Muse

I am a good person, and sometimes good people don't get no respect. Rodney Dangerfield. Hey, I don't get no respect. No respect at all. When I was in the sandbox as a kid, I got no respect. Ah, you know what don't get no respect? Airplane food. Why don't they just make the plane out of the airline food? My wife don't get no respect. So take her, please, for example. If you don't get no respect, you might be a redneck. Respect is nice. What's the deal with grape nuts? No grapes, no nuts. I don't get no respect.

TBTL.

My mom told me if I wait for things, like, good things will happen to me, dude. and I waited for some things and I got some banana bread at work today, dude. Hell yeah.

Listen up, ladies. I get it. It is very hard not to get seduced by these two. And yeah, I'm going to say it. These two, super good looking, super hot guys.

Oh, that naughty old elf must be one mean bastard to give us this so early.

Oh, won't somebody please think of the children?

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

Get ready for a few laughs and some great information.

My name is Luke Burbank. I'm your host. As Jay would say, he's got flow. Coming to you from the corner of Hollywood and Highland, in the shadow of the Hollywood sign here in beautiful Los Angeles, California.

California, got sunshine.

Had a wonderful Monday morning already. Got a chance to head over to Runyon Canyon, which I feel is a misleading name. Because it sounds like you're going to be walking in a canyon, but really what you're doing is walking up a mountain. I don't know the point at which a tall hill becomes a mountain, but it feels fairly mountainous when you're trying to make your way up to the top of that thing. So you walk up it, and you think, this is really challenging. Like, this is very steep, walking up Runyon Canyon. And then you think, well, when I'm jogging down the other side, that's going to be easy street. But actually, it's not, because it's so steep going down. Presents its own set of issues. But anyway, I am feeling good. I am feeling ready, my friends, for episode 3484 in a collector series. Coming to you from, by the way, steps, mere steps from the magic castle. This is the magic trick, huh? Illusion, Michael. That's right. As I said, it is 3484 in a collector's series.

Let the fun begin.

And we've got stuff to talk about on this Monday. Important things. Important things related to the world of TBTL, including...

What's courageous about eating a hot dog?

The story that Oscar Mayer and Dogecoin have collabed. They are selling. I think it's like, well, it's the street value is about $2,000 of Dogecoin. It's a cryptocurrency, right? That is embedded somehow in a pack of Oscar Mayer hot dogs.

How funny is that? That's pretty funny.

Just relentlessly fun. The synergy of, well, one thing is very real. Oscar Mayer hot dogs are very real. Dogecoin, I don't know. The jury may still be out, but we'll tell you what's going on with that. Also, I may have this morning torpedoed an international business deal involving medical data tracking in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I told you, I get a lot done in the morning before this show. I just chatted with Cecily Strong from SNL. That's for the Livewire show. I ruined an international business deal. I hiked up a canyon. A lot going on, and I want to tell you about all of it. I also want to tell this guy about it, the longest-running Cobra of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. Recently back from beautiful Packwood, Washington, he is Andrew Firedall. Walsh, and he's joining me right now from the Roosevelt neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. Good morning, my friend.

Hey, Luke, good morning. I wouldn't usually ask you this once we're already recording, But could you add one thing to the top stories segment of today's show as well? Do you do you remember last week? You probably.

don't but i think it was on friday you had mentioned briefly a headline that you had seen uh involving the artist the weekend uh the headline had said that the weekend is now sober but there were some caveats it turns out that he's still uh-huh drinking and smoking weed he's just no longer doing cocaine turns out there's some um audio of uh an actual interview he gave about that i'd love to share that in top stories love to share that with you during top stories today if possible it's just i think it's informative it's kind of a just add that in

there okay i've got it down i don't i don't foresee the uh hot doge story taking up all of the top story uh sort of time anyway so i think we'll have room to hear that hot audio from canadian singer um i was gonna say singer songwriter but that makes it sound like the weekend is in a coffee shop somewhere with his acoustic guitar just kind of like how did that

How did that get co-opted? Right, because he is a singer and songwriter. Exactly. He is one who writes songs. He is one who sings songs. Yet singer-songwriter usually means acoustic guitar, like you say, coffee shop setting, kind of a more of a kind of a crunchy sound maybe. I don't know if that's appropriate to say. But, yeah, how did that get appropriated?

I don't know how that became the exclusive province of the acoustic set. Speaking of which, really quickly, I was kind of wandering around on this seemingly deserted third floor of this giant hotel that I'm staying in, and I was looking for the FedEx office center because that was where I could print some stuff out today. But on my way there, there was this, it's kind of hard to describe, but basically a little sort of half wall that was separating what I think is probably a ramp for people that use wheelchairs to get from one level of the third floor to a slightly elevated level. and I'm just I'm walking around I'm kind of thinking about all the stuff I've got to do today here in LA and I'm I just suddenly I hear this beautiful music and there is a a young woman I don't know how old I'm maybe thinking early 20s who is tucked behind this half wall and she has an acoustic guitar and she's just kind of playing a song slash maybe practicing a song and it was so lovely and it made this otherwise very unremarkable third floor of of this kind of mega hotel into just a beautiful little moment of grace and i wanted to go over and say that is awesome what you were doing at 7 30 a.m in this hotel but i did not because i didn't think she needed me leaning over the half wall and saying that but it was so cool i just felt like just this little moment this beautiful moment that was that that otherwise wouldn't have existed so i'm pro

singer songwriter i guess is my point andrew yeah i mean you know who else is a singer songwriter is madonna i mean there's all kinds of people who write songs and sing them um but uh you know so this person was just sort of playing very softly acoustic guitar that matched the surround

and singing oh and singing as well okay wow but hiding behind this wall that was what i was trying to figure out i couldn't quite tell if this person maybe worked for the hotel in some capacity but was on their break so maybe like maybe they worked in housekeeping or maybe i'm some other uh they didn't seem to be dressed like they were working at the front desk but i couldn't tell if they work for this hotel the lowe's hollywood hotel or and they were just like this is what they like to do when they get their 15 or if they were someone that was staying in the hotel although that seemed like a very odd place uh to be again this third floor is kind of a a sort of no man's land i think it has a bunch of big ballrooms in it for when they have events you know if we ever go back to that kind of stuff and then like i said this fedex center um so she was i don't know or i didn't know if maybe she was about to like go audition for something i mean this is hollywood and it could be that she was about to go play for some folks maybe in this hotel maybe in one of those rooms where they're auditioning people for whatever some kind of musical thing probably related to the movies and she was practicing she sounded great though i hope she got the gig whatever it

what well I'm glad that it matched the tone and that maybe she was even trying to tuck herself away a little bit as to not draw a lot of attention because I gotta say I mean maybe it's just Monday and I don't know what the week holds and I think maybe it'd be good to come out strong with some hot takes here at the beginning but I've been formulating some pretty well I'm just gonna say what it is anti-busker sentiments lately which I don't think is gonna win me a lot I mean, I think everybody loves the idea of free music and free art and this idea of people expressing themselves. It doesn't seem like a ledge that I should want to walk out onto. But I just I've had a few folks from out of town visiting this summer. And both times we ended up down in like the kind of the tourist area of Seattle, which I got to say, as far as tourist areas go.

