Muse

Ah, look at that kooky old cookie jar. You like cookie jars, Kenneth? Well, I guess I never thought about it that much. We had a nice one back home in Georgia. Had a bear on it. I remember when my mom's friend Ron would come over. They'd go into the bedroom to sort out their paperwork, and I'd just go ahead and stare at that cookie jar. It was almost as if I took every problem that I ever had and I put it inside that cookie jar and I sealed it up so tight that nothing would never, ever, ever get out. So, I guess to answer your question, I'd give cookie jars about a B.

TBTL!

I'm starting my own podcast. Hey, that could be fun. All right, everybody, who's ready to laugh?

Yeah!

I can't hear you. That's not true, of course, but cheer louder. Are you seriously detaining me again? Am I being rendered? No, you're being friendered. So just please accept our compulsory hospitality. If you had a favorite saying, what would it be? Life's a party, rock your body. It stinks.

All right, hello. Good morning. Welcome, everyone, to a Tuesday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. Hey, where's the freaking gabagoo? My name's Luke Burbank. I'm your host. You're still doing a podcast? Coming to you from the Nest Broadcast Center high in the sky above Portland, Oregon, where it's currently a bit gray and overcast. But the word is that it is going to be in the 90s today. Mm-mm-mm. I'm flying in hot for that hottie. We got to wrap things up fairly quickly here because I did not get my jog in before the show. And I don't think that this 45 year old sleep apnea plague frame of mine is going to be able to get out there and do a jog in the in the midst of a 90 degree day and the real teeth of it. So I've got to get that going before the sun is at its most intense, which means we need to keep things on schedule here. And again, I do have my priorities straight. This is my job. I'm just mentioning to all of you that I need to get it done so I can go on a jog. That's all. You're on episode 3465 at A Collector's Series.

Let the fun begin.

Sometimes I'm, you know, 5% offended that our supervisors never listen to this show. And then there are other times when I'm 95% relieved they don't. And when I say things like, we got to get this episode over with so I can go take a jog. Those are the days when I'm 95% relieved that they don't know what goes on over here. I mentioned my sleep apnea riddled 45-year-old body. Well, actually, I don't know if it's as riddled with sleep apnea as I thought. I got this special weird mouth guard. It's really a tongue guard in the mail yesterday. So I wanted to try that out. But I also needed a kind of, you know, I needed a, what would I say, a passive observer. I needed some unbiased feedback on how much I actually snore at night. So I downloaded an app to my phone Which actually is kind of like a sleep study Just study it out and you'll see We've got the results Of what is going on with my snoring situation Including some audio From last night So stay tuned for that Or tune out if you're somebody who finds that kind of stuff To be really unsettling Like my friend Andrew does Something I know my friend Andrew loves is bowling And the topic of bowling balls We learned that recently And we've got more bowling balls in the news Beautiful purple balls. Guy in Michigan was breaking up a sort of concrete porch behind his house and found 160 Brunswick bowling balls, which is, you know, novel. There is just a dazzling deed at the end of the story, though, that I think is really what the article should have been about. It should have been guy finds bowling balls and then this happens. we'll tell you what the this is coming up and then time permitting we'll keep things in the upper midwest and tell you about what's been going on in some Minnesota lakes I've heard that they have a few they call it the land of a few lakes people turning their pet goldfish free in the lakes

is it too early to get a fish sandwich

they're pulling goldfish the size of footballs out of these Minnesota lakes so we'll We'll try to get to that. We have a bunch of V-mails.

as well that we're going to try to clear off the books this week before we go into the TBTL Summer Games, which are coming up starting on next Monday. So anyway, that's the plan for today. Of course, we can't do any of it without the help of this guy, the longest running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. He likes to live life, Manos. He's trying out a new, I don't even know if it's catchphrase or just expression. He is Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now from the Roosevelt neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. Good morning, my friend. Good morning, Luke.

I just discovered a little issue not regarding the podcast, regarding my email while you were doing that intro. I'm going to try to make this not boring, but this is something that is slightly upsetting to me. I've done some listeners dirty accidentally. So, listeners can email you and me at these following addresses, andrew at tbtl.net or luke at tbtl.net, right? But there's also a way to contact us through the TBTL website. You click a button, and it says submit a form, and then I see that, and Christina sees that, and I think some other people at APM see that as well. You used to see it. Now you don't see it. That was actually a mistake of mine. I don't think you really care. But anyway, those all come in with a generic headline that says new form submission from website or something along those lines.

And if I remember right, when I would get those, new form submission was bracketed, which makes it even more confusing and generalized.

And you just get a bunch of emails that all say new form submission, and the subject line will give you no hint as to what's in there. So it's not a very good system. It's what I call an APM system. No offense. Some offense. So anyway, well, we've already established there's a low chance that anyone will be at the home office. But it really is one of those things where every little system like that is kind of like, well, we'll have to figure out a workaround, and then the workaround is always kind of janky. But okay. So this is how we get some of our email. Most people just email us directly. But anyway, let's move on to another topic, which is GoDaddy, which is the web service we've been using for a long time, which recently did kind of a big change where the platform for which we read our GoDaddy email is different. And it's actually, I will say, it is better.

I think it's worse, but okay.

It uses Outlook, I guess. It uses Outlook for web, which I did mention I had an issue with the other day. We don't have to get back into that. But it has been way easier for checking email, sorting email, et cetera. It's just not this janky old GoDaddy email system that was probably made in 2001. But all of that is to say when they made the switchover, the Microsoft product saw all of these form submissions as spam. I just clicked on my spam folder, and I've been missing blurs days. I've been missing emails for the past month or so. You're doing me dirty. You're doing me dirty. I'm on. It's on. People looking for help with their TBTL-a-thon, GIFs, et cetera. Like, I've missed, like, weeks and weeks of Blur's Days here. Looks like I've only found, like, three so far. But they're probably just, like, waiting around to hear their Blur's Day, and they never heard it because they used a form that says, click here to email us, and I never saw it. So my apologies. I'm going through all of this now. Well, we'll have to add those folks in, and you know what? Yeah.

Those will be our most special Blur's Days this week.

Yeah, exactly.

So just know that whereas you're probably – if you submitted a Blur's Day for someone or if you submitted your own Blur's Day and you were feeling kind of bummed out that you didn't hear yourself, you're going to get a special – you'll get a special – I can't even – I don't even want to tell you. I don't want to ruin it for you, but you're going to get a very special Blur's Day message on Thursday to make it up to the folks who had their Blur's Days passed over.

Wow. I feel like now we're making a lot of promises. see that that was now now i don't i don't know that we can once again i'm cleaning up your mess okay so just what but i may be creating more messes wait what are we doing i'm harvey kytel

i'm the wolf okay you've really mucked this up yeah now i'm here to i'm here to fix it and the way i'm fixing it is by promising something to the listeners we can't deliver on yeah i like the way

you ended up by saying i drive fast so try to keep up um anyway do we want to talk i'm sort of interested in your snoring situation but i can't remember if we're holding on to that story i don't

think there has been a topic andrew that has generated more email response in recent memory oh mine all went to spam sorry speaking of our email i know that you somehow think snoring is like is is puerile or taboo uh wait what well because you when we talked about it before i think you were a little you seemed to slightly put off by the topic or just not not put off but like maybe sort of like there are certain topics definitely. anything bathroom related anything kind of body part related those are topics that my sense and i could be wrong tell me if i'm wrong my sense is that those are not spaces that are your favorite to play in on the show you're usually like okay we get it let's move on to something else would

that be am i accurately describing things i don't know if i want to i don't know about the broad brush question there i would just say that the thing about snoring the other day was um you know a big part of the show was us literally making snoring noises into the microphone which i think Because, you know, probably every now and then, it's just you and I talking, so some sound effects are probably good. I was feeling self-conscious that a big part of the show was me making snoring noises. I think that's what I was reacting to.

Is that because somebody mentioned, like, you doing a snort months ago, and that is kind of now something that lives in your brain a little bit?

No, I don't think so. I think it was just two 40-year-old men making fake snoring noises into microphones that just maybe thought, like, I don't know if this is, you know, what everybody's into.

Well, I don't know if it was what everybody was into, but what I can tell you is I have, like, I'm done not exaggerating, 20 emails related to snoring. And CPAP machines and fixes and people sending me links to dentists in Portland and people telling stories of how they were going to divorce their spouse if their spouse didn't get a CPAP machine and eventually they relented. And now the person finds it sexy because their spouse doesn't snore. I mean, it is a rich, rich vein of content, Andrew. Good. So, and now we have.

