Muse

So, Brent, I see from your file you were in the materials business. Oh yeah, big time. Strings, cords, vinyl, synthetics, rubber. We do vulcanize now, so that's huge. Plus metals, aluminum, brass, copper. What else? Steel? No, not steel. Steel's a sucker's game. Polymers, coatings, internals. You crack open an HVAC, that is all us. Is there golf here? There frickin' better be. TBTL! I came here to do two things, eat eggs and nothing, and I'm not out of either.

The most rewarding part was when he gave me my money. Thank you for the dough.

Do you have any idea who I am? I'm a verified Yelp complainer.

By the way, I'm a dentist. Okay, so I read body language very, very well.

This is the kind of spontaneous publicity, your name in print, that makes people.

All right. Hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Thursday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. It's unique. It's bold. It's ahead of the competition. My name is Luke Burbank. I'm your host. You've garbled your last ghoul. Coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center right here in Portland, Oregon, where... Is it really happening? Kind of. There's a little bit of sunshine out there.

Oh, ma, pa, it's just beautiful.

Temperatures may go north of 40 degrees today, which counts as a win in this strange weather pattern that we found ourselves in in the 503. We're also in the 3662, as in episode 3662 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. Well, we're going to talk about CNN Plus today. cnn plus i'm sure you've been talking about it with all of your friends around the water cooler and over the dinner table is this a thing people care about no this is cnn's new streaming service that they rolled out last week and as of right now it has as many viewers as tbtl has listeners losers in other words well i mean that's not i'm not exaggerating like we actually there may be more people listening to my voice right now than are tuning into CNN Plus. It is, as Defector put it, it is getting very close to Quibi territory. It's rare that we can celebrate a massive media push that's less successful than this program, and we're going to celebrate that today when we talk about CNN Plus. Speaking of digital products and properties, what is going on with the ads that the Washington Post is trying to present to me.

Who are the ad wizards who came up with this one?

There's something going on with my Washington Post feed, and it may be me, actually. We'll get into the specifics of online advertising coming up as well. And because it's a Thursday, a.k.a. a Blur's Day, we'll do the Blur's Day messages. Do all that with the help of this guy, longest-running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. of course recently purchased a house with his partner Genevieve and has been doing all kinds of projects including slab jacking but hopefully just within the privacy of his own home or wherever the slabs need to be jacked he is Andrew Walsh and he's joining me right now from the sweet cream district Seattle Washington good morning my friend hey Luke I'm in the market for something

that you might it just occurred to me have some expertise on I'm in the market for a Charleston chew okay have you had these i have never had one one of our friends posted a photo of a empty wrapper of one the other day said something like i got too drunk last night or something it was related to him tuning up a little bit too much and then i guess ripping through a charleston chew and i and i was like oh god i thought those were disgusting i thought those were the things with like i don't know peanut brittle or leather or something in them that you know one of those old-timey candy bars that nobody really likes, and then people started, no, I looked it up to see what they're actually made of. They sound great. They come in three flavors. It's all nougat. That sounds right up my alley, but now I can't find one. I stopped at a 7-Eleven yesterday and went directly to the candy aisle. I never hang out in candy aisles for whatever reason. Don't eat tons of candy. Well, because of the restraining order. Well, that's why I kicked out of libraries. That's for the courts to decide. But, yeah, no, I mean, I guess I'm just not a candy person. I'm not trying to make it sound like I'm a healthy person. Trust me. I am not. But I'm not a candy person. So it did occur to me. I went into the 7-Eleven, and I'm looking at the candy aisle. I can't find a Charleston Chew. So then I asked the guy behind the counter. He wasn't super engaged with my search for a Charleston Chew. You'd be surprised to hear.

This fella who runs a 7-Eleven And then I just left I didn't stomp out he's like nope don't have him I'm like alright bye And it occurred to me that's probably a very rare thing For someone in his position to see Because most people are just like I'm in the mood for candy And will probably stare at the candy wall for a while And pick whatever looks best Whereas like I was on a mission I'm looking for a Charleston Chew so I can try it for the first time

I am shocked That you have not had a Charleston Chew in your life it was my go to candy bar as a young kid, but only because of the size of the Charleston shoe. They did something very smart with it, which is it was longer than any other candy bar. Yes, yes, I noticed that from the photo. And so as a kid, if I had my 25 cents, I'm going to the optometrist later today, Andrew, so I'm already feeling extremely advanced in age, like I'm already in that mental space. And now that I think about the fact that I used to wander into Cregan's Pharmacy with a quarter and I would be able to walk out of there with two candy bars. It is just, oh my goodness. But anyway.

Wait, a penny farthing is not a, that's a bike. No, that's the bike, but that's what I would ride. Yes, that's what you would ride too.

I would ride that bike. First I would, I'm trying to think of another thing in the era of the penny farthing. I would go around and I would collect up all the chamber pots from the various homes on the Bowery and then I would dump those out and then they would pay me half a cent for my time and then I would get on my penny farthing bike and ride to Cregan's Pharmacy.

To get two Charleston shoes.

