Muse

Yes, I'm looking for a French baguette.

We don't do French baguettes. We do hoagies. Do you want a hoagie bread? Six inch or foot long?

Which one is longer?

Well, the six inch is like this, and the foot long is like...

Oh, yeah. Double in size. That makes sense.

And then we have our six-foot party hoagie.

Oh, okay. Can I get two feet of that, please? Two feet? Yeah, two feet of the party hoagie, please.

You have to get all six feet, sir.

Well, maybe you just give me two feet of it, and you can have the rest of the four feet.

I'm not allowed to take gifts from clients, and I already have two strikes.

TBTN! I was just fixing to get me some grub. Beans. I love beans. Big, fat, hot, juicy beans. Now don't get me going on beans, or I'll be jabbering away till the sun comes up. This is not your mama's podcast. This is too beautiful to live. It's got all the funny parts on it, all the good parts.

Celebrities, dancing stuff, and music. What is the deal with the smart car? How smart is that? Er, I am so smart. E equals FC squared. I drive a smart car. That's not smart in my book.

I view the world through the eyes of a child. You know, I have the heart of a warrior and the spirit of a gypsy.

Okay, enough chit-chat. Let's get the family in here.

All right, hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Monday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. It's a kind of magic. My name is Luke Burbank. I'm your host.

I don't know who that is, and I don't care to find out.

Very happy to be back in the comfortable confines of the Hollywood Broadcast Center in Portland, Oregon.

Bring it back home, baby. Bring it back home.

And I'm going to get to be in the comfortable confines of this apartment for the foreseeable future because I just tested positive for Omicron. That is right. I was on a hot streak, I have to say, with the negative tests last week while I was in Austin. I took three tests I got the results also of a PCR test I had taken earlier in the week all negative and then got home yesterday and was not feeling super great wondered if it could just be well the effects of being in Las Vegas, Nevada or something more sinister and I took a test and in fact it lit up like a Christmas tree so here I am I'll just be in this apartment cooking whatever instant mashed potatoes and cans of soup I have left in the pantry as I isolate for the next few days, waiting to see how this whole thing goes. We're not going to let that stand in the way, though, of episode 3594 in a collector's series.

Let the fun begin.

In fact, I don't know, maybe we're going to have a great week of shows. I feel physically okay, I'm happy to say, due to the miracle that is the vaccine and the booster. Um, but this will probably be the most concentration that I'm able to put into TBTL in years because I basically have one job this week and that is to, like I said, uh, drink hot tea and eat instant mashed potatoes and do this podcast. And we're all out of hot tea and instant mashed potatoes. Uh, so, uh, it'll be an interesting week. It starts off on a little bit of a bittersweet note. As we remember the life of the very funny

Oh, he's hilarious, dog

Bob Saget Who passed away in Florida over the weekend Quite unexpectedly And I found it to be really interesting To look at the kinds of tributes and memorials That have poured out for him And who they've come from And specific language that they've used Because I think it really indicates something important about him May be important to all of us As we go through this life So we will remember Bob Saget Also, we've got a lot of feedback related to neti pots in the emails segment. And I would say the email in the, well, 3,593 or so shows that we've done. I don't count this one as happening yet. We still haven't introduced Andrew. But for all the shows we've done, for all the years we've been doing this, I would say an email that is the most detail-oriented around the topic of nose-blowing came in. So we'll check in on all of that. We'll do all that with the help of this young man, the longest-running Cobra of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. He may have made the right decision skipping Las Vegas.

Smarty pants dance. Smarty pants dance.

He is Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now.

from the roosevelt neighborhood of seattle washington good morning my friend good morning i was already i had something i wanted to tell you about a dream i had this weekend but no you've you've won up to me i big dogged you you big dogged me you got you caught the bug during a global pandemic really kind of kind of puts my dream talk to like i don't know second position fine did you have a dream where you got omicron no i didn't i'll just tell you because No, I can't. It's one sentence. I had a dream that I was looking to buy one of those old Wendy's tables. That's it for the dream part. But I totally forgot. What do you mean when you say a Wendy's like the kind you would just sit at in a Wendy's? Yes, that's what I wanted to ask you about. We really do need to talk about your life. But I had totally forgotten about this, except for one part of my brain held on to this weird memory that when I was a kid and you'd go into a Wendy's and you sit down at the table, the tables had fake newsprint it was like a do you remember that it was like collages of old newspapers from like the 1800s and early 1900s I think and I would have never ever remember that that was like one of the details of going into a Wendy's in the 1980s and 90s but my brain randomly this weekend was like hey I'm going to give you a dream where you're trying to buy one of those tables from your youth I wonder if because Wendy's started out in Ohio right was

it's like um oh dublin ohio you know what you're right i forgot about that but yeah dave thomas was an ohio fella i'm wondering if because i i don't know if that i'm looking at pictures of it on the internet right now i don't know if that exact style of decor made its way all the way out to like seattle i wonder if it might have been more of a midwest thing um but i have seen something like that in other restaurants like i've seen that as a as a as a you know whatever we want to call it design concept and i what i wonder is do you think we could probably zoom in on it do you think that the newsprint was from real things well it looks like it's a bunch of ads for kind of old-timey stuff white liniment and uh things like that that's what i'm remembering

just as you were forming the question do you think it was real i suddenly remembered wait a second it was mostly old ads for weird things exactly like that um so yeah my guess is yes they because it wouldn't be worth like recreating it it wasn't funny it wasn't like onion headlines or something it was just like right somebody thought oh this will add a bit of character but such a strange thing that was like a that was like you'd walk like they made that decision at some point and i don't know exactly why now fast food restaurants all kind of are the same unless you're going no offense mccafe i realize you're on a different level jeez louise calm down mccafe there are

there are every once in a while a franchise e and i see this on tiktok sometimes of like there's a burger king i forget where it is but somebody on tiktok went in there it's like a it's a burger king that wanted to be like hollywood style for some reason because you know i i would guess it if you if you are the franchisee if you own the rights to have that burger king restaurant in wherever you can kind of have fun with the building if you want now there's a standard plan that probably has been optimized by Burger King corporate that says, this is the right square footage. This is how you need to do it so you can sell the most burgers. Oh, I could talk about the airport yesterday in Las Vegas and a whole debacle at the Burger King there, Andrew. Not even a debacle, but a study of human behavior. Remind me to come back to that. But I'm sure you can kind of do, if you want to spend a bunch of your own money to have film reels and things all over and like crazy decor you can also do that and that happens on occasion those places are truly a wonderland like the just the the franchisee of one of these fast food places that just decided to go completely off script with what they're doing with their particular location there must

be some sort of rules and regulations like an hoa though right like because you can harm the brand

if you go you would think but i'm telling you and i i'm 99 sure this is a burger king but the design of this place was you know what it looked like it looked like it was the inside of you know in christmas vacation julia louis dreyfus and her partner the kind of like yeah uptight yuppies uh-huh who who clark griswold just keeps completely ruining their lives unbeknownst to him with things like an icicle shooting through their um bang and olofs and cd player or whatever yeah and like everything in their house is like glass cubes you know separating things it was like whatever the height of kind of like late 80s modern design was this burger king has had elements of that if i remember that just like the color pattern and stuff but also just it was if if one of our listeners can try to locate the thing that i'm talking about that would get me out of at least this jam here's what happened at the vegas airport yesterday Well, one, I'm like never, you know, early for a flight. But as happens in Vegas, you know, you you wake up if you're me anyway on Sunday morning, you're like, OK, that was enough of that town for ever. And so I didn't feel like doing any more carousing. I didn't feel like doing any more gambling. I just was ready to kind of get on a plane and come home. So I wake up, I check out of the hotel, I go to the airport on time. Of course, my flight is pushed by like four hours, but I'm already at the airport. so i'm like really is it worth getting a cab back to town and just hanging like i just ended up just chilling at mccarran airport for like five hours yesterday but at one point i was hungry and i thought i i was gonna and i hope it's okay that i associate this with you andrew i know that you have a policy where you're allowed to eat kind of fast food and maybe not great food when you're on when you're traveling when you're in the airport that feels like you know it doesn't count or

whatever what is your theory on that yeah i'm trying to think of this as me or more genevieve but just kind of a gen and they're they're ruining it for us not to go on too many tangents here but it used to be that hey i'm stuck in an airport i guess i got to eat at a chili's you know like oh too bad like and you know you don't usually like go out to a chili's when you're just like hey honey where should we go to dinner tonight that's not usually our speed but when you're you're in the airport you're like well chili's is the best i can do and so you just kind of enjoy it for what it is but the problem is they're replacing all those now it's all wolfgang puck bullshit now those things are actually pretty good by the way i got a mozzarella and um basil