You didn't see any of these emails? Did they literally go to spam? I got one of them. I did just see one that went to spam. Somebody saying, hey, take this seriously. You got to go to a doctor and see if you really need a CPAP machine. And I saw that. I got one about cleaning a CPAP machine, I think. But I think most people probably because this was something you were going through specifically. I think they were probably directly sent to you.

Well, because I'm the, I think we established we both snore. I'm the one who's brave enough to confront it head on. Sure, yeah. So people knew they needed to reach out to me directly. Anyway, so this whole thing started because you said, you kind of want to hear about my snoring, but dot, dot, dot.

Oh, I just wasn't sure if you wanted to wait. I wasn't looking at the show sheet in that moment, so I wasn't sure if I was forcing you to talk about something that you wanted to talk about later on in the show.

Well, let's do this. Let's remind everyone that the TBTL Song of the Summer contest continues and that you can go to tbtl.net right now and you can vote. And there's also a Spotify playlist Which I've seen a number of people Asking about Because the songs are so good And I've even been playing the songs Well I don't want to say which song Because then I'm influencing the outcome But there are a handful of songs Off that list that I have now fully integrated Into my listening experience So please do go vote Because on Thursday So in a mere two days DFTB is going to come back over You know I set up a whole new microphone set up for dftb andrew and i am loving it like i mean since the last time he was over or you set

it up for him last time and now it's just kind of a permanent fixture yeah i set it up for him last

time i didn't realize i had another microphone arm here like oh you love your microphone arms nobody loves an attenuated microphone arm like luke burbank um and i i realized that i actually had another functioning one down here um because i had bought one online that that was kind of cool looking but immediately broke and then i had to go out shell out a bunch of money uh which i should have probably just asked eric if they had something but anyway i bought a better one turns out there was one more mic arm in here and a microphone assure sm7 and so i've got it all set up over there it makes me feel like this is more of a real radio studio now yeah there's two mics like it just there's just something very i i can't describe it other than to say there's something comforting about seeing that microphone over there and i set up a director's chair um for so it just feels like i could have a guest over it i could make a friend at any moment and bring

them over um yeah well i honestly think i'm looking forward to having david on the show on friday but um also yeah like let's leave that set up david i mean he's a he's what we describe in the industry as a fan favorite yes and so he could come on the show even after the song of the summer is over we could always find things to talk to him about hey luke don't forget we have something special to share with david i'm whispering so that he doesn't hear this while he listens to the show but remember we jogging 17 miles somewhere right now hearing this yes we do have something to share with him too have you forgotten about that i mentioned no i have not forgotten very excited

about this no i'm i'm excited about that too um uh the thing is though we're actually friday show So what David is, he is my brother. He is a fan favorite. What he's not, Andrew, is a lobby guest. I know I've talked about this before. We used to have a joke when I was a booker for NPR about the different kinds of guests. There were the guests that were really hard to get. Like you had to work for weeks with their people and maybe, you know, just they were very difficult to schedule because they were busy or whatever. Then you had the people who were clearly like. Like, you could call them the day of, and they'd usually drop everything to come on the show because maybe they had something to promote, a website, a book, a think tank. And then there were what we call lobby guests. They were the people that, if you're really out of ideas, you could just walk to the lobby, and they're probably just sitting there waiting for something to happen. David is not. David is a busy, busy man. And so in order to make this all work from a scheduling standpoint, we're recording that show on Thursday. The reason I mention this is because if you're voting on the Song of the Summer competition, you got to do it like today or tomorrow.

I don't know when he'll be tabulating things, but like I might actually I can I actually have the I set up the polls. So I'm actually the key keeper on that. So I can tell you I'm going to be counting up these polls on Wednesday night, Pacific time. Gotcha. Yeah. So get your votes in on Wednesday during the day or early evening because once the sun sets on the West Coast, I will be counting these up.

Are you using those voting machines that the ghost of Hugo Chavez has direct access to? I mean, what's the security on this vote?

There are chads involved. That's all I can say at this point. There's a guy named Chad who works at APM. Well, there's two chads. There are chads involved.

So definitely, please, yeah, go to tbtl.net today, listen to those songs, and vote so your voice can be heard. Because on Friday's episode of the show, you will hear the reveal of the eight songs that are moving forward. Then we're going to have, because we've got the tbtl summer games going on. Then we've got, like, two weeks. Then you've got nothing but time. Although you know what will happen. It'll be like when you're a kid, Andrew, and it's about to be, like, Christmas break. and the teacher's giving you assignments and you're like yeah but that's that's a lifetime from now that's two weeks from now that will never happen and then it's sunday night yep january 2nd and you're just like oh man i gotta write an entire book report on huck finn you know

that's literally how i ended up doing my colombo impression before i really knew who colombo was was because i had done something like that and we had three options i'll make this quick we had three options for um some sort of like project related to a book we had to read over break and i read some kids mystery book and one of the options we could do was i think a book report one was we could read the actual book out loud onto a tape recorder or we could give some sort of a presentation i'm like well i'll just read it into the tape recorder like that sounds so easy and then i waited until the last minute i just remember having the sunday sweats like trying to read this book and whoa this takes way longer and i remember at some point i had to come up to my parents and say i can't get this done in time can you help me come up with a plan b and then that's when they said do you know who colombo is and i said no and they said start rolling up brown

construction paper because you need a cigar i i love i love this story and i love that you like figured it out and that you pulled it off and that you got a good grade and that i think it was probably so much more fun for your classmates than you know doing the other possible versions of the assignment oh yeah what what i'm what i find interesting about it is it did not send you on a lifelong journey of phoning shit in because stuff like that absolutely did

that for me it did send me on a lifelong journey of having my parents bail me out but like you know

what i mean like that's early and formative and like if you learned at what grade was it again

You know, I don't know. And I also worry about how many of the details I have right about that. But that's my memory of the story. I'm going to say this is, let's say, third grade ish, maybe fourth grade ish. I can't remember who the teacher was.

That's early enough that if you were like, oh man, I'm screwed And then you sort of find an air hole You pop up the ceiling tile and you realize, oh no, there is an escape from this room I'm just going to get into the ventilation, John McClane style Come to the coast, have a few laughs And then you drop down and you realize, oh, that actually worked That's the kind of thing that can then become very much how one lives one's life and it is not how you live your life. You're very on top of things and you really like to avoid those situations.

Yeah, I'm trying to think. There was something the other day that I was doing that I didn't have like a tertiary backup for. And I remember thinking like, I don't like this. I like to always have backups. I like to have backups of backups. And it wasn't even, you know, like with this radio stuff we do, I literally have backup recordings rolling all over the place. I don't, I get really nervous like when I have a file that is saved but not published yet. Remember I had to, for our Lord of the Rings three-hour recording, I immediately put it on a thumb drive and made you hide it somewhere special in your apartment in case anything happened to my copy of it. Like, I really am like that, but I'm like that with other things too, not just radio-related projects. And just the other day, I wish I could remember what it was, but I was like. I don't know, man, you're out, I don't know why you're here, and it's probably like, I'm only buying, like, one quart of milk. I don't know what it was, but it wasn't very life-threatening.

I think, by the way, if things go well on Friday's show with DFTB, we should actually maybe give him access to the loader broadcast that he carried, even if he's not in a financial position to donate at this time.

Oh, that's right, because he can't hear it because he didn't donate. I don't know, though, but then what do we do for that? Yeah, I just feel, and the proper level, by the way, was anything. Yeah, but he's not at any level right now, which hurts. What if we, and I'm not married to this, what if instead of just giving it to him, Luke, because I do wonder, like, he's in his developmental stages, too. And maybe that sets him up for just, like, getting handouts. What if we instead? Hand up, not a handout. That's right. Yeah. What if we'd spent some time on Friday's show? Yes, talking about Song of the Summer. Yes, talking about some other things. but also just taking some real time to sit down and talk to him about how the financial model for public broadcasting works and how we really do rely on listeners to keep this show going.

Or what we could also do is just let him do another recording and take another shot at it, do another version, and then he can have that file. So in other words, we get together, we re-record that riff track, but that one is just for David. but that one he is allowed to take home and listen to on his epic jogs.

Are you, me, and Genevieve also on this, or am I just setting up a recorder and letting him do it? No, it's just David, and he records it at his house.

So we let him, we allow him to record his own riff track at his house, and then he is allowed to have that one if you want.

And he can probably just do that on his phone, right? He doesn't really need anything from me to do that, right?

Yeah. I don't think so, no. I think he's kind of, I mean, the guy is an accomplished radio producer in his own right.

Yeah, that's true.

