Muse

Well, I see you got them snakes and sparklers, but where's good stuff, man? Good stuff? This is the good stuff. Snakes and sparklers. Are you nuts, dude? You need stuff to explode. Go boom! Why is that good? So you're gonna tell me that you don't have no black cats, no roaming candles or screaming memes? No. Oh, come on, man. You don't got no ladyfingers, buzzbuttles, snickerbombs, church burners, gutbusters, zippity-doo-dots or crap flappers? No, I don't. You're gonna stand there Owning a firework stand And tell me you don't have no whistling bungholes No spleen splitters Whisker biscuits, honky lighters Husker do's, husker don'ts Cherry bombs, nips and daisers With or without the scooter stick Or one single whistling kitty chaser No Snakes and sparklers are the only ones I like TBTL How many hot dogs do you have for lunch?

Well, there's your problem. You're starving. Your body's literally eating itself.

You have to be it so we don't see it. You have to live it or we won't forgive it. You have to inhabit it or leave it in the cabinet. It's a B-A-R-T-Y because I said so.

Hey, everybody stand by. Here we go again. Well, hello there, good afternoon, and welcome to a Monday edition of TBTL. And boom goes the dynamite. The show that just might be too beautiful to live. My name is Luke Burbank. I'm your host. You paint your bald spot? One bald spot. Coming to you from the Nest Broadcast Center high in the sky above Portland, Oregon. It is Monday, July 5th. This is the holiday that most of us get because the 4th of July fell on the weekend. So hopefully you are getting to enjoy a day off. You are resting. You are relaxing. We're not, of course.

I'm not even supposed to be here today.

Not all heroes wear capes, my friends. And not all podcasts are able to take national holidays off because we know that as the frontline responders in the podcast war, You rely on us to be here five days a week. So here we are, my friends. Although, it might have been a little hard to find Friday's show.

Hey, what happened?

We're still trying to untangle why it is that Friday's show is not on the Apple platform. It's everywhere else. And it's on our website. It's over at tbtl.net. So if you're one of the folks who couldn't find us on Friday, I guess if you're hearing this, you did find us. But just know, when in doubt, study it out and go to tbtl.net. The shows are always there. You can always listen at tbtl.net, where today we find ourselves at episode 3,459 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. A whole bunch of us in our friend group convened in the greater Marysville, Washington area. Specifically, I believe, the Tulalip Native American Reservation this weekend to hang out, to toss the baseball around with some young children. And, of course, also to visit maybe the largest fireworks, I don't know, sales bazaar, if you will, on the West Coast. the combustion becomes an explosion. Also known as Boom City. So we have a full report on that. Also, Maine is, well, at least some lawmakers in Maine are trying to cut down on the number of vanity license plates that they see as being rude. Including a woman who has dubbed her minivan the Milf Mobile. and has a license plate that says, well, it's encouraging people to go topless. She's got some interesting logic behind why she's picked the particular vanity plate that she has. And in fact, just the list of vanity plates that people have been able to get in Maine is quite fascinating. So on this, the day that we get to not go to work because of the day that this nation declared its independence. We'll talk about Maine trying to, I don't know, abridge free speech. Plus emails and v-mails. And this guy, the long-stranding co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. He is essentially the human embodiment of a firework. He is Andrew Walsh. And he's joining me right now from the Roosevelt neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. Good morning and happy 5th of July, my friend. And to you, good sir. And afternoon, by the way. I mean, good afternoon. one of the rare times that we're actually doing the show in the afternoon which we did because we wanted to at least feel like we were kind of

getting a special holiday treat for ourselves and we didn't really talk about this explicitly but i've been under the assumption that we might keep it slightly shorter today since it's a holiday show i don't want to i don't want to you know not fulfill the wish the listeners wishes i want to give the listeners what they want obviously and what they want is more time of me mispronouncing words and babbling but it is a holiday we're getting a late start let's try to keep it maybe let's keep it a little contained also like you mentioned I don't know if today's show is going to go to Apple or not so I may have a long afternoon of me shaking trees trying to get people who are not at work at 8pm to figure out what's going on with this podcast but hopefully everything is fine right now as you hear this yeah we have a few

theories and we will be investigating those but for the time being we're just as you and i are sitting here on july 5th andrew recording this the hope is that it will flawlessly and seamlessly find its way onto the internet onto every platform including apple and people will be able to hear it if not yeah we've got a bit of a situation and also i feel bad for you that here on what is supposed to be a holiday for us i don't know if i've mentioned that yet on the show i'm not even supposed to be here today on what is supposed to be a holiday for us you are about to have one of your more stressful posting sessions or at least stressful waiting sessions after you have posted the show yeah uh to see if it works which and i