sandwich at the wolfgang puck in the lax they're ruining airports anyway so i'm sitting there i have forevs and i think i am going to because because the other decision i made was i'm going to really get my life together on monday i was like it's new year new luke uh i'm gonna get back on my health grind i'm gonna because i you know i've been on vacation and just kind of doing whatever and so i was like this is my last day of being able to uh just have like burger king fast food plus burger king has the impossible whopper so they're like the one fast food burger chain that i can actually go to if i want you know mcdonald's doesn't i think there's rumors of mcdonald's having their own creation but i don't think that's widely available yet so anyway the line for this burger king andrew is just it's it's it's blocking the entire walkway of mccarran airport which seems like a bad system like probably somebody should have said you have to snake the line because it went out of the burger king across the entire like whatever you call it terminal and then over into another area where people were waiting for the planes now normally this is the kind of thing that i avoid you know like the plague although it turns out i also have the plague so i've been avoiding none of this stuff effectively yeah but i i thought i have five hours in this airport i have my phone it has tick tock i have airpods i'm gonna get in this ridiculous line and i'm just gonna like look at my phone and i'll either be sitting and looking at my phone or i'll be standing and looking at my phone getting ever closer to some delicious impossible whopperage so but it was also really warm in this airport like it seemed like there was some kind of hvac thing going on so we're all standing in this interminable line it's going it's taking forever and everyone's a little bit warm now because just the temperature isn't isn't quite right so everyone is thinking god it's going to be great to get a large fountain drink fill it up with ice and just take a relaxing and cooling sip of the beverage of your choice except the ice machine had this big sign on it that said i mean the soda machine that is also the ice machine said um uh the ice is broken or we're out of ice or something a big like hand printed quickly hastily printed sign no ice so you could just see everyone in line trying to do the math on like do i just do i just get a soda and hope that the temperature of the beverage is cold enough is do they refrigerate i don't know the answer to this do they refrigerate the soda

before it goes into your paper cup sounds like a nightmare i'm a big ice guy as you know and like i would not drink a fast food you know soda fountain drink without ice that's so i am i had

so much time in this line one of the things that i realized was almost everyone was in this line really more for the cold drink than anything like the food was sort of secondary to everyone but there was no other great alternative because it wasn't a thing where they also had like a cooler of you know cold uh you know bottled soda or anything like that so this was pretty much your option then i was like okay well there's a coffee bean and tea leaf next to this like separated by this divider and i was thinking okay i'm going to get my cup and i'm going to i'm not going to put any soda in i'm going to go over and then get in line at the coffee and tea leaf and then maybe they have ice and i'm gonna say can i just get a can i buy a cup of ice from you and then i'm gonna come back into the burger king and then i'm gonna get my like i was strategizing through all i was gaming out all kinds of pot it was like i could go to the alaska airlines lounge and ask them for ice like so at some point at one of the burger king employees i want to also just say this burger king at the mccarran airport was an extremely well-run operation considering the labor shortage in this country considering all the people in line considering the things that were just breaking down all around them they did an exceptional job they were just really on it i was like very impressed and they were people of different you know ages and just appearances and like it was like everyone on this team it was like they should have kind of been a commercial for burger king because they just it was a good crew but so one point although this one lady god bless her i mean she was trying but she didn't really totally understand how things work she comes out from the back of the store now the back of the restaurant and she has got this cart and she's got three huge things of ice on the cart like basically like a watt you know like a culligan water bottle you turn upside down yes a couple things of that size full of ice and she is rolling through she might as well have been rolling you know water through the desert in front of a bunch of people i know that ice is a form of water i am aware of that but it was like everyone's eyes got so big as she wheeled through just like massive amounts of pristine ice like where did that come from and how do we get that so she walks over to the ice machine this is like ice pirates the movie ice pirates so she walks over to the machine she wasn't a big lady either i was like is she gonna be able to do this she like hoists one of these collagen things and she's trying to pour ice into like there's a sort of part of the of the soda machine that juts out a little bit and it's where the ice comes down from but the thing is the top of that there's a ledge above where so just imagine like a a rectangle that sticks out from the machine she was under the impression that the top of that rectangle is where you put the ice oh no lady which makes no sense this ice lady you couldn't have you couldn't just pour ice into this open thing where this like dust is settling on it like the ice

comes from inside the machine there's a refrigeration there's a whole thing in there where the ice is being made inside where also the bags of soda syrup are it's not it is this is not a thing where you can just insert ice into the this top of this thing and hope that it will filter down and sure enough it didn't work she pours a bunch of ice on this thing it makes a pile of ice up there then she starts trying to like go like hit the ice you know where the ice comes out and nothing's happening and she looked very exasperated so she still has a significant amount of this ice though so she wheels it back into the back of the restaurant kind of defeatedly can I ask you a quick question

here yes even if it did work that way which from your description of it I can you know it's obvious that it doesn't but even if it did work that way was she gonna like Mary Poppins the ice into it like it sounds like she had more ice than oh yes square you know jutting out part of the soda machine no this was i give

her i give her huge points for being proactive and for identifying a problem which is i mean this is what i'm saying in this moment of life that we're all living through as a society it is not uncommon to go into a place for them to be like sorry no ice that's just it yeah like this woman was like there's no ice it's really gonna bum these customers out let me try to solve this problem yeah yeah okay okay but you're no no no no no no but the point is you're right it wasn't the this was the kind of plan i would hatch like it was long on uh it was long on optimism and short on technical planning because she she dumped it then she tried to kind of like do the thing with her hand where she sort of kind of sifted it a little bit so it would sift down into this thing which it didn't do because that's not how that system works um but yeah it was also much more ice than than the machine could have even held etc but this is what starts happening andrew i thought i was the only person who really watched all this and figured it out but i was like now there is a pile of ice sitting in this weird limbo of this soda machine all the ice that she dumped into some sort of cavity that doesn't feed into the ice machine it's just sitting there and it's basically fine and what I could do is just get my cup and scoop some ice from above and it's also it's probably six and a half feet above eyeline so you have to be at least my height to kind of know it's there and kind of reach for it

oh this is accessible to you the whole time I'm picturing it if you said that I'm sorry I was picturing it like behind the counter but of course this is like a serve yourself soda machine

exactly yeah you can walk right up to this thing okay and do your thing So I'm like, there's a pile of ice That was put there by mistake But that I couldn't

now access and i'm just like okay i hope nobody else figures this out but what i see there's like still 10 people in line in front of me i see like the first person who gets their food you know who's at this point in the line they get their food and they get their cup this lady walks over and i see her just kind of like stand kind of look kind of assess she wasn't that tall either and kind of do like and then kind of like sort of almost like she's doing something she's not allowed to do Casually kind of walking over And then sort of reaching up It was like monkeys It was like if you did this If you put a bunch of monkeys In an experiment And they wanted something And then you were just putting it in a weird place And studying And then how would the group think work Because this woman went over And she grabbed a few ice things and put them in And filled her cup up And then I saw some people Who had gotten iceless soda Who were still in the area like either eating or waiting for their stuff and then they started to come over they started to flock to the machine and dump out their like room temperature soda and start to kind of like and i was really just hoping anyone who does this use your cup please use your cup to slide through the ice do not use your hands then this one woman walks up and just with her i won't i i've referred to someone's bare hands this way before on the show you didn't love it there's a certain term that Camaro Kev learned for your one's potentially unwashed hands. Anyway, this woman walked up and with her presumably unwashed hands Her airport hands, like that's enough. Just reached right in and just like grabbed a bunch of it and like dumped her ice in and I was like so devastated because I was like, you have just ruined this for all of us. Animals. But then I was still like, I'm probably still going to just try to get the part of the ice I think she might not have touched. Like I was desperate. And then like, this is why I said this was an amazing crew of people the woman who had tried the ice capade or the ice caper number one that was unsuccessful she reappears now behind the counter with all this ice still and a and an actual proper ice scoop nice and she sits it next to the woman who is working the register and she says when people order a soda you just put their ice in here nice and it was like this is how you do it

this is not a bunch of dirty people putting their hand in the middle of a goddamn pandemic I'm losing my faith in humanity We'll talk about that tomorrow But I think I am Like that is Who does that Come on Oh I would have done it I would have absolutely