I loved the Charleston shoe. Again, I purchased it mostly because it just seemed like it was more candy bar. Although I bet you if you actually took the, like it's probably an optical illusion. Like it is probably longer than say a Nestle crunch bar, but I bet you it's also more narrow. So like it's one of those things that if you were to i mean they weren't just like we're going to give you more candy they just were smart enough to fool people like me into buying it uh some people like to freeze them that's a

thing that's what i'm being encouraged to do by our pal rodin um who's been advising me on this journey he says he thinks he charleston shoe advisor he thinks um that i can get my hands on one at a chevron that's either at what did his text message say yesterday he was like he's like

i can't remember the cross chevron in bellevue where he works that like there's a chevron on

50th no it might be 52nd he he follows up with a frantic text um the thing is at some point i

i turned andrew i turned on the charleston shoe because and i'm going to do the opposite of what i did with severance for you which is i probably overhyped it i'm going to do you a real favor I'm going to under-hype the Charleston Chew. It started to taste, to me, a little bit chemically and synthetic at some point. And so I eventually went more in the direction of a Nestle Crunch, of even a—I mean, I love Twix. I'm a Twix man like my father and his father before him. So I haven't had a Charleston Chew probably since I was like 10. but it's worth you know it's worth having one so you can say that that you've you've tried it in your life but i wonder what as an adult i wonder if you're gonna actually like a charleston shoe as compared to like other i think more high quality candy bars well here's my um here's

i guess maybe my backstory on my interest here like i said i always assumed it has an it has that old-timey name so i thought like there are certain candy bars like that have that brittle stuff inside that i absolutely hate and i can never remember the name of it oh like heath bar and score heath bar score and then everybody gets mad i do this every single time too what does bart simpson sell oh a butterfinger butterfingers um i guess you're also a fan of having a cow man

no i'm not a fan of butterfingers um i know but i'm saying if you're going to if you don't like

bart simpson's candy advice then i you also ignore his advice about not having a cow i think Yeah, it's a transitive property. Have a cow, friend, is my catchphrase. That's a show title I'm writing it now. Have a cow, friend. And then I speed off on my pedi-farthing. I'm going to make that work. But anyways, if I were to have a candy bar, like in my experience, I did not grow up eating candy bars. We would have some sweet treats or whatever, but candy bars were just not it in my family. But at probably like a ripe old age of like 11 or 12 or 13, I remember my first candy bar, like full candy bar, not like mini size, not Halloween treat thing. But like I'm sitting down with a fork and knife to eat a candy bar of the napkin.

I saw a guy doing that on the plane the other day, and I thought maybe that's going to be my move. Now that I'm entering my dotage, I'm considering becoming the guy who tucks his napkin into his collar when he eats. But anyway, mine was a Milky Way. That was my first.

candy bar wait no andrew you're an idiot not milky way three musketeers but you know you're

forgiven for yeah you're forgiven for confusing those because they both have that very kind of airy would you call i don't even know if you would call that nougat would you i thought it was which

is that's what that's what's piquing my interest here because the three musketeers candy bar is very simple first of all i don't want nuts in my candy bar i and i don't really need caramel either

Stay away from the payday then, my friend, because it's nothing but.

I mean, yes, paydays, like the health food of candy bars. They're Brazil nuts of candy bars.

Honestly, if there was a kid, when I was a kid, if there was a kid whose favorite candy bar was payday, we ostracized them. And I think rightfully so, because they were a narc.

Yeah, exactly. I do fellow teens.

I'm just enjoying this salted peanut log.

And then later I'm going to suck on a hard candy. Like, get out of my face with that. Anyway, so I love Mia Three Musketeers because it's simple. And it's just what I believe to be nougat. And then when I realized, oh, that's what these Charleston chews are made of. Only three different flavors of nougat, apparently strawberry, vanilla, or chocolate. I was like, I want to try all three. Like, I'm not joking. And I wanted to start with strawberry. A Neapolitan.

For some reason, strawberries sounded great. stack all three of them up and then just take a bite could that be a hey dummies video actually

that will be the next hey dummies video that i do that's a great well no though because i just did one i'm not going to wait two weeks to get my well okay i'll tape it and then hold it yeah yeah

i got an idea for you yeah let it live in your phone you're not live streaming you're not live

streaming your hey dummies videos you're not doing it right luke i've also never tasted

The strawberry and the vanilla I believe are more recent Inventions Of the Charles Entertainment Chew Empire I assume he's a cousin of Chuck E. Cheese So I can only speak to the chocolate And I will say this In the way that the Filling of a Three Musketeer or a Milky Way Is very almost It's not marshmallow-y but it's just Kind of very light The Charleston Chew, the center of the Charleston Chew Is much more dense for what that's worth.

It's worth a lot. You are probably doing me a favor because that isn't... I expected it basically to be like different flavors of a Three Musketeers, and it sounds like there is a quality difference.

Well, again, I haven't had one in... going on 30 years now, so I don't know. And again, I am now... I'm really invested in this Hey Dummies video. I want to see the look on your face when you bite into your first Charleston chew.

I'm going to line up all three, too. I'm going to try one after the other, after the other. But I'm going to have to have a glass of water, right, to kind of clear the palate. Yeah, like a palate cleanser.