If we start talking about our old radio home in Seattle And you know the next place I'm going to go with this And we don't have time for this This is already a packed show Which I've established needs to be done by a certain hour of the day So I can try to get out and get my jog on Before it's extremely hot So anyway, let's take a quick break And then we will come back And then we'll get through as much as we can today Before the temperature rises to a level outside That I find to be untenable So stay with us, it's TBTL all right let's thank some donors of the day just realized something andrew going on and on about the potential heat here in portland today and uh I have, I've, I've got to figure out the right temperature for doing this show, because if I put the AC on cold, it gets too cold in here, and then I, like, it's, then, you know, it's just uncomfortable, but if I, but, so what I did today was I had the temperature, the temperature right now is at, like, I think it's at, like, 73, which 73, if you're outside, If it's a 73-degree day, that's, like, lovely. That's just absolutely perfect. But my palms are sweaty. I'm having trouble typing. I'm feeling clammy now because of the temperature. Do you think 73 degrees inside is somehow different than 73 degrees outside? Or is it just that I'm rarely podcasting outside in 73 degrees?

That is an interesting question because, yeah, if I'm using any kind of, you know, I don't have air conditioning here, but if I'm in a hotel or something, yeah, like 70 is where you want it. 73, things are getting a little bit warm. Well, also, hotels, that's a different thing, too, though, because you can't open any windows and you take a shower in there. Don't you hate that feeling? You take a shower in a hotel. There's no real ventilation in the room. And the air is like, you know, at 73 or something. You're just like, oh, I live in a rainforest now.

Yeah, I was when I was in Napa, I was in like a Spring Hill Suites in the Cork District. Seriously, it was just all warehouses where they make cork for like wine bottles. And, you know, it was a fine hotel, but I took note of the fact that they actually had a fan that worked in the bathroom. Oh, nice. I was like, well, this is rare. There must be something about the HVAC. By the way, thank you to our donors of the day. That concludes our message. No, like I, you're right. There must be something about the way hotels, like just the number of rooms and what that would mean from an HVAC standpoint to actually vent all of the rooms. because it's very rare that you go in a bathroom in a hotel and it has a fan that actually draws the steam from the bath or whatever else out of the bathroom. And I have, I don't know if I've said this on the show, but I've certainly thought it. I would like hotel bathrooms, even if they don't have a fan, there should be a switch that turns on a fan sound. because one is often staying in a hotel room with one's significant other and one is often when in the bathroom very close to where one's significant other is and without that just gentle buffer of the sound of a fan, things can get very personal very fast.

The last hotel we were in was that kind of, it's a nice place. I don't want to drag it. I won't say the name of it, but it's near your place, Luke. And Vives and I had to stay there the night before we were – actually, it was the night that we recorded the Lord of the Rings track that David will never hear until he finally does something for TBTL. But it was a nice place. I liked it. Kind of trendy, very cool people there, very nice people there. I liked everything about it. They said if you're going to smoke weed, go on this porch or, like, whatever. It's, like, very accommodating. We didn't take them up on that. It was just the first time I'd been in a hotel where there's kind of like these are the weed smoking sections. But anyway, the one thing is it still had one of those modern bathrooms, which was basically a glass case of emotion, you know, and it's kind of that clouded glass. So there's some privacy. But like the I guess the idea of ever having a shower that isn't just on the same level floor as the rest of the bathroom is out. Like, I just do not understand that design at all so that when you're done taking a shower, the water is just like, you know, all over the floor by the toilet. There's like a drain system that doesn't really work well.

It's a very European thing where they've got, you know, the whole bathroom is basically a giant shower. It's all tiled in such a way that the water can kind of go anywhere. But, yeah, we're not used to that over there.

And also what this thing does, speaking of European, is when European, it actually amplified the sound.

I'm not going to make snore sound.

it amplified the sound like Genevieve if you commented and Genevieve's not as prudish as I am but it's just kind of like not only did it not only did it not like do anything to cover it up it really felt like you were in one of those like weird science experiments where it's like I'm going to pee over here you run across the room and tell me if you can hear

it also I know the hotel you're talking about and they this is just a message to the hotels of America and even to the people remodeling their homes the barn door the barn door has become very popular that sliding barn door the thing that's i mean that's on tracks because it's a space saver so if you have a tight footprint for a room a door that swings open is going to eat up a certain amount of space and it's going to mean that you can't put things in certain places because you got to create clearance for that door opening so the great solution that we've come to in the last few years is everything's a barn door the problem is they're always hung in such a way that they're about an inch off of the ground meaning they do zero sound dampening oh yeah and there's gaps between like the the sliding

door and the glass wall that is sliding you know next to right it's like it's i've never i've never

encountered a like a barn style door a sliding door on a bathroom anywhere that's actually been up to the task of being a bathroom door. No, no. I mean, they make great barn doors. Sure. That's where they should stay. Let's put things that go on the barn on the barn. Let's thank the people who donate to the show on the show, Andrew. And of course, we're talking about Heidi Reynolds out there in Farmington, Minnesota, our Latin correspondent, our hockey enthusiast. We've known Heidi for years and years, and we really appreciate it we are very much in the in the minnesota state of mind andrews we were talking about yesterday because we've also got sarah danzinger and burton cooley in lakeville minnesota checking my notes on today's story see if they're oh uh there's a city called burnsville minnesota where this goldfish story uh is uh is centered out of but that's i guess not lakeville Bert and Sarah, go check your local lakes, though, and just try to make sure that the goldfish population is at a minimum. Christine Hoff is in Moorhead, Minnesota. That's got to be slightly confusing because isn't there a Moorhead North Dakota?

Well, there's Moorhead State, which is in one of the Dakotas, right? I don't know. I'm looking it up. What do you think their mascot is?

I feel like Moorhead State, like where Carson Wentz went?

I'm getting Minnesota. When I type in Moorhead State, I get Minnesota State University Moorhead.

Also, there's a Moorhead State in Kentucky as well, so maybe I'm all confused. I always think of Moorhead as being in the Dakotas, but apparently there's one in Minnesota, and that's where Christine Hoff is. Christine, thank you for the donation. And Siren is in Bluffton, South Carolina.

carolina do you know andrew i may be traveling not to south carolina but to uh georgia where's savannah at georgia right yeah i may be going to georgia for a tv story about the savannah bananas which is a minor league baseball team that has changed a bunch of rules so that the games go faster they're trying to basically solve what's considered to be the boring baseball problem

I know you don't like that, but I do love, I haven't been, wait, yes, I went to Savannah once for a birthday weekend from my friend who had recently, this is years and years ago, she had recently graduated from SCAD, right, Savannah, what is it? College of Art and Design, yeah, and so I got to spend one weekend there, but I remember, and again, this was 15 years ago, if not more, and I remember thinking, I'm going to come back here, and I never have. But, man, there's no other place like Savannah, is there?

People love Savannah. I think I just passed through, but, I mean, it's like one of those places that when people visit it, they come back going like, you know the most fun place to go in America and also the sort of most design-y in a surprising way. I think that has to do with the College of Design being there, the art college being there. But, yeah, people love Savannah. Anyway, people also love Glenn Rosen, who's in Newtown, Massachusetts. Wait, Newton, Massachusetts, right? I'd say Newton. Yeah, Newton. Newton, Mass., and Newtown, Connecticut. Yeah. Okay. All right. Glenn is in Newton. Thank you, Glenn. And then Alexis. Coe. I bet you anything, Alexis, this is not the first time I've seen your last name, and it's not the last time I'm going to mess it up. Keough. Alexis Keough. Or Coe, right? Maybe. Yeah. Coe or Keough in Alexandria, Virginia. I believe that may have been the first place that I ever visited a Five Guys. It certainly was in the greater Alexandria area. You never forget your first Five Guys. You really don't. And you never forget Alexis, although you do forget how to say Alexis' last name. Well, sometimes, yeah, of course. Thank you so much to all of our donors. I saw some other show. I think it was Hodgman. I followed John Hodgman on Twitter, and he had tweeted something about, I think it might have been Judge John Hodgman, the show he does with Jesse Thorne, Something about Well it's time for us to mispronounce a bunch of names People who donate And I was like I felt very seen by that tweet Because it's like it just It stresses me out because these folks are So kind and generous and are the reason We're able to do the show And yet we mess up their names And yet I don't know what we're supposed to do Because we don't have pronouncers So it's just I guess sort of how it goes And I'm never sure

If I should push to get pronouncers For all of our donors I feel like I've asked that before, but it feels like a lot of listeners don't really care. I get the impression a lot of them think it's funny. I think enjoy us stumbling and bumbling with their names. Right. But anyway, yeah, maybe I could work on that for next year.