Used your hands Well I was going to use You're holding a cup I was going to use the cup But if the cup didn't work I was going to use my hands Andrew You don't understand What it was like You weren't there You weren't there dude But then it was great Because this And like this happened Like I said Maybe two spots Before I got to the front of the line So I didn't have to go mess with the weird ice situation i had like a large ice filled cup of diet coke which i then sat in the airport and nursing while i looked at tiktok on my phone so anyway on the subject of fast food

architecture andrew that's what i have on that i am we still haven't talked about the main headline of the day i'm very impressed with these uh folks maybe during your week home you can write to corporate and say like that you really appreciated their ingenuity and uh yeah get up and going this Also I was disappointed to hear From my partner Genevieve Who came home from Vegas with you yesterday Well she didn't come home with you from Vegas But you guys all departed Vegas yesterday She came home to our house Just to be very clear there Because there was a lot of confusion Friday on the show There was a lot of talk between you And Camaro Kev about going to Club Taco Bell where DJ Chalupa Was going to be spinning And it sounds like none of that ended up happening

The Taco Bell Cantina Right I saw it from across Las Vegas Boulevard, Andrew Just like a beautiful oasis Shimmering in the desert We did not So when we left When we wrapped up on Friday Recording this episode Camaro and I were both Reaching the point of hunger And he mentioned this thing And I was like, we should go there We did not end up going into it We saw it, though, across the street I have to be honest with you It was a little Taco Bell nightclub Was making it sound a little more exciting Than it was It just looked like a souped-up Taco Bell. Were there DJs? Or I guess you didn't go in. You wouldn't know. I did not go in. Like I said, it was across the street, which you know in Las Vegas is the geography of that place. You've been there, right? I mean, oh, we've been there. We talked about this on Friday. We've been there once, but only in an RV and only at Five Aces Club.

Yeah, and you drove. Oh, yeah, I looked it up. I think it was – it wasn't Five Aces. It was like four doors or something because I looked it up, and I did a little Google search of the inside of that place. I was like, I think I found it or those places all look alike. But anyway, yeah, no, I haven't really seen it, but I can imagine it. It's not I'm sure that there's like some pedestrian flow in some areas to keep you in some areas. But like you are not a free pedestrian in that town.

i'm assuming you can't just like cross the street without climbing over barriers and whatnot well there's that it used to be the case that las vegas boulevard when i was young and going out there um it was just a big street i mean it was busy but you could just if there were no cars you could just cross it you could jaywalk it if you want if a cab was dropping you off they could just pull over and you could get out um and they they embarked on a major kind of uh you know i guess you would say like it's an urban design project where yeah you can't it's all barriers now you can't get to the strip it's all escalators and sky bridges and things but what's really disorienting about las vegas if you're trying to walk is everything looks like it's two blocks away and it's really two miles away but because everything is so massive somebody should really study this because it's like every building is so out of like scale for what we're used to that it tricks your eyes so you're like going oh the stratosphere i'm looking at it what is that three blocks and it's like no it's six miles away but because of its massiveness and because of how just eye bending all of this architecture is of this las vegas strip you you know so that taco bell cantina which looked like it was across the street was probably two miles and we're trying to walk it sure yeah yeah um plus it's also just hard to coordinate the other thing was it was a really fun weekend we actually had a very fun dinner out in the um i forget which uh i guess it was in the aria we went to this mexican place on uh saturday night that was lovely or maybe it was friday night but other than that we had there was a bunch of people and everyone's kind of on their own schedule of eating and napping and wandering and so we could it was hard to get everyone on the same food page i kept i felt like we kept making plans like the taco bell cantina and other things we're like we're gonna do that and then it just kind of like we got distracted and then it just involved me going to like a subway to get a veggie delight at like two in the morning you know somewhere like in an underground mall in las vegas i also saw uh one of those uh like terrifying robot dogs patrolling a mall oh just free on its own it appeared to be it was i was in that there's this mall that connects the aria and the cosmopolitan and it's very upscale like i've never even been in any of the shops i've walked through this mall hundreds of times in my life and have never entered any of the stores because they're like they have guards first of all but It's all like, you know, Gucci and Balenciaga and all like, I don't even know what anything in their cost, but it's prohibitively expensive. I'm also not into it. Isn't it weird how the more expensive, like you walk by a Lanvin or something and you're like, not only is that stuff, I couldn't, not only could I not afford it, I don't think I want it. Like, I don't really get, I don't get that kind of high expensive fashion.

But anyway, in that mall, one of those yellow, like Boston dynamic dogs just walk, I taped it on my phone. It was totally weird and upsetting.

Yeah, those things are scary. I've only seen video of them, of course, but I would give that a why. And also, what's it supposed to do? Is it armed? Like, what is that dog patrolling, and how is it patrolling? What's it looking for? Does it have cameras on it? That's probably it, huh? It's got cameras on it, and there's somebody in a booth somewhere just, like, operating this remote control and looking for ne'er-do-wells?

Or, honestly, it could be one of these high-end clothing stores. It's like an art piece. You never know. Also, CES had been sort of occurring, so maybe it was a CES project. I don't know.

I was going to ask. I did a really quick search on Las Vegas Robot Dog Mall, if you want to follow me along. Could this have been the win, or is it just win Las Vegas? Okay, because there's a whole bunch of articles about robot dog greeting guests at win Las Vegas, but it's not black and yellow. It's got fake furry. It is a robot, but they put like a video screen where the dog's head would be. And it's like a video of a dog's head. It's also disconcerting. I'm texting you. I'm emailing you right now.

It was supposed to say Robo Dog, but it says Do I Dog? But just ignore that. Sending you a Do I Dog video. This is a video of the dog at this place called The Shops at Crystal. Okay. And you know what? Now I'm looking at it, and it looks like there was a guy walking next to it, maybe who was its handler.

Maybe he was training the robot dog.

I went around and around on the kind of tweet that I wanted to send. I ended up with saying something like, these designer dog breeds are getting out of control. I kind of wanted to do like a, it's a rescue, some kind of a joke about it being a rescue or adopt, don't shop or something. I don't know. You know, it's now about 30 minutes into the program and we haven't talked at all about the fact that I have Omicron. So maybe we should do this. Let's take a quick break and then come back. I mean, I don't know how much there is to say about it.

I have this unfortunately I tested positive for this thing that um a lot of people are having breakthrough cases I'm obviously vaxxed and boosted if they would allow me to get the one booster a day I would like if you could just build it into your schedule just pop by the CVS for a booster each day like you get your cup of coffee I would do that for the record but anyway um we can talk you know what I want to talk a little bit about the weird silver lining this for me anyway personally um to kind of my enforced you know home confinement now i'm i'm actually kind of looking forward to that a little bit so uh we'll talk about that and bob saget coming up here in a moment on tbtl hey let's thank some donors of the day Hey, what wonderful listeners we have, Andrew, who support the program financially, month after month, making this possible. Every once in a while, a listener is just a brother-in-law you owe an email to.

That's the first name on our list. It's Zachary Has. As I like to refer to him famously now, my brother-in-law from another mother-in-law.

That's right. He's in San Francisco, California. Zachary. Zachary, thanks, man. Thanks, man. We appreciate you. Now, is that Zachary's Christmas gift to you? Ooh, yes. That's how it should be. Yeah. You know, like, hey, here's what, you know what? I sponsored a podcast for you. I adopted a podcast for you. What if I did that? This donation is being made in your name, Andrew Walsh, to TBTL.

What if I sent out, like, some sort of holiday greetings? I was just like, in lieu of gifts. Now, keep in mind, I'm not a big gift exchanger. I only exchange gifts with Genevieve. But I will just suddenly reach out to people whom I have not exchanged gifts with in decades and just say, in lieu of gifts this year, please donate to TBTL. And then, yeah, I'll do what you said. Put it in my name so that when we're reading the donors, every other day there's an Andrew Walsh in there.

What a great trolling. That will happen, by the way, next year. Don't do that, anybody. If we actually, you know, if we get to keep doing this. Also thanks to Mary Halcom of Muckle Teo, Washington Hello, Mary Is TBTL10 still the mayor of that town? Is Mary living in a TBTL-friendly zone?

No, Mayor Gregerson is no longer holding that seat, I believe It's gone back to being a TBTL-unfriendly zone That's right, keep your head low No, it's still very TBTL-friendly

Don't let on Thank you, Mary Also, Sarah Hernandez is right here in Portland, Oregon The rainy, rainy Portland, Oregon Although, I believe it's only 15 days from now, Andrew Until the sun starts setting after 5 p.m. again

I don't know how much our weather patterns reflect each other I think a pretty big deal, right? Pretty big deal I think that often what's happening There's some similarities But I saw there's another atmospheric river We just lived through this thing called the Atmospheric River That actually caused a lot of problems in this region. And then we had one nice day this weekend, which was yesterday. And then the headline in the Seattle Times is, well, starting Monday night through Wednesday, another atmospheric river is coming into town. But then by this weekend, we're supposed to have the first dry three days since September. Wow.

