Muse

I will come to your house. I will go to your refrigerator. I will take your butter out of your fridge. I will eat the butter in front of you and your family's eyes. And I, I force you to watch me while I eat all your butter, you will beg and cry and say, no don't eat all our butter, we need for Christmas, I will say, ha ha, not my problem, and take the empty bottle, I will throw it on the stairway, I will go home. TBTL!

The new phone book's here! The new phone book's here!

In this business of show, you have to have the heart of an angel and the hide of an elephant.

You know, these two are good. Very tough to do a morning show, this chit-chatty kind of thing. But these two have an intellect behind whatever it is they're doing. Notice me, senpai. Notice me. This is the kind of spontaneous publicity, your name in print, that makes people.

All right. Hello. Good morning and welcome, everyone, to a Wednesday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. You want to do a make-believe radio show in a room somewhere. I'm telling you, there's no money in that. My name is Luke Burbank. I'm your host.

I've got something to say.

Coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center in Portland, Oregon, where I'm entering Home Alone 3. As in day three of isolating because of the Omicron. If only we were trapped in a castle in the middle of winter with nowhere to go. I am feeling pretty good today, actually. I don't feel any overt symptoms. Although, the way that it's felt for me throughout this thing since I tested positive has been pretty mild symptoms. I'm lucky I don't have, you know, back pain or bad headaches or any of the things that other people have reported having. but if I were to close my eyes and just lie down here on the floor in the studio I would just go to sleep and that's despite having slept for 10 hours last night I mean I'm always a kind of a sleepy guy I could always take a nap but I have an insatiable ability to sleep right now which I guess fatigue is one of the symptoms that's the only one that I seem to have but I feel really good but again i gotta write myself a note not to close my eyes at any point during the show because

i will probably just go to sleep it is a beautiful wednesday right oh ma pa it's just beautiful i am

dealing with a problem that i have not had in a long time certainly in this relatively new room that I'm broadcasting from, which is the sun is out, and the sun is shining through one of the windows, and I actually have to pull the shade down. But I will take it compared to, you know, the days of dark gloom and doom, which are the default setting here in the PNW. Here we are together again at episode 3596 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. We made it, my friends. And we've got some animal-related stories for you today in the top stories. How about, like, pranking an animal? Of course, we want to talk about Magawa, the hero rat who passed away recently but is being fondly remembered for their... I didn't actually check on what Magawa's gender is. So we're going to go with their... Incredible work saving lives. True story. We'll talk about Magawa. And also, I don't know if these cats are saving anyone's lives, but they're certainly delighting people all over the world by way of the Internet. Their owners in Vancouver, British Columbia, bought a new Vitamix. They're very excited to have a new Vitamix in the house. And they brought the box home and their cats refuse to let them open the Vitamix box.

There is something about the soul of a cat.

They have been sitting on the box for, I think it's going on a couple of weeks now. and when one cat gets tired or needs to go get food, the other cats jump up on it and just stand vigil. So we'll talk about animals in the news. Oh, and even some stuffed animals. I saw a great documentary about the history of the Beanie Baby craze yesterday on HBO Max.

Beanie wrap, it's a beanie wrap, it's a beanie wrap, I'm all tied up.

I mean... The story of the rise and the fall and maybe the rise again of Beanie Babies is really quite something. So we'll talk about that, too. Plus emails and v-mails. And this guy, a handsome young stranger and the longest-running cobro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. When he talks to me... An innocent champion of honesty. That's what he is. He's an innocent champion of honesty. He's Andrew Walsh. And he's joining me right now from the Roosevelt neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. Good morning, my friend.

Hey, good morning, Luke. I got to do a little exercise with you here at the beginning of the show as the as the protector of the Home Alone 3 brand. I want to make sure that you keep respect on that name. Let's go through a little checklist here. You claim that you're living a Home Alone 3 scenario. Are you sick right now? You are sick, right? Well, define sick. I mean, I guess I could... You are home because you're sick?

Yeah, I'm confined home because of a positive test that I received related to COVID. Are you alone?

I am alone. Good. Okay. So far, so good. So maybe you're fine here. Unless you count Randy, but I don't think we do yet. But are you the recipient of a gift remote control toy car that has a secret computer chip in it? Not yet, but I haven't opened all of the Christmas cards from the 10s, Andrew. Your silence is telling there. Is there an international cabal of evil spies trying to get you? At all times, despite what my psychiatrist tells me. Oh, yes. You know what? You know what? You can use it. You can use it. I'm sorry. I was wrong.

I've got it all written down here on the wall if you want to come over and check it out. The international cabal that's been after me for years. Oh, wait.

Now, I'm not talking about Star Whackers. That's a different thing. I just want to make sure that we're on the same page here. Okay. You know what? I apologize, Luke. I thought that you were misusing the term home alone three-ing it. But, no, it sounds like you are. So have fun. In fact, Randy could be. I wonder if Randy is the updated version Of the remote control car in this case Have you taken apart Randy to look for A highly sought after and rare Computer chip

No but you know what else Randy might be That could be he could be what's monitoring me I mean how perfect They know of course my Amazon orders And then they just make sure that the robot The Roomba that I get sent to my house Also just happens to be recording

My comings and goings That's actually again not unlike the movie That is what brings the spies to the door of, I want to say, Alex. I don't know what the kid's name is.

Isn't he one of the kids from the Tool Time? I always call it the Tool Time Home Improvement.

I only learned that during our Home Alone 1, colon, the original recording that we did with you, me, Avivs, and Kamaru Kev a while back. One of you guys said that, let's see here. The name of the actor is Alex D. Linz. I'm looking it up. Is this somebody from Home Improvement?

I remember seeing his face and thinking he looked like it, but Alex D. Linz, let's see here.

He was in Home Alone. No, I don't. Whoever said that I think might have been wrong. It was probably me, and I was probably wrong. Do we have to retract the commentary?

Yeah, we do. Well, no, wait. That kid was in, he was in something else. I don't know. Again, I may have been wrong about the tool-timification of things, but he was in something. I can't decide um if I'm if I'm good or bad at being quarantined Andrew because I keep thinking I keep making plans in my head to go do things I keep making to-do lists like I really need a haircut at this point not like I needed a haircut anyway it's not like I've only been home for a few days it's you know I'm not Tom Hanks in Castaway or anything but I keep my thing that I will do If I'm just sitting kind of bored in the daytime, I'll start making to do lists and I keep making these to do this and only at the end remembering, oh, no, I can't to do any of those things because I'm positive for covid right now. I can't go expose people to this. So in that way, I'm sort of not great at being home here, but I'm also kind of settling into it. Like I've had the same Nike sweatpants on for three days now. and right after that moment of remembering oh i can't go do anything because i would be it would be unsafe i would be exposing people to this a massive wave of relief washes over me where i think yeah i can't go do anything it's kind of a great feeling i'm i'm kind of getting it i've always been a pretty hyper social person i don't tend to like i know that for you andy times are important you really enjoy having a a weekend or a few days where you can kind of mostly stay home and putter.

and do your things i may have be developing a taste for that yeah well i mean i think you have um you you expressed this a while back you and i were on a road trip together and just chatting and it sounded like maybe even then you were starting to ease into this idea of hey maybe uh maybe a little downtime i mean it must be part the thing is i was middle-aged when i was 19 years old now you and i are both middle-aged and we're just kind of acting middle-aged i mean that's what's probably happening here right like having a little break plus like i said and i sound like a broken record but even by your standard i feel like the past year or the past six months have been extremely busy and you know but a lot of a lot of like big ass projects where you're bopping from city to city so yeah it's no surprise to me that you can enjoy this downtime yeah there's

something about it being also making me the hero i mean let's not oh i see yeah i did i like the fact that I'm being I'm actually being good now by staying home that feels really nice like I'm I'm I'm not you know uh what's his name uh Novin Djokovic the tennis player who's been oh good oh you are a hero oh good who went well I mean literally he he tested positive and then went and did an interview sans mask and was meeting with people when he knew he was positive uh recently I mean what a bummer that development is because he seemed like kind of an interesting character um i remember watching a um i think a real sports profile of him and he has a pretty interesting backstory um you know how he grew up and everything and he's a pretty inspirational athlete in terms of his dedication to tennis but what is it with the athletes and the conf i mean hulk hogan just came out as being hulk hogan's contention on some social media recently was that betty white and bob saget passed away because they had received the vaccine oh my god i had not i hadn't visited this corner of twitter interesting if we cannot trust terry bolea that's hulk hogan's real name if we cannot trust hulk hogan anymore or if we can't rely on hulk hogan to be up to speed on the medicine what i mean what do we have as a society you know

honestly i was going to make some joke there i don't remember what it was but like honestly you saying that makes me wonder what would it be like right now if it were let's say 1985 which to me that's kind of the prime me Andrew Walsh like childhood year right let's say 85 to 89 kind of like pre pre tween but you know starting to pay attention to the world so that's why I just kind of go to that as a reference point like I know the 80s sort of I'm like I'm like hey VH1 I know the 80s sort of sort of um but like don't you think that if we were going through a pandemic back then we might have like ww it still would have been wwf then right but we would have had maybe like hulk hogan and mr t doing psas like wouldn't these people who are now like being the eric claptons of the world and just like rat holing and becoming toxic and spreading misinformation like do you think that in the 80s these people would have probably been doing like psas on television and we would would have wrapped our arms around this more or am I just am I just exaggerating the change

between then and now no I think you're right and I think it's because there wasn't an internet back then I just think I mean the thing is Hulk Hogan is just sitting in his giant McMansion in Tampa or the outskirts of Tampa and just sitting on the internet and going around and you know or getting texts from friends who are sitting on the internet the the way that misinformation can spread now i mean there always have been conspiracy theories and there have always been some people who don't trust the government or don't trust you know you know the the anthony fauci's of the world but the way that i i think that that was more fringy in the in the olden times and the internet has made it so that so many more people people who are very bad at media illiteracy they're bad at knowing what it is they should be believing and or trusting and not trusting people like hulk hogan they can now just there's just so much more information for them to consume like so much more sort of false information and if you take 10 000 people it turns out that like 3 000 of them are going to be idiots and in the olden days they were still idiots but they just didn't have there wasn't someone walking up to their door and handing them like a telephone Thick stack of documents Full of false information That if you were to look at it And you weren't very smart Would sort of make some sense You know And so I think people tended To just go along with things Much more There was no one When speaking of Mr. T When Nancy Reagan was out there With Just Say No Which ironically