My riff on candy bars is always that it's amazing to me that as adults, we're not eating more candy bars. Because as a kid, if you would have told me, hey, at some point, Luke, you will have ample resources to buy. Like, you can walk into a 7-Eleven and buy $100 worth of candy. And you also have a car to get there. i would be like well that's my life i'm just driving to places and buying massive amounts of candy and it's so strange to me that in adulthood i i do not avail myself of that in fact i very rarely eat a candy bar even though as a kid i mean that was like the centerpiece of my life was doing chores to get some money to go to kreggins to get some candy yeah i mean for me i mean i i can't believe you did not grow up eating candy bars like i know you see kids eating can't weren't you like hey what is that nestle crunch what is that twix bar like weren't

you intrigued and again yeah well i mean i guess but i just can't picture those situations well first of all i wasn't like i just wasn't hanging out with kids that much when i was a little kid like first of all like i was growing up in the country i literally didn't really have friends i had like two friends uh tim and tony and they didn't talk to each other no that's not true although we didn't really hang out we didn't hang out as a crew right i was friends with tim i'd go to his house sometimes it's friends with tony i'd go to his house sometimes but like i wasn't and also it's like i wasn't hanging out like in urban or suburban areas where i could ride my bike around with my friends and maybe get a candy bar here and a slurpee there and then go you know hit the

ball around or whatever um you have literally described every single day of my childhood which i'm not saying yeah i know that's a i know it bums you out a little bit that not bums you out But I'm not saying that to be, you know, to rub it in or something. But, I mean, you have literally described what we would do every single day. I mean, that pharmacy was a stone's throw from where I lived. And so I feel lucky that that was, I guess, you know, available to me.

Yeah, no. And that was my idea. I mean, I really wanted. Listen, as an adult, I have zero complaints about my life. So it's not like I spend a lot of time while I'll tell stories about myself.

sad sack my sad sackness growing up um it's not like i spent a lot of time actually saying god i wish my childhood was different because i mean whatever it however it worked out it led me here and it's pretty chill and now i live in a city and i can drive my car to go get some charleston shoes later on today on either 50th or maybe 52nd chevron station i think anyway um yeah so i just didn't kind of have that so the candy i was exposed to was again usually around some sort of a a Halloween party at school or something going on, but it would be bite-sized candies and this and that. And at home, like, yeah, we would have, like, you know, tons of ice cream treats. Like, you said Nestle. Like, I remember, like, Nestle Crunch ice cream treat bars on a stick. Like, we ate those like crazy. I was not wanting for sweet treats. It just wasn't in the candy bar form. Gotcha.

And for me, it was sort of the opposite in that we didn't have – I don't know. it's so weird thinking about what the kind of food we had in my house growing up because i can't quite tell if it was i don't think it was because my parents gave a ton of thought to whether food was healthy or not i think it was because my mom did the grocery shopping and she didn't want to buy stuff that seemed expensive to her and somehow like like we just never had there would never be a box of like um you know uh ice cream sandwiches in the freezer We always ate like wheat bread We never had sugary cereal Like there was a lot of stuff that we didn't have access to But again thinking about my mom I don't think it's because She was like being super Healthy with us so we had like no good Treats in the house which is why we had to go Find it on the streets To learn about it On the streets parents this is why you got

To give your kids a lot of candy you don't Want them eating candy in the streets Absolutely

I'm in a in the midst of a bit of a dilemma here andrew which is i am trying to get a receipt for a flight that i went on this is for like travel expense purposes and i love alaska airlines as you know i uh that's exclusively the airline that i use and they have been so kind to our show letting us go to seahawks games and hiring me for gigs etc but if you call alaska airlines right now the hold time is 7 hours they're going through it man they have the and I feel like that automated lady doesn't understand what she's saying when when she says a number like 7 hours with a straight face because she is a robot the wait time is between 5 and 7 hours if you'd like us to call you back I'm like do you understand

robot lady how ludicrous a number seven hours is yeah and it's true too because i was following a friend of ours on instagram who recently took a trip and there was some issue i mean just with her and her kids flight anyway and then also baggage was lost like it ended up being i mean an absolute nightmare that and i was watching her update the story across days and she had to be on the phone luke i think that this is our friend genie by the way you know genie um i think that she said she was on the phone for um like i think literally seven hours i think she said after seven hours i finally got this is to track down her baggage and she said somebody got on the phone with me and they were amazing she did say the person who and she ended up talking to was incredible at customer service but she was on the phone on hold for seven hours wow now i want to

say this because again i want to keep flying alaska airlines and i want them to keep letting us go to their suite for seahawks games this is across i mean alaska airlines is dealing right now currently with a a dispute with their pilots so there's some stuff going on specific to that airline but it's also just across the industry like i've been watching so many tiktoks of people that are just like you know like particularly these airlines like spirit and jet blue some of what you might call the sort of discount carriers like people that are just on like trapped on a plane like no one will get them off the plane or the line is out the door of the airport to try to check in and there's no one at the desk and the people are just like it's just it's chaos out there yeah with the airline industry yeah that's what that's what it sounds

like and again i don't you know well i guess i didn't know the conversation would lead this direction but i don't actually even know what's going on with that labor dispute thing because obviously i would usually can i assume that i would always be on the side of labor in a situation like this yet i am also very brand loyal to alaska so uh totally i mean i i'm my guess is

that the pilots have a point also you know the head of the pilots union is yeah pal will i know i know so you know if if the head of the pilots union is a 10 uh i you know i'm assuming that they have a legitimate point um so i'm hoping that this will be worked out in an equitable fashion because I have a little bit of work track. coming up in a couple of weeks and I'm about to book it and I really want to fly on Alaska because that's my go-to airline but I'm also at this very moment a bit nervous because there's lots of cancellations and again just trying to get this documentation basically what's happening Andrew is this hotel that I stayed at in LA is trying to charge me for an extra night when I was not at the hotel they have some kind of error in their system that thinks i stayed an extra night and they charged me for it and i called them and they will nobody will take it off of off of my credit card i was down there for this like prx thing and so the so i disputed it with my credit card and my credit card wants the evidence that i didn't stay there that night and the evidence is that my flight home was that day oh okay so that's what i'm

trying to get i am really surprised did you say what uh hotel this is or is it a big chain it's

There's a hotel called One West Hollywood, this very schmancy hotel down in L.A., and actually a lovely hotel. Other than them trying to charge me for a day that I didn't stay there, I would highly recommend this place. It was very nice.