Do I say tourist funny? I think I do. I need to find a different word. But as far as those kinds of areas go, I like Seattle's, like going down to the Pike Place Market and what have you. It's still a working market. It's cute in its own way. But you get down there and inevitably there are, I guess, buskers. But, I mean, it doesn't even – I'm really – I'm seriously trying not just to sound like a jerk. It doesn't sound like they're trying. It feels like it's a prank show kind of thing. And it's real loud. It's not like an acoustic guitar and somebody singing and just using their voice. I mean, they are plugged into amplifiers. And when you're like within blocks, you start hearing some pretty terrible performance coming. Just, like, one guy, like, in both cases, I believe it was both – I don't think it was the same guy both times, but, like, young, white, person with a guitar, that is amplified. That is really, like – I mean, I guess you can't say music is objectively bad, but, like, they weren't – Well, I did once in Australia, and I learned my lesson. But, I mean, it's like they weren't being, like, noisy, like, trying to do avant-garde stuff that some people may not like. It was them doing covers or just singing songs that seemed like they should all fit together, but nothing was fitting together. It was just really bad performances. And again, very loud, very loud bad performances. And every time I get these thoughts like, well, do you have a permit to be here? I'm assuming you do because I think –

It's not like get off my lawn like I'm old. It's like, well, you need a permit to do this. Do you have a permit?

But the thing is, my point isn't, hey, where's your permit, buddy? Permit. My point is, I'll bet you they do have permits because these would be pretty sweet busking spots, right? And I know, like, when we were in Boston, like, you would have to get a permit and then you could busk down in the T stations. And those performers, if I recall, were usually pretty good and worth listening to while you were waiting for your train. So I feel like these people in Seattle, they must have gotten permission because otherwise somebody would come along and say, hey, you got to get out of here. I have the permit for this spot. So if I'm right on that theory, we're talking about people who have gone through the process of saying, hey, I want to officially perform here on the steps of Pike Place Market or whatever, and I'm going to do it very loudly. And they went through all of that effort, but they didn't seem to go through any effort of learning how to perform. You know, they learned how to plug in and they learned how to get the permit. That's the easy part.

Yeah. The permitting is the hard part, you know, channeling your inner Bob Dylan. That's the easy part. becoming one of the great singer songwriters of a generation that's you'll figure that part out you got to get that permit you got to get the permit and you got to plug in like I'm I'm

seriously somewhat confused about what that process is like and who are the people who are these people beating out you know if I'm right that there is competition for these spaces

because it's not good yeah it's it's always a dangerous game to start getting into what art is good and bad or what music rises to the level of something that should be performed publicly and i hear that hesitation in your voice and i agree with you that being said i am very much on your side with this which is i am very sensitive to loud noises that i did not ask to be engaging with yeah you know i'm obviously really don't like motors loud motorcycle sounds i don't like loud anything and i do think i probably have some kind of i don't know if it's chemical or neurological or what it is but i think i have a stronger reaction than most to a sound that kind of surprises me or seems aggressive and so i'm very not into what i would consider to be noise pollution somebody making a noise that you can't avoid as a person trying to live your life that you didn't ask them to make and this sounds very much like that and i guess it does come down to a question of how talented they are because if someone is playing let just stick with the bob dylan thing if somebody is playing bob dylan and they're playing it well They're playing, you know, Like a Rolling Stone, a song that I happen to really love. I'm not going to be as mad at that as if they are just absolutely, you know, massacring that song and they don't know the words and they're out of tune and they can't play the chords. I will I will look upon it much more unfavorably if they're not good.

Yeah, I'm looking here at the Pike Place Market dot org permits and application section.

And Andrew, I want to thank you. I want to thank you, my friend. I mean, this is going to sound patronizing. I don't mean it to be. But I want to thank you for not calling it Pike's Place. I mean, I know you've lived in Seattle for like 15 years. I know you – but it's amazing how frequently that happens. And that's one of those things that if you're from Seattle, you know it's Pike Place, which I now consider you and Veeves to be full-fledged Seattleites. But that is a rite of passage when you learn it's not Pike's Place Market. Well, where are you? I just brought this up with Genevieve the other day because she calls the drugstore around here, which actually, by the way, was just sold to a bigger conglomerate, but it still goes by the name Bartell Drugs. Genevieve was calling it Bartells, and I gently, I think gently corrected her. I said, I think it's Bartell. I don't think locals call it Bartells. I think it's Pike Place Market, Bartell Drugs, and then there's one other. What is the store? Nordstrom. Nordstrom. Right, no S.

Which I was listening as I was wending my way through, you know, your traditional Sunday night at 10 p.m. traffic in Los Angeles trying to get to the hotel last night. I was listening to an episode of This American Life and actually a Northwesterner who I am friends with and think is very talented. Our friend John Mualem, the writer, had this great story on about a moose in a town in Alaska that was kind of became a sort of a local celebrity because the moose would eat a bunch of crab apples that had gotten rotten and basically get drunk and then just wander around the town and kind of like pass out like in front of a bar or they'd find it with like Christmas lights all tangled up in its antlers. They'd have to untangle the Christmas lights And I think they called it The bowl was named Buzzwinkle Which is kind of a funny name For a moose that gets drunk all the time Buzzwinkle And in the piece he was talking about a time When Buzzwinkle, John Wallen was Buzzwinkle was at this martini bar Outside of this martini bar drunk And he said it was across from a Nordstrom's And I just thought What? He needs a local Well I think he's a transplant And the problem is the folks at This American Life, we don't have enough folks from Seattle out there. Probably there are zero Seattleites on that staff because a Seattleite would have said Nordstrom, not Nordstrom's. But there was nobody there. I understand this is lower on the list of representation needs we have when it comes to the media. Like it's pretty low. We have enough white people. Well, let me think about that.

I'll go back to tomorrow and see what The Weeknd says about that.