I think it's fine the way it is, but I just want the listeners to know that it is not – it in no way indicates how appreciative we are. Definitely. We're very, very appreciative. So thank you to our donors for making the show possible. hello and welcome to top story all right um let me just because this is hot the hottest off of the presses at least the presses of my life andrew let me just tell you and we don't have to belabor this but i'm gonna tell you how i did last night in uh my snore study i downloaded an app we are not sponsored this is like the one app that's not currently sponsoring the show so this is uh you You know, not an embedded ad or anything. I ended up on some kind of app called Snore Study. I started on the New York Times Wirecutter blog trying to figure out the best sleep tracking app. And they sent me in a direction of one that's very scientific and very much about improving your sleep. Like, you know, you put in all these factors like here's why I'm not sleeping well. It's this, this, this. And then I think it listens to you, and it does a very complex analysis of your sleep, and then it's a whole mission to make your sleep better as almost like you're trying to improve your physical fitness or something. That wasn't as much what I was looking for from last night. I just wanted to hear if I'm snoring that much. And so I ended up on this other one, which I then downloaded, and I had to put on the nightstand next to me. Now, the plan originally, I got in bed, Andrew, and I put this, like, kind of weird sleep guard or anti-snoring guard in my mouth, which is basically imagine, like, a baby's binky, okay? A pacifier. It's almost exactly like a pacifier, except.

You know where a pacifier has a little, like, ring on the outside so you can pull it out of the baby's mouth? Or, you know what, imagine DK Metcalf's mouth.

I was trying to remember who the player was. I couldn't remember. It's a few of them now.

I don't know why I find it so charming, but I just think it's hilarious.

They have mouth guards, for those who don't know. They have mouth guards to protect their chompers, but on the outside they look like baby pacifiers, often in bright colors.

Which, again, I just think is so funny because I love how much it undermines Or it plays with this notion of hyper-masculinity of these football guys. It's like you've got a baby pacifier in your mouth, which I think is pretty funny. Anyway, so imagine that. But instead of that little ring, that little thing you can pull the pacifier out with, it's got a bubble. And what you do is you press that bubble down so you create a kind of a vacuum. And then you put your tongue in there, and then you release it, and then it kind of holds your tongue in place. Okay. So my original plan was sleep with that thing in and then see how it's going. Well, I got to tell you, it wasn't the most uncomfortable thing I've slept. Well, actually, that's that's not true. It was the most uncomfortable thing I've tried to sleep with in my mouth because I've never used a CPAP. I've never used any other kind of like thing like that. So by definition, because it was the first time I tried to sleep with some night guard, it didn't feel great, but it also didn't seem intolerable. But I was lying there. It also, this is a weird thing to say, it probably didn't help that I had consumed zero alcohol because I was, you know, if I have a few glasses of wine, of course, that'll kind of knock you out. Probably not in a good way. I mean, that's not restful sleep, but it certainly does cause one to be more drowsy. so i was like fully sober pretty well rested from the night before so i'm lying in bed my tongue is like in this little bubble i've got the sleep monitor going and i'm just i'm just like not falling asleep and i'm working through all of my trying to fall asleep stuff and then i realize oh you know what the data on this is only going to be reliable if i do the first night with no mouth guard in so i have a baseline of what's because if i put the mouth guard in and i have zero snores i don't know if that's because or zero apnea i don't know if that's because i really don't have any kind of sleep apnea and because i'm not snoring very much or if it's because the mouth guard was working so i needed to basically do a night without the guard in just to see what the kind of starting point is a baseline a baseline so that's what i did also i was kind of happy to get my tongue out of that weird contraption um again i mentioned at the top of the show but lots of listeners have been weighing in on this topic and sending me messages and uh what most people are saying is the thing that really works or has worked for them or their their partners is going to a dentist and having that dentist custom design some kind of mouth guard that basically keeps and It goes on your top teeth and your bottom teeth, and it keeps your jaw slightly jutted out so that your airway is open. Because I guess part of what's happening when you're snoring is you're relaxing your jaw. Your jaw is sliding back, and it's sort of constricting things back there. So it may come to that for me.

I don't know, but I would like to read you my sleep report here, Andrew, which is, I have to say, not as bad as I was expecting. Okay, so I went to bed. Well, I started this thing monitoring my sleep at 11.13 p.m., and I turned it off at 6.59 a.m. So I was in bed for 7 hours and 46 minutes. My time spent snoring was 1 hour and 22 minutes, which was 18% of the entire night. Now, a minute and 5 seconds of that was light snoring. that looks like oh i see it sorry one hour and five minutes was light snoring okay 16 minutes was loud snoring and i'm happy to say zero minutes and zero seconds was what this app describes as epic snoring how many zero did you say zero zero i did not demonstrate any epic snoring which i'm not even kidding you andrew i'm weirdly proud about no i i would be as well i don't know that i would pass the same test because i again i don't know what it sounds like to be in the room with me when i'm trying to sleep because i'm you know i'm living inside my body in my experience i will sometimes wake myself up a little bit um what i don't see on here and i know this isn't the same as doing a full-on like lab sleep study but interestingly enough what i don't see on here andrew is any kind of apnea like they don't even seem to measure for that but like going through and listening uh i hope this isn't too disturbing for the listeners i'm gonna play some sound of me actually sleeping yeah before you do that can i just mention that

like when i saw this the show sheet today and this is different than what you were saying before it's not about grossness for me especially right now actually having the opportunity to listen to yourself snoring I think this is the one of the most vulnerable things one can do I think I told you a long time ago Genevieve recorded me snoring when I was like sleeping on the couch or so I don't think it was in the middle of the night I think I was taking a nap on a futon which if anybody's gonna snore in a futon um passageways aren't straight um i could be misremembering that but i do remember her playing it for me and me not having a really good sense of humor about it like it was it just felt very it it was it was exposing me like it just i did not like it um and so this what you're about to do i want to say like how not to overly dramatize this but i mean how do you feel about this like this you're about to play for everybody the sound of you snoring I don't know if I would be brave enough to do that well it's strange because different things embarrass different

people differently right like this is just something that I mean probably helps that I didn't register as epic yeah I think if it was epic I would probably be like I would that would be embarrassing for me the fact that I got so my score was a nine now I again people can email in and say this is not this is an app you got off of the apple app store this is not like you're in a lab and there's people studying you with those like electrodes on you and that is all very true but what this app said which was the highest rated app for this kind of thing what it said was the average person who does this for the first time gets a 25 i got a nine zero would be you have zero snoring but i was kind of like i will be honest with you i'm a little relieved to see That I was only snoring for 18% of the night And that most Of that an hour and five minutes was Considered light And that only 16 minutes was loud which by The way were I sleeping in a bed next to someone and they Loud snored for 16 minutes that would be a gross Not gross but that would be a frustrating 16 minutes for me probably or it Would you know be something that would disrupt My sleep let me ask you this Did you say this app was free or not Is this one of the free ones well Well, it's free to download, but then, of course, if I wanted to record the entire night, I had to pony up. I'm on some free trial, which I have to remember to undo, or they're going to nick me $11 for the year.

Well, that's weird that I started from such a cheap place. That doesn't matter. If I'm interested in doing this, I can afford the $11. I'm just curious. Part of me wonders if I should do the same thing. I don't know, like I said, that I would be brave enough to play the results on the air, but I would be interested. Again, I don't think it's consistent night to night, but I think there are nights that I could rock that, what was it, intense snoring or whatever? Epic. Epic snoring. I feel like there are nights where I could probably really ring that bell like somebody's swinging down a heavy hammer at a state fair, if you know what I mean.

Yeah, well, that's the other thing. I didn't have any alcohol last night so that's also skewing the results because if it's a Friday night there's a decent chance I've had a few pops and that could be a whole other ball game right I mean I guess what I need to do and I can't this week because I have like every single day for me is is uh is is quite packed with work so uh I'm not gonna test it this week but I mean what I really need to do at some point I guess on Friday night I could put this thing out uh and although again even i have an event on saturday so uh it's all this work is really interrupting my drinking schedule andrew which is frustrating but um what i really need to do at some point is on a night when i've had a few drinks also do this test because that could be a whole other really a whole other alcohol is one of the main contributors to snoring so anyway so you're gonna play this i

just want to see what your mental state was you're you're okay playing this you've already

reviewed it so there's well a little bit of it it's weird because they sent um the the app it like it records you all night and then it gives you the option of emailing yourself the results and it gives you the option of emailing the audio and it'll just pull it says like 20 clips or something so i think what it does is it goes through and it just automatically identifies 20 moments or like something was happening but they're not labeled they're not it's a little unclear so I the first one I'm gonna guess is more like light snoring I've actually not previewed this I'm just gonna play the first thing it emailed me this is 30 seconds we'll just hear it together okay oh another thing is I didn't I usually run a fan at night but I didn't because I thought I needed to try to keep the room relatively quiet of other noise so it wouldn't confuse the recording. I don't know if that was unnecessary. I will tell you, my neighborhood is louder at night than I realized because I've never tried to sleep without the fan on. I believe that.