Ironically, it's probably – U.S. drug policy is actually pretty questionable, the war on drugs. But it was like there just – there weren't a lot of people at the time saying Nancy Reagan is saying that you should say no to drugs because she actually wants Warren Buffett to control your mind with a microchip. Like there were just things that people were like, yeah, that's probably generally a good idea. Again, I picked a terrible example because the U.S. war on drugs has a lot of problems with it. But I just mean, I feel like as a society, we were able to get on board with things sort of more broadly before there was an Internet. The Internet really does seem like it has divided us because anyone can go on there and find whatever it is they're looking for and then have that be their personal gospel.

Yeah, it's hard not to. We should maybe move on to the funny and we can maybe compare you to the character in Home Alone 3 again.

Donald Trump hanging up on Steve Inskey. That's the funny that I'm bringing.

I haven't listened to that yet, but I've been seeing that. And I'm like, I don't want to read the recap. I'll listen to it. I actually have some pre-opinions on that, which maybe I'll keep to myself. That just sort of seems inevitable, though, right? Like Stephen Skeep with his interviewing style. Like of anybody at NPR, it almost seems like, well, yeah, of course. I could have written that.

It was like Mike Tyson fighting Jake Paul. Seven people got that reference. It was – I was dreading it, Andrew, and then I listened to it, and I found it to be extremely gratifying.

You know, I don't want to finish my thoughts. I don't want to go down the road of how hopeless things feel right now, which they sort of do. Here's what I was going to say, but then I'll move off and I want to ask you about Jake Paul instead, because that's a conversation that I'd rather have right now. But I have been I was going to say battling a sense of hopelessness, but almost like maybe worse, maybe sinking into a sense of hopelessness that I haven't felt in a long time. And I think part of it is, I mean, obviously, you know, as the Internet speak gestures to the world around me, like obviously this is not a unique feeling, but there's what I've been analyzing my feelings lately and I've been feeling more misanthropic than I have in a really long time. Like when I was kind of sophomoric, not a sophomore, but like a sophomoric college student, I was kind of a dour. I don't think I was dour. Actually, I think it was very much like I am now. But my outlook on life, like my driving principle was kind of just like people are bad. Like we set us we set ourselves up in a whole bunch of different situations and cultures and whatever. But at the end of the day, you know, nature means we have to be selfish. That's that's a guiding principle of, you know, to extend the species. You have to have selfish instincts. Therefore, humans, we've been given a bit of knowledge and, you know, we have free will and all of these things. But we're still basically, you know, selfish for survival reasons, which will mean that we're always just going to be kind of a mess. Like humanity just kind of sucks was my driving principle. I left that behind because I think that that's a pretty, again, sophomore, simplistic way of looking at the world. But then recently I've been sort of feeling that again. God damn, I got to get to Jake Paul fast here because I'm sinking. And I wonder if part of it is during the Trump administration, which was terrible, it felt like I woke up every morning having just fought in my dreams and having to fight again. Now, I wasn't getting into fights with people, but I think you and a lot of our listeners understand what I'm talking about. When we were waking up every single day in Trump's America, it felt like we were kind of in an emotional and intellectual battleground that was goddamn exhausting. And now, two years after the end of his administration, I'm trying to think, two years, whatever, now it's like he's sinking into a malaise, you know? It doesn't feel like I'm battling all the time, but it's just like you look around at the billionaire – I mentioned it to Genevieve. I said one of the billionaire astronauts. She's like, exactly. You don't even know which billionaire astronaut you're talking about anymore. Was it the Dan Flashes one or the power pair one? I don't know if like I don't know, you know, it's just like kind of like it's not this constant kind of trauma of Trump being in the White House, but it's also just like, yeah, but just look around. It just feels so the world's problems just feel so unsolvable. And it's just seems like it's getting worse.

And a lot of this probably has to do with class issues from my perspective and the just the exponentially widening gap between the haves and the have not. And it just it can I mean, again, it can just seem hopeless. And I'm trying not to give into that. But the important question is, is what do you what do you think about Jake Paul?

Hi, I will listen, Jake Paul being undefeated, even though they're setting him up generally against non boxers. You want to talk about something that gives me a malaise because all I want is for Jake Paul to just get throttled in the ring. But it turns out he's actually for a non he is technically a professional fighter. He's getting paid to fight. But for someone who's not. really a pro fighter he's he works really hard at it and he's not completely without talent and also they've careful he's carefully selected people who were either like he fought um nate robinson a former basketball player uh from the university of washington in the nba that was his first fight and of course i was like extremely invested in nate robinson winning because i love that guy he went to rainier beach high in seattle and uh he was dispatched pretty quickly and he's just now he's been fighting MMA guy he's been fighting people that weigh less than him and that are not boxers by training and then he's but he's boxing them so him winning really bothers me that's why I'd like to see him fight like Tyson or something I like to see even Tyson who you know is older than us and and also not in anywhere near his prime would I think just disassemble Jake Paul really quickly so that's why I say hearing Steve Inskeep interview Trump was actually very satisfying because steve handled it masterfully and he had he i honestly would recommend everyone listen to it in particular you andrew because the satisfaction comes from inskeep having a response for every lie that trump is telling and having the kind of wherewithal in the presence to not get steamrolled but just to say and and i mean because what happens when you get into some kind of a discussion with someone who's from like maga town is they're throwing out so many random lies that you kind of can't whack all those moles down in real time and also you don't have the data to refute something that you know just instinctively is probably not true and that's how somebody like trump gets by is just throwing out there's kicking up so much dust all the time and most interviewers if if he ever actually does an interview with someone who's not you know um judge genie piero they just get kind of they start choking on all the dust that just didn't happen to inskeep and what was funny was trump didn't even hang up like a this interview is over he just said all right i gotta go steve thanks good talking to you bye like he he wasn't even brave enough to make a stink of it he he got off the phone the way i try to get off the phone with my mom all right mom i gotta go i got cbs on the other line it's like a saturday at 6 p.m like that's the thing about trump is that he is such a cow he at his core is such a coward like i don't know why he agreed to do the interview yeah i was thinking about that too i was wondering um it's because i think he he he probably he agreed to do the interview for the same reason

that i send out tweets that i then delete he was probably feeling emotionally low he probably thinks i can i can outmaneuver you know here's here's a better example he agreed to to talk to stevinsky for the same reasons that i go to the casino thinking this might be the time when i get a hand pay from the triple fortune dragon machine sometimes you just think yeah maybe it's my day and so he agrees to do the interview and then you know he's throwing out his usual just various bs and lies and it was just quite incredible to hear inskeep just tactically and surgically resect each i mean that really just means to cut out i guess i just wanted to really try to roll with my like medical thing he just took the whole thing apart and he just had facts and so you know you can just basically figure that trump just knew he was beat but it wasn't even one of those things where he was like he quit the interview in a bluster he literally like pretended like he had another call on the other line or something which is just the most cowardly way to go out it was it I found it to be very very soothing actually to listen to it made me feel like there is and the other thing too not to get overly political but this is one little tiny grain of possible hope okay and then we can move on to me telling you where Alex Linz is actually from. It's not Home Improvement. I've been on his IMDb page. The kid from Home Improvement. Yeah, yeah, I know where I know him from.

Okay, good. I want to know what your connection is because I looked at it. I didn't recognize a lot of those projects.