I don't want to say this is why representation matters, because there are other things that are much more important. But I was like, ooh, how did that get through? Like, I've done many pieces for This American Life, most of which have never made it to the air, probably for the better of the listening public. But, man, it is a not insignificant fact-checking and vetting process that stuff goes through. How did Nordstrom's get onto the radio? Yeah, yeah. No, Pike Place. But where are you in Bartell, though? it is i went well i think i have been guilty of saying bartels because of i mean it's the same as nordstrom you just sort of think well this was started by the nordstrom family so if the store belongs to john nordstrom then it is nordstrom's in a way but the actual title is nordstrom and the same thing with bartel it's like well i'm going down to mr bartel's drugstore to get some foot spray because by the way andrew the tsa confiscated mine at pdx everybody you're safe everybody loses in that situation i that's what i thought also i don't want to be the guy was perfectly nice but he goes he he goes looking at the x-ray and he pulls my bag out and then he goes you've got two huge cans in there uh and i said i don't remember having anything over the size limit in there but okay and then one thing i had forgotten about this like you know foot spray whatever like dr shoal's odor eater which i would like to say is not even a liquid it's a gas like that sprays a powder is that because you know you know can't have more than three ounces of liquid but i mean would you call a foot spray a liquid there's nothing about that

on the pike place market permit page but i assume that if i went to the t no i'm just joking but it's okay to leave that in the past but if i went to the tsa site it would probably say something about liquids and it would probably say something about aerosol cans as separate line items that's

my guess i don't know i am sure that this guy was following the rules he seemed like he knew what he was doing and he wasn't you know he was a perfectly nice uh you know fella so it wasn't like and i was uh i was pulling a real andrew in that i was kind of early for my flight luke came early i wasn't gonna say it if you didn't but shout out to party harderson um but i so i wasn't like stressing about the bag check but i did think you know the concern around a liquid would be that you would could mix it with something else and make something dangerous i guess maybe an aerosol could count as well and then he gave me the classic well you can go check this bag and i was like no you know what i'll just have to i'll just have to visit dr shoals at a bartel down here in L.A. if they have them. So I left that behind. And then he goes into my like my dop kit and he pulls out. A thing of shaving cream But it's the travel size That I had purchased Specifically so that it was small enough To get through the TSA and he goes this is the other one I go I think that's the travel size and he looks at it and he goes Yeah it is and he puts it all back in And I think well so then you go wrong about one of These large items that the X-ray picked up because one of them was in fact Just a travel size Shaving cream so

I wonder you know I did just watch the end Well I just watched a big chunk Of the movie Jaws there was a Jaws Marathon on this weekend by the way and I guess oh we should probably talk about our weekends at some point Vives and I were staying in a small humble little hotel room or motel room really in the rural town of Packwood Washington so we could go on a little day hike and just kick it and chill and part of kicking it and chilling in the summer to me is if you see Jaws on TV you leave it on to me I've been using this phrase too much lately and I know it's probably already it's already slang that is no longer cool but I feel like Jaws the first movie is very much a vibe like to me I was telling V's I want to make I want to make a Jaws remix Jaws without Jaws like I love that movie my least favorite parts are the parts with the shark I just love the I love the just the east coast summer island life vibe I mean it's just shot so so beautifully it's just and it's on that you know that era film I don't know enough about filmmaking to talk about why having that movie on in the background to me is just always fulfilling but anyway that movie's We watched the good parts, but then we also watched the Jaws parts. And is the shark's name Jaws, by the way? Is that ever established? Does anybody ever say, hey, look out for Jaws? Because I don't think so. Mr. Jaws was his father. Well, it's Jaws, actually, in the Pacific Northwest. But at the very end, I don't know if you recall, and this is going to be some spoiler territory here, But they end up blowing up the shark whose name may or may not be jaw by like throwing like some sort of compressed air thing in the shark's mouth. Right. And then our hero shoots that with a gun and it explodes. I'm assuming that's what informed the TSA policy is my point. That's a really good point.

So I could have potentially taken my Dr. Scholl foot spray.

Yes, right. Exactly.

And, like, then if my buddy had snuck some kind of firearm onto the plane, then he yells, pull, and I throw the foot spray up into the air. Then he shoots the foot spray, and then, you know, then we're in big trouble on that flight.

You know, looking back, I feel like they would have focused more on the firearm and less on the compressed air. You would think, Andrew. But it's not on the list. I don't know.

Okay. I want to hear how Packwood was, and I want to give folks an update on my weekend, which also involved outdoorsyness. But we should go to a break. Yeah, let's go to a break now, because I do want to tell you about a very uncomfortable moment that I had here in the hotel before we started recording, Andrew, where I may have completely scuttled an international business deal. And I'm not even like I, you know, sometimes I sort of hype things up just to try to make them interesting. It's rarely successful, but I'm not hyping this. I was very concerned that I was messing something up for someone. So we'll talk about that coming up in a moment here on TBTL. Let's thank some donors of the day. These are the people that are making today's episode 3,484 possible thanks to their donations, their patience with this program, and, well, their intention and their commitment to keeping it all going. I'm talking about Jesse LePage, who's there in old Cincinnati, Ohio.

Jesse I was here I don't know I don't know if you recall Luke But It was Jesse's Blur's Day recently And a whole bunch of 10s reached out To say that Jesse is just the 10s 10

And that's the home Cincinnati is the home of The Skyline Chili right

That's the big thing there Yeah Yeah I've never I've never partaken myself Also Home to the Cincinnati Reds Which is a baseball team I believe

Oh okay Sure I only Actually The Skyline thing I only I connected the dots recently because I was reading my favorite yearly football thing, which is Why Your Team Sucks, from Defector, Drew McGarry. We're just savaging every single—can we say savage? Oh. Savaging? Is that? Oh, as a verb. Yeah, I think it's okay. Or just, I mean, as a word. I mean, it's a complicated word because it was misapplied to many people over the years. But as a word by itself, is it offensive? No, not as a word itself. I mean, don't call a human.

being a savage obviously but you can say like savage something i think that's a verb and i also think it's like a um like it's a it's an adjective too right like that that was like a savage storm

or a savage skateboarding trick just something that's very sure yeah goofy footed stale fish that would be savage that'd be savage just meaning it's kind of intense right yeah and extreme okay Well, Drew McGarry likes to get very intense and extreme talking about why every team in the NFL is bad. And he was talking about, he kept mentioning Skyline as he was writing about the Cincinnati Bengals. And I was like, what is he talking about? The Bob Dylan album? Or is that a Bob Dylan album or a Willie Nelson album? Who is a Bob Dylan album called Skyline?

Nashville Skyline, I think it's called. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking of. Ding, where's my bell? I got one. Look at you, Andrew. I got it all over here Hey one thing about the Cincinnati Reds Do you know that their official slogan is Now this is a team you can bet on I just made that up That was some 1980's era Of P. Rose humor that I'm just slinging around We're through one by the way One donor of the day I apologize for holding us up

Well I hope you have some I hope you have a tight five on the San Francisco Giants Baseball team Because next up it's Kenneth Mejia who is in San Francisco, the city by the bay, I think Kenny calls it. Kenneth, thank you so much for supporting TBTL. Sarah Montero Buria is in Greenville, South Carolina.

Yeah, sorry about the noise coming through my window, but Sarah, we've met Sarah at live events.