gotta be honest with you i don't want to i don't want to um i don't want to start with loser talk here luke i don't want i don't want to be giving you loser talk i don't want to be a loser but the the truth is if there's an issue today i just don't know that there's much that can be done about it until tomorrow honestly until 8 p.m is fully staffed again so um let's just really hope for the best i'm anxious right now actually if we wanted to wrap it up now that would give me more time to kind of find out if this thing posts you got anything else on the agenda my friend

i just wanted to read you a couple of the names of the more memorable fireworks that we saw okay good at boom city yeah now i i want to preface this by saying i know i know fireworks a bad idea at least in the hands of you know lay people right like dangerous very scary for pets almost no redeeming qualities other than they're awesome gosh they're fun um like but i get that like this is one of those things where i just have a massive sort of um you know a massive amount of cognitive uh dissonance going where all the arguments in fact i i mentioned this on the radio show i guess i must have this weekend we record the radio show during the week that is live wire and then um and then i will usually forget what i talked about and then on saturday I'll start seeing tweets from people then I'm like oh I guess that's in the universe yeah somebody was somebody was not super pleased with me on Twitter about fireworks and I was like it was like noon on Saturday and I was like where's that coming what did you say yeah I think I mentioned to Elena that I was going to be going and meeting with some friends for the weekend and I was going to be visiting a giant fireworks stand um which you know for the average public radio listener being the smart type they they're pretty aware they're highly aware of the downside of fireworks i will also say we didn't i didn't buy any fireworks i just wandered around boom city with y'all um because uh it's weird i think fireworks are really awesome but much like karaoke my desire to personally participate in it has oddly kind of it's sort of ebbed as i've moved into middle

middle age hood middle aged them i mean i think it's interesting that the listener or listeners were upset with you just for visiting just for acknowledging the existence of of fireworks

stands like that's an interesting take there this person who tweeted at me who i didn't recognize as a tbtl stan um there was a lot going on in the tweet i feel like it had a lot of hashtags and so i don't i don't know where that person's at in their life i didn't i really didn't take a lot of offense yeah for once in my life but but yeah it was because i don't i don't think i said everybody should get an m80 and you know throw it at a cat like that was because i think that would be a terrible idea and it should be illegal and probably is so yeah you're very you have so

much compassion for animals too i gotta say i've come a long way in that too sorry to cut you off but i do want to acknowledge that like if you're praising my animal compassion you can cut me off anytime shut up luke i'm praising your compassion um but like no i mean i i think that there was a time in my life where i maybe would have been more dismissive of the people who said oh they make my dogs nervous but like now you know you get through social media you get a actual grounds eye view of what that looks like for a lot of people them spending their spending the day you know huddled in the bathroom with their with their pooches to try to calm them down because they don't you know what I mean like that's that's a real thing and I feel a lot of compassion for that so just I want that on the record as well I didn't blow off any fireworks either but I'd be but I also don't want to lie I don't want to just say the thing that I I know I know you accuse me of this sometimes I don't want to just say the thing that people want to hear I'm being honest like I grew up in the country my dad would blow off fireworks out in the valley city of Ohio I loved it going to um going to like soccer games or monster truck rallies at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. Often those would end with fireworks displays. I'll be honest with you, I was very afraid of them. I was like the nervous dog. I truly believed that the fireworks were going to come down and set me on fire. So that was part of my past too. But I generally love fireworks, and there's this place behind Boom City. This sounds so dangerous. I've been hearing about this for years. So there's this huge bazaar of just – it's like a huge flea market. of just firework stand after firework stand after firework stand, which is just astounding. And then people take it, and I'm going to say maybe, I don't know what, 400 yards away. I don't know how far away there's this area where they have it kind of barricaded off where people can actually then blow off the fireworks that they just bought. And we stood there. I didn't do that, but we stood there, and I watched that for quite some time. I loved it. It didn't go on long enough for me, honestly. They shut it down at like 10 or something. But, yeah, no, I mean, I will admit, like, I know that a lot of people hate it. they have good reason to i'm not trying to be uh i'm not i want to be sensitive to that but i also don't want to just say i don't like fireworks because it's the right thing to say in 2021

because they thrill me i'm laughing because i'm remembering what camaro kev said as we strolled into boom city which he said this is the closest thing you'll find to barter town from mad max which is like the original like the one with mel gibson in it where you could just like you know It's this outpost Where you can just sort of barter for anything Because society has collapsed There's some pretty heavy overtones of that at Boom City You know it's just Because he was I probably went to this place Boom City Maybe once or twice when I was a kid Because it was very far away from my house But it was like if you got really lucky Someone's older brother maybe had a car Like had their license And you could get a ride to Boom City So I'd been there maybe once or twice I think for Camaro and his brothers It was a more regular experience because they lived pretty close to it. Kamara said you used to be able to bring like a DVD player or like a NES or like a... You could just bring anything of any value and you could find somebody who had a fireworks stand who would trade you for fireworks for that, which I find kind of charming. I love this idea that there's still some barter economy existing somewhere. But yeah, it's a bit, you know, it's just a bit improvised. I would say it's a bit ad hoc over there at Boom City. I have to say, oh, God, my brain's going in a million directions, and none of them lead to this show being 30 minutes long. One thing is one of the fireworks is called the LiveWire. Oh, right.