Yes. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, it is. I don't know each winter in the northwest to me feels darker and wetter than the ones that precede it but um you know this one feels especially you know you like not dry um looking forward to that I mean that is I have to say the beauty of apartment living for me I do I mean I did buy this little house that I'm gonna have a bunch of work done but that's just kind of that's just kind of simmering but like you know in Bellingham boy that was a uh that was certainly something that kept me up at night, the questions of water intrusion in the basement and things like that. Oh, right, yeah. Now I'm just in this apartment building in the sky and it can rain, you know, 40 days and 40 nights. And other than it being kind of a bummer, I'm not worried about this apartment flooding, which is lucky.

Yeah.

We've got to keep thanking these donors, including Rebecca Ormsby, who's in Plano, Texas. You know who else is from Plano, Texas? Demi Adigebe, noted comedy writer and performer, and also Melanie Sevchenko, our editor on Livewire. And I know that because Demi was mentioning being from Plano, Texas, and Melanie was like, I'm also from Plano, Texas.

And then we had a 40-minute conversation about Plano, Texas. You want to know some more? Troy Aikman, Lance Armstrong, Steve Harvey. We saw in the...

In the Planet Hollywood Hotel, which is where Camaro was staying, as you go to the elevators, there was a giant framed publicity still. Not a headshot because it was his whole body or most of his body, but of Steve Harvey, but of a young Steve Harvey, like a 29-year-old Steve Harvey, maybe 30-year-old. I don't know how old Steve Harvey really is. But I just said look at that life Look at that face just full of optimism Because he has not This is before he spent years and years Listening to bad answers on Family Feud Just aged him Which has just worn him down Which just created the famous Steve Harvey Apoplectic response face Of you just gave the worst answer ever

In the history of Family Feud It always has to do with making Whoopi now I want to give a quick I want to give a quick shout out, a little thumbs up to a very janky website. It looks like this is more of like a squatting website. But it's Plano Homes and Land dot com. But it is it does have a blog entry, celebrities who live in Plano. And I don't know who or what is behind this again. Oh, actually, it looks like there is a human being. It looks like somebody named Terry Smith wrote this. It's a list of some famous people who are from Plano, as I listed them there, and then a bunch of people who I don't recognize. But there's a little description. Troy Aikman, Dallas Cowboy quarterback, Pro Bowl Hall of Fame. Lance Armstrong, seven-time Tour de France winner? Question mark. Oh. What do you think? I love that. Has a question mark ever been louder? That's pretty clever. Right.

That's subtle, though. Yeah. That's pretty good. Nice job to that website. Yeah. I'm a ding. Jennifer Bierman is in Jersey City, New Jersey. Thank you, Jennifer. And then Emily Finger. Oh, speaking of rivers, atmospheric rivers in Bellingham, Washington, Emily Finger is up there in Bellingham, Washington.

Oh, Kate, look out for your basement in the coming days, Emily.

Yeah, sandbag the whole town, if you can. Just the, in fact, yeah, I mean, that's a, I'm hoping, I don't want bad things to happen to anyone But I'm hoping that this particular atmospheric river Spares Whatcom County Where we have a lot of listeners And that's where Bellingham is where I used to live Whatcom County and parts of British Columbia Were particularly hard hit By that last one So why can't the atmospheric river Dump its river into like Puget Sound You know what I mean Why can't it just like Why can't the rain just funnel into the ocean And then just kind of keep that hydrological cycle going

Well I'm making a machine that would start to control the weather in certain ways. Oh, that's good. That'll never fall into the wrong hands. I am the wrong hands. I'm sorry to interrupt. I was going to say, did you happen to see, though, just while we're talking about just bizarre headlines and things related to the weather, did you see that Seattle was basically cut off from, like, basically Washington State and Seattle? No, I think Seattle was cut off from Washington State and basically the rest of the country this weekend because of, like, the snow and Snoqualmie Pass was just like unpassable like and there were in there were some other infrastructure things that basically made Seattle just cut off from everything else I went to the grocery store last week and there was just nothing I'm not nothing but it's just like tons of of empty shelves and not like at the beginning of pandemic where it was like all the toilet paper was gone and cleaning supplies it's just like random places in the store just like just big swaths of empty shelves because we You're just like cut off from everything. It has been a weird couple of years. Anybody point that out yet?

It certainly has been. I didn't hear about that. But I did hear that, yeah, like the passes, the mountain passes basically getting from the eastern part of Washington State to the western part were just a total mess because of tons and tons of snow dumping. So, well, did you get what you needed? Were you okay?

Yeah, I'm in decent shape. The one thing that they had literally nothing of that I wanted to buy was cat food. But luckily, I had enough cat food at home to get through it.

Well, that's good. Thank you to our donors of the day for keeping us in cat food and other necessary staples. We would not be here doing the show without you. So thank you, babies. Hello and welcome to Top Story. I guess our top story. I get dizzy spells, nausea, cold sweats, hot sweats. I actually have none of those things right now, Andrew. I do have the cron. I think I'm very lucky that I am in the category of people who are basically asymptomatic. I mean, I feel like I have a kind of a mid to low grade cold, which is, as I said at the top of the show, probably due largely to the miracle.

is the vaccine and the booster so i feel really lucky about that i feel really um lucky that i don't have a job where like i do food delivery or i'm a nurse or uh you know a school bus driver any variety of jobs where you have to physically go do the thing i can kind of do my job stuff from here so that's really privilege i don't have young kids here that need me to not be sick so as far as as far as people who who have this thing i am in the very very very privileged position um uh you know and and to be honest with you when i realized well i'm not going anywhere for a minimum of five days i was like i can get into that i'm just gonna hole up here and i don't even know can i even here's the thing if i order food they have to bring it they can't bring it to my door in this new building it's just how it works with the elevators and stuff so they leave it at like a desk in the lobby and then you go down and get it is it socially irresponsible of me to go down to that desk even if i'm double masked to get things like when i hadn't really thought about this much when people say i'm isolating what do they really mean how is isolated like i am not going to open the door of that apartment for five days or is it i'm going to if i have to leave the house double mask up i wonder what the actual like

what the best practices on that are i don't know i mean i think everybody you know they're people kind of interpret and it in different ways and then act as they see fit i would say and i don't want to get into a like me telling you your business thing i feel like it's probably best to avoid elevators i don't know what floor you're on oh yeah i can walk down the stairs yeah yeah i mean even if there's nobody in the elevator it's probably just not good to leave maybe like a cloud um yeah and so i was doing that long before oh that foreshadowing to an interesting um voicemail we have later on in the show um but yeah so definitely avoid elevators i would say and then i don't i mean the thing is like all these businesses started like contactless delivery for this reason right so that you don't so like leave the bag leave the cannoli you know uh take the gun no leave the gun take the cannoli you know so yeah i mean i guess as little is there somebody at this desk if somebody drops off food downstairs are they dropping it off with like

somebody who's sitting behind a desk it kind of depends on the time of day see if i was living in the other apartment building it would be fine because the system was i could hit a button on my phone and it would turn the elevators on or it would basically mean anyone could take the elevator So I could have somebody leave food outside of my door I could wait until they were gone I could open the door and then take the food And no one had to If they leave the food at the desk and I go down And the person is at the desk Or even if I'm going down the stairs And I emerge into the lobby and there are people there Obviously I want to try to be as far away From any humans as possible For the next five days

Get your neighbor sex, lies, and videotape To go down and get it for you

I wonder what that guy thinks My deal is just generally like i'm gone all the time i'm like you know uh he probably hears some weird muttering from me which is this show or live wire as he's like you know leaving the apartment at times um yeah maybe i could see about that i mean i guess i could actually ask there's a very nice uh a woman who works for the the leasing office she's extremely friendly and i could ask her because she's the one usually that's at the desk i guess i could say hey i have the cron i don't want to be out in the building um endangering anyone would it be possible if i had food delivered if maybe you just ran it up and dropped it outside my place or something i don't know is that too big

of an ask i don't know i don't know i feel like i'm doing it for the general good yeah you know yeah i don't know you know honestly i i can't um i just don't you get a vibe from some people and I think you've talked about this person before. She had your back on a couple of things. I don't know if it was elevator-related when you were moving in or something. It sounds like you have a good rapport. This is the same person who you were negotiating screen issues with, right? Do you still have that screen in your apartment? Oh, they fixed that immediately.

I'm staring out the window right now that previously had a screen on it.

Yeah, but where's the screen? Didn't it create another problem of like you had a screen then?

Yeah, but that was a different person from the management team. They all are very nice. They're all very helpful.

The screen is gone, though. They took care of the screen is gone. Oh, nice.