Absolutely. Sarah, thank you for checking in. And Ben Quick, Benjamin Quick, that is, is in Everett, Washington. Thank you, Benjamin. Leslie Seton is out there in Port Townsend, Washington, the small maritime village of— I left my heart in Port Townsend, Andrew. A lot of people leave their heart in San Francisco. Not me. Left it in Port Townsend. If it were ever practical for me to live there again, which it probably won't be for a while, I certainly would think about it because it's a cool town. And then Nancy Rohar is in Tacoma, Washington, another fine, fine city in the Pacific Northwest. So thank you so much to Nancy, and thanks to all of our donors of the day for making TBTL possible. Hello, and welcome to Top Story. I want to talk about our weekends, but in the more recent past for me, Andrew, I was mentioning how I was walking around on this kind of abandoned third floor of this hotel, and that was because I needed to print some stuff out. And the only place that you can do that is in like a branded like FedEx business center that doesn't have any people working in it. It's just like you use your key card and you can get in and they've got some printers and stuff. so I have like I'm looking at my day and this is like a pretty kind of this day is fairly scheduled out for me I told you I interviewed Cecily Strong for Livewire and now we're doing this and then I'm going to hustle over to the Hollywood Bowl after this and talk to Gustavo Dudamel who is the musical director for the LA Phil and then I'm going to talk to the CEO of the LA Phil and there's a lot of history around the Hollywood Bowl that I'm trying to learn and remember. So the point is, I had a lot of things to print out. And so I was like, I'm going to go down to, and it's the kind of thing where I have to print stuff because if I'm interviewing Cecily Strong and I'm looking at the questions on the computer screen, then I'm not really looking at her or I'm not looking at Elena, the co-host of that show, when she is ready to jump in and ask a question. So I can't have it all happening on one screen. I've got to have this printout. This is not optional or voluntary. So I bust into the FedEx tiny office, and there is a dude having a full-on, very professional-sounding business meeting where he is switching between English and Arabic, and he is presenting a slide deck. He's having one of those meetings that usually Common is rapping about regarding Microsoft. Oh, yeah, yeah. You know when people are like being futurists and like doing, you know, people are solving problems at enterprise scale or whatever it might be, solving previously unsolvable problems at enterprise scale?

This guy is doing all of it and it's like very technical and business related and it's clear that he is presenting this pitch to a bunch of people about tracking medical data in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Hmm. And I'm just I'm I'm thinking this guy does not need me that this guy does not need me printing my Cecily Strong questions right next to him. But guess what? The printer is right next to the dude. It's a giant ass printer. And I'm like, I am sitting there trying to wait for a pause in his pitch, trying to wait for when the people he's trying to sell this system to ask their questions. but also there's a lag and when i hit print so at one point he pauses and they're asking a question i hit print but by the time the printer gets the memo he's now talking again and this printer andrew is so loud it is like it's like a small it's like a small engine or something like it is not quiet and like i am feeling so bad because he is definitely this is definitely coming through on his call but on the other hand he is kind of in a place that is designed for people to go print

stuff out so that this is a big hotel problem man I'm sorry but like if you if this is that big of a deal and it looks like you're in an I mean if you're tracking medical data which I don't know what he's doing but um you know no he seemed legit okay this is a I know I know but I mean even legit like you know I you know anyway it sounds like this is a lucrative industry this isn't like you know you're not like right trying to close a deal on like a 1992 Subaru or something is that you know his manager says it has to be off the lot by today like he's probably got a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist right like they should be able to afford a place for him to privately have this conversation if he's having it next to a public printer I guess that's his prerogative but also people are going to have to use the printer in the same way if you're I've heard people have like meetings uh in a bathroom stall before i'm not gonna not flush for you i've

had a meeting with god a time or two in a bathroom stall but that's a whole different situation you've

heard that before right i swear i heard somebody on a uh on a um i'm pretty sure this is my memory and not something that somebody told me i'm pretty sure i heard somebody on something that sounded like a job interview one time in a stall and i think that was also in los angeles wow that is somebody who does not want that job or is very confident confident i think that was the latter

yeah um yeah well here was the thing though i as a person who works in the audio field i am always struck by how oblivious people are and again a lot of times it's not their problem that i'm trying to do some kind of recording somewhere but this actually happens very frequently with tv stuff we'll be set up we'll be trying to do something like uh this red rock story that aired this weekend when we were filming a lot of stuff there it was open to the public as it should be since they paid for it in a roundabout way but i was trying to record like a promo and every time it'd be time for me to start talking some bunch of kids would walk by screaming i mean like teenagers or people just be yelling to each other or having loud conversations and again they're just living their lives and they should be living their lives they're not doing anything wrong but i i find myself very semi-frequently in the position to think boy people are i people are very oblivious about what is going on around them and if someone is trying to maybe record some audio so i saw this as my chance to be not oblivious i saw this as my chance to be like i get you dude i work almost in the same industry except you're paid handsomely and um i work in public radio and only recently found out how much we even make andrew because series of paperwork snafus where i was like how much do we make again um but so i was trying to be like a real comrade to this fellow like i was really trying to like not screw it up for him and therefore or thereby uh cement my sense of myself as a good guy you know i was like i'm not going to be the dude who wanders in on my own call talking and I was like very quietly typing I was trying to like not make the clicking sound and again I was trying to like wait it's like you know a sniper you wait in between heartbeats to pull the trigger I was trying to wait in between his statements to like hit print you breathe out and then you press the mouse button yeah exactly I'm like Bradley Cooper in that movie whatever that was so then I get done and I had The problem was I had a lot of stuff to print. And so there was just no getting around it, and I needed it for my work. So I print all this stuff out, and I'm just feeling terrible. And then the guy wraps up his call, and he looks at me, and he goes, I am so sorry for making that noise. And I was like, you're sorry? This, man. I'm sorry.

This is the future liberals want. Yes, this is it. Because I was even going to say there is the other side of this, that he's in the public space. And you weren't mentioning this aspect of it So I didn't want to layer it on Because maybe it was appropriate

Maybe it wasn't. But like there are more times than not that I feel like, hey, how about you take this phone call someplace where you're not disturbing me? Like I know it I know it looks like I'm just reading a book over here, but also you don't know this about me, but I'm very dumb and it's hard for me to read. And so, therefore, when you're blabbing in public on your phone or, God forbid, you're on a speakerphone or or as happens more and more and more at the places I go to for lunch, like people will just be blasting their their YouTube videos, you know, loudly on their phones. I take I take offense to that. And so the fact that this person was self-aware to say self-aware enough to say, hey, listen, sorry, I know that wasn't ideal. I really that goes such a long way. I care less about what people do. It's more about like, are they at least like, are they oblivious to it or not?

Yeah, it was. We had such a moment in this FedEx business center because I had been sitting there feeling terrible about my printing noises. And he was apparently feeling terrible about closing the Jacobson account. And so, yeah, he was like, oh, I'm so sorry for making those. I was like, no, I'm sorry for the printing. And I tell I was trying to print in between your questions. And he was like, yeah, man, this was the only place I could find. He goes, I know. He literally said, this place is for printing. He was like, but it was the only place I could find to do this meeting. I was like, do you want to be friends? Did we just become best friends?

You're like, here, I got you this hairbrush, but I had to shave all my hair to afford it.