This is One Tiny Grain of Hope. Mara Liason came on afterwards and she had been listening to the whole interview and then they kind of did a debrief with her, which also I thought was really good. It was very clever producing, I thought. to have somebody from the staff listen in on the initial interview and then kind of give their feedback about where it fits into the political context. As we saw what happened in Georgia, where Trump's baseless claims that the election was stolen and that it was all rigged really hurt those two Senate candidates in Georgia, those two Republicans, because it depressed the Republican turnout just enough that the Democrats were able to win. There is an internal debate, and it's very internal right now, but there is concern in the heart of GOP land that constantly talking about the election being rigged and stolen, which of course strokes Trump's ego, will depress turnout.

and you it is i mean just think about on its face it's bad messaging to tell everyone that their vote is going to be stolen but that they should also turn out and vote so the fact the fact that trump has to do that because he can't admit that he lost the fact that that's in what the what a lot of republicans want their candidates to do is to go after joe biden on things like inflation and other stuff that i don't think really is biden's responsibility but this is how politics are you talking about joe inflation or inflation like like there's a lot of republicans are like let's just go run against biden on all of the things that suck about american life right now which always hurts you know this the sitting president because you know they don't like i don't again i don't i don't think inflation is his fault necessarily but it's something that is going to make you know it's a headwind for him so there are the republicans saying why don't we just go back to like we could win just based on people being generally unhappy they're in the middle of a pandemic that's in wave whatever there's inflation going on their kids are you know driving them crazy because they keep getting sent home from school again none of these things are biden's fault but this is you attach him to these things and that's like part of the Republican Party's going let's just run on that that's working and then the other part's like no we have to keep pretending the election was stolen that all elections are rigged so that this orange guy down in florida isn't mad at us and the idea that that is is potentially strategically a problem for them that made me feel a little bit less of the malaise this morning so i don't know if i can offer that to you it's just a little ray of sunshine but i mean we did it did have an effect in georgia and i wonder what the effect that's interesting will be going forward i know when i hear at least about something like that i it gives me some tiny shred of optimism i guess

You know, my pre-opinion on this, which it sounds like I'm wrong about, and I'm glad that I am, I think I have some residual feelings about Steve Inskeep that I remember, I sound so old, I just looked it up, do you realize it's been about, it's like just shy of 20 years since Bob Edwards left NPR? It was 2004. So I guess 18 years. And and I'm pretty sure Steve and Renee Montaigne are the people who who replaced him. Right. So Steve's been in there since then. And I think that he came in very much as a as a kind of pugnacious interviewer who is going to hold, you know, hold people accountable, almost like BBC style, which I do appreciate. And we have a need for that. But when I read this headline today, I just sort of thought like, oh, of course, it's going to be a Stephen Skeep interview. Like sometimes even though even though I'm sort of rooting is the wrong word, but let's just go with it. Like, say, rooting for the journalist who has, you know, the truth on his or her side and has the facts. And you're interviewing some some moron, whether it was some George W. Bush toady or, you know, somebody from the Trump administration or in this case, Trump himself. Sometimes I think that, well, Steve is just going to kind of go in there and just like be a dog with a bone on one thing. And just like, I don't know, it sounds like I'm bashing Steve Inskeep. I think it's an interview style that's necessary. But I was also thinking if NPR gets one interview with Trump, is Steve the right person because he's going to be tough? Or is he is he the wrong person? Because there's going to be a lack of nuance and he's going to just going to like just go just butt heads and never really get past the first question with Trump. And it sounds like that is not the case. It sounds like he went in there in there with a scalpel as opposed to what is the opposite of a scalpel of bludgeon?

I don't know. I can't remember how the expression was. I think he was pretty savvy about it because he doesn't start off like he starts off like, you know, thanking. He calls him Mr. President Which I guess is the technical title But that still, you know, that sticks in my craw But, you know, he was He sounded, he was very sort of collegial At first with him, you know, saying like We've been, well, we've been, he goes There would be no way for you to know this But we've been trying to get you on We've been asking to have you on the show for six years And then Trump's response was something like Well, I guess I've been lucky that I've He says, well, I guess I've been lucky That I've avoided it or something And then it's like, well, then why are you on today, you Nimrod

And also, what does luck have to do with it, either?

Nothing, nothing at all

Just such a terrible response That was the one thing that I saw It was so bad But that's not even a good retort And this is, our show is built

Mostly on terrible responses We know about terrible Inchoate responses And that one runs laps around Our worst work And then I say something But like No, I thought he did a pretty good job Anyway, for folks who haven't heard it and are kind of like wondering what these because I mean you know here on this program and by that I mean TBTL I was tempted this morning You know, we have a lot of audio drops of Donald Trump that where he sounds silly and that we used to play on the show and we've stopped because his very voice is triggering. I mean, he's triggering for me at times. It can be triggering for the listeners. Like we don't play that guy on the show because, you know, I also thought it was kind of interesting because there was some slight, I guess, internecine public radio fighting. I saw Tanzina Vega from The Takeaway or formerly from The Takeaway. I'm not sure what she's doing these days. um but uh tweeting basically that there was no why are we doing why are we doing this interview why are we you know why are we giving this guy more attention and then i saw layla foddle the newly appointed morning edition co-host giving all these reasons like they're kind of back and forth on twitter about if it was legitimate to present this interview or not um but yeah no i i thought uh i thought inskeep handled it pretty well and if you if you saw if you're one of our listeners and you saw that this happened but you were like i don't want to listen to that person right now that person being trump i found it to be kind of satisfying because it's the only time i can remember where he's being interviewed by someone who has all the facts ready to go is not cowed by him and is pushing back but not in a way where it was just like the the interview explodes after minute one like they they got nine minutes into it and like i said trump didn't even have the cojones to to just like storm out he sort of acted like i'm getting a call on the other line which is i didn't know that that is actually he didn't literally say i have a call on the other line he said i gotta go steve thank you so much or whatever just but it was just like he just went out with a whimper because that's what he is he's a little whimper

of a man um so hey the good news is i wasn't that far off it's scalpel instead of a sledgehammer i almost said that but then i started thinking about one's a knife and one's a hammer and i think i went with bludgeon which i don't know if that's even bludgeon now i think yeah I think bludgeon's a verb, right? Yeah, I don't think there is such a thing as a bludgeon. So I kind of, my own self-doubt led me away from sledgehammer, which I think I was going to say. But I also want to just put this entire idiom on trial here, if we can. Like, scalpel instead of a sledgehammer, like, they're not even the same thing.

What surgeon is debating between those two tools?

Exactly. I would say, like, maybe if you want to keep it in the hammer thing, you could say, like, a ball-peen hammer instead of a sledgehammer. Or a finishing hammer instead of a sledgehammer. I don't know if a finishing hammer's a thing. But, you know, like a small little hammer or let's stick with knives. Right. A scalpel instead of a butcher's knife or something. But, yeah. So anyway, I'm not wrong. Society.

Like, imagine the doctors who are like meeting like, OK, I've looked at the patient's chart and we're definitely dealing with stage three cancer here. And so I am proposing that we go in with a scalpel. And the other doctor says, doctor, I must respectfully disagree. I think this is more a job for a sledgehammer. Yes. And what does that doctor look like?

That doctor is wearing wraparound sunglasses. That's torn the sleeves off of his scrubs.

He looks like the rapper Riff Raff.

How did you have this hospital noise ready to go, by the way?

I was Googling heart rate monitor SFX as I was. That's why my impression of two doctors talking to each other is even worse than you would have expected, because really where my brain was at was, let me try to find that sound effect on the fly if I can on YouTube.

I was really thinking you were going to go with something like, this patient has a bad funny bone or something. I didn't know where to go right to stage three cancer.

Andrew, if I didn't have to do so much work on the show, if I didn't have to both be... No, that's on me. I should have known to be looking up heart rate monitors. If I didn't have to find the sound effect, let it play four seconds of an Applebee's ad, skip the ad, slowly pot it up, because I still don't know what it's going to sound like, and try to create improv to Dr. Stone. No, it was pretty good. I mean, the sound really got me. Speaking of great performances, I want to talk about Alex D. Linz, the kid from Home Alone 3. This has got to be the third or fourth time that I've said I thought he was also from Home Improvement. No, he's not. And so I want to sort of say that for the record. What he was in that I love and I highly recommend everyone go out and watch is the film One Fine Day with Michelle Pfeiffer and George Clooney. And wait, can I guess?

Can I get? Yeah. Is this the lottery ticket movie? No. God damn it. No. There is one or two lottery ticket movies in the 80s and 90s. And I keep on guess when everybody brings up a movie, I'm like, oh, that's the lottery ticket movie. But I'm always wrong I think the lottery ticket movie

One of them was called It Could Happen to You Oh okay Yep That sounds right And one of them One of the lottery movies Was I think based on I know Nick Cage was in one of them Yes And I don't know if he was Meg Ryan One of them was based on a true story Or at least loosely based Where I think a cop A hero cop Leaves a waitress at a diner A lotto ticket as a tip Or you know a whatever I don't know if it was like a scratch off Or I think it might have even been like a You know the kind you go buy at the mini mart And then that ticket Turned out to be worth like millions of dollars And so like this waitress was tipped millions of dollars I think that my memory is that that was woven into the plot of one of those lottery movies. But no, one fine day is, by the way, plays the waitress, Bridget Fonda. One fine day is Michelle Pfeiffer and George Clooney are both single parents. That's not true. I mean, they're they're they're both, you know, not married to the people they had a kid with. And they're both basically on child care duty on a particular day when their kids, their kids go to the same school. oh and michelle pfeiffer's daughter is played by um egg from arrested development her her um she's low center of gravity um so uh it's it's it's out it's the kids from home alone three and then the other the other little kid is is um i can't believe i'm spacing on her name but may whitman i think is her name yes you got there sorry i was looking i saw her once in line at the uh hollywood forever cemetery movie night and i was quite starstruck online very her her and um i was online at the hollywood forever cemetery and i believe it was her and ali shaukat a a a maybe oh so i was kind of like oh that's cool they're friends in real life it was quite the saturday night for me but anyway the the george clooney and michelle pfeiffer both for whatever reason get their kids to this field trip late their kids are in the same class and supposed to go on this field trip but it's on a boat and the boat like is taking off as they're getting to it and so now they both have huge days michelle pfeiffer is an architect george clooney is a journalist and so they agree to kind of like one of them's going to watch both kids for half of the day and then trade off because they both just have like days they cannot miss and uh hilarity ensues i really do think it's an incredibly charming film i mean are there two more charming adults than michelle pfeiffer and george clooney In my opinion, no.