It just seems like this would be – I'm just surprised that any company wouldn't just say, oh, okay, sorry about that and take it off. Not that – I mean if it's a schmancy hotel, then I'm sure it probably costs it.

What happened was I got a late checkout from them, as you know, as is my want. And for some reason, they entered it in the system. This is, and it's so silly because they have me down for a late checkout, which they charged me for, which I was fine with because my flight was in the afternoon and I just wanted to kind of like hang out by the pool and not check my stuff and I, you know, sleep in and whatever. So they charged me for the late checkout and then they charged me for an additional night. And I was on the phone with them. I was like, well, you, obviously both of these things can't be true.

Yeah, right.

If I stayed an additional night, then there should be no late checkout charge.

So why aren't they just being cool about it? I mean, what is this person saying to you? Are they blaming the system? Like, oh, I can't get in the system?

The first time that I called them, it went to voicemail. The front desk went to voicemail. And then I left a message. This is when I saw it on my credit card. Then I called and got a person, and they said, we're too busy. You have to email this email address. So I emailed. This is a month ago. I emailed the email address with this whole description of, like, I didn't stay that night. I was like, check the security camera. No one ever emailed me back. Then I called them, and they said that the manager, the person who had, like, inputted this in the system is not in this week, and they're the only person who can take it out of the system. And then they told me to email the same email address I had emailed a month ago. And so it's just like I've just been going around and around with them. And finally I was like, screw this. I'm just going to, like, dispute this charge. I'm going to put it on them to enforce this payment, but now I have to, with my bank, prove to them that I wasn't there. It's a real kind of, like, forensic thing. Yeah. Because I'm like, I couldn't have been there because I was on a flight that day.

I think it's okay to tell this story, but, yeah, I think it's okay to tell this story. So this group that I volunteer with on weekends, right, we are kind of in between treasurers right now. It's a very loose group of volunteers and we don't have much money. We're always just we'll do a we'll send out a fundraising email every now and then to get maybe a couple thousand dollars so that we can buy meals for the next couple of months or whatever. It's a very, very shoestring operation. But we do have one person who's kind of in charge of the finances, but she's not going to be as involved anymore. and um we're trying to kind of figure out like what we should do if we should get some more people kind of signed on to this bank account that we have at a local bank and i'll probably end up being one of those people and then i'll probably start embezzling and then it'll you know i'll probably do some time but it'll be interesting tbtl content anyway that's not the point here the point is the two people whose names are actually associated with the account who are kind of less involved with the organization now, went to this bank in person this week to say, hey, what would be the process to get more signatories onto this account? We'll stay on. Our names will still be associated with it. But if we wanted to put Andrew or somebody else on this as well and maybe get them some their own ATM cards or whatever, what would that process be like? And apparently because this is an account that was specifically set up for an organization like ours, small though it may be, the way the bank or like the way the bank wants to verify that this is a legit thing is they want us to have a meeting and then share our meeting notes with them like the record of the meeting notes where it was officially said that we are we here in this meeting we are officially saying that andrew and so and so um are going to be signatories on this account and then write it up in the what do you call the meeting notes why am i blanking on the proper name for the minutes the minutes. They need to see our minutes. Isn't that weird like well i could just write up some minutes i can get you a minutes with nail polish by 2 p.m yeah that's that is a really interesting hoop to jump through but i also kind of understand it because think about you know like you made a joke about embezzling but like i mean there are probably so many not-for-profits that get started and then unfortunately somebody is has the sort of fiduciary access brett farve it goes sideways brett farve isn't brett farve always in trouble

Wasn't he in trouble for scamming some organization, some nonprofit he was supposedly running?

Am I about to get sued? The copper, the guy that's always trying to tell me to wear some kind of copper elbow brace? Yeah, didn't he? No, I think you're, are you thinking of the pitcher, Kurt, what's his name, the bloody sock guy?

No, no, Schilling, no, I hate that guy. No, Brett Favre, it had something to do with skimming off of like welfare and some nonprofit that I thought he was.

i haven't heard that but that doesn't mean it's i wouldn't put it past him i feel like my guess is because kurt schilling is was very much like he started a video game company and got all these tax breaks and like jersey and then the company imploded um but uh he had some yeah

i'm i'm very sketchy and the details here but mississippi threatens to sue uh brett farve over eight hundred and twenty eight thousand dollars the former uh quarterback was among more than people who receive letters from this auditor it had something to do with some like non-profit that he was like farves kids or something mr farve wrote that he had donated nearly 10 million through his farve for hope charity to help underprivilege and underserved children i bet this is a tax scam maybe i think yeah but it involved some organization you know he was moving

i bet you that he was i love it that i didn't even know this existed until four seconds ago and now i have a theory on it really went zero to 60 on this well because of course because also like i just paid my taxes and i wish i would have donated 10 million dollars to farve's kids because they were like got me out of a couple of jams like i was you know because that's tax deductible so my my guess having again only heard about this from you now 30 seconds ago i wonder if what it was was that he was claiming this huge financial donation as a way to offset a tax liability and