I don't really know what happened to the gift of the magi. Yeah, I know. It involves a brush, maybe. Yes, it does. it involves combs made of abalone shell or something i do think that no pearl or something i don't know anyway it was it was i ended up feeling very i went from being kind of like and luckily i wasn't having the strongest version of this that i do at times i wasn't resenting the guy for being mad at me which is a move i do sometimes by the way so in other words i assume someone is judging me over something that i don't think they should be judging me over and then i'm mad at them for judging me yeah right despite the fact that there's no evidence any of it's happening i wasn't quite in that state but i was kind of thinking like oh man i'm really kind of screwing this thing up for this guy but i just don't have any other option and uh and so anyway it was it was i my faith in humanity was restored that every everybody was just trying to kind of like you know be helpful to everybody else in that little fedex center so i like it was a good

that was a good outcome humanity at its best right now by the way the um the leading candidate for show titles is a bologna comb which is not what you said i know but it's just like i'm gonna need something so maybe that's inspiration for you to come up with something better um throughout the show because otherwise we're gonna have a bologna comb yeah is what we're going with here yeah you

could be thinking uh i'm sure that there are people that have gone through their whole life thinking that when someone's talking about abalone yeah the crustacean actually is it is it a crustacean or a bivalve uh abalone they'll think someone's saying a baloney that's right i mean

that's in my certainly um oh they're marine snails um in my house that's how we uh that's that's that's the only baloney that we recognize certainly yeah were you gonna ask me how the weekend was

yeah did you see any um abalone in packwood in that lake that i saw pictures of on the gram i

didn't it was a nice weekend it was like again um packwood and i don't want to speak ill of packwood either but like you know packwood is this very small town uh you know just south of rainier national forest and of course mount rainier um and but like if you're picturing it as like a cute little bed and breakfasty town with like antique shops or whatever it is not it is just like a you know it's a very small trump country like tiny little tiny little kind of rural poor town. Bend in the road, as they say. Actually, Genevieve says this is literally what they mean when they say a widening in the road, or is that what they call a small town where the road widens and that's the town? Oh, I think I've heard it to be a bend in the road. Like, oh, it's just a little bend in the road. No, I've heard that before, too, but I think a widening of the road is another thing. Anyway, because it's true. Like, you're just on this 55-mile-an-hour rural road, and then And there's like, I don't know, a spattering of, I don't know, maybe 10 buildings, one of which is a diner that looks just like it used to be a church. Yet everybody denies that it used to be a church. I'm very confused about that still. There's like a tavern that has, you know, a bunch of, you know, like kind of locals drinking in there. They kind of give you the hairy eyeball when you walk in. But it's also enough of a hiking town that they see plenty of people like me and Vives as well, because you have people like us coming from the city so that we can go hiking, you know, in the I think it's a national park there, if not a state. Yeah, it's a national park. So anyway, it was really nice. It was the weather wasn't like kind of hot and and sunny. like Genevieve was hoping for so we could like the idea was to take this five mile walk into this lake area and then Genevieve was going to go swimming and set up her hammock and spend some hours there basking in the sun but instead it ended up being one of those very um it was still very beautiful I mean hiking in this part of the world is so beautiful it's so verdant but you know when you're driving through the mountains and you see from afar like the mist just clinging to the tops of the mountains or whatever like we were walking through that on the hike we weren't at that high of an elevation but my point is like we were walking through dampness that was not rain necessarily or drizzle but just like just wet air if that makes sense and you know but it was it was really beautiful and I think the slightly more interesting thing that we don't have to go into tons of detail about I meant to mention this to you on Friday's show but it wasn't just me and who were going on a little trip this weekend um so did our very elderly cat theodore murray who of course has to take um pills several times a day now so it's a little bit hard for us to go on weekends together we usually hire somebody often hire our friend nicky um who uh is used to have a little pet sitting business um to come and maybe stay at our house and watch the cats and give them their pills but this time we thought it's a short trip and our friends Anita and

Camaro Kev volunteered I think Genevieve asked them but they seemed very happy to let Theo come have a sleepover at their house this weekend oh fun yeah and they they sadly lost their own cat recently they had an 18 year old cat and I think Manolo exactly and I think that they might have been happy at first to at first being the keywords here to have have a cat in their home and so we did this whole thing where we dropped theo off on friday afternoon and you know set up a little litter box for him and he was kind of poking around the house as we were dropping him off and he seemed you know okay and then um and then anita gave us some updates during the weekend sent a photo of theo sleeping on the stairs and you know basically she's saying he's he's being a good boy uh we came and picked up theo they were not home we had a key we picked up theo on sunday afternoon and brought him back home everything seemed fine um theo comes back home he was very trembly in the car i could tell that like you know he doesn't love driving in the car but on the way home i let him not sit in the cage i let him sit on my lap and i held him tightly and i think that helped yes um but we brought him home and then he immediately kind of lays down to take a nap which is good and then i immediately lay down to take a nap which is also good it was a long long hike And anyway, Theo, around pill time, around 4 o'clock or something in the afternoon, I'm laying in bed for maybe, I don't know, 45 minutes or something. He decides to wake me up, as he often does, with kind of a loud yell. Like, again, Theo is loud. He's not just persistently loud at times. Like, he can. If he wants to belt it out, he can belt it out, like as loud as a human baby at least. And he's been mistaken for a human baby before, in fact. as have I for very different reasons certainly but anyway so I'm laying upstairs in bed and it is Theo's pill time and all of a sudden I hear from downstairs a Theo yell except his voice is hoarse and I can just tell like you just know your pets right you don't think about it but I'm just like man that was loud and also your vocal cords sound fried and so I kind of thought about that a little bit What could the previous couple of days have been like? And again, so we had been texting back and forth with Camaro and Anita, and they were saying how good he was and everything. But then I'm thinking about this yell, and about, I don't know, a half hour later after it sinks and I texted them, I'm like, was Theo noisy for you guys? And instead of a text response, my phone rings. And I'm like, oh, Theo was so loud, wasn't he? So I pick up the phone, and it's Anita and Camaro on speakerphone, and they're like, we just thought we would talk instead of texting. Apparently, Friday night, his first night there, Luke, he didn't stop. Apparently, it started at midnight. Genevieve and I call it car alarming.

Sometimes about an hour or maybe even two hours before we're supposed to wake up and give him his food, he'll start annoying us by car alarming. like loudly yelling and crying and and around the house apparently this started around midnight and did not end until six or seven in the morning oh for my and they said just one and then they have kind of three floors in in their unit um but they said even when he was all they're on they're sleeping on the top floor even when he was all the way in like kind of the basement floor they said they could still hear him. They're going to ask their neighbors if the neighbors could hear him. Apparently top of the lung lungs, yowling, yelling, screaming, and then they said, well, Saturday was a little better. Oh, my God. And then he would sleep all day because he just wore himself out, just screaming at the top of his lungs all night long. I feel so bad. I don't even know. How do you make that up to somebody?

