron goldsmith hated the buffalo wings because he didn't want to be mean to this place but he was like it's like it was like what did you think of the wings and he was like you know they were wings like you can tell that Goldsmith likes him probably likes him a good B-dubs and and much like when I was there and I wanted to watch the Mariner game and I went to the anchor bar and they said you should go to B-dubs at the mall because they have all the baseball games really they sent you there

that's funny this is amazing though remember old Eric formerly of Culver City who had a few random thoughts about the show thought number two luke was wondering whether any restaurant has influenced american food tastes as much as the anchor bar did with buffalo wings the thing that immediately came to my mind was starbucks and the american obsession with espresso drinks still though the anchor bar the anchor bar did it from just a single location so they clearly win uh thank you eric for

seeing the eminent wisdom of my ways have you seen that commercial for b i was almost going to text you last night for this is good after these messages content potentially it's clear that buffalo wild wings is trying to roast outback steakhouse no i haven't seen this they're showing somebody they're like ditch the um ditch the onion sculpture it's like somebody like cutting an elaborate like making an onion into a sort of like a presentation you know how you can carve vegetables into sort of shapes and things but it looks basically like a blooming onion at the end it's not deep fried but it's very evocative of the blooming onion and i think it's unmistakable That what they're trying to say is don't go to Outback Steakhouse Come to B-Dubs

That's interesting now that they're not also taking a shot At Actually speaking of El Ropo I feel like he was on the show Talking about this while back I've never been to this what's the Asian Chain that has kind of performative Serving with Benny Hanna yeah it's not a Benny Hanna

Thing at all I just don't see Benny Hanna As being the biggest competition To Buffalo Wild Wings Like I don't think that they really play in the same space I think that they were And again I could be misreading it too But my guess is that they're not going to expend a lot of energy Taking on Benihana Or Teppanyaki That style of presentation I believe is called Teppanyaki But Benihana is like the most popular well-known chain that does it Well Andrew If you do decide to make a personal trip to the Minnesota State Fair, I expect you to eat all of those foods that you just mentioned, even though some of them you don't like, and give us a full report. Okay, yeah, I promise to not do that. It's like that line from The Office where Dwight is telling Jim, I need you to be I need you to promise me you're going to be on your best behavior, and Jim said, well I promised some other people I'd be on my worst behavior. Which just comes up as a TikTok meme all the time, which I kind of love. Yeah The Many Saints of a Newark Trailer is out I'll play you a little bit of it Have you seen this yet Andrew?

No I haven't I think you mentioned this On the show a while back That a prequel to The Sopranos Is coming out But that's all I know

Yeah I don't know if this works as audio But it's set in Newark, New Jersey

Guys like me Were brought up to follow codes

Hey Jerk off

So it's Mike Tony Is played by his son Michael Gandolfini his actual so James Gandolfini who's of course passed Away his actual son Michael is playing a young Tony Soprano Getting his start in the world and I will say What this thing has going for it is That he does look remarkably like his Dad it's almost like it feels like They saw how much Michael Gandolfini looked like James a young James Gandolfini and they said can we make a whole movie Around this but it's like So the young Tony Soprano Is using a payphone and some guy calls him a jerk-off. What do you think is going to happen to the guy who called Tony Soprano a jerk-off, Andrew? He'll probably just walk away. Yeah, he'll probably de-escalate. What'd you say? What? No, Andrew, he beats him up.

Antonio Soprano.

I wonder if I can talk to you alone for a moment, Mr. Soprano. On the basis of the Sanford Benet, he's high IQ. You can't prove it by me. He's got a D plus average.

So they've got the actress. I always have a hard time saying her name. Venta D. Why would they not put this in the main graph of this article? Livia Soprano makes an appearance, and they're letting you know. That was Livia Soprano. Sorry, Vera Farmiga. Vera or Farmiga. however you say her name, she plays Livia Soprano. And basically, they're setting it up so that the principal at Tony's school is telling Livia that Tony is smart, but Livia is saying he's not. Uh-huh. Which is very Livia, right? I wonder if I'll ever have to talk about that in therapy. Exactly.

Well, he doesn't apply himself, but he is smart. The results tell us. He's a leader.