Would you allow me to play a little bit of the trailer? I would love it. It begins with, I think, Michelle Pfeiffer's character waking up in bed. It says 7.01, and then it's 14 minutes later, or 13 minutes later, it's 7.14. Just to give you a sense of what's happening on the screen. She's waking up in bed here.

Ow!

Oh, the kid just hit her in the face. We have to take your friend Maggie to school, and we can't be late because of your field trip.

You know what? I forgot. I think it's like George Clooney's daughter is Mae Whitman and Michelle Pfeiffer's son is Alex Linz.

That seems to play out here. So now it's 7-14. We're in the Clooney household. He's waking up. Hi, Jack. Hi.

Hi, Daddy. Call Melanie Parker. Melanie Parker. Now let her know that you don't need her to take Maggie to school for you.

You know who that is? That's, I'm so bad with names, Luke. The woman from Friends Not Rachel Oh Ross's sister Who is in the Courtney Cox video Courtney Cox I believe I don't know That probably starts around 9 Everything starts around 9 I'm gonna miss the boat trip We'll make it I promise That's the kid from Home Alone 3 There he is That's what everybody on the boat is saying They're all pointing at him saying that Okay I don't think

Bring the boat back

That's the kid who's gonna be in Home Alone 3 in four years I don't think I'm going to continue with that because this is not really paying off. I was enjoying it. Were you? I mean, I'll go again, but I'll stop interrupting it. No, the listeners are probably hating it. I just love that movie. I'm going to watch that movie tonight, Andrew. It just has that like kind of New York. And I am assuming this is New York. It's actually Chicago. I was about to say, or is this Chicago? But I like those style of movies. And even just the way the placards in between are sort of like giving the time, like kind of punctuating the scenes with the time. Like this is a well-made trailer. it's sort of yeah it's got a vibe i could totally see myself watching this i i would recommend it

to everyone if you're looking for a comforting film where you know it's all going to turn out okay no one will have been dead the whole time it won't be i just watched the i have been i said at the beginning of the week that this might be a really good week of tbtl since i have limited other distractions since i'm homebound what it really means is i've just been power watching film in television andrew which i don't do that much during my normal life because i think i'm i'm out and about a lot but i watched uh the lost daughter with olivia coleman which is uh directed by maggie gyllenhaal it's getting a lot of attention have you heard about this film no No, I didn't know that Maggie Gyllenhaal directed anything, but I really like her as an actor, and I love Olivia Colman as well, so that sounds right up my alley.

It is very subtle. It's a very quiet film, but it's like the opposite of One Fine Day. It's sort of this movie that unfolds in this kind of Greek seaside resort, and you get Olivia Colman there who's reflecting back on her life, and you have Dakota Johnson, and there's a child that goes missing. And there's just all kinds of there's sort of an ominous. The whole movie has an ominous feel to it. I mean, it's very well done, I thought. But it's like if you just watched The Lost Daughter and you just need like some comfort food, then watch One Fine Day because you won't be like asking yourself, what did Olivia Colman do the entire? You'll be like, what is George Clooney hiding during One Fine Day? You will never have that thought.

You are literally describing something in our household that we call going to the Applebee's of your mind. because I think I've said this before. I'll make it very, very quick this time. But when Veeves and I went to see The Ring, we were living in New Hampshire. I'm not a big scary movie person. Genevieve loves scary movies, but they also legit scare her. And we went out to the theater on Loudoun Road, for you New Hampshire heads, and we saw The Ring, and it freaked Genevieve out so bad that afterwards she said, we have to go somewhere safe. We have to go to Applebee's. There was an Applebee's like in the shopping center like next door to the movie theater and like we were not big applebee's people but she's like i need to go somewhere where they just have like i just need the applebee lights i need the applebee i need to go somewhere where everybody knows my name exactly and so ever since then that time we went to an actual applebee's but then like i remember we would watch american horror story or something on tv we'd watch two episodes of that and i'd say we need to put on 30 rock we need to go to the applebee's of our mind and that's what that means and it sounds like it's exactly how

you're describing this film that's one fine day is the applebee's of my mind but you know what else is is arrested or excuse me 30 rock which yeah that's another thing i've been watching a ton of as i've been on home confinement and i have discovered the most delightful thing which is i somehow missed like i don't know if it was an entire season of 30 rock or at least like five or six episodes from season four which i don't know how that happened i was obsessed with that show we on tbtl were obsessed with that show but i just stumbled upon like a hidden trove of

episodes that i've never seen before and they're not like near the end they're somewhere in the

middle or do you think this might be near the end of the i think it's well season four so wow oh no yeah that's that's pretty that's you know yeah i mean it wasn't like i do remember things getting a little off the rails towards the end as can happen with these shows but no i mean it's like Yeah, there were just a bunch of episodes Where I was like, okay, I definitely would have remembered These plot lines Where Jack has bed bugs And it's where they're auditioning They're looking for a new cast member And they're trying to use something called the Hornberger technique Because they have this one particular guy That they want to have cast But they're worried because Jack Donaghy Is going to get to make the ultimate pick So they set up They basically put three kind of people who have no chance of getting it into the audition and then the guy that they want. But as the episode unfolds, more and more people get involved. I think Dotcom wants to try out and then everybody from the cast wants to try out for this role. And then it gets totally out of control. Meanwhile, Jack is dealing with bedbugs, which is this amazing scene when Jack McBray or Kenneth's character sees that Jack Donaghy has bedbugs. and the names that he has for bed bugs based on his Southern. Ah, so you've got a case of the Chew Daddies. And then just like throughout the episode, he's just casually deploying different Southernisms for bed bugs. It's so funny. And then I'm just like, I got to start pulling this audio for the show. I'm like, do you think that the TBTL listeners have heard enough 30 Rock on this program?

I don't think there's a way for me to do this, but I've often pictured my audio library, which is just a, you know, it's just a folder on my, you know, my Windows machine that has, you know, thousands of drops and intros and things we've pulled. I've always wanted to see that as a like a pie chart of like what I feel like 30 Rock would be the biggest piece of that pie chart. But I mean, but also Arrested Development would be really big in their office. Like there's something about the office. I'm not a huge office fan, especially compared to those other two shows. I like it, but it's not like I've watched all of them or practically all of them. But there's the rhythm of The Office just just makes itself perfect for those intro tapes, listing things and power out right before the TBTL. So I'd love to like I mean, I guess I could.

put in the work but I'm not I don't care that much but uh yeah I feel like 30 Rock must be a huge piece of that pie for us it is and I think it's because Jen and I were obsessed with it whereas the the American version of The Office which also weirdly enough I sort of started watching that again when I was in Austin the TV in my hotel room like the day I turned it on it was just on maybe TBS or some station that just runs The Office like all day long maybe it was comedy central so it was just like back to back to back and i just kind of was letting it run because i was like well whatever and of course that show is great our listeners know that but um but because i wasn't as obsessed with the american office as i was 30 rock it is a bit of a blind spot for me and there's you've used a lot of that tape in intros but it does it's not the i don't play a lot of steve carell when when it's the part where i'm playing the drops there is a really great something that would be good intro tape where steve where you know michael scott is trying to get somebody fired who he doesn't like it's probably toby and he's talking to his superiors and he says they said well you can't you can't fire him um without cause and he goes i do have cause it's because i hate him this makes me laugh so much i mean that show is as as genius as as, you know, all of our listeners probably already know. So, okay, let's take a quick break, and then when we come back, we do have these top stories, and we've got some e-mails and V-mails as well here on TBTL. Stay with us. Let's thank some donors of the day. These folks are making this episode possible With their financial support Thanks to Amber Doherty Out there in Baltimore, Maryland About Betty Lee Minkler In Seattle, Washington Betty Lee

That's a great name

Yeah What's the, is it Patty Lee? Who has a Patty Lee, shine the light on me Because there's something I don't understand. Do you remember? Oh, my gosh. Now, what's weird is I can remember.

Do I need to turn this down to get you there?

No, I can remember the name of the lead singer. It's Tim Heather. It's Tim Hetherington. But I can't remember the name of the. Le Savvy Fav.

Oh, yeah. Le Savvy Fav. Yeah, you kind of got way. Or Vanessa got way into Le Savvy Fav, right?