Which you took a picture of me with. With your phone, though, right? I don't have that photo.

No, it's on my phone. I'm looking at it, and I'm holding it. If I were to tweet this back at the person who tweeted at me about fireworks that he heard me talking about on LiveWire, would that be the most epic trolling of all time? I think so. I'm not trying to get into it with the guy, but the fact that there's a firework called the LiveWire that I'm holding is so perfect. I almost want to, but then he would think that I'm trying to roast him. It's more of the coincidence of the thing. Could this be the show pick today?

Yeah, as I was going to say, it could be the show pick. I mean, just a reminder, this is not LiveWire. but I do think it would make a good show pick for today, yeah.

Okay, I'm going to send it to you. Anyway, that was one thing that I'm looking at my phone right now at all of these different fireworks that, like there's one that's very clearly a ripoff of Minions. Oh, yeah. So it's yellow. It's the color of like that iconic Minion yellow, and it's got the eyes, like it's whichever Minion has like his eyes are goggles. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

I think a lot of them are that.

I'm not sure.

Maybe that's all of them. One of those movies was on at the gym the other day. Yeah. I just like to work that in whenever possible because I've gone to the gym twice in the past year and a half. But it was on. I was actually enjoying it because I can never remember. What's the name? The Minions was the sequel. I just asked. Despicable Me. Yes. And I think that might have been the one that was on. And the subtitles were on. I was really enjoying it. It really took my mind off of my exercise.

I absolutely think that if I were to sit and watch Despicable Me, where I think Steve Carell is the voice of that guy, I want to call him Groot, but it's not. I think Groot is the tree from Guardians of the Galaxy. It's something like that. And I don't think it's Gru, because Gru was that other comic book character I loved, Gru the Wanderer. But anyway.

I bet you anything, if I sat down and watched Despicable Me, I would laugh and really enjoy it, as well as the Minions films. I just – I don't have young kids. It just hasn't been something I've spent any time with, but I'm, of course, keenly aware of their – It's Gru. Do you know what I knew? It's Gru.

Steve Carell is Gru.

When I noticed – when I first became aware that Minions were taking over the world was when I was in Las Vegas, And all of a sudden Half of the people who were along the strip Like dressed up as famous Things so as to get pictures taken Were minions Like one trip I went to And I didn't even know what was going on with minions But all of a sudden there was like 20 minions on the strip You know trying to pose for pictures with people And then get you know a tip or whatever So anyway this minions This very clearly ripped off minions thing Is called the 21 fart gun salute Yes I saw this

Not even a good play on words

As a man who plays with words. Yes. And I don't even know. Again, this is where, because I haven't seen the Minions movies, I don't know if that's an in-joke. Like if someone does a fart, if one of the Minions farts a lot or something. No, no. But that was pretty dope. There's also a box of fireworks called Zero Forks Given. You mentioned that to me before the show. I don't know if I saw that one or not. That was pretty clever. There's, of course, one called Baby Shark Do Do Do, which is not as much a play on words, but just jumping onto the Baby Shark trend. There's something called the Boss Baby Assortment, which it's very funny. Who'd have thunk that? Because Boss Baby 2 is coming out now.

Oh, wasn't that one that was supposed to come out earlier, but Pandemic set it back? No joke. I know it's an animated thing, but I swear that was supposed to be out years ago, right?

Well, Boss Baby, like with Alec Baldwin playing a baby that's a boss of people. Again, not a film I've seen. Me neither. Apparently, it did well enough that there's a Boss Baby, too. And also, there's something called Boss Baby Fireworks.

That is a weird. Yeah, it's hard to imagine, like, that journey, right? I mean, there's a lot of movies out there. Obviously, it's a marketing opportunity. But why that one? Why now? What are they doing? And how can you steer clear of it all? I love that drop.