Ankle Dick Growing up with the family Takes a toll

That song by itself might be enough to make me not see the movie

Whatever this BS soundtrack is I feel like we've talked about this before I think the opening of The Sopranos is genius But I hate that song And I always did Like, I hate the song that opens the Sopranos, but I think it's the perfect song to open the Sopranos. I don't think that they made a mistake by using it. I feel like this is a song that he would like, you know, but I don't. So this – and this song reminds me very much of that. Oh, there it is. Yeah.

Got some gabagoo. And then I woke up the next day and got some gabagoo. Keep waking up and keep getting different types of gabagoo.

So the trailer, I guess, or the movie itself is about sort of Tony looking up to actually Christopher's father. So the story is that Dickie Moltisanti was sort of Tony's hero.

And I think he – I shouldn't even get into this. But, like, of course, he plays a semi-big role in The Sopranos, right? Isn't he the guy who gets out of prison at some point during The Sopranos, the TV show? Maybe. I don't remember that.

I don't remember Christopher's father actually being on the show at all.

Yeah, maybe you're right. I'm thinking of somebody else. Sorry.

The problem is, though, based on this trailer, which is just – like, I won't play anymore of it because that song is annoying and it's also hard to follow what's going on. But basically, the trailer makes it look like this film has none of the nuance and interesting parts of the television program The Sopranos. Like, what was interesting about The Sopranos was Tony.

in his backyard having panic attacks and seeing a bear wander through his backyard in New Jersey. Like, of course, I'm not even the one millionth person to point this out, but the things about The Sopranos that were always fascinating were the real-life just issues that everybody was dealing with set against this backdrop of organized crime or whatever and murder. This appears to be all just the murder, all the tough guy-ness. Like, it looks like a shitty version of Goodfellas.

I'm kind of watching it now with the sound off. It is, and I know you said this, it is hard to say whether or not this is a bad trailer for a good, whether this is a bad trailer for a good film or, you know, how representative it is. But, yeah, this doesn't seem compelling. Also, the fact that it's a film, not a, you know, not a TV show. I mean, that's where a lot of the nuance could happen in The Sopranos because it was drawn out. the storyline was drawn out exactly so much time not jam-packed into 90 minutes of you know beat

them up mobster stuff yeah and it's almost i mean i guess it wouldn't make sense well first of all you don't have tony but i was going to say so you can't really make a like a sopranos movie that's like where are they now so i guess they had to go with prequel um but it's still that kind of thing too where it's like i feel like i would need a like a laminated chart when watching the movie to try to figure out who everybody is and then to remember who they become on the TV version of, on the HBO version. And again, it feels to me, and by the way, maybe Michael Gandolfini is a really good actor. I don't know anything about his chops. Apparently he was also in The Deuce, which was David Simon's other show, the show about porn in Times Square. Oh, yeah. That show The Deuce.

I vaguely remember that, yeah.

So I guess he was in that. So he may be a very competent actor. I don't know. But it really does feel like they were like, God, does this guy ever look like his dad? Let's do something with that.

This just makes me this makes me less want to see this movie and more just go back and watch a bunch of James Gandolfini movies, not even necessarily, you know, in the Sopranos universe. I just love him. Like to me, like that's that one is just when I remember that he's gone, it's like a punch to the gut. Like I just when he is on the screen as any of his characters, he was in that movie. I don't think this was a widely loved movie But it was very much up my alley It was a small little kind of love story Called Enough Said With Julia Louise Dreyfuss Yeah Did you see that? I didn't see it I did not see it

But I know that it existed

Yeah, I really liked it And so, you know He's also, he plays some sort of I believe a military general In the movie In the Loop Which I absolutely love Anytime that man walks on the screen I mean, he can fill up various spaces. He's not always playing some sort of Tony Soprano-esque character. In fact, quite the opposite. All three of those examples are very different characters he's playing. He had such a range and also just, I don't know, exuded something that would seem bigger than himself. James Gandolfini is one of the biggest losses in that realm, I think.