I brought it down to their office. Oh, cool. And they I don't know. They made it go away. They made the bad screen fly.

I don't know where to. You got to. I don't know, man. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. The only reason I'm sort of hesitating is like, you know, I don't know the rapport. And then, you know, is what is this person? What are you pulling them away from? I don't know.

I have no idea. Well, I'll figure it out, you know, because like I said, I got some time here. Also, there's a question of testing. So I have two home tests left. These things are so stinking hard to find these days, Andrew, because I basically I'm going to wait like two or three days. I'm going to test myself again. And then if I'm positive, you just have to keep waiting, I think, until you get a negative test or 10 days goes by. But I don't know how once my second test home test is gone. These are the weird ones that I bought from the Internet that I have to scan this card basically so that they can have my my my email address and my personal information. But I only have two more of those. I don't know where anyone's getting a test at this point. So, yeah, I don't know either.

Like we didn't have any Genevieve wanted to get tested between Hawaii and Vegas. And, you know, there were just none to be found anywhere. So she did what you did, which was like ordered them online in case we need them, you know, in the future, which then you actually got some of them. No, they're not here yet. But it's just kind of like she ordered them online saying like, well, I should have she just kept saying I should have done this a long time ago so that we would just have some on hand. And I didn't. So now I'll order them to have them on hand if we need them in the future. And I'm thinking like maybe this will be a like a good luck charm. Like when you buy something that you end up not needing or you fill your gas tank up and then your car dies for the final time and you think, huh, I could have saved that $20. That's something that happened to my friend Greg. Anyway, he was so broke in college. That so reminds me of mine.

He was so broke. Well, you know what they say in AA, Andrew? Shoot the alligator that's closest to the boat. What's the thing that's the biggest threat to you? And so if, I mean, fill your tank with gas, why? The car could die. Yeah. Put $2 in.

get to the next thing you're trying to drive to he had a he had a it was a camaro i think he had a yellow camaro when i knew him and but he he would tell me stories about his pre i think it was a previous camaro some other kind of car like that um but like you know like kind of a you know an old one and maybe a junky one and his his car finally just died on him the one previous and the thing that he was most sad about i just i remember remarking on it 25 years ago that he was just like so bummed about that last tank of gas that he put in. He didn't care about the car anywhere near as much as he cared about that gas. I would have been

trying to get into whatever wrecker, you know, whatever junkyard had taken the car and see if I could siphon that gas out.

Yeah, right. I almost wonder if he did. This is, yeah, this is Greg. That sounds like something he would do. He's got strong Brunswick energy.

Is that a show title? Maybe. Strong

Brunswick energy. Maybe. So, but yeah, so you're just going to navigate like, like you said, you, I mean, I've been saying this to you on the show and a little bit off the show too. Like you need some downtime. I think I've, I've been maybe slightly worried about you just like, you're just constantly traveling against the backdrop of everything that we're all up against. And you've just been doing all this stuff. So again, I'm not trying, I don't want to be glib about it, but it sort of sounds like you needed something. You needed something in your life to say you need to stay home for a week for God's sake.

Well, the other thing was, I mean, I was supposed to be this week. The schedule is that I would be working from home anyway, but you never know. And I'll get a call and they'll say, can you go do this thing or whatever? By the way, if people out there are going, boy, Luke's your talks about a lot of television stories that never air. I promise you, this is not a delusion that I'm living in this week. The Kirsten Dunst piece got bumped or this last week because they had to run an obituary for Sidney Poitier. and the week before the story about cold water swimming got bumped because they had to run an obituary for Betty White so those stories are still supposedly going to be on television at some point but less the listeners think I'm just making things up for some weird reason I promise those are really things that happened that I did speaking of obituaries by the way very sad news over the weekend that Bob Saget passed away at age 65 very suddenly he was in Florida he had just played a show he was in Orlando and um uh the the early police reports are that uh there were no signs of foul play and no signs of drug use in the room um he seemed by all outward appearances to be a pretty typically healthy 65 year old person um I am I don't know if I was too young or too old for Full House but I never really I mean Full House was a phenomenon in this country so even if If you because of the Olsen twins and all that even and probably, you know, just John Stamos, whatever, even if you didn't watch Full House, you were kind of aware of it. Right. Like, were you aware of it growing up?

Oh, God. Yeah. And I remember seeing the dates, you know, and reading Bob Saget coverage this weekend. And it was like mid 80s to mid 90s, I think. So that's like, you know, that's kind of those are the years that I grew up and I was watching TV. I never liked.

show though I always disliked the show I thought it was just like the worst of that type of television no offense to Bob Saget as we memorialize him but that show was not for me I as I got older and I learned how much he was beloved and how really those you know his role on Full House and America's Funniest Home Videos actually kind of belied who he really was as someone who could really like spin a filthy joke and all that and how other comedians loved him I my appreciation for him as a human being came later in life but that show was not for me

yeah I never really I think I was just a little bit too old so Full House just seemed a bit too broad for me the fact that it kind of leaned as much as it did on these like you know little twins although I guess I guess we didn't know they were twins in the show it was just one kid but they had two kids to play the same character um the thing that that I was obsessed with as a kid that Bob Saget was part of was America's Funniest Home Videos that was one of those shows when we finally got a TV and we were like allowed to watch it we there was a couple of shows that we were allowed to watch as a family be like Sunday night viewing one we would watch Rescue 911 hosted by William Shatner it's a truly bizarre thing and then the other was America's Funniest Home Videos and it was like I would just look forward to it all week Sunday night we're gonna all gather on the couch we're gonna watch America's Funniest Home Videos hosted by Bob Saget and I always remember my mom very much kind of drove my sense of what was and wasn't funny when I was a kid my mom has very strong as the listeners know very strong opinions on everything and so she was always kind of like criticizing Bob Saget's humor on that show and so as a kid I grew up thinking like Bob Saget is being very unfunny on it this guy is supposed to be funny he's on full house and yet why is he making these corny jokes on america's funniest home videos and only later like no one's ever asked me to host something that's that popular or or watched but even just working on some projects now i understand that like bob saget signed up to host a massively popular television show that was aimed at an incredibly broad audience and that but bob what bob saget was doing was he was just operating within an environment well i mean that's it goes for full house and for America's Funniest Home Videos but like what I took to be Bob Saget not being funny on America's Funniest Home Videos was Bob Saget realizing I'm going to pay for my kids college and I'm going to set myself up for life by introducing these clips of like a dad getting hit in the balls when his kid hits a wiffle ball or something and that like that wasn't really his comedy but he understood the assignment as they say on TikTok and then And in later years, as like you said, Andrew, as I started to hear that, like, Bob Saget was a favorite stand up comic of other stand up comics who I really liked. And then it was like, you have no idea how much Bob Saget is different when he's doing his stand up than than when he's, you know, hosting America's Funniest Home Videos. and then when the aristocrats came out which he was one of the producers of that just kind of incredible tour de force comedy documentary about this one incredibly filthy joke um that was when i was really like i realized oh okay this guy is a is way way way different than i thought as a kid and then the rise of podcasts also was a real boon for my sort of relationship with the idea of bob

Saget because there were just so many comedy podcasts and a lot of comedy podcasts and so you would like I started to hear Bob Saget show up on like Marin and lots of other podcasts that were hosted by comedians who I loved and they all loved Saget and every time he would come on he was so funny and dry what I didn't realize until I started reading all these obituaries of you know by everybody in this guy's life by the way everyone from that TV show and not like phony like you work to get like the kind of obit that you'll put out on me when i die it'll be that kind of when you have to because we work together you'll be like i respected luke's ability to roll this podcast rock up a hill for you'll say something that's factually true but kind of you know doesn't you don't you're not going to overstate it you're not going to say anything that you don't really stand behind these obits or i should say these memorials these tributes from That everyone he worked with on Full House Were like he was the kindest person I ever knew You know the Olsen Twins John Stamos Dave Coulier Then you move to All the comedians he knew they all say He was the kindest person I ever knew Pete Davidson was like how does Pete Davidson Even know Bob Saget he was like he helped me with mental Health stuff that I was dealing with one of the kindest People I ever knew to To make that impression on the world and And also considering so something like Full House was a massive TV hit in its time and I can only imagine that when something is generating millions of dollars and is this is it's a source of so much sort of like intense scrutiny because everything that's happening i mean think about it it was a less cool version of a show like friends or maybe a seinfeld and maybe it didn't quite get to those levels but i mean it was a massive juggernaut to be working in that environment there must have been so much pressure on all of them all the time there must have been so many notes there must have been so many ways that those relationships could just get destroyed and somehow he didn't do that at all with anyone at any level at any point in his life like he sent his adult daughter a text right before he went and played his last show that said I love you it's showtime then he went and he played his show went back to his hotel he fell asleep and he didn't wake up like he just left a pretty incredible legacy that's so consistent in the way people are talking about him that it had to be