But maybe my favorite, the Outlaw shells that are extra Flamin' Hot. They are exactly, this is an exact ripoff of Flamin' Hot Cheetos. Like, this is one that definitely, if you worked for Frito-Lay, and you were in that department that tries to enforce their, like, trademark, and you walked by this, you'd take a picture of it, and you'd send it to someone. Because this is not even, they're not even trying to, like, get cute with it. They literally ripped off the font. There's a picture of a Flamin' Hot Cheeto on it It's the exact color That exact non-naturally Occurring red of a Flamin' Hot Cheeto

I just

What do they call it Flamin' Hot shells I just feel like It's Outlaw shells and then it's XXXTRA Flamin' Hot And the Flamin' Hot is in exactly the font Of the Cheetos

And then it's got a picture of the Cheeto I see I'm not coming up with anything better It just seems like we're missing we're missing a beat there with a play on words i don't know what it is but also i'm trying to do this on the fly and keep the needles moving but i feel like i don't know flame and no need andrew because i have so much to say today go ahead go ahead uh when you were talking about being afraid

of the fireworks as a kid or being a little a little nervous around them i i thought of this thing that i saw today on uh twitter which i must have seen it when it originally happened but i'd sort of forgotten about it someone posted a video they said this is a nine-year anniversary of the time that a computer malfunction in San Diego exploded all 17 minutes of fireworks at once. Woo. Have you seen this video? What year is this again? Well, it was nine years ago.

Yeah, okay, I remember when this happened. Yeah, sorry, I blanked out for a second. I remember this story. I remember this story. It's been a long time since I've seen it, though. I think I had a vague memory of seeing it,

but for some reason, by the way, this tweet, This is the weirdness of Twitter. This tweet today has, or as of like a couple, I guess it would have been as of yesterday, has like 136,000 likes and retweets and stuff. So enough people weren't familiar with this or had forgotten about it like I did that basically retweeting this nine years later or signal amping it nine years later is now in the current world we live in a big hit on the internet. This thing is unbelievable, though. like the the the noise the size of the flame the it's reflecting off the water because of course it's out in a barge in like you know the bay there in san diego and what what i thought when i watched it was this is an amazing little snapshot of different kinds of human behavior because somebody

is videotaping it i don't have it right in front of me i don't know if maybe you're able to are you able to find this and see if it's also loud like it's so loud that i wonder if it's actually going to be triggering for people um because it is like a very very loud explosion but but the the video somebody was you know they had their phone out they were videoing what they thought was just going to be a beautiful firework show and this thing is just getting larger and louder and brighter and i mean it is just wild and everybody in the video that you can see everybody's

responding differently to it this might be it this might also this is wrapped around a cnn uh this kind of in the cnn piece which usually i wouldn't go for but i actually kind of want to hear the setup on this this is you said san diego right san diego nine years 2012 okay take a look on a date

just like this this is uh we can call this a fireworks fail maybe not so if you're watching this, this entire 4th of July fireworks show, boom, exploding all at once. Check it out.

Whoa.

No way. The beginning, the middle, and the end. This was San Diego, the big bay boom, and it kind of went bust.

This is not what you wanted to hear, right? Are there people reacting?

Well, no, because it gives me a chance. No, no, it just, that gives me a chance to roast whoever that anchor is, because it wasn't a bust at all. It was awesome. This is how we should always do it, first of all. First things first, I'm the realist. All 17-minute-long fireworks shows should explode at one time because it's flipping amazing.

This one that I'm looking at now is way closer than what I saw before. It's terrifying. It looks like a tornado of light coming in against a black sky. It is intense.

And what you see in the video that I was seeing on Twitter today, you see some people grabbing their partner and running or briskly walking away from the explosions.

I could see that being terrifying.

Well, that's it. You have some people that start dancing. Like they just start like spontaneously dancing around in the light. You have some people that just are frozen Just sitting there You have some people that are laughing You have like the whole range of fight, flight, or dance

You really learn who the people are Who just want to see the whole world burn I know

Or people who are just somehow unfazed by things And then you see the people whose instinct is I gotta get out of here Like, I am nervous about this I am going somewhere that's not here Yeah, yeah

And I mean, listen We got into a serious conversation about this last week i don't want to rehash it now but we live in a scary world you know what i mean the people who the people who are there all of us we've seen just a lot of violent things in our lifetime some of us closer than others and i think that probably this could be very i could see this being very i remember how scared i was i mean this is what got us on the topic before but just hearing that i was getting a little bit of heat from our friend jay dog about this because As I said, I was scared of the motorcycle sound. I cannot ever overstate how ear-splittingly terrifying the sound amplified through this garage of this unmuffled motorcycle screaming back and forth and back and forth outside of your apartment building was a couple of months ago. It was amplified in this alleyway, then through the garage in this way that set off car alarms. And it felt like it did I had a physical reaction Or a physiological reaction to that sound Right