I was, like, having fantasies of, like, punching out every person driving a bored-out Harley-Davidson at 115 in Portland. I'm like, what the actual? So I think this would be—this is bare—I don't even think you'd call this snoring. This is just breathing. So that's good, you're breathing. So that's good. But I think it might be it starts you off with like the, you know, the least offensive of the things you're doing. One, two, three, four, five.

OK, so six. You have timestamps on these. Are we playing these in order of the evening? Are we going through your night? I'm assuming.

Well, I'm assuming that that's how the system generates them. They're not timestamped. Again, it's hard for me to explain this in a way that's interesting at all. But basically, I'm kind of flying blind here. But let's see. I know that the sixth one of these is I quickly previewed them. One, two, three, four, five, six. This one is weird because it's not – well, I think the snoring is kind of – there's probably some snoring in here that's not great. But you know what it really was? This is me adjusting the blankets, Andrew, and I think, like, scratching my arm, but in this way that I have no memory of having happened. When you hear this, you're going to be like, well, this person is awake, right? this person is you like it's just a very distinct sound of me scratching my arm and of me like flopping around in the bed like adjusting the blankets but it was the loudest event that happened the entire night like if you look at the wave file it spikes like this was this was the Biggie. Probably me turning the pillow over. Yes, again, tossing and turning. No memory of any of this, by the way.

Yeah, yeah.

So that's like, that was the big event.

Yeah, the breathing there, though, I don't think that's disturbing. It doesn't seem like you're awake there because you're not breathing well.

Right, exactly. And the other thing is I'm not snoring there because usually when I readjust, I lie on my side, which is my least snore-prone. I like sleeping on my back. It's my most comfortable place to sleep, and it's also the most likely to make me snore. I've heard of people doing something where they have their partner duct tape a tennis ball to their own back. So that every time they try to sleep on their back, they can't. Oh, interesting. Wow. I mean, so that it just forces you to be on your side. Now, this one, though. Okay. File number seven. This is, I think, this is the loud snoring. Okay. If these are still in the order they were previously, let's take a listen to this. now here's the thing first of all classic snore i mean that's just right out of central casting i'm not but you know what i'm happy about hearing that i'm not like stopping breathing and then gasping yeah like there doesn't seem to be any evidence and again catch me after a wild friday night it could be a really different story but as far as last night goes this one app that i downloaded it did not appear based on listening through to some of the files and looking at the data it did not appear that i was going through periods of like stopping breathing completely and

then gasping yeah i think i've genevieve says that she's heard me do that i don't know to what degree i don't think it's often but i know that when she does hear it it's upsetting to her and it's probably upsetting to admit for some listeners that i'm admitting that because that's not a good

sign well uh sure but i mean um i mean i think we all know a lot of people uh who have sleep apnea it's it's a pretty common thing and there are people as well who are it's not it's something that also comes with age which is great this is really fun about getting older it's not even always necessarily related to somebody's like physical size or what's going on with that there are all kinds of people with all kinds of different bodies can sort of develop sleep apnea And, well, I don't want to name anyone, but there's – not that this person would ever hear the show, but there's somebody that you and I both know who has been involved in a few shalanigans and other such debauched hangs who has – this guy has sleep apnea like you've never heard. And in fact, we would sometimes, like if the rest of us had woken up or if he'd gone to sleep before us, would just marvel at the fact that this guy was alive.

Because it would be like long periods of time Of no breathing And then just like gasping and catching up And I was like this seems dangerous But this person's still alive on planet earth I don't know if anyone's ever literally just suffocated In their sleep from sleep apnea I tend to think that your body will At some point kick in But anyway I'm relieved that At least night one It didn't seem like I was doing that a lot So I guess tonight the plan is I'm going to sleep with that stupid tongue guard in and see what happens and see if I get the snoring down to like a zero.

Oh, I think you're going to do the opposite. I thought you're going to do like tonight. I'm going to sleep with a bottle of Jameson. That is I'm going to pass out with it.

I will be having Jameson and bad decisions.

That's right.

I can't. I told you I can't have any bad decision nights this week because, again, not there's people that are. we have listeners who are working like in emergency rooms pulling 18 hour shifts as residents dealing with like covid patients so i want to i want to temper my comments uh by pointing out that there are many many people doing things much harder than what we do but i look at my schedule every day this week and it's just like oof so i will not be able to i will not be able to test out the alcohol plus sleeping theory this week but you know i'm sure at some point during uh my little vacation that's coming up andrew i may have a chance to test it out and i will do that uh for tonight though i am going to just sleep with try to sleep with the tongue guard and i'm also a little worried about what that's going to do to my tongue like i was thinking about this as i was tossing and turning and uh starting out with this tongue guard in my mouth which was obviously they couldn't sell this if this thing was going to damage your tongue but i thought boy if there's one thing on my body that I really need for my line of work it's this tongue and if like if I if I wake up tomorrow and like my I've somehow permanently put part of my tongue to sleep or if it's if I pull a tongue muscle like if something goes wrong with this that's pretty bad for me

considering what I do for my job yes that was my big concern when I was had that oral surgery several times right I mean that was they were cutting in not to be gross but they I mean that was really intense yeah exactly and i haven't snored a day since so i said while you're in there take out my snore muscles and they said okay sweetie go back to bed which well that is

you know that i'm i don't think i'm anywhere near that but that is also a thing as i've been doing my extensive snore related reading i mean there are certainly uh surgeries that people can get although those are not always effective either um so who knows again i'm what i'm gonna try to do gonna try to be a little healthier eat a little better and see if I can drop a couple of LBs off of old LB because that also I think helps with it I'm glad though that at least I have a sort of a baseline now I was at 18% of the night with snoring or whatever it was and now I just want to keep working on it and see if I can get that get that down to you know

1% or 0% it's fun to have challenges in games right that's the gamification

I'm gamifying Wait, what? Is that a swear word?

Don't ever say that again.

I'm gamifying my sleep, and I'm happy about it. What do you think, my friend? Should we try to—let's just talk bowling balls real quick. Let's talk bowling balls. Maybe we'll talk goldfish tomorrow. I was surprised at how excited you were about the story of people trying to recycle, or at least people sending bowling balls to the recycling center in—I want to say it was in Brooklyn, in New York. And the guy that was getting like, what was it was some obscene number of bowling balls a day or a week.

The number of people trying to recycle bowling balls a week is just way too high. Like for that many people to be getting rid of bowling balls in 2021 doesn't make sense. And these are the people who've tried to recycle them. There must be a lot of people who are not trying to recycle the non-recyclable bowling balls. Like what is going on?

Well, Andrew, there's another way to get rid of those bowling balls you don't need anymore. Bury them in your backyard under this and use it as fill for some concrete steps you're putting in. This guy in Michigan named David Olson was demolishing the back steps of his house early in July. He had been having some water intrusion problems and somebody had come out and said, well, your problem is these steps are slanting towards like the sliding glass door on the back of your house. And so when it rains, that water is draining into your house. So he got out there with a sledgehammer and started to break this kind of like concrete steps area and whatever it was, patio up. And he found some bowling balls and he dug some more and found some more bowling balls. First, he found 50 and he put that on Facebook. Then he kept digging. He found a total of 120.

Then it climbed to 158, and he also has now found a couple more balls. He's up to 160 bowling balls that he has pulled out from this area. He thinks there are more bowling balls in the yard, but he just doesn't want to keep digging because it's like he kind of needs them now for, like, fill.

Because that's why they were – oh, sorry, Luke. Go ahead. No, keep going. I was just going to say it turns out that's why they were there. It wasn't like somebody built a house on an old bowling ball graveyard. It's that apparently there's like a Brunswick, you know, the Brunswick brand bowling ball company. Apparently, there's like a factory or something nearby or there used to be. And apparently workers used to take the non usable balls home and use it for fill in their construction projects instead of like, you know, sand or dirt. They took up a lot of space and they were solid.

Yeah, it was in Muskegon, Michigan. There was a Brunswick bowling ball plant. I love the idea, though, Andrew, of someone building their house on an old bowling cemetery. And the ghosts are those animated characters that show up when you get like a strike. Like a pin with a cowboy hat on it. And sunglasses. Yes.

And they haunt the house.

You come around the corner. It's just – I mean that is possibly the lowest form of graphic-based humor. It's like whatever you call it, like a 7-10 split. Shows up, and it's like a demon. It's like two demon bowling pins, because this is a really tough split to pick up.

May the power of Homer compel you. May the power of Homer compel you. I think I'm confusing my horror movies.

No, I think that was good. That was The Exorcist.