Yeah, and then I got way into them. And then he actually was on. We did TBTL Live in Brooklyn. at Union Hall years ago. And he was there. I forget, Eugene Merman stopped by. I forget, we had quite a lineup that night. But anyway, yeah, Tim from Le Savvy Fab. But they have a song called Patti Lee, which is not what Betty's name is. Betty's name is Betty Lee. Maybe we can go out with that. Could we go out with that Patti Lee song by Le Savvy Fab today? Yeah, I'll look for it. We've also got Brooke Latsky Davis. Here in Portland, Oregon, every time I read a name of someone in Portland, I wonder if I've bumped into them on the streets of Portland or if I've seen them at Livewire. Brooke, thank you so much for the support. Kirk Eldred is in Woodinville, Washington. My Aunt Alice and Uncle Tom used to live in Woodinville. They're on my dad's side. And they're like... Funny thing is I think they were living in those days probably a very solidly middle-class life. Maybe bordering on the upper side of middle class But Their house Which was in a recently built suburban Cul-de-sac type of thing It struck me as the most fancy home I'd ever been in in my life Compared to our rental Just off of Aurora with one bathroom I just remember I would be so excited to go out there for Christmas Because I was like We're going out to Woodinville We're going to Aunt Alice and Uncle Tom's house And it was just like that is that is really farting through silk and it must have felt somewhat exotic as well just from the location being so much different than where you were living yes i uh i loved it um and i'm sure that uh kirk is loving it out there in beautiful woodenville washington susan goodwin is in seattle washington susan thank you for supporting the program and then felicia isaacs is in Medina, Washington. Talk about silk farting. That's what they put on the Medina. Welcome to Medina, Washington. Talk about silk farting. I thought it said silk farting for a day or for a lifetime. Actually, what I remember about Medina is when I was training for that marathon with our buddy John DiLoretto. That's a famous story within TBTL that I won't bore. everyone with yet again but he lived out in that area and we would jog around i think like yarrow point and medina and uh it's a beautiful area over there and a beautiful person named felicia isaacs is there supporting the show so thanks felicia thanks susan kirk brooke betty don't call me patty lee and amber thanks for making tbtl possible we would not be here without you hello and welcome to top story it's rare that we're ahead of any curves on this show andrew

in terms of like the news cycle but i saw this kind of a story on the bbc yesterday about magawa the landmine sniffing hero rat and it was just like a little mention it wasn't there wasn't that much detail and i thought well you know if we're if we're running out of steam on the show which of course never happens particularly on days we have our friend chris hayes on it's like never a day where we're like god we just we ran out of content before you know before the end of the show but i threw it on the the show sheet we didn't get to it yesterday and then i swear i got up this morning and it was everywhere morning edition did a big piece on it it's now in the new york times we had the chance for once in our life to be ahead of the curve on the news and Instead, we talked about Get Back for an Hour.

I blame television's Chris Hayes for that. That was a really fun show. I don't know if it was fun for the listeners, but I did.

Oh, it was fun for them. We're getting lots of positive feedback.

Oh, good. Because as I think I said during the show and certainly after, I don't think I realized how much I needed or wanted to talk about that movie. Chris really wanted to come on, and I was like, oh, okay, well, if Chris is going to come on to talk about it, I'll watch some of it. And then I had these thoughts banging around my head, And I didn't kind of realize how much I needed to let them out. So it was fun to just kind of nerd out over that. But yeah, but then as I was typing up the description later, I referred to it as the new Beatles documentary. I thought, am I being disingenuous here? Is that still the new Beatles documentary?

I also noted that I'm loving, by the way, thank you for sticking with it, Andrew, the practice of tweeting out the episodes from the TVTL account. Like, I love that, honestly. And every time I catch one in my feed, I smash the like button. Well, what I thought was fun was the picture that you used for the show. We're having on like a pretty major national television personality. Yeah. And the picture is the guy from the Beatles who looked like Eric Wareheim.

I had to really think about it. Because specifically, like we don't usually use pictures of individuals and we don't usually have guests on the show. And yet here it was the perfect storm of me really wanting to use that photo. And we had Chris on the show. so it really sort of seemed like that was chris hayes like this photo and you wrote not pictured

so it was like today on the show something like you know chris hayes and then you go right not pictured parenthetically and then what's funny is if we put something out on twitter and then chris retweets it there's this whole like world of twitter that has no idea what we are but they know what a chris hayes is and so then they're all kind of like you know it'll get a lot of interaction if he if he retweets it or likes it or whatever and so then someone wrote someone who I don't think follows either of us or knows us were like something like lol not pictured yeah like laughing at that because of course we have a chance to put somebody's face on there who might drive some engagement and we go with the Eric Wareheim look like which I totally stand behind

as a choice by the way yeah I saw somebody said oh good thing that they good thing that they said not pictured I think one person kind of didn't realize that I was being a goofball that is knowing because again they have no idea who we are but anyway fun all around now it's time to

talk about the damn rat we missed the magawa i mean the story is already kind of crested but whatever i was really interested in this story because at first when i saw the headline i thought it was just one of those kind of news of the weird things but it turns out this rat in cambodia who passed away recently really was kind of an amazing um an amazing little rat his name was magawa he was uh an african giant pouch rat so not a little rat a giant no in fact i've been looking at pictures of him rat is almost misleading giant african pouch rat he's almost like the size of a kitten or something which you know you think about a rat the size of a kitten and it starts to get uncomfortable you start to think oh i'd be creeped out no this thing as cute as a as a little devil it was trained magawa was trained to smell for the smell of tnt basically so magawa's job was to go around unfortunately cambodia still has thousands and thousands of landmines that are buried and they have to find them and dig them up um and the thing that was cool about magawa was he was like huge by rat standards but light enough that he didn't set off the landmines.

and they they said that he sniffed out over a hundred landmines he could in they said about an hour sniff out an area the size of a couple of tennis courts that would take humans two weeks to survey with like with metal detectors and the like so he was actually very very effective over the course of his life and they had him on a leash i don't know if he was going to run away or not but they would reward him with a banana when he would sniff out a landmine so he would they think that over his career he cleared the equivalent of 20 they say football pitches because this is the BBC article but that's like soccer fields they say that he cleared like 20 soccer fields worth of land in Cambodia which was like orders of magnitude or exponentially practically

more than any other um bomb sniffing rat they had and this rat did it was able to enjoy some retirement before passing away it looks like here well he was slowing down recently they said the

other thing this is where i really felt connected to magawa the hero rat they they the morning edition story i heard today they were playing an interview with somebody who had worked with magawa and they said magawa was an amazingly spry rat kind of up until the end and was really effective but also loved napping so as soon as um they would say like say as soon as they would bring magawa back and give i you know i keep going i go with him but let me just double check does it say anywhere um his what do they say him in here yep first line of the new york times article um the uh they said magawa was really into napping but magawa was in good health at the end spent most of his last week playing with his usual enthusiasm he started to slow down napping more and showing less interest in food in his last days um magawa was bred in tanzania he underwent years of training before moving to cambodia to begin his bomb sniffing career um and um yeah so r.i.p magawa he also received a designation uh or he was part of this hero rat initiative That's run by this Belgian nonprofit And he received Something called the PDSA gold medal Which recognizes civilian Animals who have shown true bravery And exceptional devotion to duty

So that's what the Initiative is I'm a little Confused what are they initiating How do you mean I just Mean like so there's a group that is just dedicated Hero rats initiative yeah What is hero rats yeah that's what hero

Rat is a it's a group that trains rats oh they train them okay they don't train them how to sniff out landmines so he was part of that program but he was he was a real star and then he was given this other uh this award called the PDSA gold medal okay gotcha which there's pictures of him wearing the gold medal and it's also freaking adorable like this is extremely a Pixar movie

yeah no kidding although it's a little bit dark I guess with kind of but I mean he didn't I mean

it's dark what the implications of landmines are but it's he didn't die in the line of duty yeah no that's also true yeah he makes it yeah yeah he like he survives he gets to retire you know he's down he's standing that boat on the beach in ziwantanejo he's andy dufresne you know he climbed through a mile of shit to to to get to uh you know being this hero rat which is kind of cool but i mean this does feel this is like ratatouille with much higher stakes yeah is that

Is that the show title? Ratatouille with much higher stakes. What did you go with yesterday? Whatever we said on the show. Hold on. Oh. Today's show title would be whatever we said on the show. Unproblematic colonizing, according to my notes. I think that's what we went with. You did go with that. I wondered if that would make you feel a little uncomfortable. No, it didn't make me uncomfortable. It didn't. What would be your favorite? It didn't have as much zazz as I would have liked, but I didn't have anything better. And I did think it was kind of funny because we have Chris on the show, and we're talking about colonizing, and he's got that book.

You're saying it wasn't a terrific title. It didn't jump out at you like a rat.

That's a terrific title. It jumps out at you like a rat in your underwear drawer.

Can I just say really quickly, Andrew, that Genevieve was part of the group of folks that I was in Vegas with last weekend. And I think that Genevieve – me and Genevieve are the two founding members of the Andrew Walsh Fan Club. We spent a considerable amount of time talking about how much we love you and how great we think you are. How come she didn't tell me any of this? She's trying to probably kind of keep your feet planted on the ground and keep you, you know, she doesn't want you to get too cocky. But yeah, we were talking, the subject of the show titles came up and she was saying how sometimes she'll just be reading through them. Obviously, she doesn't really listen to the program, but she'll just be reading through show titles and cracking up. And I was like, I know Andrew. has this incredible ability for those there's i forget the particular one that we were oh i know what it was because she mentioned it um because i don't even think i told you this but on friday's show when we had uh camaro kev on and he was talking about a c-pap machine i called it if you see pap say pap yeah that's so good do you want i mean these are not all mine by the way a lot of these came from um from just like things we said during the show but did you see the list of top 30 um show titles from 2021 that i put together for the newsletter i didn't do you want we can't do all 30 here and the newsletter is already out so do you want to do the top 10 do

you have a bell okay yeah i've got a bell and i've got a hold on i've got a drum roll around here somewhere okay so let's go with number 10 drum rolls too long you have just waiting

This is Zit You were talking about acne I think adult acne at number 10 Maybe not the best, maybe that was number 9 Too highly ranked Wes is more, we talk about Wes Anderson films Oh, that's a good one Number 8 Schadenfreudian slip Luke talks about the time he made a motorcycle crash With his mind

That's high concept

Schadenfreudian slip number seven a symbol plan luke had a magical time at the hollywood bowl last night i love it fart blanche luke and their famous friend chris with rhetorical dilemma that must have been a chris hayes show okay we're up to number five here it's taking longer than i thought god don't make no junkets luke's interview with a film director suffer some technical setbacks i think

I texted you after I saw that one because that was that's real good you've got Mel that was you

talking about the return of Mel magazine I believe yes number three American Splenda Luke has another adventure involving coffee and a less than ideal sugar substitute oh that's good oh this next one That's so good. Number two, ASCII and you shall receive-y.