And J-Dog, listen Walk a mile in these Louboutins If you, like, come down here To this apartment building And stand where Andrew and I were standing Trying to change a tire for a travel nurse from Texas And listen And hear what we heard It was, imagine those fireworks times four

It was

I have never heard anything like the sounds of those motorcycles i there's no way it was even legal like it had to be a thing where they had literally installed something on the motorcycle that was amplifying the sound right it wasn't just a matter of not muffling it it was something that was designed to make it louder and i promise you if that if that guy in that motor on that motorcycle if he drove past a cop here in portland or a state patrol person he would get pulled over like it was unreal you could hear it

for i bet you could hear it for a one mile radius it was so much louder than the blue angels like yes so much louder than blue angels but i want to make it clear though that uh again i guess we're just going with j-dog which is just every time i say that makes me j-dog um it was a very gentle teasing he just said i'm not saying get off my And we'll see you next time.

lawn i'm just saying please you're on my lawn get off my lawn or something don't come for andrew j dog because you know you know what you're right it is a beef i was trying to keep it friendly don't try to take the rose by the thorns bro no you're right it's a it's a straight up beef now

sorry i was trying to downplay it but i'm pretty yeah man anyway so it was a fun weekend um again no we all in well you know actually i was gonna say we didn't get any fireworks that's not true because kev oh she did i didn't know that part i knew kevin and anita bought something that i'm obsessed with now adult poppets no that's not like it's not something for the bedroom or your next um you know could be a key party they're just poppets that are like 10 you know the little things that are wrapped up in tissue paper you get when you're a kid those are i think those are considered to be a pretty safe level of explosive fun generally speaking uh we used to try to tie like three or four of them together to get them a louder pop well they sell these ones that are just like way louder and they're called adult poppets and those things are so fun i meant

to buy some but i forgot to get we actually yeah we've bought some of those we actually had some of those from fourth of july's past as well i think the branding was slightly different but genevieve bought she re she um bought some more of those we threw a few of those off the roof uh into the into the street on roosevelt last night but we made sure that nobody was no cars were going by or pedestrians i seriously was like when i saw pedestrians coming by i would say to my friends hey cool it like i don't want to be freaking people out you know they're not super loud they're poppets but i don't i don't know i just didn't want to be disrespecting people but yeah knowing that people are very you know some people are very sensitive about this but also genevieve bought the longest um sparklers ever made did you see did i see did i see dirz and

And Nikki enjoying those on our Insta?

Yeah, I posted that to my Insta store yesterday. They are, I can't remember, I should call Genevieve in here. I think they're like three feet long or four feet long or something like that. So just giant sparklers. She bought a few boxes of those. So we'd like to party.

When Carrie and I were living in Port Townsend, we had a big Fourth of July get-together. And people brought a lot of fireworks. I don't know if that was the plan or what. It definitely ticked off my neighbor who is, at the time, who was a classic. She, like, runs, like, a crystal shop. It was, like, the least chill person you've ever met. Like, her entire outward-facing business lifestyle persona was of being extremely chill and centered and spiritual until anyone did anything in the neighborhood that she didn't like. And at that point, pretty much all that shit got dropped real fast. So she wasn't happy, which is probably fair. But there was a moment where our friends Mo and Chris, a married couple, they were holding Roman candles. And this was, you know, it had gotten dark. We were very lucky to be renting this house that was, like, literally on the ocean. And those are not loud, right? They just go, phoo, phoo. Yeah, they go, phoo. And, like, I'm not telling anyone to hold Roman candles. I'm sure there's a lot of danger there. But I've now seen people. Like, I didn't do that when I was a kid. I didn't grow up holding Roman candles. I was afraid. I mean, I liked them, but I would have been afraid to hold one in my hand.

Yeah.

As a kid, I would have thought, oh, that might burn me. But I just remember them running, Mo and Chris, it didn't hurt that they're like, they look like they're out of a, you know, a like, I don't know. I'm trying to think of what, let me get my, let me update my clothing model references. They're like, they walked out of like a J.Crew catalog or something. They're very beautiful, striking people. they were just like running around the yard shooting these roman candles each they each had one in each hand or something and they're running and they're just like standing as the ocean breeze is blowing you know them and the fireworks and there's music playing and everyone's happy in the right amount of drunkenness and rudy had not eaten drugs that the mummy left out yet that would be later in the night when things would really take a turn it was kind of drugs

Or do we not want to talk about that here?

No, it was some kind of, I want to say it was like maybe kratom or mushrooms or something. What would happen is there had been some little bowls that he had some crap going on with, and he had left them at a level that Rudy could get to them. And it was never clear if Rudy had consumed any of it or not, but when it was realized that it was something Rudy could have gotten to, we all got really worried.

Oh, so Rudy never showed signs of distress? No, we never saw anything happen.