I have to also remind myself when I start to feel bad about my physical degradation, about whether it's, you know, my hair thinning or, you know, putting on some weight or whatever, I have to remember that I know I could name, like, five women who think James Gandolfini was, like, maybe the sexiest dude on screen. And he had nothing going for him in the physical department that I could figure out, but it's more of a vibe thing. And you kind of have that vibe. Yeah, I mean, troubled relationship with my mother, a lot of money spent on therapy, Love Gabagool You know Occasional panic attacks I'm basically the James Gandolfini of podcasts That's right, impossible Gabagool of course The Beyond Gabagool is mostly made from mushrooms I don't really go in for it I knew yesterday on the show Andrew When I took a fairly strident position I just knew that there's no upside to me Weighing in on if we should be wearing masks Or not from like an epidemiological standpoint Or from a public health standpoint And so I sort of knew that when I said we don't need to wear masks if we're vaccinated, I knew that was about to bite me in the ass. I didn't know it would be the very next day in The New York Times to headline masks again. Delta variant spread spread prompts reconsideration of precautions.

Luke, I got this as a news alert push notification on my phone about 30 minutes after we got done having that conversation yesterday. So today, just to reiterate really quickly, today in Washington state, it is official that the mask mandate is not in full effect anymore. And all of the restrictions on, let's say, 50 percent occupancy in restaurants, all of that has rolled back. There are still some mask mandates both in the state and in the country, like any public transportation, you have to wear a mask. Some businesses might.

just still prefer their customers wear masks, and also I think nursing homes, any kind of care facility, doctor's office, there's still a mask mandate in place. So it's not like everybody's just ripping these off and burning their masks today. But it's a pretty big day here in Washington State and Oregon where this thing finally ended. And we had the conversation about it yesterday. And then a half hour later, the headline literally pushed out to my phone says, don't take off that mask yet the world health organization says it's too early

the the who uh is recommending that everyone including vaccinated folks wear masks to stem the spread of particularly the delta version of the the delta variant um health officials in los angeles county are also recommending that everyone regardless of vaccination status wear masks indoor in public places as a precautionary measure. Now, there is some disagreement between the WHO and the CDC on this, by the way. The CDC does not necessarily agree with the WHO. The WHO's rationale for maintaining masking is that while immunization is highly effective at preventing severe illness and death, the degree to which vaccines prevent mild or asymptomatic infections is unknown. Officials at the CDC disagree, saying the risk is minimal. So I don't know if this is the who just i mean there's no downside other than just fatigue and people being annoyed at you people putting up a dartboard with whoever the head of the who is and throwing darts at it there's no downside of the who saying everyone should continue to mask up right because if there's even an infinitesimally small risk that you could be asymptomatic so you could be vaxxed you could get the delta variant you could not know you have it and you could pass it on to someone else i don't know if there's even evidence that that's happening but i guess what the who is saying is we can't rule that out and so since we can't rule it out let's just continue to play it really really safe i think the the cow is has left the barn in the united

states as far as masking goes has it i mean sort of like i just said like it literally has not on the federal level in some instances again care facilities i mean psychologically oh yeah maybe and public transportation but I don't think psychological I think it has for some for some people certainly and it sounds like you're moving more and more in that direction like and I'm I'm with you like I don't want to wear a mask in fact I feel like as we discussed it on this show I think I had a harder time normalizing mask wearing at the beginning um than you did like I don't like wearing masks but it's just hard for me at this point to say like we are still in this thing like it is not this is you know the pandemic is not something of the past we're still trying to figure it out and like you just alluded to I got to remind myself that there's no um there's no downside to wearing a mask I mean except for the very very rare instances where somebody literally you know can't wear a mask because of a health condition or something along those lines but like generally speaking for me for most people there's no downside other than I don't want to be told what to do and I don't you know like and I don't want to do it and it's an inconvenience but even as inconveniences go it's relatively minor and i've gotten used to it so don't get me wrong i'm hoping that we're still going to see a huge decrease in mask wearing because we're going to find out that we don't really need to but if any authority is saying hey listen we do still have to continue wearing masks it's not like hey we have to keep restaurants at 50 capacity a little bit longer and that's going to continue to drain on the economy and going to continue to put businesses out of business like there's a there's a downside to that there are economic real life downsides to that but there's just not a downside to the mask wearing other than it's inconvenient i agree with everything you're saying intellectually