Is that about those Mickey Mouse drawings made out of semicolons?

Listeners helped Luke and Andrew with some details about emoji versus emoticons. And you got into some ASCII and you shall receive-y. I would say that one is... Oh, dude, that's genius. And then number one, not from our brains at all, but number one, close, but no Seagal. We kick off the winter games with Steven Seagal movie quiz from listener Mike So Mike won the day

Wow well you know we are Launching a new live wire podcast Called the best news podcast it actually Comes out today and It's like it's a sort of expanded Version of we do A segment on the show called the best news we heard this week And now this is a whole podcast Dedicated to that and so because We're just now developing it I was Emailing with our producers And one of them asked How do you Like we're trying to come up with snappy names How do you do that on TBTL And I said well number one it's Andrew But I go the other thing is And I go What we kind of do is if somebody says something silly We propose it being a show title And then we ding a bell and someone writes it down And then it was only in like typing that out in an email That I realized what a silly process that is Like what I'm trying to describe How TBTL actually works Yeah Like it all kind of just feels natural And we do this five days a week It's just what we're doing here I guess But when I like formalize it in that way And I go well here's kind of the system It's like Andrew will say something And I'll go show title And then I ding this thing And then one of us tasks the other person With writing it down Like when I explain that that's the process It strikes me just how silly this show is I remember that being a

Like a decision that we made on the show I remember it was right after I quit my job at KCRW and we got hired at American Public Media and so like I suddenly wasn't squeezing TBTL in like after work and I was like oh we have all this time we need to start new initiatives and I remember just thinking like let's make this a new thing and I think we even talked about it on the show when we had the idea to do that and then also like remember the other like ill-fated things like we do well that's sort of when we did a different thing with dreams that you and I were just reminded of earlier well I guess like last year at some point it came up remember we were trying to get listeners to call in the voicemail line with their dreams like it wasn't me just blabbing to you about dreams and we had a few other things that um went nowhere actually uh remember I was trying to do Monday motivations oh yeah that wasn't too long ago yeah that was that was I I liked that segment but you really got to find you got to keep an ongoing list exactly um I I'm Thank you. fine with the i would be into the dream thing you know what has been kind of strange well i don't i'm not you know i don't have remember my dreams a whole bunch but having this covid the the last two nights i have slept for between eight and ten hours solidly through andrew without waking up without remembering any dreams without needing to go to the bathroom without like any kind of middle of the night tossing and turning and i guess it's just my body is like we need this for recovery but it's it's almost like i took a melatonin or something and i you know i want to be careful talking about this because there are people that are having a much worse time of it in fact i noticed that the journalist maggie haberman was tweeting about she has omicron right now and she was tweeting about how bad it's been for her and she said something to the effect of it would be nice if everyone stopped saying how mild it was which those are the kind of things that when i read it i didn't get in my own head because i'm having a mild experience i don't have young kids i'm trying to take care of i am very privileged to have a job i can do from home you know so i want to like be mindful of all of that but i will say i've never slept better i can't explain it like i guess it's just because my body is trying to fight this thing and that's what it's doing but i'm like i would like it if i could continue i mean i don't need 10 hours of sleep a night that's excessive but if i could get back like when i was in my 20s that's just how it was i would go to sleep and then i would wake up in the morning and that never happens to me anymore outside of being sick with this thing it's like i you know i wake up 25 times a night now usually i mean it's only for a few minutes and i'll just keep i'll keep caveating everything by saying i know there are people in our listening audience who deal with real insomnia and real insomnia is an absolutely terrible thing to have to deal with um so me waking up 25 times a night is

i'm still falling right back asleep so it's not like the worst but it is amazing to sleep through

the night like this i'm loving it yeah i've got that old man thing happening now where i wake up like consistently sometime between three and five in the morning closer to the probably four o'clock hour usually but that's the range and then i get up i use the restroom and then i can't go back to sleep again and then i'm up for like sometimes up to two hours and then i finally fall asleep about 45 minutes before i have to get up out of bed and it's just like it's kind of a miserable and that's the deepest sleep too isn't it the you mean the 45 minutes well weirdly i think it's the lightest sleep but it feels i i don't know what i'm talking about here exactly but i think i might be right i think it's the most dream induced and dream inducing sleep um and so when you wake up from it it feels like you were really far away but i also think and i could be totally wrong here although i also kind of don't want to read the emails correcting me but i also think though because you're not super deep asleep you remember those dreams maybe you don't have more brain activity like with rem sleep but i believe that those dreams the the line between you being asleep and being awake is a little bit thinner so those are the dreams that stick with me certainly like i'll sleep all night not remember anything wake up and finally fall asleep and then in that last 45 minutes have very vivid dreams often sometimes related to am i going to wake up on time which

then adds stress to it for me on the nights when i don't sleep particularly well which mercifully is pretty rare um when i then let's just say i have a night where i'm just really tossing and turning and i'm just up in the middle of the night and stuff then it's like i finally fall asleep at like five or something and then what it feels to me and i think you're probably right that i'm not getting into rems it feels like that five a.m to seven or let's just say my alarm's going off at six so far even in between snooze even snoozing for eight minutes at a time it feels Like, in those eight minutes, I fall deeply asleep, which I couldn't be because it's not enough time to get into REM. But what it feels like in my body is, oh, this is the first good sleep I'm actually getting. And then it's like, meh, meh, meh. And then I get snoozing. And then I'm like, oh, God, yes. I'm so asleep right now. And then meh, meh, meh, meh, which is, like, probably not the most restful sleep. But it just feels like that's when I actually can finally get some sleep going. Did you see the story about these cats in Vancouver that have taken over this Vitamix box?

I only saw that you threw it in the show sheet, but I don't know the details here.

It's a cute story. A lot of people have been sending it to us. There are this couple, Jessica and Nikki Gerson Neves, self-described middle-aged lesbians in Vancouver, British Columbia. They've got three cats. They've got Max, who's also known as the sentient soccer ball. They've got a 13-year-old named... george the destroyer of worlds and then they've got another cat named lando calrissian um these uh cats have been particularly intrigued with this vitamix box that the gerson neveses bought in december uh they bought this vitamix they're all excited about it they brought it into the kitchen they put it down and then they went off to do something else and came back and one of the cats was just sitting on top of the box and so they thought well that's cute we'll just wait till the cat gets bored and jumps off and then we'll get into the vitamix and then the

other cats lined up can i just say something here only because i didn't know this before clicking on this article and maybe other people are as uh unworldly as me i thought vitamix was some sort of a mixture or something so this is a mixing this is a this is a small like countertop

appliance of vitamix yes it's a they call it in this washington post article um don fallick writing uh they bought a blender i guess a vitamix can be a blender i mean it is a blender my parents have one it's just like a it's like a blender meets a food processor have you ever been to a state fair they're always selling vitamixes and they're not cheap they're like four or five hundred bucks but it's that kind of thing where there's a person with a headset microphone and they're blending up like all kinds of things that you didn't think could get blended and they're telling you about the the motor on this thing and how it you know will never break down on you and buy the and they give you like a sample of a sorbet they just made in there and by the end You're like, if I don't have a Vitamix, my life will not be complete.

I just came up with a life rule, I think. You can tell me if this is a bad rule. But I would say never spend more than $60 on a single item at a fair. Hmm. Well, like you're going to go buy an appliance for $500 at a fair?

Well, I like the simplicity of your statement, and I also like grandiose statements. this show so i dig that but i guess my if i interrogate that a little bit further my question is why is a state fair like i buy items over 60 online all the time that's probably worse at least at the state fair you're standing there you're looking at it becca and i went to the oregon state fair this year and literally like saw the dude with a vitamix and he literally made a sorbet just out of some frozen um fruit and i ate it and i thought that's delicious and reasonably healthy isn't that as decent a um a sort of perspective on it as what would the alternative be you go to

the appliance store yeah or buy it online like or go to a place and test it out and then go buy it online because yeah you're right if you're buying a lot of things online you're maybe buying them sight unseen in a way but there is a return policy with most of these with most of these online stores, so there's some accountability. I just feel like spending $500 at something that is going to disappear in a few days. I mean, listen, I'm really getting us off track here, but you're speaking to a kid who was flim-flammed at a state fair. Actually, it was a county fair. What did you get flim-flammed on? I think I've mentioned this a long time ago, but it still embarrasses me, but I was at the state fair. You bought a trampoline with a waterbed built into it? not that well kind of far off but um uh my parents were not the type of parents who would give in to like kind of whining and begging for something but we were at the um the county fair and there was like a guy showing a magic little mouse that would move on its own and I can't remember exactly what the demonstration was but it was fascinating it was this small little thing and this mouse was magical and it would move all over the place so with nobody touching it and then I like begged my parents i'm like are you watching what i'm watching it was like a it was almost like a belcher moment from bob's burgers like i don't know which kid i was but um probably the christian shawl character like just being like are you not comprehending the magic that we are seeing in front of our own eyes mom and dad like you're gonna turn your back on this magic mouse really we're gonna walk away and just like leave a magic mouse on the table and so we get this thing and Of course, it was just like it was like an illusion, Michael. It had strings and you had to learn how to use it. And you're just supposed to impress your friends and convince them that it's magic, too. I didn't want to convince. I didn't want to trick anybody. I just wanted a magic mouse.