So I guess we can still put a question mark on that. But it was just like – anyway, my point is it was the perfect moment of this night with our friends having a great time and running around in this amazing scene shooting these Roman candles off. It's like one of the top five iconic snapshot memories in my mind of something I've witnessed. thanks for the invite that's sweet everything aligned uh i think you were playing hearthstone i'll bet you a million bucks you did invite me to oh i got a million dollars i can borrow i will bet you i will bet you a million dollars you guys were invited and um and actually you know what you were in la that was the problem oh it was it was back then

you know what yeah because you have yeah i was just doing the math on some of the things you said so yeah that would have been a while ago but anyway um i had a great all seriousness i had a great weekend i was telling you before the show without getting into tons of detail is one of those weekends where i had a lot of things stacked up and you know me i'm always buffering you know if i'm doing something on saturday then i say well then i want friday to be my me night or whatever and we had some friends in from out of town so we had something to do on friday then we went up to boom city on saturday but then i did and we spent the night but had to rush back on sunday for my volunteer gig and then we had those same folks coming over with some other friends Andy and Nikki for a barbecue all stuff that on its face I enjoy doing but it was all kind of stacked up kind of tight without any buffer and I and I found myself both looking forward to each individual thing that I had this weekend but also sort of stressing about it all and I just had such a good weekend and now especially now that today I didn't even realize today is technically a holiday but I'm in such a good mood now because we got through I'm not even supposed to be here today and I just had such a great weekend I'm not even supposed to be here today but now I also can regroup a little bit right we can kind of get done early and now it's just like I'm in the perfect mood

right now oh good I'm glad and you got a little extra rest this morning and it's a beautiful day but it's not 115 degrees and ideally this has been heard by way of Apple right now so everything's coming up Milhouse Yes, that's what I'm going to – that's what I'm going to – wait, did I just remind you of the thing you're stressed about? Yeah, I keep forgetting about that, yeah. Okay, got one more thing to worry about. All right, let's do this. Let's take a quick break, and then we will be back with more TBTL.

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, I know, I know, I know. That's normally where you would hear the top story sounder. But you know what? It's a holiday, Andrew. I don't know if I've mentioned that before. Oh, I tried to do a tricky thing where I played two drops and it didn't work. You got douged. You got douged. So, yeah, we are going to skip that top story about the license plates. But I really do want to talk about it tomorrow because it is a very interesting story. I mean, it touches on a whole range of things that I was not expecting. Yes. You know, it starts off with this kind of somewhat silly thing of this of this woman's license plate that's referencing her her body and how she wants to be in the world. And then it gets into somebody dealing with ALS. I mean, it's a whole thing. So we'll do this tomorrow. We'll talk about it. But for today, because we're not even supposed to be here today and we're trying to keep it short for our benefit, we're just going to do maybe an email or two and then get out of here.

All right. Sounds good. I got a couple of emails here. I'm a little bit worried about this one, Luke. I don't want to upset you, but I got an email from a listener named Stavros. Subject line, I am livid.

Is that J-Dog's alter ego?

Because I know we're in a beef. Yeah, I don't think J-Dog's listening anymore. I got to bury the hatchet with that guy. Stavros says, I am livid, all caps. On Tuesday's show, you said Arby's, they have the meats. Airlines, they have the planes. How could you not say they have the seats? Is that too obvious? Is that the Maroon 5 of alliteration? I'm so sorry. Please help me understand this.

You know what, Stavros? It's really easy to Monday morning quarterback this show. With the benefit of one to two days to sit and ruminate on better examples of wordplay. Yeah, you can come up with a lot of great ideas. You know what's hard, though? And you know what not everybody can do? Climb into this foxhole day in and day out and risk our very reputations to try to be funny in the moment and or in some way trenchant. Okay? So I go to battle with the wordplay that I have, not the wordplay that I want. But actually, that is a pretty good play on words.

And also, I mean, sure, APM could go out and find and hire hosts that are smarter and quicker and funnier, sharper and more handsome. But who's got time for that or the money? And who's going to come in on the 5th of July and complain about it the whole time?

You think that handsome, smart, funny person is going to be coming in on the 5th of July? No way. We're here. Sorry, is a brains on doing a show today? Yeah. Ask Molly if she's got what she would have said about Arby's. They have the meats, airlines. They have the planes. All right. Let me read another email. Well, I don't know. Are we buying into the Stavros view of the world? It's pretty good.