Oh, I bet Kevin will come up with some ways.

what i meant was how do i avoid camaro and no i just mean like you know yeah no of course you

know just like i'm sure you'll have a chance to do him some solids after you know a a a hectic night for the crew or something who knows but like but like i feel you know i feel i feel genuinely a little bummed for everybody in this scenario including theo because obviously it's like he's doing that because he's he's you know going through some mental emotional stuff probably feels confused about where he is etc i feel bad for you guys because you just love theo and want him to be okay i feel bad for uh anita and kevin uh yeah that's i mean i don't want to take it to a an even more sad place but i guess the the alternative is that you have somebody come over and take care of theo feed theo and and all that at your home but then when that person has gone to their home i'm just imagining a saturday night where theo is probably still doing that but just in your house right well in the past or do you think it'd be lessened because he would he knows he's like i'm in my house now it was you think it was activated by him being in a different location well a couple

of things this isn't the most interesting thing but um when we were hiring nikki to and i don't think nikki nikki um now i'm giving out everybody's information i i don't know if nikki is going to continue the service anymore but um when we hired her to be a cat sitter she would stay here for like however many days it would be so like you know she would stay here she would live here it was a great i think it was a good situation kind of for everybody involved actually because she could stretch out a little bit here maybe get some work done also it just i mean there's just it was just so great knowing that somebody was here for you know the whole time right um also i think i mean i've been thinking about this a lot i don't have any solid answers i mean it's probably a combination of a lot of things theo probably did miss us and our and our smells but it probably is definitely mitigated by being in his own surroundings I'm starting to wonder too like who knows how well he can even see or hear anymore like he's pretty good at hearing when we open a can of cat food but like I'll bet you his senses are somewhat deadened I'll bet he's relying more and more on smell and probably it was just like somewhat disoriented as well as thinking and again not to put myself on some sort of cat pedestal but I think Theo's connection to me it becomes it's always been a strong connection like between me and Theo even more than me and Vives and I think that as he gets older he relies on me more and more he's kind of like my little shadow and stuff and so I think that probably he missed me and he was confused like I think if me and Vives and Theo were all having a sleepover doing each other's hair right exactly talking about boys I think that potentially he would have been fine because I would have snuggled with him or whatever but it was just like he was in a

stranger's house with strangers yeah oh god that is um yeah that's rough so i guess that's probably

the end of theo having sleepovers probably we just put him down honestly it's the end of theo we decided it was more trouble honestly like no joke way back in the day when he was a younger stronger cat we'd have people go and try to feed him and he was more of a there was an opposite issue yeah he was so scared but he was a big cat and he would lash out in in ways that he would it would scare the pet sitters so like he's always been a problem for us one way or the other but um no we did not have him put down but i don't think that we'll be going on any more uh sleep away

camps for old mr theodore uh i had a little sleep away camp at my sister's place uh in uh sort of southwest washington state right on the the columbia gorge where they live or close to there we all went out and as a family got together and camped out i um i don't have any camping gear down in portland with me because a lot of that's in bellingham some of that will be going to carry so i i went to rei and rei is a very dangerous place for me andrew because as i've said on the show many times it's a very aspirational place for me i want to be the kind of person who like you and Genevieve is hiking around mountain lakes and doing things. And I like that. I like being in nature, and I like the idea of being a person who goes out in nature. And when I'm in REI, I see a lot of things, a lot of objects that I think will help me become that person. And so it's very hard for me to not overspend, as I did at REI. I don't even want to put the number out there. Like I said, considering I sort of have a tenuous sense of how much money we make at APM, but let's just say it was most of my yearly salary.

to get a tent, like a small tent, but a tent, a sleeping bag, a couple of chairs to sit in, and it was quite expensive. But I was excited to break it all out, and most of it worked fine, but the sleeping bag was a little bit short. The sleeping bag was made for somebody who's 6 feet. I'm 6 feet, but I don't want the sleeping bag to be exactly 6 feet. I'd like it to be for someone who's like 6'4", because I don't want my toes touching the bottom of the sleeping bag. It just made me feel a little claustrophobic. So I asked the person at REI, I said, when I was buying it, I was like, if this, because they have one size up, it's like the jumbo. And I was like, if I, if this doesn't work, can I bring it back? And they said, yes. But I still feel weirdly bad about returning a sleeping bag I slept in for two nights, even if it's the rules. I mean, I don't know why I feel like I'm worried for REI's bottom line. I'm sure they're doing fine. But I guess that's the rule. I'm allowed to bring it back. So I'm definitely bringing the sleeping bag back.

Oh, really? because it comes up to your what did it come up to like just your neck but you'd like a little bit

more no no it has like it has like um a hood you know how these like these modern sleeping bags are very designed and very you know i don't know they're they're pretty well designed so i mean i can but basically if i'm in the kind of hood part of it the length of it is roughly the length of my body i see and and like so i want it to be i don't i don't want there to be i don't want my feet to feel the zippered up bottom of the burrito I'm sleeping in yeah basically so but then also I started thinking you know I wouldn't mind this is a two-person tent that I had but I thought if I'm actually going to ever have another person in this tent this is way too small for two people and I don't like backpack I'm not gonna I don't need the tent to be particularly light when I'm carrying it because I'm just need to be able to carry it from the back of my car to wherever I'm putting it down so I was like maybe I get a three-person tent and then also the air mattress that I was sleeping on. I thought it was self-inflating. And I had my little nephews, Jack and Abe, and my nieces, Mary and Maddie, like helping me the whole weekend with stuff. So I was like, okay, here's the project. One of you, figure out this self-inflating air mattress. And like little Abe, he's working on it with Mary for like 20 minutes. And they come back, they're like, it's not self-inflating. And I'm like, it's self-inflating, I promise you. The person that already told me, they're like, we don't think it's self-inflating. I have a major argument with two children only to realize they're totally right. It's not self-inflating. It comes with this pump, and you've got to pump it up, and it's kind of a weird system. So I kind of want to take that back, too. I don't know. I just feel like I'm going to have a moment coming back into this REI where I'm returning 80% of the stuff I bought. It's going to feel like when they dragged my boat back into the marina after I crashed it and ran out of gas. Like it's me coming back to the REI in the Pearl in Portland and just going, you know what? I wasn't ready. I was not ready for the great outdoors. please take back all of these products that I bought and used for one weekend well the question

is um are you going to return this stuff for cash or are you going to return this stuff for different versions because if you're returning this stuff but you want to you know pick up something else to replace it and potentially something that's even more expensive like a bigger tent and a bigger sleeping bag I don't think that I don't think anybody's going to be judging you like thinking that you're trying to pull a scam dude that is my exact thought process

While I was in the tent – oh, what I love about this tent, by the way, is that it has a rain fly, right, which is just kind of a cover you can put on it if it's raining. But generally speaking, the top of the tent is all mesh, and so you can just look at the stars.

That's nice.

And it was so beautiful just lying in this sleeping bag, pretty cozy, staring up at the Big Dipper. I was very into that design element of this tent. So I like the tent. But as I was lying there, I was also thinking, I'm going to bring almost all this stuff back, but it's going to be OK because I am going to I'm not trying to just get my money back. I'm actually saying I like this tent, but I need the bigger version. I like the sleeping bag, but I need the bigger version. Like so I think that will buy me some kind of goodwill with the people there. I it isn't like I just bought a bunch of camping stuff, used it for a weekend and now I'm just returning it. I'm actually going to get replacements for it that are going to maybe cost me even a little bit more money. So I think that should make it make it OK.