when i say the cow has left the barn i just mean i think people are really fatigued and i think even people who are very pro-science what i've noticed is like no one's for the last two weeks no one's even wearing masks in the elevator in my building i don't actually know what the rule is my guess would be that this apartment management company is probably taking a a fairly safe line on things my guess would be that we're still supposed i mean i am wearing a mask but it's now the norm to get in the elevator and someone wouldn't be wearing a mask and these are all people that were all masked up four months ago you know what i mean that was a hundred percent mask compliance in this building and now it's like five percent mask compliance and i mean this is just totally anecdotal but i just think even people who believe in science and who were very very careful around this stuff i think it's just and again maybe i'm just speaking about myself it's just emotionally fatiguing to think about going back into masking to think about going back into certainly any kind of lockdown i'm not saying it's the wrong call i'm just saying emotionally i

think it's going to be really hard for people it's weird because i i feel like i can say the And I think we're just talking. about this I think we're heavily influenced by our own experiences and so far I haven't been in a lot of experiences where I can just wander around freely without a mask except for outside I've totally normalized like not for the longest time I would if I was leaving my apartment door I would put on a mask and wear it to my car and then I would take it off in my car and drive wherever I'm going and then put it back on when I arrive at wherever I'm going and it's been nice in the past few weeks of not having to put that mask on until I get to whatever my destination is let's face it it's probably tubs the sub shop in lake city um but like or the hourly hot tub rental place or the hourly hot tub rental place um and i do wear i wear nothing but a mask in those in those hot tubs and a smile but it's funny how i think you're right like in a certain way there's fatigue that is set in but also haven't our cultural norms shifted and haven't we also gotten used to masks in a way that we weren't a year and a quarter ago when this all started like I feel like I've changed so much like yeah I guess there's some fatigue but also I was a guy who really felt uncomfortable putting on a mask at the beginning of this and now it's like second nature and I don't think of it and I'm going into the doctor's office I'm going into Whole Foods I'm going into wherever I'm going into and I snap on the mask and it doesn't cause me any kind of I don't even give it a second thought and so I'm wondering if both of these things can be true at the same time there's maybe some fatigue going on but we're all we've all got to be more comfortable with the general idea of mask wearing than we were yes i think you're right both things are true i am

now like it doesn't feel it wouldn't feel weird to me to wear a mask in any scenario because i'm so used to it but i will also tell you those like three days in california where i didn't have to wear a mask when i went into the grocery store i don't know why maybe it's just one of those weird things where i don't know it just felt amazing to wander around the hotel and not constantly ask myself oh did i bring a mask or you know like they're just just these little tiny moments which again none of which are like such a big deal or enough that we you know people like if if they were to i mean literally if they were to come back and say you have to wear a mask i would wear a mask obviously but something about not having to deal with it not having to remember it not having to have it i didn't realize how much it was kind of on my mind until i stopped doing it it's like uh the listeners who have kids might be able to relate to this i always say like it's like having a baby that's in diapers it's very weird because you don't realize what a hassle it is until the kid is potty trained because when you're doing it when they're in diapers you're just changing their diapers all the time it's just part of the deal and then once they start learning how to use the bathroom for themselves you go damn i was changing a lot of diapers right it's almost like that with this mask it was like oh my god that was a fair amount of mental energy again a worthy amount of mental energy and one that should have been expended so as to control the virus but i don't think i realized how nice it was going to be to not have to have a mask on yeah um and and so now the other thing too and i i want to be careful because this is a good way for me to sort of get on the listener's last nerve but i will say this because i'm wired the way i am i have noted that there were a number of things that we were doing in the early days which turned out to probably not have a huge effect and i understand why they were put in place because it's like let's better safe than sorry if there's even a chance that hope you know wiping down my groceries will actually stop the transmission or masking outside will stop the transmission on my jog if there's a chance that that will have an impact of course that's why we tried it but it turns out that there were a number of things that were really actually not doing us that much good i think masking outside has been proven unless you're talking about a very very tightly packed group of people masking outside is pretty unnecessary they now think and they don't think it could live on surfaces for really that long so all of this like sanitizing of everything uh of our groceries and stuff also turned out to probably not be necessary so when the who kind of says well we don't 100 know but we think there's a chance that maybe you could be carrying it even if you're vaccinated some part of my brain goes oh yeah you were the same people telling me to wear a mask when i was jogging and we found out that didn't matter so i which again I don't it's not a good look I don't like that I'm very pro-science I don't like that even a small part of my brain is is is curdling into being the kind of person who goes huh well I guess we'll like I said if if they said you have to wear masks again I would wear a mask again because that's the rules but I would also be unsurprised if then six months down the line we found out

that there was actually very limited risk of people who are fully vaxxed transmitting the delta variant asymptomatically like I'm not a scientist I don't know the answer on that but I I can just tell you I wouldn't be shocked if we found out later that that was not a huge risk.