true and it's sort of incredible to me yeah and like you say you learn that he's he's beloved by the other people uh you know his colleagues in the craft but also just like he just sounds like a good guy all around my uh friend a good friend of mine named Allison Steele she worked for the Concord Monitor I knew her from my days in New Hampshire and I worked at the public radio station and she worked for this small uh you know newspaper she went on to work for the Inquirer in Philadelphia but anyway um she tweeted this little thread out this weekend if you don't mind I'm going to read it directly I don't usually read things this long directly but just give me like two minutes here I thought it was really touching Allison says for a year during my time at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire I did a Q&A column where I interviewed celebrities who came through on tour Bob Saget was by far the most famous and by far the nicest person I ever spoke to the whole joke of the column was that we were a small local paper in the middle of nowhere an outlet that no celebrity would feel obligated to talk to so the goal was to see how far we could go Bob Saget was gentlemanly and kind, asked me questions about myself, and radiated warmth. When I said I'd seen one of the Olsen twins in Manhattan recently, but I didn't know which one, he asked questions to figure out who it had been. His voice lit up like he was talking about his own daughter. It was an easy opportunity to crack a harmless joke, but he was all love. I love that he was from Philly. I'm sorry, he loved that I was from Philly. He was completely uninterested in promoting himself. He didn't need to. He took the time to enjoy the conversation. He had better things to do than to talk to some random 20 something with a novelty column in New Hampshire. But instead, he fucking made my day. R.I.P. Isn't that real? Like that is like that. You know how much I love those things. You know, I'm still I'll never let up on celebrities who punch down, even if it's during a junket and they're tired or what have you. It's just like this is it. Like, I'm not saying that every celebrity can talk to every 20 something with a novelty column. But if you're going to do it, this is how you do it. Be kind. You know what I mean? He was an incredibly famous man Who was kind

You know also A lot of times the currency in comedy Is to be snarky Like that's the way that you That's sort of the way that you Let everyone know or I should say this That's the way you let other comics know That you get it that you're funny Like there's like kind of not that much honor In being like the person Who's on Full House or the person who's hosting America's Funniest Home Videos to the comedy community you don't have other stand-ups like watching uh you know those shows and thinking like oh man you that joke crushed that joke hadn't that joke was so edgy i couldn't believe he said that like but the thing is he was confident enough and funny enough that he also did not need to spend the rest of his life pushing back on that or being somehow like snarky and like kind of like acid so to prove that he wasn't danny tanner you know what i mean like that's Actually a real level of confidence to be like Yeah I did this thing a bunch of people got a lot Of joy out of it I made These friends that I'm still friends with Who clearly hold him In hugely high regard which is again Incredible nobody from my job life Has ever held me in that regard Nor ever will like the fact that He's the fact that he's being Remembered the way he is is really a testament But like the fact that he just Seemed to have perspective on all that like I did that stuff I made a bunch of money I'm also a very talented stand up Who the other stand ups vibe with When I'm talking to Andrew's friend Allison in New Hampshire I don't have to prove to her that I'm edgy guy I don't have to be like Rude or big time or Whatever like just like The consistency around The comment of him being kind It's really struck me I don't think I've seen one I think I've seen one remembrance of him Where the person didn't use the word kind or kindness yeah like wow what a testament to someone to actually really to to make somebody from new hampshire our friend roden interviewed him or i think was at a thing with him once and tweeted about it about how kind he was it seems like every single person that this guy bumped into came away from it thinking what a kind person yeah that's amazing that's yeah honestly i mean that is we talked Talk about how we'll be remembered when we're gone. We don't talk about it all the time, but it's come up on the show before. And like I've just in my heart of hearts, like I just don't care about leaving a legacy. And that might be that might be a problem. Like maybe I should try harder, but like I sincerely do not care. And part of that is wrapped up in I think just my general perspective on the world. And I guess I'm kind of a humanist and I think this is it and whatever. but like if I have anything I want I just want people to be like yeah he's a pretty good guy you know what I mean or like kind like he was kind he made the right decisions because you know we talk about our insecurities all the time on the show and I think that like everybody is insecure even the people who seem like the most cocky people on earth I think that like their cockiness is them covering

up some sort of insecurity right and so our insecurities are what I think can turn us into I think obliviousness for some people but then also like our insecurities is what us reacting to our insecurities is what can turn us into the people that we don't want to be or maybe shouldn't be and if you can be the kind of person who like you said in that world like if he's like he's not just a comic before America's Funniest Home Videos or Full House he's like as they say and I sometimes roll my eyes at it but I think I know what they mean when they say a comics comic right like you can you can go work the crowd you can do your stand up and you can make the crowds laugh but like when you're you know hanging out with your uh kind of ball busting comedian friends and they all love you and you're the one who can like slay the the the room or the table when you're hanging out with them that's like the comedian's comedian right and so I love to think about what those people thought of Bob Saget's performance on America's Funniest Home Videos when I'm just a kid and i was like yeah this is kind of corny this guy's corny but to know to know that this guy actually can slay a room of really funny probably right really cynical sarcastic it's almost a meta joke to see him on there exactly they must have been like holy shit bob can do this too he didn't let his insecurity say i'm not going to do that because i'll be seen as like a jay leno kind of sellout kind of thing like he just he he he possessed some sort of confidence and kindness that went hand in hand it sounds like yeah and and i think that i think in order

to be truly kind to people you have to be you have to be okay with yourself i think because i mean there are people that seem nice there are lots of people like if you kind of loathe yourself low-key you can you can do a lot of things to make people think you're nice and you can go out of your way and you can do all kinds of stuff but that's different than true kindness and i feel like true kindness you have to really be pretty like you have to be pretty dialed in on your own stuff to to be able to really be kind to other people because otherwise it's performative it's trying to get it's trying to make other people have a feeling that will then make you have a good feeling kind of thing yeah and it just seems like he just he really did just move through the world in this really this really kind uh thoughtful way that is is being remembered so uh i think it's a good is 45 too late for me to start being kind give it a shot start with me yeah yeah okay well um starting tomorrow kind luke here i go once again with the email every week i hope that it's

from a female oh man it's not from a female all right you said something a little earlier in the

show about foreshadowing of the email segment what was the yeah i want i want you to share some

of your neti pot stories because it sounds like you got some that i didn't as well um so while you get those in order i have two things i want to share with you number one and if kind if new kind luke will allow this i'm really embarrassed about me starting to talk about a story that i read in the seattle times earlier in the show um but then i didn't remember any of the details of So I'm going to read you the headline and earlier on today's show. Yes, it was that I was trying to explain why Seattle was cut off from Washington State and the country, but I did not explain it at all. Here's the headline from the Seattle Times from three days ago. Record snow, serious flooding left Seattle area cut off from Washington State, comma, country. Snoqualmie Pass closed. Stevens Pass closed. White Pass, Blewett Pass, Interstate 5 closed, closed, closed. For much of Friday, record snow in the mountains and serious flooding in the Chehalis River Basin shut down nearly all of the major road and train routes connecting the Seattle area to much of the state and the rest of the country. So if you were wondering what I was babbling about before about how we were essentially coming up.

I think that was generally what you conveyed, by the way.

I guess, but I was like, I don't know. Snow, call me, pass. And then I realized I don't know any of the other geography of the state, and I just petered out. That's the opposite of a power out right there. Peter in I do have a voicemail that I was going to play for you, but did you want to share some of this neti pot stuff that you were talking about?