it didn't really happen or something and it says uh here's an article from the guardian from october of last year that's oh so this is not that long ago this is just last winter yes brett farve uh repays 600 000 in welfare money for speeches he didn't give he didn't make so yeah he was like doing some shit where he was like i think charging through this organization he was charging the

state for things that he wasn't doing geez louise i wonder how this wasn't a bigger story um at least i wonder how i missed it i wonder if this was like how was defect or not on the case like any of yeah far of scam news yeah really hit my radar and i don't know why i know it either

because it's not it wasn't a big levitard thing either i don't know i just like i said well as i just demonstrated i really don't know that much about it i just know that because now when i see his commercials for his golden elbow or copper elbow brace or whatever um i always just think boy you're still allowed to do commercials too like you have become like the least trustworthy

spokesperson you know writ large yeah well i will be googling this after the show and i love nothing more than a good scandal related to someone who i already kind of low-key don't like right the reason i don't like i don't like brett farver the same reason i don't like roger clemens because they both did that like I'm retiring and then they got to do their victory lap and then they unretired and didn't the Rangers give Roger Clemens a Hummer or something like oh I don't know he got like a retirement Hummer from sign of that's I don't mean that okay yeah euphemistic sense although I mean I can't speak to what was going on in the dugout but like both of those guys just kind of really what it comes down to is my guess is they have bad politics and it's not because i know them to be particularly maga like but i i would bet care to make it interesting andrew i would bet clearly not i would bet you a lot of money that both of them have very bad politics and so that just kind of informs my opinion of them off the field uh-huh uh all right before we get in any more legal trouble um actually no you're you're you're on the money with that yeah i was happy that i yeah me besmirching their politics is where we could get into some sort of slanderous territory so let's take a quick break and then when we come back i want to talk about cnn plus because again it's so rare that we can laugh at the misery of a different media property than us so we're going to do that coming up on tbtl

we was hoping for some razzle dazzle razzle dazzle that's right man razzle dazzle on your mark on your get set get set now ready ready go everybody razzle dazzle let's thank some dazzling donors

I don't know.

These are the wonderful, generous folks who are donating to the show each month. I promise you, this is not a scam. You will not hear about how any of these funds were being misappropriated. Why? Because we don't actually get the funds. They go to the 501c3, that is American Public Media, and then a small amount of it gets paid back to us as our salary.

And plus, if Favre is accused of getting paid for speeches he didn't make, I mean, unfortunately, there's a lot of evidence that you and I have talked. We have talked and talked and talked. Too much evidence for most people.

We want to start by thanking Corey Plucker in East Hampton, Massachusetts. Corey says, Hi, Luke and Andrew. Last year, my dazzling donor message paid dividends throughout the year. You ended up using drops of my daughter Rhiannon. Oh, right. singing tbtl and saying life's a potty wipe your body all year i should have had that ready let me see if i i got it right here let's see i've uh yeah yeah whoa that was rihanna was really fun here's what i think happened i bet you cory was asking rihanna to say it and maybe wasn't recording the first time so here's the potty wipe your body yes so that's like yeah that's rihanna in all of her glory and then this is when cory was trying to force it

Or no, that sounds like maybe an imitation

Colonel Kurtz Maybe Rhiannon is doing a Colonel Kurtz imitation there

You think From Heart of Darkness? Yeah, no, you don't think so?

Wow, interesting

Then she goes on to say

The horror, the horror

Heart of Darkness was the book What's the movie? Oh sorry, Apocalypse Now

That's Rhiannon I love that And then she also, but also, she's singing TBTL. I was really obsessed with, I don't know if I can find that on the fly. Oh, here we go. I love this audio so much.

TBTL! Whee!

Just the... I love it so much. Just the, what would you call it? The kind of like beautiful innocence of a child.

TBTL!

Or Colonel Kurtz, as you like to call them, Andrew. Hey. Corey says, do I owe you extra for that? Do I claim that on my taxes? Wow. It all comes back to taxes, Andrew. If only there were a Beatles song that we could play to honor how much we're talking about taxes today.

You say it's your birthday.

This year, could you just put a plug out there for my friend's business, Noble and Cooley. It's a premier quality manufacturer of drums for musicians, both amateur and professional. They are in their seventh generation of family ownership. holy did they even did they have drums 70 years ago like i mean obviously they had there were drums also as a generation 10 years more than that right how old is this company yeah must be a pretty old company but i know that like you know early civilizations had drums but i'm talking about like you know gene krupa sitting behind banging the skins that kind of thing does that

go back a hundred years well who knows how you know who knows what the drums originally were like When this company first started messing around with them Maybe they were marching band drums

Also think about it It's 2022 so 100 years ago Is 1922 where they definitely Had drums because people were doing the flat foot Floogie Right

Are people not doing that anymore

Shout out to Noble and Cooley They've been Oh look I should just read these messages and they would answer all my questions They've been around literally Since the Civil War Don't worry they were on the good side of course think about i mean yeah because you didn't call it the war of northern aggression that's how i knew but also i'm like how old are drums think about the civil war i mean you always had that guy walking around with the drum with the snare or whatever you want to call it like slung around his neck being like here we come well literally when you said that i was picturing drum and fife from like the revolutionary war too yeah so maybe that's so noble and cooley was selling the drum to the guy i don't know why i'm going to make this reference again from the cover Of the book The Red Badge of Courage By Stephen Crane The version that I had as a kid I referenced that earlier this week because I have this wound on my forehead and I feel like The guy on the cover Because it's a book about the Civil War right I feel like he had a big bandage on and he may have had a drum And it may have been from Noble and Cooley

Look Enhance, enhance, look for that logo

Check them out at NobleCooley.com and follow them on Instagram At Noble Cooley Where you can literally watch a log Turn into a drum

I want to do a quick correction on that Instagram handle It's Noble and Cooley At Noble and Cooley

Their entire process is handmade and custom And is fascinating And they were on the right side of history Re colon the Civil War Cheers from listener Corey Thank you Corey It's weird that he signed that the South will rise again That's strange That's strange

He did say the good side, but he didn't specify. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Well, you know, agree to disagree, Corey.