Well, I don't know, though, because you know what? actually if we can take one more minute to play this out i mean we have the seats rhymes and is funny and as of course uh i don't think it's actually alliterative technically no no you're right involves a rhyme letter but like putting that aside yeah it's more rhyming than alliterative but anyway it's clever but i don't think it's the seats i think it's that the the planes are more fundamental to the situation because you could have the seats i could probably have the seats i could probably go on ebay right now and buy a seat from an embry air whatever it is that i was probably going to be on i could have the seats what i probably can't have is the functioning

plane i'm sorry you you were just talking about going on amazon and buying something i want to let you know that um or ebay genevieve's a little bit closer to me convincing her that there might be a better cooler out there for us remember we were having this little debate about like i said you know i don't even know what i'm talking about but i just feel like cooler technology has probably come a long way i could probably get a better cooler and she was like we don't need a better cooler we just bought this thing like last year and i said it's been about 10 years but i still think there's probably been um some you know because there's always something out there you're always you're always buying things that are a little bit you know more futuristic than i realized was out there why am i just using this rubbermaid uh cooler you know like maybe there's something out there and this weekend i mentioned something about the draining technology on it before this We had a cooler that didn't even have a drain spout on the bottom of it, and this was a big deal for me. I finally got my cooler with a drain spout, my, you know, what, $15 cooler. And the thing is, though, now the drain spout isn't good enough for me because ice keeps on getting clogged in there. You get a nice stream going when you're draining the cooler or just kind of like siphoning off some of the water so you can add more ice. And then all of a sudden it'll just clog up because a little ice cube gets stuck in there. All it needs is a little screen mechanism. There's no way a Yeti cooler hasn't accounted for that. So anyway, just I'll keep you updated on that.

I fully support this, but I don't support you going full LB on it. No, I can't do that. Constantly filling the hole in your heart with upgrading things that were probably fine. I know. Yeah, right. I don't want to do that.

Although this ice machine. There's got to be my friend. Yeah, speaking of, like, you didn't even get a cooler. You just said, you know what? I want a cooler that makes its own ice.

Well, I can't afford a cooler anymore because of how much the ice machine was. But I will tell you, man, the thing does not disappoint. Got home yesterday, and the first thing I did, I walked in, scooped out some of that sweet, sweet pebble ice into a glass, put some Brita-filtered water in there, and I was set for the night. And I also brought some of the ice with me so Rodin could have it in Ziploc bags.

Oh, nice. Not just to cool off your cooler, but actually so he could take it. I see.

Well, I had real ice. I bought real ice at the store, and I put that in the cooler. And then I carefully scooped pebble ice from the ice maker into Ziploc bags and then brought it up to Boom City and its general area so that Rodin could have some. And a lot of it had melted by the time we actually got back to the hotel room. But it was fun because he then did take it. He put it in a glass and he had a drink and he said, this is actually very good.

I'll bet you that was some claw in there. Hey, I have another email to read. But before I get into it, I have a question for you regarding your appliances. Let's get into it. How does Randy get along with the new ice maker? Is there any kind of like battling for your affection there? Is Randy kind of moping around your Roomba?

I have been getting error messages from Randy. I'm not even kidding you. When I was up for the 4th of July hangs, I did, in fact, get a notification that Randy was not able to engage with his duties because he thought that his bin was too full. Was it? I don't know. No. Or was he just, is this a work slowage or a work stoppage?

Was his bin too full or his heart too empty and sad? That's the question. I don't know. I'm going to go check on him right after this. Do you remember a couple of weeks ago we were talking about the cellular technology and that it went back way earlier than we thought to the 1940s? Yeah, mobile phones. Mobile phones and how they were – one of the first examples of usage was for, like, long-haul truckers. And I said, well, weren't CBs around by then? Like, wasn't that the whole point? And I wanted to hear from truckers about whether or not CB radios are still used today with all the – you know, smartphones and cell phones and mobile phones. Heard from several truckers, actually. And they were all really good responses. So my apologies that I'm not going to read them all. But I will read this from our friend Ryan, the trucker, who says CB radios were never long-range communication for any company. Those were for truck-to-truck for three miles or so. Companies could buy a company radio system. Those worked in the 50 to 100-mile range. Starting in the late 1980s, an invention called Qualcomm. I've seen Qualcomm. I think that's used sometimes in radio production as well.

Well, Qualcomm is a huge company. Yeah, I mean, the football stadium in San Diego before the Chargers moved to L.A. was Qualcomm Stadium.