I just wanted to just say that it's amazing that all I have right now is Omicron, because you said this, by the way, and you were not wrong. Last week on the show, I was talking about how I decided to do a home-brewed neti pot in my hotel room in Austin. I filled a water bottle up with warm water from the tap, and then I squirted it through my nose, and that then I was kind of having some ringing in my ears and some problems. And we had a number of listeners check in on that. Listener Katie said, not to be alarmist, but Luke's concerns regarding snorffling tap water into his sinuses are well-founded. And then Katie goes on to link to this article that you had kind of mentioned as well, Andrew, of a person who unfortunately died from a brain-eating amoeba, essentially. It's called primary amoebic—why did I start reading this, Andrew? Menin— You sound like me. Hold on. Hold on. I just, I did not realize this next word I was going to say is 39 letters. Primary amoebic meningiocephalitis deaths. They're associated with sinus irrigation using contaminated tap water. There is an amoeba called Nagleria fowlerii, and it can get in the water. And if you happen to do like a neti pot type of thing where you're trying to wash your nose out with water, that that has this amoeba in it you could be in bad shape one thing i want to say really quickly andrew was i was telling camaro kev this story in vegas and he said oh do you hear those navage ads i was like no what said he goes they play it on kvi i go might they also play it on kick scene he

goes probably yes that is actually i listen well i don't listen to kvi but i listen to their sister station como and so that's probably where because i mentioned to you what who's the guy who has his own neti pot and it's definitely navage that i was thinking of for sure so there you go the other

other reason i wanted to read katie's emails because katie said on a more positive note i love your show i discovered you this year and you've become a mainstay of my pod rotation sincerely katie a new b10 from hillsborough north carolina nice boy can't we get a new listener it's i know the angel gets his wings get the fatted calf i know i don't eat meat but sorry fatted calf yeah bad times for you now the person who really just gets way up there in the nose hairs of this story is listener brett yes i was scanning that yes he says if you're looking for a senior neti pot correspondent sign me up you're hired brett by the way uh as a long-time neti pot user and a slash reluctant fan i've got something to say uh he says first of all luke you're correct the tap water and the neti pot could equal brain eating amoeba that was actually you who said that andrew i don't remember saying that was i googling it on the fly my memory is that you said somebody died from that or that could be dangerous or no you said you don't want to get a brain i think you

literally said you don't want to get a brain eating amoeba or something i must have been googling that on the fly because i do not remember that and i didn't know about any of this until people started emailing in i i could be wrong but i think you said that because um i because i didn't remember

that story until all this so uh brett says uh uh you're also right the liquid solution in a neti pot tends to involve salt you want non-iodized uh so table salt is not ideal but the fine grain of it is desirable due to the easy dissolving kosher salt can work in a pinch but make sure it's dissolved i'm a big fan of the no squeeze ceramic neti pot below then he attaches an image of like imagine it's like a tiny teapot basically um which seems to me uh like it would be more difficult to deal with because of um like the squeezing is what gets the water going when you use one of the things that looks like a teapot you got to tilt your whole head to the side anyway brett continues and just buckle up everyone because this is very detailed the first time you use a neti pot you will quickly become convinced that you are waterboarding yourself after you get the hang of the correct water temperature correct angle for the water to flow in and out of your nostrils comfortable seating position etc you'll likely get hooked and want to use the neti pot every day you feel the slightest congestion one pal does them daily and calls it her strong cup of coffee during my self-waterboarding phase of neti pot i watched a ton of videos about correct neti pot use and in addition to not waterboarding myself i learned a couple of tips that i've adapted to other nose maintenance tasks it's like brett what's going on with your nose uh there's a lot going on here the best of which is anytime i have a stuffed nose i blow one nostril then the other then both for some reason that tends to open the air passages better than anything i have tried before andrew when i tell you i started doing this on friday and it actually works brett is not wrong i've never this is like a nose blowing hack so so this is the prep

for the neti pot or this? This is just nose-blowing 101. I think on the subject of nose-blowing.

Okay.

This is an aside. I don't think this is Neti Pot related. Okay. I think it's just, you know, I think most of us, at least what I've always done, is you get a tissue. I get two. I don't trust one tissue for what I'm dealing with. Yeah, I'm a double guy, yeah. You get a couple tissues, and then you just blow your nose. Brett's saying you close the nostril, blow one, do the other one, then blow them both, and you seem to get a better. I think that's probably just physics, right? Because if you hold a nostril closed, you're effectively doubling the PSI on the other nostril.

Like in your car, when you have the fan blowing or the air conditioner blowing. Exactly. You close one of those, and the other one gets stronger.

Yeah. So it does work, Brett. Thank you for the tip. Ever since the brain amoeba scare, I've started boiling my netty water. And that adds some complication to the exercise. I'm just imagining Brett at his house. This is a cauldron. What are you doing? i'm getting my neti water ready for the week now instead of just a blending hot and cold tap water and testing it with your tongue if your tongue feels good with the temperature the inside of your nose typically does too there's another pro tip test your neti water with your tongue before you put it in your nose because your tongue and the inside of your nose are similar membranes or something um okay so that's one way but he's saying instead of doing

the tongue method it says he also has a whole bunch of household thermometers right right so

that's also part of the process for him he's he's using again i wonder if brett isn't just looking for something to do this feels very andrew puttering to me i know it's just like how much

and again brett i'm not throwing stones here obviously this is coming from me but like how how much of your day is dedicated like multiple thermometers and then mixing in salt like the water thermometers it's like it's seven o'clock at night and you're like okay ready to start the

day um or it's seven o'clock at night he's like i gotta start on my prep yeah that's true yeah that's actually that's more like me sorry kids daddy can't read you a bedtime story yeah um

tomorrow's neti pot today

he says use your household thermometers to make sure it's a good temperature before mixing in the salt and transferring it to your neti pot to start the waterboarding I mean the healing because of the added complication I've developed a shower routine that accomplishes a lot of the benefits of the neti pot without actually shooting anything up my nose and having to go through the full neti solution prep process it's not a thing I bring up in polite conversation but it's helped cut down on my winter allergy related congestion Happy nose year to you both Listen to Brett in the U-District So if I understand this right Brett has now And he didn't get into the details But he's figured out a way To do a bunch of this in the shower

Yeah it sounds like he's said Because I was just teasing him About how much time it takes to do this But it sounds like he's just gone With a more of a Just a quick way of doing this In the shower Using the water pressure I guess like once you understand The angles

I know but isn't that water

That's I don't problematic right yeah good point

send us another four page email you will too by the way thank you Brett I we actually all joking aside that was very informative I'm now I'm never gonna blow my nose the same way

again I think the nose blowing thing I think I do that instinctively I think I go back and forth nostril to nostril pinch like you know what I was born this way this next voicemail that I have how about do you want to save it for tomorrow sure yeah Yeah, it's in reaction to something that you had said on the show last week. I found it kind of funny. So that'll be a good reason to tune into tomorrow's show.

So good voicemail tomorrow.

Yeah. So for for now, you're going to stay you're going to stay isolated this afternoon and I guess just hope for the best. And then after what, after five days starting yesterday, you're going to test yourself again because there's no point in wasting tests. Right.

Right. I also just don't know when I got this because, like I said, I kept getting negative tests, But I wasn't feeling great. But then I'm wondering, did I just have a cold? And then I also happened to get Omicron. Yeah. I mean, do people just get anymore for real?

Like I'm not joking. Like with this Omicron, with the people who are vaccinated and boosted, we know that. And of course, I always want to be careful saying this, but we know that most cases like the symptoms are very light. You're not the first. I don't know if we've talked about this, but like in the past couple of weeks, I've heard from so many people, Luke, from various walks of life who are all in my life for one reason or another, young people, old people. Like, I was in the flower shop, and I was in the plant shop on Saturday just getting a... I killed one of my air plants, one of the air plants that hangs in one of these... How do you even do that? You roll over it with the casters on your chair. It's one of these little air plant holders on the wall. behind me. I wanted to say sconce, but I don't think that's the right word. I don't know what you would call

these things. I think I would call that a sconce. Yeah, really? Okay, we're going to go with sconce. You know, you say lighting sconce, but I think anything that hangs from the wall and does a job like that could be a sconce. I don't know. I'll Google it while you're talking.

It's just like a very, you know, it's a very thin wire little holding device for these air plants that live behind me. And one day I was doing TBTL about two weeks ago, Luke, and I don't know what happened, but I must have knocked one with my head or maybe it just gravity worked and it fell through the little slats of the sconce which i'm now comfortable saying and i didn't realize that until i got done with the show and i looked down and the air plant was on the ground and i had been rolling over it with my with my uh chair so i tried to save it i soaked it in some water and i started peeling i'm like well this one's damaged this one's damaged i'm peeling off all the little leaves and then i realized at the end i was like oh there's nothing left i just did it she loves me she loves me not with my air plant so

God about that Yeah right There's another big part Of childhood That I feel like Really falls away In adulthood I'm never figuring out Who loves me Based on flower petals

And are you rubbing Are you rubbing Dandelions on the back Of your hand To figure out Whether or not You like butter

What was That was No no that was Well the way I grew up with it That was Not dandelions It was a buttercup

Oh

And it was supposed To be like But again you know That could have just been The kid on my street that's how they were doing it but it was something called a buttercup and yeah it was supposed to be like if you hold it under your chin and you your face gets yellow you like butters that's so so

the butter thing must have come from buttercups but i definitely remember taking because we grew up in the country we had so many dandelions i don't know that city kids don't have dandelions i just mean that like we had like you know just big huge yards basically that were if you didn't mow it just like dandelions would pop up like crazy my dad hated them I still don't understand why people hated like there's a war on dandelions all the time I'm like yeah they're pretty like they look good on the grass like what's the problem here but I just remember like we pick them and then we'd rub them on the back of our hand and I don't know maybe we were conflating that with the butter thing I do like butter I mean another way to find out if you like butter is like ask if you're human I guess because I think Wired

Magazine physicists find out why buttercups make your chin glow yellow Huh We all have fond memories Of playing the buttercup game You simply hold a buttercup flower Underneath your chin And if your neck lights up yellow Then it's conclusive Empirical proof You like butter Wow We've really gotten to the bottom

Yeah right So far

Butter mystery No but also I just mean like Who came up with this game To just be like We gotta figure out Who likes butter And who doesn't

Yeah And then sort them all out It gets real dark Real fast Yeah Right What the hell Why was I talking about my air plants I have no idea

Because you were at the plant store And somebody mentioned Yeah, exactly.