Yeah, but I...

And then Homer, because he loves bowling.

But The Exorcist isn't the one where it's built on an old burial ground. I believe that's Poltergeist.

Is that Poltergeist? I know Pet Sematary is also kind of based on something like that. Now, at the beginning of the show, well, actually, before the show even started, Andrew, when this episode was just a twinkle in your mommy and daddy's eye, you and I were talking about this story. And you said, Luke, I know exactly the thing that you're fascinated with.

Yeah, because you said, oh, there's a dazzling. I think we were going through our sound check and you were like, oh, yeah, there's a dazzling detail. I'm like, dude, I almost like in the back of my mind, you sent me this article, but wasn't it the very last line of the story? And I was in my mind when I read that this morning, I'm like, I hope there's an off chance that Luke didn't read this dazzling detail or it didn't stand out. Because like to me, like the whole story just begins with the last sentence. Like we need a reporter on this now.

Right. So he's got all these bowling balls and they're asking what he's what's he going to do with them. And he says he plans to use the balls as edging for his landscaping, which I'm really not into kitsch. I'm I'm I'm pretty sort of stridently anti kitsch. This would be the one time when I think I would allow it, because every time you go in his backyard and you're like, what's the story on those? You'd be like, well, actually, like the fact that they were like part of the sort of building, if you will, they were part of the of this home when he moved there, unbeknownst to him and his family. I think that actually makes it kind of fun.

Yeah, my neighbors in Wallingford had, and they were, like, they had a really nice yard that was also kind of, like, overgrown and had kind of a natural beauty. It wasn't, like, overly tended, and I'm not saying that as a backhanded compliment, but it was that kind of Wallingford neighborhood. And they definitely had some bowling balls around the edges of some of their, like, kind of garden areas. But, again, they had been there for years and years. It didn't seem ostentatious. It just seemed sort of like the natural surroundings almost.

i am i am very very very much not into whimsy like for my design aesthetic like you will you'll never catch me putting up a whimsical thing in my home um and i find i think the idea of bowling balls it's it's it's it's more kitsch than whimsy but it's right on the line but in this case like like i was saying at least there's a story behind it so that's going to do with some of it he also donated eight balls to a nearby church andrew to use in a bowling ball

cannon at a pig roast yeah of course to use it a bowling ball cannon at a pig roast okay he donated eight of the balls to a nearby church to use a bowling ball cannon at a pig roast a bowling ball cannon i'm sorry what at a pig roast a bowling ball cannon luke at a pig roast what are they

doing are they sending hunter s thompson's remains are they johnny depp not finish the job

how far do they go like just please embed somebody embed a reporter at this pig roast i want to hear the entire story of the bowling ball cannon that's all i care about from this

story is that there is a bowling ball cannon, which sounds... unbelievably dangerous. It really does. Now I'm bowling ball cannon. We've got to Google this. We've got to figure out bowling ball. Let's see. I'm sure this will be a very underwhelming thing, but this is from the Salt Lake Tribune. Robert Kirby's bowling ball cannon destroys a washing machine. It's not sounding more safe. No, but more exciting. Here we go. I'm just playing. They're out in, like, the salt flats, which that's the kind of place where you might be able to pull off a bowling ball cannon safely. I don't know about Michigan. I don't know about the greater Detroit area. Here we go. He's lighting. He's using like a little small kind of handheld torch to light this cannon, which is just pointed horizontally at a washing machine that is, I don't know, 20 feet away. Oh, he missed. Wow. Here it comes again. Try number two. And let's see. This time. What's weird is the cannon, maybe just the perspective of the video, the cannon doesn't look big enough to hold bowling balls, but I guess it does or something. I think he has a bowling ball cannon. I can't believe this is where I'm taking it. I think he might have been using something else, though, because he has two different cannons. He has one that looks like it shoots baseballs and one that it looks like it shoots bowling balls. And I think it's the baseball cannon that's aimed at the washing machine. So check your facts, Salt Lake Tribune, MSM. Come on. Get it together. The other thing that was interesting about this article was that his father-in-law, or rather his stepfather, is going to use them as custom furniture legs, which is less interesting than the bowling ball cannon, but still kind of interesting. I feel like a whole family legacy is going to be established of bowling balls being used. It's sort of like that family that has, like, a really productive pear tree on their property for some reason, and so everything is pears. It's like they're bringing you jarred, like, canned pears for every Christmas. Like, hey, we canned some more pears. And you're like, thank you. I still have the ones from last year. Like, this family, everything in this family is going to be bowling ball related because they've got an abundance of bowling balls. That is true.

They're going to hollow them out, use them as, like, you know, plant potters. What's the word I'm looking for there? Pots for your plants probably is what I was looking for there.

You're thinking of bower flocks, Andrew, which was a very unsatisfying answer to the weekend edition Sunday puzzle. I haven't listened yet.

What is it? Is it like a spoonerism? Instead of flower box, it's bower flocks?

Wow, good use of spoonerism. And yes, so this was the way the question was set up. It's a thing that is a place where plants would grow. And when you spoonerize it, it's also something, a place where plants would grow. And then the second part of the spoonerism is a plant. Now, I think I just did a better job explaining to you than Will Shorts did. No offense, Will. I know this is your whole game, literally. But I got thrown because I thought that the spoonerized version had to both be a place plants could grow and itself a plant.

That's what it sounded like even there. Right.

So it ended up being flower box, which if you spoonerize it is Bower Phlox, B-O-W-E-R.

Why wouldn't it be a Blower Phlox? You're right about that. Why are you moving two letters from the front? It would be Blower Fox. You're absolutely right. Get him on the line. He's the competing network, right? We can't just get him on the line? I don't know.

I used to romp with Lulu, though. She could probably get him. They seem tight. By the way, I think Lulu Miller, peace and love. Everybody loves Scott Simon, and Scott Simon is great. And also Leanne Hanson, I think, maybe started off the Wee Son, like that puzzle thing. And I love Leanne Hanson. I think she's really great. I think Lulu Garcia Navarro is the absolute best at hosting that thing. She gives really great hints that all feel like she's just making them up on the fly and trying to be helpful. She will sing things all the time, but, like, not in a show-offy way, not in, like, oh, I think don't make me sing, but more just in a, like, she has no ego, and she'll just be, like, anything she thinks she can do to kind of help the person. I mean, Lulu Garcia Navarro, like, hosting, along with Will Shorts, that puzzle segment, it's just – it's chef's kiss. Is that her – is she the main host now or she just fills in sometimes?

See, I haven't heard that. really long time she is great i think she's like me she's one of the most talented people at that network in my opinion but whatevs um i think yeah because listen flat you're right flower box should be blower fox if we're just gonna swap he did say swap the consonants i mean is it a spoonerism if you swap the consonants i feel like a spoonerism which i had to look up is very much about just switching the first two letters.

I think so. Although, I mean, I don't want to come in strong here like I'm an expert. I don't know. I feel like Will Shorts, I feel like I would trust him more than me on this.

I don't, I'm sure, yes. Will Shorts is very smart. This is all he does, and I'm sure he's beloved by our listeners, and I think he does a great job. So I'm sure he knows that that is technically a spoonerism because can you imagine the emails that they get Like, I mean, that thing is like a moth to the pedantic. I should say it's like a flame to the pedantic moth. Like, if you are somebody who likes to well actually, probably that puzzle is your favorite thing that happens all weeks. You know what I mean?

Oh, my gosh. I got to get this off my chest. We have so much to get to. Maybe I shouldn't just like, you know, shadow box with some idiot on Twitter. Uh-oh. But this doesn't involve us at all. You mean battle shocks? This isn't a personal. Yes, that is what I think. But OK, so, you know, that I'm at least was pretty deep in the Levitard show listening. I've fallen off in recent weeks, but it's this complicated relationship. There's this one really hardcore listener who used to, like, kind of run the Dan Levitard show's unofficial Reddit page, which is where fans can, you know, get together and love the show but also complain about the show, whatever. He was sort of ousted from his role as Reddit king. We don't have to get into this. All I know now is he now tweets under the account, like, Reddit or Levitard fan account or something, right? But he's still like a – he's just like one of those uber listeners who's kind of on everybody's radar. And so – and, of course, Mina Kimes is kind of part of that world too or used to be. She's still at ESPN, so she's not allowed on the show anymore because of ESPN rules. But Mina Kimes, who's just a damn delight, tweeted something out about the second – she said, I don't think the second season of the show Dave on FX is getting enough love or something like that. she's clearly saying i'm watching the second season of the show it doesn't have as much buzz as the first one and um and i don't think it's getting enough love this person this fan account this this person who's a big levitard fan comes in and says actually like literally i don't have it in front of me but it actually it literally started with the word actually or the first sentence said the new season is a little bit thin actually and it doesn't hit this this and this and I'm just like, this was just a person who, first of all, is a million times smarter than you and more famous than you just saying, I like this show. And you actually lead her. You actually lead her that her opinion is wrong, that not enough people are appreciating a season of a show. It was just like, I don't understand. And the reason I'm maybe emphasizing, this isn't a stranger. I'll bet you this person has potentially met her or she at least knows who he is. you know like he's that he's big enough in the universe and i'm just like right how are you actuallying people like this like do you not hear that yet weirdly now i'm thinking about a conversation i had you know on the slack channel yesterday one of our listeners i'm sorry i can't remember your name um posted that uh they don't like the second season of i think you can leave as much as the first and i actually did say weirdly i do like the second season more but i think it's because it's darker and i like dark stuff but i hope i wasn't actuallying that person But I was like saying like, well, weirdly, I was I meant more like, yeah, it is a weirder season, but I kind of like it more.