Yeah, and it's interesting. I'm still very interested in the emotional side of this and, of course, how it impacts me and how it will impact me. Because I think that, yeah, you mentioned your three days in California and how you kind of really quickly got out of the habit of mask wearing. I wonder if that's part of the psychology here, too.

something that the WHO is thinking about, like, once we get out of this habit, how hard will it be to get back into the habit if there's a reason to do it? I actually, I take that back. I don't think this is a consideration of the WHO, but I do think it's an interesting consideration because the only taste that I've gotten of kind of a maskless future, the only taste of that I've gotten was when we went to the Mariners game. I want to say that was two weeks ago. And the mariners at T-Mobile Park they now have like vaccinated sections as of tomorrow they will have or as of two days from now they will have just a full grand reopening without any kind of without any kind of segregation at all but by the way I don't like the fact that I use segregation there I realize that that is being used that's being bandied about by the right who feel like they're being oppressed by making non-vaccinated people sit in different sections of the stadium which is just ridiculous but anyway so sorry for using the word segregation there but my point is this you and I and Genevieve and a bunch of friends went to this Mariners game a couple of weeks ago and we're all vaccinated so we got to go in what's called the vaccinated section which is most of the park basically if you show your vaccination cards when you go in you don't have to wear a mask you don't have to follow any of the usual protocols and everything just seemed normal like a return to the old normal for about three and a half hours or however long we were there actually vives and i got there way early so it's probably longer than that and at one point i was you know we're sitting down in our seats and then i got up to get another beer or a hot dog or something and i'm walking up the stadium stairs and i realized for a second oh no i left my mask in my jacket pocket and my jacket pocket is down at my seat and of course it's a pain you know to go back to your seat you have to crawl over people they have to stand up you're ruining somebody else's experience i have this moment of my mask it's down at my seat and then i'm like don't need a mask like I it wasn't even wearing the mask but I could walk away from my mask I could put more than two feet between me and my mask which is always in my pocket if it's not on my face in public and for the rest of the game like something like clicked in me like I could just I was just wandering around without a mask and then after the game I think all of us most of us went to have some drinks at a bar and I don't want to I'm not even going to mention the name of the bar because I don't want to get them in trouble but like we still have these rules where you go into a bar and you can take off your mask at your seat but if you walk to the restroom you have to put the mask back on and you know this was a relatively crowded bar and it was late at night and we were like a week away from the mask mandate lift being lifted or two weeks away or whatever it was and people weren't being that strict about it and the whole night just sort of felt like a glimpse of a maskless future that I feel like maybe you got a stronger taste of these past three days and it was nice and it was freeing yeah and yeah I have to say like I agree with

everything that you just said and that was a really fun element of that baseball game like I couldn't put my finger on I kept saying I kept like side hugging Camaro Kev and Nikki and being like this is what I needed and part of it was just seeing my friends part of it was seeing baseball but yes sitting there you know without a mask on drinking a beer watching the Mariners win it was just like i think what i was really responding to was the fact that it felt like normal life again which i think i had kind of and a lot of us probably has sort of like blocked out how much i mean a lot has been said about the psychological toll of this pandemic and of course i have a tremendous amount of privilege i'm not trying to raise young children i was fortunate enough to keep my job you know like i didn't get sick like i didn't lose anyone super close to me to this so i have been very very very lucky throughout it but a lot has been said about the psychological impact but i think i kind of don't think about the psychological impact very much until i'm in a moment where it's not happening or at least you know normal life feels like it's resumed and god