Okay. Well, Ryan says those were put into most long-haul trucks in the 1980s. There was a big keyboard satellite communication, and all your loads were assigned off of this. These charged the carrier literally by the letter. So your company wanted you to use it as little as possible with as few letters as possible. Think of these as text messages 30 years before anyone knew what a text was, because that was basically what Qualcomm is. That also reminds me a little bit of like telegrams, right? Like you have to be really economic with your language because you're paying by the letter or the sentence. Ryan says before Qualcomm's drivers literally used the phone. You emptied out and you called your dispatcher. If he had nothing, he would tell you what direction to drive and call in an hour or so. Finding a place to park a truck with a payphone wasn't easy. So that's interesting. You're just like out there looking for payphones. You can keep checking in. As far as CB use today goes, I have one in my truck, but they aren't used much. And I doubt anyone who has been driving less than 10 years has one. I drive in Washington State. People here generally don't talk much to begin with unless there's bad weather or an accident somewhere. Then they talk quite a bit. So, yeah, I mean, for me, it's just sort of I just remember I think it was my my uncle Steve who maybe had like a scanner or something. You could like on road trips, listen in to the truckers talking. And it was always just kind of exciting. Like it was a quasi public communication that also sort of felt like you were eavesdropping a little bit.

Yeah, I was starting to think when you mentioned Qualcomm that and I think actually what I was thinking of was Nextel. Remember when Nextels came out and the big thing with these Nextel phones, we had them when I worked at KVI. which I was very excited about. Nextel was a sponsor of the show, so I got this free Nextel phone, which you could—it had—I'm going to mess up the technology on this, but it had some kind of almost like walkie-talkie CB-type function on it. So you would just press a button on the side of the phone. It would make that chirp.

Oh, yeah, you could just hear people walk around with that all the time, yeah.

You could just start talking directly to anybody who was in your little Nextel network. Right, I remember that, yeah. Which is kind of a clever idea. I know there's like 8 million apps that do it now, and people send around these Marco Polos. Do you know about this? These are just these like audio recording apps where you just leave this long message and then you just send it to your friend, which again, you can do that within most just texting apps anyway. But yeah, I remember Nextel and being very psyched. I don't even think I used it that much, but just liking the fact that I could use it if the opportunity warranted it.

I remember overhearing them and feeling annoyed by like people walking around the mall going, and like having CD conversations walking around the mall. It is funny. And then we should get out of here. But it's funny how you mentioned now there's a technology. There's like an app for the 2021 generation where you can leave long voice messages and send them to your friend. And it's like, yet leave a voicemail and you'll be laughed off the damn planet.

That is so strange how we're doing that. Or at least there are apps that are now starting to capitalize on the fact that it is nice to sometimes hear your friend's voice. It is. And like I said, this whole Marco Polo, as far as I understand, it's just basically leaving voicemails for each other. But because it's called Marco Polo and it's not, I just called your phone, Andrew, and left a rambling message, somehow people are into it. It's a going concern. Indeed. All right. I was thinking, Andrew, that it might be fun to go out with a song that Ben Gibbard played at my old house in Seattle. i love this um many moons ago i know i i have to say like not to brag but i was listening back to this song this weekend and i was struck by the fact that and please don't get at me music producers in the audience we have a lot of people that actually are professional musicians and people that have their own recording studios i'm sure that there's a lot that i should have done differently with this but the fact that i a person who has no training in how to set up microphones mic'd this in such a way that it sounded like it does i'm pretty proud of how this sounds is what i'm trying to say andrew considering i mean you saw the operation at my old house in seattle it was literally held up by a stick you'll see what i have to work with it also didn't even

capture like the percussiveness of a dog's collar i think momo walked by and and like shook his neck and he had a like a you know some like tags on because there's you can definitely hear a dog shaking uh their collar about 20 seconds into the song i even picked that up yeah that's the kind of Get out of me, Quincy Jones. You ever do that? Thank you. Move over, Diplo. Move over, Calvin Harris. Is move over, Diplo a show title? Sit down, Mark Ronson. That's a better one because he actually is a producer. Well, the problem was you heard me hesitate because I was going to say, sit down, Phil Spector. But then I was like, actually, it's too bad because he's like the easiest. Let's not raise that Spector. Whoa. Was that a show title on a holiday? I don't know. I also wrote down, you got duged, which is actually my favorite so far. Anyway. Okay. Anyway, we're going to go out with that. This is little Ben Gibbard playing at my actual house, recorded by actual me with my actual former dog. This is two dogs ago, shaking his collar in the recording. So anyway, we'll be back here tomorrow with more Imaginary Radio for you. Please do join us for that. Until then, have a great Monday. Hope you're able to relax and enjoy this day. And we'll see you tomorrow. Until then, please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

Shine out and say hello to Never. All the people are dancing and they're having such fun. I wish it could happen to me. Because if you close the door, I'll never have to see the day again. And if you close the door, the night could last forever. Leave the wine glass out and drink a toast to never. Oh, someday I know someone will look into my eyes and say hello. You're my very special one. But if you close the door, I'll never have to see the day again. Dark party bars, shiny Cadillac cars, and the people on subways and trains.

Power out.