At least you were a child, Andrew, because do you know that when I was in Italy on my honeymoon, my first honeymoon, I saw somebody was I don't know where I was somewhere in Italy. And there was some street performer person and what they had. I mean, they weren't really a performer, but what what I saw when I walked up onto the scene was somebody that had a boombox. And in front of the boombox were these dancing legs. They were made out of like paper. They looked almost like the like Mickey Mouse legs. OK. And they were dancing in. in air they were in mid air like the feet were touching the ground but the torso of this dancing leg was just suspended in mid air and somehow it was conveyed to me by this person selling these things that this was something to do with the sound waves from the boombox i'm sure there was a language barrier but i was 20 i had like an eight-year-old child at this point and i was like i gotta get this this now listen i didn't go to the best school i did think the earth was 7 000 years old when i started college like i'm not saying i'm neil degrasse tyson over here but i understood vaguely the principles of gravity and physics and i guess what my brain taught me was maybe all that has been wrong maybe this one random street urchin in rome has cracked the code on gravity and physics that was clearly what my mind thought because i purchased a set of these crazy legs and then was like got back to the hotel room was like oh hell yeah and then of course it was like they didn't like work at all it was some fishing line situation that i didn't see light of hand it was a slight of hand it was i've also been taken by a three-card monty oh man when i was in i got taken by a three card monte um i was with my sister liz we were on canal street in new york this is when i was like 20 and i over the weekend in vegas i was walking on one of those skyways between the casinos and i saw someone running a three card monte and i watched it all unfold exactly how it does which the trick on that one is there they always have a plant in the audience so what they do is there's a person whose job it is to act like they're part of the audience but then they play and they win usually win the first one you i don't need to explain what three card monty is right it's like yeah they're three cards yeah this one was actually bottle caps but it's the same difference you know there's a thing under one of the bottle caps so they do the three card monty someone in the audience is actually a plant and they win the first one and then you start watching because you're like oh my gosh these people are they're not good at this like they're just giving money away and then the person who's the plant loses the second time but you saw where the card really was so you're watching now and you see the card and then the plant picks the wrong one and then they're mad and then they stomp off but you're

like but i knew where it was and then you're hooked in like i have fallen for a lot of these things in adulthood andrew which my point is you shouldn't feel so bad that as a child you were taken with this little mouse illusion and at least it came with the wires i don't think my mickey mouse legs even came with whatever they just said no they just sent me with fishing line not included right i mean and they didn't even tell me there was fishing like that was the purest form of a scam you were at least buying something where you could then theoretically trick your friends if you wanted to use all of the equipment or go fishing i could have just i could have just used it as

fishing line too yeah exactly or those legs more than 60 let's come back to my rule i feel like

we've proved they were less than 60 dollars yeah never spend so you're ruling out fair i'll tell you the things you're ruling out buying at a state fair with your $60 rule you're ruling out buying a trampoline good you're ruling out buying a jacuzzi yep good good you're ruling out buying a set of cutco steak knives yep you can get those elsewhere pretty much you're ruling out buying a vitamix trying to think of what that leaves at this what's below ah how much are how much are

um super chamois going for oh i'm not you know what i'm not sure but that's fine buy a super chamois for 49.99 that i mean you know what do it and buy yourself the biggest elephant ear you

can find and eat it on site but i i feel like i would have done pretty well as one of those folks selling things at a state fair because really what are we doing here that's very different than that we are talking into mics we're trying to be entertaining we're asking people for money i mean i'm supported by fishing line at this point yeah exactly like this is not tremendously dissimilar to that and i don't want to um i don't want to cast aspersions on whatever whatever anybody does for their living but i think i would have made a lot of money doing that and i think i would have been even more broken inside i feel like it's funny because when you're talking

about um the three card monte thing i was thinking could i be a plant boy boy if you and i i don't know why I just said boy boy but boy boy if you and I had met under other circumstances there is a chance that you we'd be grifters and you'd be the three card money person I'd be like the plant I'd always be like I'd have a I'd have a whole closet full of hats I would wear that would be

great if there's too many photos of us together now on the internet we've kind of gotten our burn notice unfortunately we can't flim flam people the way we could if if there weren't you know People know that we're working together.

already if i shaved my entire body i'll bet you nobody would recognize me the hair dad it's dirty anyway long story short in vancouver these cats for like three weeks have been trading off sitting on this box and it's kind of cute now what i did appreciate about the article was dawn uh phallic this is in the post does she addresses the chonky cat in the room at the end which is as do the the women who own the Vitamix and own the cats they could just shoo the cats off of the box. They could do that. It could happen but they're having fun with it and they've been posting photos because they've got a Facebook page about these cats. They've been posting photos every day just documenting the cat's sort of vigil and what will happen is as soon as one cat goes to do something the other cats will jump up or another cat will jump up on there. There's been basically a 24 hour constant presence of one of these cats on top of this box for the whole time. And yes, they could just shoo the cats off and do whatever they want, but they're just kind of having fun with it and seeing how long it goes. And the internet is having fun with it, which I appreciated that they at least addressed that because that was kind of my first thought

when I saw the article. That was exactly what I was going to say, like Mr. No Fun Nick over here. I was going to say, why don't, because I'm looking at all these photos and yes, they're cute, but also you can pick up cats. Like it's not like it's a porcupine sitting on top of this box. By the way, are you looking at the byline for Don Fallick, who wrote this piece? Quite interesting. I'm going to follow Don on Twitter. I just did it. Don Fallick is a Philadelphia-based medical reporter and an associate professor at the University of Delaware. She's working on a book about the medical consequences of chronic loneliness. So that's interesting that this – I mean, maybe she just kind of saw it online and wanted to write about it. But also, I wonder if this also plays into this idea of, you know, these kind of exactly where this article ends, this idea of, hey, listen, we're all trapped in our houses. Let's have a little fun here. Let's not let Andrew Walsh take the piss out of this by pointing out that you can pick up a cat and move it.

I appreciate that. Again, though, I appreciate that little nod, because if without that sentence, I think I would have I would have I rolled slightly hard at this. Also, you know, cat, internet cat culture is well documented and something I think you and I kind of go back and forth on on the show. It's like if it's providing people joy, then what's the downside? But, you know, laser cats are a thing that at this point, it doesn't cause me to break out into peals of laughter if I hear about a cat being, let's say, chonky. But I definitely feel like this is a force for good in the world. You know, what else was a force for good in my life last night was this Beanie Baby documentary, Beanie Mania on HBO Max.

That's a great name. Such a good name.

I would highly recommend folks check this out. I just, I was not the right age. I was too old for the Beanie Baby thing as a kid. And then what I mean is, like, I was already into sort of young adulthood, but I didn't have, well, I was about to say I didn't have kids. I actually did have a kid who could have been the demo for Beanie Babies. But for whatever reason, I just never got quite into it. Had I known, though, Andrew, all of the financial sort of the speculative nature of Beanie Babies, I might have been as a person who likes gambling, I might have been tempted to get in on it. I did not realize the wild financial bubble that the Beanie Babies were. Have you heard about this?

Well, I feel like I feel like I remember this, but go ahead. Fill me in on the details.

Well, I mean, just the fact that it sounds like kind of these like four moms in or like three of them were in Naperville, Illinois, in the same cul-de-sac, kind of got into Beanie Babies and then wanted to collect all of them. and then between them and then a kind of a handful of sort of women of a certain age who got really into it they they almost created this secondary market for beanie babies then once they were doing it everybody else wanted in on it then suddenly the beanie babies you know were worth like a collection of beanie babies could be worth a hundred thousand dollars and like these women were like calling they literally called every gift shop because the deal with beanie babies was they did not sell them in walmart or toys r us they refused there's a real guy so they were sold by a company called ty incorporated which was named for this guy ty walker who owned the company ty right i see that all the time yep yeah that was the first name of the guy who started the whole thing okay and he was very savvy he like so would not let like toys r us or any of these big major chains sell beanie babies they were only and i remember this from growing up like you'd go into a like a weird like you go into a random pharmacy and they would have a thing of beanie babies like like kreggins the pharmacy where i was

a stock boy it wasn't it was all of these small little independent stores and gift shops and things that's where you would find them and uh you know once they got really popular then there would be like beanie babies that you couldn't find and so these women would literally have the yellow pages out oh by the way it's so fun to look at b-roll of someone looking through the

yellow pages andrew i was going to say as you're telling the story because i certainly didn't know the details of this at all i just remember it being a craze and that was kind of based on nothing so i assumed that was a bubble but um i was going to say they're they're creating the

secondary market pre-internet well actually right as the internet is starting oh okay part of what's there's this movie what's great about is there's so much good sort of archival like early internet footage because the the beady baby thing came along like the the mania around it coincided with the very early days of like of web pages uh where you could actually navigate enough people having the internet where you could go on and actually look around for things and people creating these lists of all the beanie babies that were available like as in here's how you complete the collection and but but right before that so like in the couple of years before the internet really hits you have these these moms on the net no these moms that are just trying to collect every beanie baby that exists and so they'll call like a store they'll call a chamber of commerce in like duluth and they'll ask like what can we get the list of all the gift shops and they'll call a gift shop and they'll say do you have i don't know whatever this certain kind of beanie baby and they'll go actually um we don't uh we're sold out of that and they'll go are there any other like stores in the area that sell them and then they would get a list and they would call all these stores and they would just give them their credit card number and have them just send the beanie babies to their house that was what kind of created this mania then the internet hits and there's also just some great like news coverage where you have people saying like believe it or not there's a website dedicated to beanie babies like when that was a good news like you're not gonna believe what they have a website yeah right right beanie babies but there's also this woman from um delaware who was uh i think at one time i think she was an fbi she worked in the fbi but she got really into beanie babies and she wrote and recorded a beanie baby rap which she released on cassette tape and she said she mailed to some radio stations but it didn't ever get any airtime i thought you might want to hear a little bit of it here

you will be saying beanie rap addy showed me this over christmas and i've been singing

Beanie rap It's a beanie rap I've been singing that in my head Why does that make me hungry? Are you thinking about getting some beans from? I'm thinking about getting a bean rap Yeah I guess beanie rap has a few different possible meanings But anyway, it's a really interesting It's a really well done documentary And it's also just a lot of fun nostalgia from the 90s It's just fun seeing things that were popular in the 90s Yeah We're at that age now where just seeing something that you're like, I remember when that looked like that provides some great entertainment. That's my favorite thing in the world. I mean, honestly. Check out Beanie Mania.