does it feel good yeah it'll be interesting even as i was reading the newspaper today i'm not trying to be a no fun nick but kind of reading uh because like the the lead graph on whatever seattle time story i was reading about like today kind of marks a a step towards a return to normalcy a very big step. But I noticed it didn't say the mask mandate is gone. And I was like, oh, what is the what is the deal with masks? And that's why I read down and I saw, OK, there are still some both federal and state mandates in certain circumstances. And so I was like, yeah, this isn't this isn't the big this isn't just totally behind us. Like we're going to be carrying we're going to be carrying some of this around for some time. And also, of course, and again, I'm really not trying to be a negative andrew here but like i i hope that we don't find ourselves having to go back into even stricter protocols again down the line i really hope that this is going to continue obviously that's the most obvious thing to say but i really hope that this is a slow gradual moving in the same direction i think a any kind of a rollback or an increase in covid can concerns is going to have a major psychological impact on everybody well and i think you're just

gonna have a really hard time getting people to abide by it yeah that's the thing so like in this article they're saying that israel which is very vaccinated it's one of the most vaccinated countries in the world they're reinstituting uh masking uh indoors and stuff like and so it's like it's one thing if it's australia where they have a low vaccination rate but it's another thing if it's israel and i look at that and i think well there's no reason then that that's not going to come back to the u.s um although we've been pretty lucky i guess also there was this alpha variant that really did a number on great britain um but it says in this article that because the u.s was also vaccinating at a furious rate we sort of didn't get hit by the alpha variant as badly as some other places so who knows maybe there's some weird way in which we get lucky on the delta that it just i mean it's one in five infections now they say in the u.s maybe for some reason we'll be spared although i don't know why we would be like if you see if israel is having to reinstitute masks i don't i don't understand why the u.s wouldn't eventually because they probably have a higher vax rate than we do well i'm pretty sure about this do you know what the um biggest variant

in washington is right now it's actually the gamma it's the one from brazil and i don't think that's across the country i think that's specifically washington state for some reason and again i want to say that according to the article i was reading about this so far it looks like all of the vaccines are equally strong against all these different variants or effective i should say not strong i sound like trump there for a second they say it's very good very strong um many people are saying it and very strongly but uh so it wasn't a um it wasn't an article that was like flashing big red warning signs but it's just interesting that there's also this gamma variant out there too and for some reason i believe that's the one that has the most kind of increase in cases here in washington state among the unvaccinated folks yeah well i'm gonna celebrate today andrew god

damn it what are you doing um making ice i'm i'm gonna make ice and stare at people on the street walking without masks on yeah and watch the mariners game on youtube which is what where

it is today really oh which is annoying well it's better than facebook because for a while they would for a few seasons they did not broadcast mariners games on tv and you could only get them via

facebook and i didn't have a facebook account so yeah it's funny i i said i'm gonna go crazy i'm probably not i'm probably gonna stay in this apartment oh my gosh we need to move on but i'm going to tell you i had the worst hot dog experience yesterday andrew i decided that i really wanted to grill up some of my veggie dogs and uh chop up some onions and and uh and and have a little uh hot dog potato chip uh rainier beer situation going while i watch the baseball game but i i don't live near any grocery stores i almost said food desert but i don't want to even throw that joke around because it's like you know that's a real thing for people and i have a ton of privilege but it is weird that i don't live like easy walking distance to any grocery store i like being able to walk to the grocery store yeah it's a weird quirk of this neighborhood and i think somebody could probably do some okay business if they opened one up um although another irony is what i needed was hot dog buns and i'm looking at the franz bakery i can see it from this window they have a spinning giant sack of bread that's their sign they're literally making the hot dog buns over there but i don't know if they have a retail component and that actually would be a pretty long walk in 95 degree heat so i went to the world's sketchiest plaid pantry around the corner from my house and uh they didn't have hot dog buns but they had hamburger buns and i was like yeah same thing so i grabbed those and i was like i'll just have to kind of like improvise a little bit but i mean you know those kind of hamburger buns and hot dog buns if you're going with the kind of standard like white bread whatever they're

basically the same thing right they're made of the same thing but i mean the shape of these things will have an impact on your on your well what i did was i decided i'll cut the hot dogs in half

yeah and then i will use the top of the bun as a kind of a mini hot dog bun so i'll use the top of

the hamburger bun as kind of a mini hot dog oh okay i'm sorry so you're not splitting these hot dogs and turning this into a hot dog sandwich on a hamburger bun you are just cutting it in half So it's still in its tubular form And then wrapping it around