But I hope I didn't come off as actually, you're not getting it.

Well, the difference I think the difference is if you're saying, well, my opinion on the matter is this. That's totally different than, well, you don't understand this or you're wrong about your opinion is wrong. That's I mean, that's where it gets weird. And you're right, I mean My guess would be that Mina At some point was aware of this person Probably when Mina was less famous And when the Levitard show was maybe Although maybe it's gone back to being somewhat boutique Because it's not on the radio There's probably a period of time where Mina was much more aware Of the online chatter around that show And who the players were Because it was a bigger deal for her to be on the show Now Mina's star has risen so much That it's like I'm sure she's got bigger fish to fry But I could see a time, you know, a few years back where it's like the person who's the main power tweeter. Related to the show would be someone

She had seen tweets from you know

Yeah like power tweeter yeah I was actually looking For it here anyway that was a really Unnecessary aside that gets into some

No I'll see your unnecessary aside And I'll raise it Andrew I have now While we were talking I've been reviewing This video from the Salt Lake Tribune Called Robert Kirby's bowling ball cannon Destroys a washing machine and I'm Very I'm very upset I almost might Need to write a letter because It's clear this guy Has multiple cannons right He's got a huge thing that can shoot bowling balls, and then he's got a bunch of other smaller cannons. And he demonstrates the shooting of a bowling ball, the blasting of a bowling ball, but the cannon is facing straight up. Then he gets one of his smaller cannons, and he uses that to shoot the washing machine. So the headline, Robert Kirby's bowling ball cannon destroys a washing machine, is just absolutely false. He didn't use the bowling ball cannon to destroy the washing machine. He demonstrated the bowling ball cannon, used a different cannon that holds smaller cannonballs, if you will, to destroy the washing machine, which, by the way, wasn't destroyed. It just had a kind of small hole blasted in it. Journalism is going to seed, man. That's what I'm saying. Although, you know, me saying that is like when the CD when it's not the CDC, but I guess it's the Food and Drug Administration. Every time the FDA makes Johnson and Johnson issue a warning about the vaccine, I'm like, can we not? I'm like, it's fine. Everyone's going to be fine. I know one person had a nerve disorder, which sucks, but can we not give more fodder to the people that don't want to take these vaccines? Right. Like, I'll roll the dice with whatever the deleterious—unless it's killing more people than COVID. Leave off with the warnings about the J&J.

Well, yeah. I mean, what? You don't agree with that? Well, I just mean—I mean, you don't want suppression of data. In this case, I do.

That's not—I can't get behind that. Take it out to the Bonneville Salt Flats, shoot it with a bowling ball cannon. That's not a good thing. Because what I don't need is the wingnuts of the world having another red herring to point at. Like, to me, this is why I'm not in charge of the FDA. I mean, it's one of the many reasons. But it's like if the side effect is more rare than – or put it this way. If the side effect is probably less bad than dying of covid, then I don't think we need to talk about it, because I think not dying of covid is the goal. And like every time they every time they hit pause on it, every time. I mean, I'm obviously being somewhat tongue in cheek here, but I just some part of me does die every time there's a headline about them posting a warning or hitting pause out of an abundance of caution. Yeah, because then they do the study. They do the study They find out that it's a very very very small number of people And that in fact If you were to give X million of people Like if you took X million people In the US population And didn't give them the vaccine Some number of them would also develop whatever this issue is Because you're just talking about large numbers of people And I don't know I see those headlines and I just think Well that's some bullshit Someone's going to be spinning on Facebook soon

And the problem is it's the headline Because you know that the article probably contains all the caveats and all of the all of the detailed information that says, like, you know, that puts this in perspective and context. But that's not what people are reading. I mean, how many times you could put together don't, but you could put together a montage of me saying, well, I haven't read the story. Well, I haven't read the story. Well, I haven't read the story because we're kind of, you know, we're we're just going on headlines these days. And that's not good for media literacy either.

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 you said yesterday you were like hey burbs we got a lot of great voicemails you have one job tomorrow don't spend the whole show dissecting a salt lake tribune youtube video about bowling ball cannons and i said andrew i gotta be me don't clip my wings So, I did kind of burn through a lot of our time, but maybe like a voicemail that is particularly intriguing to you?

Yeah, well, I got voicemails and emails here, and the thing is, I want to get through these before we go to break, because they'll become less and less relevant over the break, and we'll get a whole bunch more in.

Tomorrow or Thursday's show, let's just make the whole show. What about a V-mail frenzy?

Yeah, that's what I was suggesting in my email to you yesterday. I didn't read the email. I don't care for the ending. I think I literally wrote, let's do an email, friends. Here, I want to read an email. Did you read that skywriting over the land? I didn't like the end. This is an email from our friend, my former neighbor in New Hampshire, Ryan, who put together that amazing quiz for us for the Winter Games last year all about testing.

my New Hampshire knowledge. And Ryan heard us talking about poop in pools last week. What was the story that triggered this? Do you remember?

It's okay if not. Yeah, it was the, I'm thinking. Oh, oh, oh, the CDC. It was the slip and slide. Yeah, the CDC. Oh, no, no, no, sorry. We've had a couple of stories along those lines. We had the slip and slide show that was shut down because of Giardia. And then we had, like you said, the CDC gif about not going in a pool

if you have diarrhea exactly and in the in the cutie little cartoony gif got graphic when a little girl slides down a slide and leaves a trail of brown behind her well ryan says i was listening to the show about fecal incident responses and pools and for a rare moment i experienced the confidence of a much younger ryan i actually feel like an expert in something i took a summer gig managing a pool and tennis club this year and this is a pretty major issue with very specific protocols there are two are you ready to get science scientific here luke there are two basic this scientician there are two basic types of fecal incidents formed fecal matter and diarrhea wow yeah buckle up buddy wilson voice the reason the cdc is especially concerned about diarrhea is that it obviously releases more potential germs and bacteria into the pool as the fecal matter disintegrates into the water one of the bacteria that is potentially spread is actually chlorine tolerant which is obviously more concerning so the fecal incident response FIR for diarrhea requires significantly more time in raising the levels of chlorine to extremely high levels then okay this is going to get a little bit numbersy i streamlined this a little bit but the normal levels of chlorine in a pool should be maintained between one to five ppm that's parts per million i guess one through uh right would that be parts per million ppm yeah i'm guessing one through five parts per million the fir for diarrhea calls for raising the levels to 20 parts per million for 13 hours wow or you can use a little bit less and and go for 25 and a half hours then the filters have to be cleaned out and rinsed and the chlorine must get back down to a safe level before letting people back in the pool. So you have a diarrhea incident. You're shutting that shit down literally for 13 hours. Then for formed fecal matter, a.k.a. poop, the process is much simpler. Clear the pool.

A.k.a. beautiful double tapered shit.

Okay. Clear the pool. Remove the poop. Bring levels of chlorine to at least 2 ppm and wait for 20 to 30 minutes before letting people back in. And so that's a 20 to 30 minute turnaround with a much less increase in the chlorine. Time can go down as the chlorine PPMs are higher. The formed nature of the fecal matter doesn't really allow for much of the bacteria to release into the pool. And it is generally believed that chlorine tolerant parasite called crypto doesn't make it out of the poop into the water. So there you have it.

I've been trying to get into crypto.

Yes, a semi-expert opinion. You should have a non-fungible poop. A semi-expert opinion and explanation of fecal incident responses And if it's alright with you, let's never speak of this again

Talking about NFT, it's a non-fecal token

That was a better tip That is fascinating

That's really, really interesting So, I mean, the thing about the... I'm not trying to be gross here Or repeatedly kind of talk about this in terms that are unpleasant for the listeners So I am trying to be a little bit careful here, but let's just say the worst of the two situations, the the, you know, diarrhea, basically. I wonder how you figure out that happened. I wonder if it's people self-reporting, if it's a kid self-reporting or if it's a lifeguard seeing something, seeing a suspicious discoloration, because the the formed situation is. Well, you can see it. There it is in the pool. But it seems like the other one would be really mostly on the honor system of a person being like, hey, I had a situation because that's I mean, unless it was like something that got wildly out of control. Yeah, that's why you even know if it's happening.