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 also, I deployed an expert spoof on my daughter yesterday. I'm still waiting to hear back. So that Beanie Rap song I played, that's kind of become an inside joke with us. And so I grabbed the audio and I made it into an MP3, but then I put like a fake title on it. I put like WOR unreleased, which War on Drugs unreleased. Because she and I are going to go see the War on Drugs when they're down here in Portland. And I said, oh, the label just sent me this new War on Drugs song and it slaps. and I include and I attach the file and when she opens it she's going to get beanie wrap rolled has she opened it yet I don't know I mean let me see I don't know if I can see that on this thing but what she hasn't done is responded to it it says delivered so maybe she has I sent it yesterday at 7 p.m. maybe I should check on her because that's a pretty good spoof and I'm waiting for

her to be like you got me good dad I've done that I'm looking I don't know why I can't find the damn tape here but i do that a lot um do you remember the the commercial song uh doors go up doors go down that's what garage doors do it was something that um the stew by it was like a local commercial that the stew bot infected us with yes i know about it from stew

Yeah, and it's weird that I cannot find it either online or in my own collection here. But for a while there – oh, here it is right here. It's clearly labeled. Doors go up, doors go down. That's what garage doors do. I created like a five-minute loop of that, and I've done this to him several times where I will change the name of the file exactly like you have in something that might seem intriguing. Or I'll say, hey, does this sound weird to you? Luke and I just recorded, and I feel like there's a buzz on the line. I would send him that. He never responds. Now, I haven't done it in years now, but he did not respond to any of them, so I don't know if he never got them or what, but I know I've done it more than once. No, I was really expecting a better response from my kid, but I don't know.

I guess someone's not getting a birthday present this year, Eddie.

I have some voicemails I want to play for you. Also, you know, I was just thinking about this because you were mentioning before how um the omicron is affecting you i think it's also a cycle there's something that makes sense about calling it omicron now like i i got omicron but i also think there there's an interesting conversation about the psychology of us saying that now there was a time when if you got covid you said i got covid but now we say i got omicron because and again it makes sense because this variant is different and i think you might have seen a little bit of that with people saying oh yeah well he got delta or whatever but i still think we're mostly calling it covid then we just understood that we were in the delta phase of it but i think because omicron looks so different people say i have omicron people aren't saying i have covid have you noticed that i hadn't thought

of that but you're you're you're absolutely right and i think it's for the reasons that you yeah you're proposing like it's covid was and you know there are people that have reason to be uh concerned about uh omicron or omicron but for most people particularly people who are vaxxed and boosted it's not something that poses a uh you know a death threat and so it's it is a way of differentiating i think and in the early days of covid i mean particularly pre-vaccine i mean if you had covid it was deeply concerning omicron is just more like yeah it got me that's what it

feels like to me anyway yeah you know yeah um anyway i want to give a little um kind of shout out to some listeners who i know are kind of struggling with it in their own families in one way or another we got a note from our friend kayla in stockton and her five christian uh who've both uh tested positive for it and and um kayla sent this a couple of days ago and says that they're both feeling basically fine at least on monday they were but you know it's scary like christian's nine years old and like you're reading all these news headlines and now and now you have this thing called covid and um i hope two days later that christian is still uh doing all right but hang in there buddy and uh also got a note from our our friends sam and kim in florida i don't know if you remember meeting them but they had a a baby uh recently too and you know they have a four-month-old kim is a teacher and so kim contracted it as well and now their baby has a really high fever and sam wrote in yesterday to say like well we think we're fine but it's just it's scary they have a four-month you know four-month-old with a with a 100.4 fever so So I know that just like it's just like even even if even if you're out there surviving, it's just scary. So, you know, shout out to you guys. Hang in there. Hope that you guys and everybody. I know these are just two people who I happen to be seeing their texts here, but I know it's affecting so many people in our audience. So just wanted to kind of acknowledge that and send you our best wishes. Also, though, I wanted to play some voicemails for you here. Lukals. Here, let's see if we can help. I should have come up with some better answers for this question that Bree is going to ask us, but maybe we can do some brainstorming

on the fly here. Hi, guys. This is Bree in Colorado, and I have a dilemma for you guys to help with. Every time my five, who happens to be five, asks me to help her take off like a sweatshirt or a sweater, I'm not even thinking about it. They skin the cat, and she puts her arms up and meows at me and i've realized that's a pretty terrible phrase so i need you all to brainstorm um a new version of that phrase for me that is pita friendly okay thanks bye now i feel

like this has sort of come up on the show before yep can you remind me of is it i was listening but i missed one key detail at the beginning is this when the sweater is going on or coming off i think coming off so because it was going on i was gonna say well already skin the cat makes no sense because you're putting more skin on the cat but okay this is this is take the sweater off this

is take the thing off yeah which actually think i actually now i do have an idea for now this came up in a different context of the idiom there's more than one way to skin a cat but i feel like there's another version of that that is like there's more than one way to like we don't even there's one i feel like there's an idiom that means the same thing only

it doesn't use an animal at all. Can you recall that at all? I'm actually looking it up, and maybe I'm totally wrong about that. Was this one of the PETA-isms? I don't think so.

But anyway, I'm not coming up with anything there. Yeah, the phrase is, there's more than one way to skin that cat. I mean, we could say there's more than one way to chew that fat. No, I don't think PETA's going to like that. Chewing the fat, you also killed an animal, because now you're chewing on the fat.

But I would say this, because the context that Bree is offering here is completely different now i don't know how clever we need to be if it needs to rhyme or what have you but what i like is for the same exact thing all right put your arms up time to

skin the cat what if you just say time to peel the banana oh that's great yeah it's fun and kids love things like that say like kids love bananas peel the banana yeah i love it andrew i was going to just propose the thing that my mom did when i was a kid and i ever needed to have my arms up which is she would sing a song she made up called arms up for jesus arms up for jesus arms up arms up for jesus arms up that's the whole song actually but it would be anytime you needed to put your arms up this would this was for all my siblings i wonder if if this made its way all the way through the the dftb uh phase of of parenting for my mom i wonder if that was just in the early days like if that was for me liz and and sarah and hannah or if that made It's all the way to the end. But Arms Up for Jesus was a pretty common song in our household. But I think Peel the Banana. Yeah, how about that? Great. Peel the banana. Peel the banana. I love it. Give that a shot. Makes me want to have a small kid just so I can use Peel the Banana on them. You know what I mean? I think that's a really cute thing.

I think that's a good reason, actually, to have a kid.

Absolutely.

But here, I do have a rule for you. Never spend more than $60 for a kid at a state fair.

what if they slice dice make julienne fries what if you never need to sharpen them i guarantee you

that is not a kid that is a doll that is being manipulated with that is a knife that is a set of cutco knives mr burbank i don't have any show titles for today which is unfortunate given how um we're gonna sniff our sniffing our own show titles before um so i don't really know what to do there. We're going to go out with the song Tammy Lee, you said, right? Let me see if I can find that. Yeah, Patti Lee. Oh, Patti Lee. By Les Savvy Fab. Okay, let me see if we can find that.

I'm trying to think. What about Peel the Banana?

There, I found the song. Don't like it? Even though it was your genius invention? But then we can do something better. I think we can do something better than that. I'll come up with something. I've never felt more shot down on this show. I mean, it's just like, you know,

I just kind of lays there um alright so fine I wanted to be zazzy I said that before alright hey thanks for listening everybody

we'll be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you until then have a great Wednesday remember to peel the banana and also no mountain too tall and good luck to all

The lights on please What is gonna matter him

No for the last Was your suit or smoke Before he croaked In seven seconds He'd be dead Time to the head For a Paddy Lee's band Paddy Lee Turn the lights on please There's something I don't understand Paddy Lee Turn the lights on, please This party's gotten out of hand I believe it's lofty skin And showing what's within It's hard to describe It moves like smoke

And saladin' like ice

let me tell you story about a tiny tie since he created these bees that make me hot little beans in their bodies and cute little faces and addicted to them been to all kinds of places smuggling bees upstairs it's no lie and it all ain't it all on a guy named ties beanie wrap it's a beanie wrap it's a beanie wrap i'm all tied up power out