See it, Stone Mountain.

Wait.

Corey did not do that. We would like him to keep donating. Please do not paint him as some sort of... Wait. Which one was the bad one? Rebel? As some sort of southern rebel.

Just say maestro.

Just say maestro. Maestro. On your mark.

On your mark. Get set. Get set. Now ready. Ready. Go.

Everybody rattle, sattle.

We've also got to thank Catherine Kachunas of Ann Arbor, Michigan. I have never been to Ann Arbor, Michigan, Andrew, that I can remember, but I have heard that it is wonderful.

That's what I hear, too. Beautiful and arty.

You didn't, weren't you, what, Inverness? Where were you? Oh, Interlochen. I didn't visit Interlochen.

That's in Michigan, right? Yeah, but I don't think that they're near each other. I could be wrong.

Is that near Mackinac?

I think it's near Mockinac is how you pronounce it.

You just embarrassed yourself. Once again, Catherine is in Ann Arbor, and Catherine wants to use her dazzling donor message to support workers. Literally, she wrote, support workers. Look to support union-run businesses, donate to strike funds, and check out George the Cat. Wait, what? That's a curveball. Didn't see that one coming. Boy, I'm like Julio Rodriguez right now. I'm just getting thrown curveballs. All they're throwing me is off-speed stuff. Support workers. Look to support union-run businesses. Donate to strike funds. And check out Jorts the Cat. Ethical businesses include union protections. And then a series of emojis of a sort of solidarity fist from listener Catherine. Couldn't agree with you more, Catherine. So thank you for supporting this show. We're not in a union, though, are we? No, you and I are not. We could, though, right? I mean, I don't know.

I don't think there is, but I don't think there's a union in our particular division right now.

I see. I see. Well, Catherine, I'm with you. I hear you. I feel like it's a sort of decent – well, I'm about to make a really big statement that I can't back up. There has been some interesting news around organizing. You have that Amazon facility that I think is the first to organize, and you've also got, I think, a Starbucks that has – they've unionized. Did that happen with Starbucks? Or does Starbucks already have a union?

Some Starbucks in certain areas have unionized, I believe.

Okay. But it was an Amazon facility, right?

The recent news out of New York? Yeah.

Yeah. It was a couple of friends, right, who really led the effort. Yeah. Yeah. So congratulations to them. And yes, Catherine, thank you for the donation and the reminder that unions make everyone's life better, at least as far as the employees go. And also that companies can make money and have unions. That's the thing. This idea that it's one or the other is just silly. There's a long, rich history of companies being very profitable and also having protections for their workers. Amen. By way of their workers organizing. So thanks for the reminder, Catherine, and thanks for the donation. We appreciate you and Corey for keeping TBTL going. Hello and welcome to Top Story. This CNN Plus story, Andrew, is just fascinating to me. So they decided to launch a streaming service, but one of the things is they are contractually prohibited from actually streaming CNN. Okay. So when there is breaking news, if you're a CNN Plus subscriber, you have to turn on the TV and watch regular CNN. So is CNN Plus just like analysis or something? It's a bunch of different shows. It's got like Chris Wallace has a show on there called Who's Talking to Chris Wallace? Somebody's in trouble.

Hey, who's talking to Chris Wallace? Hey, who's been talking to Chris Wallace? Get away from Chris. He's had a tumultuous career.

They went and got a journalist named Casey Hunt who had been working at NBC. She hosts a program called The Source. um also uh are my i don't know if i can say friend my former colleague and a person who i knew and who i'm a great admirer of audie cornish has a show on cnn she was poached from npr to go work on cnn plus um so they've got a variety of shows available and then they repurpose some um regular cnn content if you go to it it looks very much like netflix like the cnn plus page but what's Shocking is that they are getting less than 10,000 people a day. Fewer than 10,000 people a day are watching CNN+. Wow.

Well, I mean, it kind of makes sense. There is something, like, when I had, like.