Cradling it in the top of the hamburger bun But oh my god These, I just thought buns or buns These were Hostess hamburger buns I don't know if they had been Sitting in that store For two years or something When I opened the bag I was hit with a chemical stench Oh no I mean first of all they were pretty stale but whatever I was going to toast them up a little bit on the grill anyway But I've just never had a terrible hammer.

hamburger bun that just seems like such an inert thing like at the worst it's just not memorable these were memorably bad oh that sounds gross it's also the way that tbtl's been described memorably bad i so i would just say to any of my fellow portland residents do not get the hot dog buns or rather the hamburger buns from the plaid pantry on burnside they gross the more you know

here i go once again with the email every week i hope that it's from a female no man it's not

from a female all right quick email or vmail and then we got to hit the road because we are recording some more tbtl summer games today andrew uh which is a great time to remind the listeners if you have a summer game you'd like to suggest we still have a couple of slots Right? Am I correct in saying that?

Yeah, we have, I think, just two more shows that we don't have a game assigned to. So if you have anything you want to send our way, send it our way. It doesn't have to be something that you've made yourself. We're getting some quizzes from listeners that listeners have created, and those are great. Those are wonderful. I don't want to dissuade you from doing that. But also, if you just come across some personality-based quiz online, send that our way. Anything that you think would be fun for me and Luke to chew on for 35 to 45 minutes.

So, yeah, two more slots on that. And they just email Andrew at tbtl.net and put summer games in the subject line. Maybe the other thing is, can I announce this, Andrew? Is it all right if I mentioned that the of course, the song of the summer contest is back. And I believe this Friday. Yes, we're going to be rolling out the 16, I guess, finalists, the 16 songs that have made the cut but if you have a suggestion it's not too late to send it to my brother david from the basement the email address for the song of the summer 2021 is dftb like david from the basement dftb dot s o t s song of the summer sots dftb dot sots at gmail.com send him uh the song that you'd like to suggest for the song of the summer and a link to it and he will go through and pick the top 16 that he likes the most and then we're

going to roll those out on friday yeah i'm very excited david's got a great ear for these things and so i'm looking forward to um having my summer playlist put together for me so yeah so and definitely tune in on friday when david uh joins us and unveil some of these songs um now as far as emails are concerned now luke when genevieve was on the show on monday of course there was some bird talk some bird related content and one thing that Genevieve mentioned at one point was when she feeds her hummingbirds in her hummingbird feeder she makes her own hummingbird food it's just a combination of water and sugar I don't remember the exact combination but you basically make a simple syrup on the stove and you pour it into your hummingbird feeders there is stuff that is for sale and it's a pinkish in color if you don't want to make it yourself but Genevieve had read that the the pink dye is actually bad for the birds apparently the birds are attracted to the pinkish color but the dye itself isn't great for them got this note from listener danny regarding the bird situation but then there's something very very important at the bottom of this email now i want to mention this is not danny from new hampshire this is a different danny this is not danny our unofficial tbtl lawyer from new hampshire this is a different danny who says please extend my heartfelt thanks to Veeves for her PSA about feeding hummingbirds. I have known for a long time that it is not good to give them red dye, and I always make my own hummingbird nectar. Ooh, nectar is a good way of putting it. Sounds even fancier. I found a great way to make the feeder attractive to them, i.e. looking like a fancy flower. Use red glass. I found a red glass feeder at the Desert Botanical Gardens here in good old Tucson, Arizona, where they have a seasonal hummingbird garden.

so you put it in the red glass because they like the red that's what the point of dying it red is

but it's not actually died so it's not yes exactly now here is the second part of her email secondly i am also a lawyer who has been known to go by the nickname danny so if you are unsatisfied with your current counsel please feel free to hit me up now luke so great because then we don't have to learn a new lawyer name exactly remember the other day off air i had a conversation with you i said should we can because we are embroiled in many lawsuits against our current lawyer danny from new hampshire i said should we consider getting a new lawyer to represent us in these suits against danny and what did you say you said andrew i don't have time to learn another lawyer's name yeah that's the only thing standing in the way of us retaining different legal counsel and what What has just come to us via email, like manna from heaven, but another lawyer. And honestly, and you know that I have a lot of respect from Danny, the lawyer from New Hampshire. But I mean, mostly just because she refuses to take our cases, which is the sign of a good lawyer. Exactly. But I do also believe that competition breeds excellence. And so in this case, I think this is a win win for everybody. So we now have two lawyers named Danny representing TBTL.