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.

I'm wondering, Andrew, this audio that you have from The Weeknd, from Singer Songwriter The Weeknd, did he email that in?

No, I found it online. Again, I don't know. Do you even know like I do you remember mentioning this on Friday? It was just a quick passing vaguely. Yeah, yeah. And apparently you had seen a headline that you thought, you know, no offense to the weekend himself, but that the headline was slightly misleading.

As my I don't have a leg to stand on in this whole world as a person who, you know, pledged sobriety and has gone back to not being.

sober as my nephew Abe boy from the mouth of babes Andrew I'm drinking a Rainier sitting on the deck of the yurt and Abe goes I thought you didn't drink well I used to I said well I was not doing it for a while and now clearly I'm doing it but did you say look how cool I am now did you say that to the young one yeah I said I said go get me a smoke because I'm going to show you what a real cool guy looks like yeah this is no but And I have no room to judge anyone about what their sobriety is or what their journey with stuff is. But I just thought it was funny that the headline kind of led me to believe that The Weeknd, the singer-songwriter The Weeknd, was a sober person now. And as they got into the details, it wasn't that. It was just that he had stopped doing cocaine, which, let's be honest, no moral judgment here. But it's probably decent for anyone to, let's just say, moderate their cocaine use because it's probably not the best thing for our bodies.

Again, and you were not saying that, judging him at all. It was just the choice of words that the journalists slashed. Yeah, the headline was misleading. The headline writers wrote, exactly. But anyway, all of that is to say I did find some audio of the interview with The Weeknd talking about his decision.

Oh, wow. You might not be able to tell it now, but there was a time in my life when I was down so low, a mosquito wouldn't even bite me. I lost my job, my four-wheel drive. I even got thrown out of my trailer. all because of one thing, freebasing cocaine. That's all my life was, was basing, nothing else. I was on that last lap with that checkered flag about to wave me on into hell, but I got lucky. I got in a rehab program down there at Redstone Arsenal, down there in Alabama, and with them people helping me, well, that smoky white devil is no longer a part of my life. And I can proudly say that today, I do not freebase cocaine. now i'll take a drink now i will take a drink but i do not freebase cocaine but you know i'll take a drink and i might even smoke a little reef you know i i like to smoke reefer you know i relax as me i think a couple of doobies you know just to get you through the day and everything but as far as basing goes i don't do it now i'll do some toot now don't give me i will do some toot you know you know if you party and everything somebody comes up give it to you it's impolite not to take it there so me and my girlfriend saturday we you know we party man i'll tell you we don't party so you know i i will do some too we do you know on a good weekend there we call a bunch of friends over i would do about an eight bottle of two but we don't base i do not freebase cocaine we'll make that clear i don't do it so there you go a little uh tape of

he sounds so different when he's not singing i know right kind of like when like somebody with The British accent is singing and you don't hear it. Yeah. Very, very different. He must be from South Toronto. I believe so. Anyway, just a smooth little joke payoff there.

Well, can I say, one, I would have loved it if somehow, and there's no universe in which it would have happened, but it would have been the most amazing thing if you still somehow had the wrong audio. No. I contemplated it.

I contemplated it.

But then you were wondering. I don't think I sent you that.

No, you didn't. I have a little bit more background. So, yeah. So, folks who didn't hear Friday's show and are wondering what the hell is going on. Is that someone doing a parody or is that someone who was in show? Yeah. So, now I have – because shout out to our great pal, Cheryl in Corvallis, who as if she and her family have not done enough for us. She said that she was falling asleep listening to TBTL and then like kind of kept rewinding it. And somehow two or three times kept hearing the part where I set up the joke that I have tape of the weekend, but then accidentally played the wrong tape. And I could not find the tape I was talking about. I just knew I kept saying, I don't know, it's about some guy. He's got a southern accent and he says he's not doing coke anymore, but he's still drinking. And you didn't know what I was talking about. And I could not find it. I think I might have been spelling coke. You know what? I think I was searching for coke and not cocaine. I don't know what was going on on the fly on Friday as I searched for this tape. But it turns out that Cheryl was able to find it with a quick Google search with just the information, the scattered information I had. And it is somebody named Shane Caldwell, who is a comedian and apparently did this character for, I think, this web video that you just heard. It goes on much, much longer than that. And then I think reprised this role. But, yeah, it's a comedian named Shane Caldwell. So I'll give you the credit there. But that's what I was looking for. I thought that was very funny.

Yep. That was good. And it made sense, too. So, like, your brain going there made perfect sense because, yeah, what that guy's doing as a comic bit is sort of what this headline writer was unintentionally doing to singer-songwriter The Weeknd. Right. Again, no judgment on The Weeknd's life choices. It was just a misleading headline. So so that was I don't think you were, you know, you weren't crazy for trying to find that, but it did make you crazy trying.

It certainly did. Hey, can I play some real voicemails for you here? Because we got some good stuff coming in. I'm actually going to start with one. It's a little bit more on the serious side, but I kind of want to share this with you and everyone, because we were talking about this idea of being a vaccinated person who can potentially still still get what they call a breakthrough case of covid. And I have a listener who's actually going through that right now. Her name is Joanne. Here, take a listen to this.

Hey, Demi. This is listener Joanna in Seattle. This will please hear, talk about people who are fully vaccinated and have breakthrough cases. I would just like to say that I am one of those people. I have been, I also have an 18-month-old, so I've been very careful. I have been continuing to wear my mask, can sanitize all the extra pre-measurements. I did go out of town for work, and I was in the Tri-City areas where there's a high level of people who are unvaccinated. I believe I caught it while I was there. I got symptoms, mild cough, sore throat. I did not lose my sense of taste, smell, did not have a fever. And when I came home, I immediately quarantined from my husband and baby because I wanted to be safe. I got the vaccine, or I'm sorry, the COVID test and tested positive. But overall, I feel great. I'm staying in quarantine right now, which means I'm hanging out in the guest room slash office, which, to be honest, has been a mommy vacation for me. Other than that, a little bored, a little cabin fever, but feeling good overall. I'm still a proponent of the vaccine. I believe that's why my symptoms are mild, and I believe that's why I'm not in the hospital right now and giving you guys a call. So everyone, you know, who's listening, I believe in the vaccine. I will still continue to mask up. And, yeah, thank you and have a great day. Bye.