streaming television or you know cable television in my home um i will say that i recorded chris hayes's show because he's a bud and i love that show and so i would record that and i would watch that usually just maybe an hour after it um after it had aired but for the most part uh that isn't how we interact with cable news channels like i will take a lesser product if it's live than something that is a netflix style with cnn content now there are exceptions because i love me them cnn documentaries right the the ones about yeah the windsors exactly cnn plus has the windsors they've got that andrew walsh oh yeah account right in fact yeah maybe that's what i should be looking up right now but um uh i did end up i do think that they released the windsors yeah they have all kinds of partnerships with with other platforms so i think i ended up finishing the windsors and some of those other docs on hbo if you can believe it but um okay so some of that programming i guess i i personally see the appeal but again when i think of cnn it means i'm going to turn it on in some random part of the day because either i need something in the background or something happened and wolf blitzer is going to be there you know yes exactly like i feel like

that's the utility of cnn yeah for most people and it's a it's a real utility i mean peace and love to public radio but i'm not turning on a public radio station if there is a a major news event you know that's like something typically awful happens i'm turning on cnn if it's political i'm turning on msnbc but i'm putting on one of those stations that's just like rapid responding to things in real time i have less interest in going to a streaming service to watch a a sort of journalistic show on cnn plus and apparently i'm not alone because again considering how much this cost just in the salaries just in the people they went and poached from other places and how much they're promoting it because i keep seeing ads for cnn plus on things the fact that it's less than 10 000 people is just i feel like if you and i start put a website out we could get 10 000 people to go to it like that's such a small a number for an operation as big as cnn yeah that is that is really bonkers they're admitting to it hey he admit it like cnn their own data on it is that it's less than 10 000 people going to it a day i'm wondering though andrew you mentioned that you don't have like regular cable anymore how is how's that treating you to have it to having had cut the cord or having cut the cord well so far so good we're

still in a transition phase of just everything right now too so i sort of feel like there's always something to do around here and i'm not trying to make it sound like i'm working all the time like i was telling you before the show like yesterday i just i kind of had the baseball game on in the background while i was putting books away we have boxes and boxes of books to unpack and you know on the nicer days i'm doing some project outside and it just sort of feels like we just haven't had like a lazy day where we just sit down and turn on the tv right but we do have a lot of streaming packages and genevieve has been you know she she consumes that stuff a little bit more than me um but you know we we've always had hulu um so that's fine and the netflix and the prime the one thing that we did end up buying that went away with our cable package was um hbo so we're now like hbo max attistas um but uh kind of through hbo directly you have hbo max you're paying for that yeah exactly we used to have hbo and hbo max for streaming just by virtue of paying for it through our cable company now we have uh hbo max that we're only paying like genevieve found a great deal it's like between seven and eight bucks a month which isn't bad but we had to pay all at once up front and it has commercials have you heard about that hbo max with commercials that's kind of a hbo mini it's weird right it's is it actually i have hbo max oh oh no i see what you did there sorry um but yeah with commercials it's weird i am so confused by what's going on

with the hbo situation because i have tv here like i have cable i pay for hbo somehow i also have had to sign up for hbo max it never remembers that i have it so every time i log in and i want to watch something that's on hbo i have to remind my television that i'm paying for hbo it's like the the sort of like app versus the like whatever i'm just getting coming into my cable box thing is very confusing to me but i i have it i'm probably paying for it in both places which

is really dumb i don't i think you'd know if you were getting bills specifically from hbo max have you met me maybe not maybe not like once it's on auto pay i'm like it's a it's a it's a murky world what's going on with that but there must be some sort of magnetic field around your house that follows you around from place to place because for some

reason like you just have the worst luck logging into fantasy baseball and football stuff and you can never seem to figure that out logging into google docs has been an ongoing issue trying to

log you know that i changed a food order the other day so that you wouldn't get an update you didn't want me to see your shame i shit you not i was i was at becca's house and i was gonna order i was on my way home and i was gonna order some food from this place i love in portland called wereo and i went to order through their online and it was shunting me to whatever that google thing is where if i make a reservation or buy something you get an update because you're using the trt our secret tvtl google account well it's you know it's my name originally um which then i made into the tvtl account um but uh i was like i just called him i was like i was starting to go and i was like you know what this is going to ping andrew's phone that i'm ordering a torta from Wero. So then I just called them and ordered it over a secure line so you wouldn't be able to follow me,

you son of a gun. Yet I still got this order for a French tickler, whatever that is. Sounds delicious. Probably a dessert, I'm

imagining. Uh-huh. Sure, it's a flan that I love. So this was a financial decision. You and Genevieve made the calculation that mostly what you're watching is on-demand programming at this point, and so it wasn't worth paying for cable to just occasionally have, say, CNN

or whatever yeah and i mean we'll see how it goes well first of all and like i said we're transitioning um in our kind of lives to this to a bunch of new realities but um also it took them oh i don't even want to get into this i mean i know that for years the i mean it was just such a trope of how bad customer service was with comcast but i don't know if you recall but they did this whole rebranding thing like a decade ago they called themselves xfinity and they said we're really going to do this and we're going to become a different company when it comes to customer service and I championed them for a long time because they turned their customer service around in a way that I just found amazing and I could always get great customer service with very helpful people and I remember just being on this show talking about how great customer service was with this company well now they've gone to a place where they're worse than they ever ever were and so we were paying so much money for Comcast we couldn't ever get anybody on the phone unless they were calling us to see if we would upgrade our service or buy their cell plan or something um and then so i canceled our our cable and internet service that was supposed to end on like i don't know the second to last week of march or something when i knew we'd be securely out of the house and i got you know an email saying that uh that you know we're confirming your cancellation ends tomorrow or i'm sorry your internet ends tomorrow your cable ends tomorrow you know we got a lot of confirmation emails and then i don't know a week later i got another bill for a few hundred dollars or a couple hundred dollars for the service i'm like what is this and it's like log into your portal and at first i thought i was being scammed too because log into your portal the the email address that comes from xfinity is like a very sketchy looking address at first i was like genevieve why do we still owe money and then we're going back and forth i'm like oh genevieve i think i just sent you a phishing email check out the address that that comes from it's like you know comcast dot xfinity dot pizza or something i'm like no way this is a legit thing this is somebody phishing us but then i googled the email address to see if other people had almost been taken and the internet's like no this is really the email that they send this shit out and it's ridiculous and i'm like why am i getting billed so i go to the portal myself instead of clicking on the email right and i log in and there there it is and it's saying for the for the month of april this is what we're gonna oh and so i you can't call them directly you have to like request for them to call you via the website or something and then somebody called me back who it again from the combination of phone line and just the way this person talked it was almost impossible to hear what they were saying it was almost like a um it almost felt like a david lynch scene or something like the way the audio was so warbled and the in the way this person talked like very slowly but incomprehensibly um and he's telling