Would you say you push back against the soft bigotry of lower expectations? I would. When you're segregating your masked and non-masked people?

Damn it. I was going to cut that out. No, I wasn't. Anyway, so good news for us there. Also, let me just read a real quickie here from our buddy Rold, who works in the grocery store industry. By the way, this is not grocery store related, although he did send me a note saying probably the reason why a bunch of the foods in the refrigerated section of the grocery store, over the weekend were pulled was probably because they had a malfunction with one of their pumps, I believe, that can affect parts of the grocery store's refrigeration system. And that's probably what happened. And I got confirmation from another listener who actually knew very specifically about the Safeway I go to, and that's exactly what happened. There was some malfunction that forced them to close down their refrigeration section. Anyway, Rold wanted to write in about Chris mullen the basketball player i asked you if chris mullen had a nickname for some reason and i think you said that chris mullen did not we tried to come up with some on the fly um rolled says listening to the show no chris mullen didn't have a nickname but collectively tim hardaway mitch richmond and chris mullen were known as run tmc because they were a high scoring offense

What do you think of that? I wonder if Roald was Roald living down there or just a basketball fans. I'm surprised that I didn't hear that at the time because that was when the Sonics were still a going concern in Seattle. And I was like obsessed. In fact, there was a year early in the Sean Kemp, Gary Payton era where we beat Golden State. And I want to say that was considered a pretty big upset. So I was quite aware of Golden State. I wonder how I never heard run TMC.

One last quick thought from Rold who says, side note, my favorite nickname for an NBA player is the one being used for Chris Paul of the Phoenix Suns right now. It's Point God. Have a great day, listener Rold.

Okay, run TMC. So Tim Hardaway, Mitch Richmond, and Chris Mullen. Chris Mullen. Yeah, there you go. There was something that you were saying there The reason you heard me pausing Was because there was one more thing I was going to say Before we wrapped up the show But it's now left my little bird brain And so that probably is a sign That it wasn't all that important Do you have a basketball related song you like to go out with?

The only one I know is the song Basketball by Curtis Blow But I don't think that's your speed

How about G-Love and Special Sauce I-76 Which is a whole song about a road in Philadelphia, I-76, but the refrain is Charles Barkley dissed Larry Bird. And there's a whole string of Philadelphia basketball players, Moses Malone, Dr. J. It's a very basketball-centric song. Perfect. I got it dialed up right here. All right. This is how we're going to go out. Thanks for listening, everybody. We are going to be back here tomorrow with more Imaginary Radio for you. So please do join us for that. until then have a great Wednesday stay safe take care of yourselves and please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all

Even spark a little Nicky J and then it's off center city in the fastest way. Cause if you gotta get downtown real quick, then the only way to go is our 76 stuff. Unless of course you want to take that scenic view, then the east or west river drive is right for you. But if you ain't got any time to lose, put the pedal to the metal for that voyage cruise. And get on down to our 76, cause in 1996, there ain't no drinks in the mix.

Back in 1982, man, it was real cool in the school. If we got good grades, like straight up A's, our parents would take us to a 76 game. I got my game and there ain't no shame Big shots of Mo Cheeks and Moses Malone Julius Erber called Philly at home Bobby Jones, Darryl Dawkins, and the Tony Sinkin' Threes Rocky Bible will come from South Philly But if you want to make it on time to the show There's only one road that you really have to know So get to Fishtown without all that job I suggest that you drive on I-95 Wanna get downtown before

Feeling a fix Getting on that road They call 676 The most expensive Expansive piece of interstate They ever made The fellas ain't paid With what they got They're gay Getting lost

76ers Traveled bodily This Larry Bird Getting lost 76ers Traveled bodily This Larry Bird Shoot the middleman out

Power out