Man, I'm glad that the symptoms aren't too bad. But, yeah, what a pain. And also just kind of a I don't know. I mean, that is not a disheartening voicemail, but it's kind of I know people feel very disheartened, feeling like we are really coming out of something. And in the fact that a lot of people have not gotten vaccinated. for the wrong reasons is, you know, creating this situation where we're still living through this

nightmare for a lot of people. Again, our listeners are very bright people. They don't need me to contextualize this stuff for them. But, you know, the way that I hear experts talking about the vaccine is it's like a seatbelt. And wearing your seatbelt doesn't mean that you won't get in a car crash, but it means if you do, you're much more likely to survive it and much more likely to avoid serious injury and you know it sounds like listener joanna again fingers crossed and all of that uh you know the seat belt caught her uh and unfortunately there was there you know she's she's got this breakthrough case but it's it's it's not worse because of the vaccine so and i'll tell you man like i'm going on this shoot in a couple of minutes uh the releases that i needed to sign with the la phil um and the the testing that we now do with cbs or i shouldn't say testing but the paperwork to show that we are vaccinated and have not been feeling any symptoms and also just in this hotel i don't think this hotel is uh the official rule is masking but i haven't seen one person not in a mask we're all just masking again you know i just think it's and when i go to this shoot i have to be in a mask at all times other than when we were filming outside like other than we're literally rolling it just feels like we're going back into that into that mode which is which is obviously really dispiriting but if we i was listening to atul gawande on the new yorker radio hour yesterday and and you know there is a chance that if if people do continue to get vaccinated the levels of people getting vaccinated are going up or the numbers are going up because people are seeing that uh their friends and loved ones if they are all of the sort of same mind of being suspicious of the vaccine these these places where there's low vaccination rates a lot of people are getting it and then a lot of the people who know those people are saying wow i better go get vaccinated so if we wear the masks if we you know if more people get vaccinated obviously we should at some point what atul gawande said was he thinks in his mind this will be over when there when covid leads to fewer deaths per day than the flu which is 100 deaths per day in the country right now it's at 300 covet is killing 300 people a day so he wants to see the covet killing fewer people than the flu does that's an interesting benchmark i had not heard that and also he had another a metric that had to do with hospitalization and i forget what that was but he was just i mean it's we're probably never going to be rid of this because we would have to be at over 90 vaccination and the world would have to be vaccinated at that rate which is That's a whole other conversation. Right. So but this idea that.

if you can get covid to where it is uh only as or if not or a slightly less dangerous than what we consider to be the flu that would be that would be when real life or normal life i should say can start again so that's interesting we all get there sooner rather i don't know why that number gave me some comfort it just felt and it's just the number that this obviously really smart doctor atul gawande had in his you know like i trust him but there was something about hearing that number that I was like, OK, there's a number we're working with.

Yeah, I don't think that that's a mystery. I mean, it's just that it's just this big unknown. I mean, it hasn't always been a complete unknown. Like we knew that, like, you know, a lot of like various restrictions, social restrictions were going to be pulled back after, like for our state and county, like when we got to a 70 percent vaccination level for those 12 and older, et cetera, et cetera. So I think it's actually very smart for people to be giving us certain benchmarks, things that we can wrap our heads around. Otherwise, it just sort of seems like is this just a morass that we just never really come out of? Like having something to shoot for and having something that we can actually kind of visualize and chart out I think is good for our psyche.

it it calmed me down uh measurably as i was just i was kind of starting to you know spin out as i often do when i start to think well they're just we're never going to get to the end of this and you know david remnick is asking about you know sort of vaccine resistant variants and things and it's like you can and i again our listeners because our listeners are smart our listeners are also some of them higher on the anxiety scale there's that seems to be connected for some dumb reason like so i know that the listeners can also identify with that feeling of like if you just listen to like two news stories in a row that paint kind of a bad case scenario you can you can really start to spiral so hearing hearing that idea of of being something like the flu again kind of comforted me maybe it'll give some comfort to our listeners yep uh do you have time

for one more quickie or do you want to move on okay here's another voicemail this is um addressing very important conversation that you and I were having on Friday as well about the word holler as in I'm going hunting in the holler

this is Lister Cheyenne I have been listening for probably about 5 or 6 years now so big fan I love you guys anyway I was just listening to Friday's show and I wanted to chime in about the holler thing so my husband is from the south and his family has been there for generations and a holler is it can be in a valley like a hollow but it's typically a road owned historically by a single family so you'll have like generation after generation of the same family even like you know you marry into a family and then you move on to their hauler and so it can be like it is typically a huge plot of land but yeah typically owned by one family it's what makes a difference from just a hollow anyway thanks

for everything you do love the show bye that's interesting and sounds way more accurate than what I was saying, which was saying that like, oh, maybe it's just the word hollow pronounced differently with the regional

accent. But even so, when you were Googling about for holler, you weren't finding anything. So I wonder if it's just this, if it's something that's just evolved over the years to where it was something that was a hollow, down in the hollow, and then the pronunciation was holler, and then holler just became sort of land, particularly maybe sort of rural land, and then it's the family holler, like that's the McCoy family holler you know but but it still is potentially originating from where you were

speculating it is which is hollow i could see that yeah certainly the etymology etymology

etymology etymology etymology right etymology etymology is bugs i think right right that sounds right is and then entomins is a delicious delicious treat with bugs in it i want to uh Tomorrow, Andrew, well, we didn't get to the Hot Doge story, which is probably not any great shame for America. But there's two things I do want to tell you about on tomorrow's show. They're both sort of digital. I want to tell you about the coolest thing ever from the USPS that I'm now engaged with. And I also want to tell you about how Apple Music is pouting that I have now stopped subscribing to Apple Music. And it's hilarious because it's totally not working in the way that like a child pouting doesn't work. Oh, my gosh. So remind me to tell you about both of those things tomorrow, okay?

All right, will do. I don't have a huge reason for this other than I've been listening to a lot of kind of power pop lately. I could play this T-Rex song, Life's a Gas. T-Rex, I believe, came up on the show the other day.

I did because I misattributed Thin Lizzy. Actually, I said Roland Bolin, which you pointed out is Mark Bolin, his son, right? And Mark Bolin is the T-Rex guy.

Yeah, exactly. He's a T-Rex guy, but I was misplacing him in Thin Lizzy. I see. That's why I came up. But, yeah, but also that does underscore that I am just in.

this Thin Lizzy, T-Rex-y kind of mood lately. So unless you have anything else, we'll go out with Life's a Gas by T-Rex. Love it. Alright, thanks for listening, everyone. We'll be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you. Until then, have a great Monday. Stay safe. Please take care of yourselves, and please remember no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

But it really doesn't matter at all No, it really doesn't matter at all Life's a guy I could have built a house on the ocean I could have placed our love in the sky But it all really doesn't matter at all No, it all really doesn't matter at all Life's a gas

Dude, you smoking pot in here? We're not smoking pot, Rex. Dude, I know what it smells like, all right? Papa sucked a bit of it down in his time, okay? This is my house. I didn't have to let you live here after your mama kicked me out, did I? Dude, we don't even smoke pot, man. Let me tell you something. I inhale your second-hand smoke. By noon, I'm smoking a crack pipe. You hear me? I gotta keep it on the straight and narrow. I know. I know you know, bro-ham. Power out.