I would have never gotten back there, Luke. I would have never gotten back there. But, yeah, I'm at the plant store. I'm in there for, I don't know, three minutes. This is the second time I've had to replace an air plant. So I walk in. By the way, this shop in Ballard is amazing. It's called the Indoor Sun Shop in Ballard. Have you been there?

I think this place is legendary.

Oh, I didn't know that. I just, like, Googled where are air plants. This is, like, the first time I need to replace one, like, five months ago. And I go in. You open this. From the outside, you're just like, okay, it looks like, I don't know, I guess it's a plant shop in there. And then you open this big vault-like door and you go in and it's just a wonderland. You walk into this indoor jungle. It's amazing. I'm in there. I go exactly to where I know the air plants are. As I'm picking up the air plant and walking to the counter, the young woman behind the counter says to her colleague, oh God, my mom just texted me. She just tested positive. That's just like one example. I know I have a friend who's a performer and she said zero, zero symptoms, but she and her other performers started testing positive so they had to like cancel their shows for a while like um and again i know that not everybody is symptom free but some people like she said literally no symptoms and other people have had mild symptoms all of the people i'm referring to are vax and boosted by the way i think the booster really helps with that so yeah you actually i will say this you sound better today than you did on on friday oh and that goes back to my original point was i'm not joking when i say is there still a common cold are people still passing around a common cold or somehow has this omicron thing which has for some people a lot of people the symptoms of a common cold can we still get a common cold and i'm not being facetious i'm being serious like is there anybody out there who just has a cold and is testing negative maybe that was you last week yeah i

don't know it's so weird because i am trying to figure out when did this actually happen to me um and because again those i know you can get like one false negative test but two like three of them one of them being pcr that just seems like i just didn't have it last week probably so then when did i get it was it in i mean was well obviously it was in vega then so was it on saturday was it on sunday i've been now texting with our group i had to tell everyone obviously hey guess what and so now you know everybody who i was there with are going through the various things they have to go through that's also real 2022 it was like the the worst thing you can say to your friend group you were just hanging out with was like hey guess what i just tested positive for omicron so now let me just ruin your week with that yeah right You know, I was like, oh, God, I hate being the one who who did it. I was really secretly hoping somebody else would send that text first and be like, guess what? And I could be like, come on, get it together. I might have it, too. Thanks a lot, Katie.

Just by the way, I found something here. This is from Mama Lisa's World International Music and Culture. This was written in 2011. There are some games you can play with dandelion flowers. A couple of days ago, I posted a video of a dandelion game my daughter taught me. Monique Palamores saw it and wrote to me about a game she played as a kid in France. Quote, when we were kids, we would ask someone, do you like butter? Or I'm going to check if you like butter. We would rub the dandelion under their chin and say, oh, it's yellow. You like butter? So there is something like, I think you're right. The buttercup thing must have been first. But somehow, I think it like, we had mission creep on this in some way. Or dandelions wanted to get in on the actions for some reason.

I also think it's very interesting what you brought up, and you're not wrong, of how, because my whole, like, a big way that I made money when I was a teenager was doing lawn work, you know, yard work for people and mowing lawns and things like that. And everyone was always wanting to get rid of dandelions, always. It was the scourge. And it's just a given, oh, dandelions are ugly, they're unsightly, and yet they are yellow and they're pretty. And like a field of dandelions, particularly out in kind of like the country. It's not unpleasant to look at at all Yeah They're yellow They're beautiful They tell you if you like butter If you're in France Or Andrew's house in Ohio Why did How did they get decided That they were the enemy And now we must eradicate them Yeah I will say this One thing that's not great Is if you have a lawn Which I know lawns are themselves Kind of At this point A complicated topic If we should all have as much lawn As we do you know But like The one thing about the United Nations That does suck is once the flower goes away, there's a lot of like kind of just visual noise in the lawn. And I will admit to liking looking out and seeing like a green, smooth, uniform lawn. And the dandelions do mess with that. But other than that, they're not like homely to look at.

And you know what else? If we're going, we got to be completely honest about this because I feel like I'm biased towards dandelions now. If dandelions have one thing working against them, it's their leaves. If a dandelion gets too big, It starts sprouting the leaves And they're like these jagged leaves That are not very pleasing to the eye Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, of course

Now, when you had your place in New Hampshire Did you have a dandelion puller?

No, but I think I know what you're talking about As a kid, I had to pull weeds Actually, we might be talking about different things When I was a kid, I had to pull weeds Like crazy around the yard And I hated it It was a whole Saturday afternoon job And I just hated it And you'd wake up in the summertime. Dad would have a list of chores to get done. And if weeding was on there, he'd be like, oh, no. But we had this device that looked like kind of a shoehorn, only instead of being a shoehorn on the end, it looked like a snake's tongue. It was kind of split at the bottom. And it had a long handle.

You put it down in the middle of the dandelion. You pull it back, and it pops it out.

Yeah, exactly. And it was a way of trying to get as much of the root as possible. Because if you're not getting the roots, this is one thing I learned growing up in the country. You got to get the roots because otherwise you're just going to be out there again the next day.

Now, maybe it's been ruined for you, but I was going to say that seems like the kind of job that you would find to be a fun Saturday putter. Maybe as an adult, you would feel different.

As an adult, I would feel different. Yeah, I was amazed how once I had my own lawn, how much I cared about it. Like, I remember one time, like, wandering around the front yard, like, looking at dead spots and trying to figure out how to, like, fertilize them and reseed them. And I just thought, like, honestly, I remember having the thought, when did I become this person? Like, when did I be? And I was in my, what, mid-20s when we bought that house. I was like, oh, I'm just Hank Hillin' it up out here. Like, once it's yours. And again, it wasn't an overwhelming yard we had. It was a cute little patch of land. Some parts of it were really difficult to mow because it was kind of on a hill. And I had to drag this lawnmower down these old granite stairs, these four granite stairs that I put these two janky boards on. And I would roll. It was so I mean, the machine was off at this point, but it was so dangerous anyway. But like it was a pain. But like, yeah, once that was my yard, I would spend so much time kind of puttering and and pulling weeds and doing all kinds of stuff that I hated as a kid. Didn't I tell you that I actually bought like your lawn dye? at some point like i went on amazon because there was these when i was in bellingham there were these parts of the lawn that i just could not get to grow for whatever reason we had actually kind of a lot of yard and so there is a whole system you can you know this is like a paint sort of yard paint where you can actually literally like you paint your bald spot what bald spot you can paint your yards your grasses bald spot with this and i tried it didn't work that well the bald spot powder i use on my actual bald spot is pretty effective yeah have you tried yard that in there i didn't it's so expensive topic it's like it's worth its weight in topic um but uh yeah no i got to the point where i was basically spray painting the yard that's how that's how kooky i got yeah yeah but there's something yeah there's something deeply ingrained in the human at a certain age i think at least for a lot of us where you just start to get really into that stuff yeah yeah why

are there no good flower well why don't i know any of these songs about dandelions i want to go out with a dance I feel like don't the Rolling Stones have a song about dandelion we could eat well they

have they have uh they have dead flowers which is a jam we could also go out with super grass that oh okay yeah that's super grass although didn't we just do that um we do that usually

about um wait is that the one that I'm thinking of what the super grass song is we are young we are free feel all right oh okay I'm thinking of um I'm thinking of a different song so um I don't know I don't think we've done super grass in a while let's do that all right why don't we

do that. Alright, thanks for listening everyone. Thanks for being part of TBTL today. We will be right back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you, so please join us for that. Until then, have a great Monday and please remember to mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

It's been alright But we like you I can't be sure I'm missing And she turns We are strange In our mouths But we are young

We get by

Can't go mad Ain't got time Sleep around If we like But we're alright

Why would anyone do drugs when they could just mow a lawn?

Power out.

Thank you.