That's as the people running the pool. Ryan's email. I edited that down quite a bit. Ryan's email was pretty long, but he does say here. Most people would be too embarrassed to tell the guards what happened. And thus, we have the gif in the campaigns from the CDC to keep people who have diarrhea away from pools.

I just really have to tell you, though, I think I sort of got into this the other day, but someday, I don't know, I may have young children. It could happen. Even young children can tolerate Luke as a father. And I think I'm fully at the point. where i'm probably never going in i told you i was at that health club that former boss is a member but talk about putting somebody's biz out on blast just so you know everyone our former boss is working out um but that club had a big swimming pool and has like a really um you know it's like a resort style swimming pool with it's huge and there's tons of kids there and there are life guards the whole thing right and like i don't know if i'm ever gonna get in a pool like that again And if I had little kids, of course, they would be like, let's play Marco Polo or whatever. I don't know. This might be an issue for me, like, going forward. Like, I don't think I'm ever going to be able to get in the pool at a Hojo's or something knowing this about these swimming pools. It's just it's pretty upsetting. I also I noticed on TikTok somebody was it was a couple of women that were like in Vegas having fun. But the point of their TikTok was like, there's no way we're going in this pool. And it was, you know, just some resort, probably one of the biggies. And the pool was teeming with humanity, teeming, just person. And I've been in pools, maybe not quite that packed, but I've been in many a Las Vegas swimming pool. And it's actually very fun. But as I looked at that pool full of people, I thought they're all drinking. Some of them have to be peeing because they just don't want to get out of the pool. Some of them, I bet no one showered before they got in there. Who knows some of them may be dealing with stomach distress and trying to play it off or have the remnants of not great personal hygiene like you just don't know everyone's story as they're getting into that swimming pool and I looked at it and I instead of you know five years ago I would have been like oh my god that looks fun a Vegas swimming pool full of people having fun and now I look at I just go that is a that is a formed and unformed fecal disaster.

You know, you mentioned that you were going on this mental journey because somebody tweeted that out. And I wonder if that's just like I wonder if the idea of things teeming with humanity, generally speaking, are just more on people's minds now. Maybe I shouldn't form this as a question. Maybe it's obvious because of COVID. I wonder if the same thoughts would have gone through this particular individual's—I'm talking like a cop now—this particular individual would have had the same thoughts pre-pandemic, or if when we see big groups of people, we think of all the grossness a lot more now.

So maybe, although I don't think like I was watching that Euro Cup on Sunday and it was in Wembley Stadium and it was packed, at least the, you know, the sort of England side was quite packed and it looked great. Like it looked fun to me. I wasn't thinking, think about all those people breathing. So, I mean, I can't speak for I think you're probably right that generally we're all more aware of germs. But I think there's just something for me about being in like a contained body of water with a bunch of other people and not really knowing what their personal hygiene or intestinal health is going into it. That like literally the scales have like fallen from my eyes in a way that they had, you know, they had been in place before. Or maybe part of it was having access to my own swimming pool, so I was very aware of what the sitch was in there, and it was pretty pristine. I don't know. There's just something about those public pools that it's become very unappealing to me.

So even if you were at a resort or something, Vives and I are going on vacation to Hawaii pretty soon. Well, not pretty soon, but in January. Look forward to those winter games. Can we start recording the winter games now? um but uh you know we're not going to a resort but we are staying in like some sort of condo that has an outdoor pool and for me like you know I assume that I will be spending most of my time hanging at the edge of that pool like in the pool arms hanging out with a paperback book reading I still like that move I mean I am a little bit more as an adult you know I was looking at the pool at the La Quinta Inn where you know we were staying a couple of weeks ago and their kids were splashing our friends kids were splashing around in there and um that did seem very unappealing to me this indoor pool in this kind of steamy area with a lot of humanity a lot of children there were not a lot of children in there in the moment i just mean that like a lot of children coming and going out of this and then it didn't help when people started pointing out some brown substance smeared on the floor that didn't look too good um that definitely started to get into my head more and more but um generally speaking if i'm on vacation somewhere and it's more of an if it's like a lot of adults just like kind of sipping a cocktail in a pool while reading a book or whatever i mean yeah there's there's probably some cleanliness issues but i don't think i'm too much in my head to never go in in that scenario again i think it's case by case like carrie and i used

to go stay at this place in palm springs a lot called the colony palm and one thing was there were not that many kids there and i don't say this to disparage children it's just i just don't think kids are as in control of that part of their body when they're really little but we would stay at this place and i would go in and out of the pool all the time it was also like

Pretty boutique. The pool looked very clean. I know this is not stuff you can actually see, but there was just – it was outdoors, which helps. Like the idea of a pool that's inside, like you said, with all that kind of chlorinated air and the condensation on the windows, that's just an overall bad feeling. That didn't gross me out at all. I think if I were to go back there and if I were – again, I understand this is all cognitive dissonance because I can't – I don't know anyone's story and how they look doesn't tell me anything. And yet, if it were that pool at the Colony Palms, and if it were a couple of adults who looked fairly hygienic, lounging in one end of it, and the pool looked totally clean, I probably wouldn't have a problem getting in.

And you said you can't tell how clean something is by looking at it, which is true, but we do have outward signifiers. It kind of goes back to the masking thing, you know, like during the heart of the pandemic. it's like okay is this mask really protecting everything right now or is it kind of a signal to say i'm generally speaking in my life following the proper protocols and so when you look at a pool if it looks nice on the outside and everything is really well maintained and everything is very uh in order well then you can assume that the people who are running the pool are also applying that sort of scrutiny to the water itself potentially i'm not saying definitely but like

but also you just don't know yeah i agree with you except yes there's like there's overt signs Like if you walk into a pretty down market motel and everything is kind of falling apart and the pool has got a greenish tint to it, that tells you something. But I also don't think somebody staying at a relatively fancy hotel in Palm Springs means they're good at wiping their butt. Like and that's the – you know what I mean? That's what I'm thinking about is like what I'm realizing now is I just don't know anyone's story and I don't know what their personal hygiene is. And so, again, if I'm using the Palm Springs example, I probably would get in the pool. But I'm definitely a lot more sensitive around that, I think, than I've ever been before in my life. So I don't know what else to say about that other than, you know, I hope that my kids enjoy splashing around. My future children enjoy splashing around in the pool by themselves. Daddy is going to be sitting on the side of the pool reading A New Yorker if you need me. Or you'll just have built your own pool by then. Oh, that's a plan. Believe me. My other favorite thing to stock are like shipping container pools. Oh, I've heard of that. That's a whole thing that they're doing now. I don't know if it's actually probably when it's all said and done any cheaper than an in-ground pool. But, yeah, there's a number of companies that will take a shipping container and convert it into a swimming pool and install it in your yard, which is somehow really cool to me, even though it is effectively an above-ground pool. but it's just so design-y and kind of cool that, you know, so I don't know. We'll see. Okay. We need to get out of here, but tomorrow and Thursday, we will definitely try to work our way through all of the e-mails and V-mails, like you said, because most of them will probably expire if we try to keep them over the entire summer game. Yeah, we should do that.

Yeah, and Thursdays, we usually do blurs days, although we don't have a – despite my mistake of not seeing some of these blurs days, Right now, we're not overwhelmed on Blur's Day, so maybe we can do some emails and V-mails there, too. You have a song that I believe was maybe a song of the summer once, or maybe it's just one of your favorite summer songs by a band whose name I'm forgetting, but they're kind of friends of the show, and it's like pool blues, summer pool blues, or what is it?

Yeah, Miniature Tigers, Swimming Pool Blues.

I believe it won. Did it? Okay, yeah. It was a song.

song of the summer one year I have this memory of like us doing the show doing the picnic from Chateau Saint-Michel and then firing Swimming Pool Blues I eat playing it and everyone kind of going crazy because it won I could be wrong about that but definitely this is like a real summer jam let's do it alright we'll go out with a little miniature tigers alright thanks for listening everybody we will be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you so until then have a great tuesday stay safe and please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all

your hair grew long in the time i was away and now you're gone and now you're gone i feel your pain your eyes are brown like the earth beneath my feet oh when you cry oh when you cry

We'll be right back.

There's no other way, no way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

When I first met you, we rushed into a bed.

Power out.

Thank you.