me oh okay i see what's happening here the the um the cancellation hasn't kicked in yet you're gonna just just ignore the bill you're gonna get a final bill for 13 for some reason which i don't know what that is it's a breakup fee i guess um you're gonna get a bill for 13 i'm like but why he's like well because it hasn't officially gone through yet i'm like you and i didn't say this but I'm just like, how are these companies that are technology companies so bad at their technology? I mean, how am I getting emails two weeks ago that say, hey, just a reminder, we're turning off all your services tomorrow. Hey, that worked out well. But then a week later, two weeks later, I'm getting bills from them for a couple hundred dollars because they're still taking time to flip the switch.

God.

that's so frustrating i'm with you that they have become xfinity has become like if you google their name the first thing that comes up is talk to a human at xfinity how do you talk to a human like their entire website's dedicated to it because their sort of jujitsu of shunting you away from human contact yep is so effective like i mean i know this happened to you too where you you were like tweeting at them at some point right because you literally could oh that was a while back yeah

And then some listener or somebody who follows me on Twitter was like, hey, cut him a break. It's a pandemic. I'm like, my bill just went up by $30.

Wait, someone was sticking up for Xfinity? Yeah, this is a long time ago. Globotel?

Yeah, somebody was kind of like, hey, these workers are living in a pandemic and they have to work from home. And it was kind of in the early days of the pandemic. If anything, that should make them more available. You can't just jack up somebody's bill by $30 and then not give any opportunity to talk to a human about it. Oh, by the way, I had to pause there because I was coughing, but my whole point of that was one of the things that was giving me extra anxiety about this bill, even after this customer service person told me not to worry about it, was our services continued streaming into this house on my computer. So in other words, I watched a lot of cable actually on my laptop or on my app, on my iPad thingy, my tablet thingy, and all of those services still worked here for a while in the new house. So even though they killed the cable and internet physically at the old place, I was still enjoying the old HBO and I could watch MSNBC and stream it. And it was going on for a couple of weeks and I wasn't sure if I should be excited about, hey, am I getting this for free because they overlooked me in some way. sorry Doug in Brooklyn I was hoping that I was getting some free cable from Xfinity but it turns out that they really did just take a long time to shut everything off and I just don't understand why it's that difficult like your whole thing is yes you are I mean you're why is it taking over a month I gave them nine weeks notice or something like that to turn this thing off no no not nine I'm sorry like six weeks notice and like why would it are you sending somebody out are you sending people out in hard hats to unplug stuff like just remember switch

off remember being young though and the whole deal was when you'd move into a new place sometimes they hadn't stopped the cable from flowing through the coax that's exactly what we've said she said

just shut up she's like i grew up on free on free every time you moved it was just like roll the

dice let's plug something in and see if this see if they don't realize that they're still sending it to this uh you know location um uh speaking of online content andrew i uh i put this out on twitter the other day i was reading the washington post i was actually reading a very interesting article about uh cloning your cat or cloning your pets you know you can clone your cat for like twenty five thousand dollars and they profiled this woman who had cloned her her beloved cat that had passed away um at a young age because of some health problems and it was just an interesting story and you know um then i look over to the right and there is an ad on my and i pay by the way i subscribe to the washington post as do we uh there was an ad to the right and i'm gonna say something uh that's offensive but it's in the service of telling people what the ad said it was i don't know what these are if they're t-shirts or signs you can hang in your house but one of them is sort of like an old school schematic of like a basketball court One is a picture of like a young child, like almost a sepia tone kind of like early photograph of a young kid with a rooster and like the kid is smoking. And then one of the signs says, sorry, no oblo, fucktardo. What? Yeah. I'm reading the Washington Post and the ad next to the article I'm reading about cloned cats is trying to sell me some sort of sign that says, sorry, no oblo. than the word that I just said, which I don't need to repeat.

Yeah, obviously, yeah, I don't speak to people like you. I'm looking at a mug that has that saying now. Apparently, that's a real thing. So this is interesting. This actually, I don't know how much I can talk about it. This kind of happened to APM recently, too, where they obloid to a... No, but through these sales agreements And sometimes using third parties to write or if not third parties, but also automated systems to kind of screen for ads and then place them within whatever your digital content is. I know that it wasn't terrible, but it was like a promo for kind of an adult themed HBO show was airing on the children's programming. It was what's the show, Luke? I think it's quasi documentary base. it's like It's something about sex and college Or something along those lines

Oh the sex life of college students? It's something close to that Is it the one that Mindy Kaling produced? Oh that's right

It's not a doc It's just a TV show But either way it's a TV show And it's like you're going to tune into some kids Or family programming It's not filthy It's not the greatest brains on pre-roll Exactly And so I think that's what's been happening around the industry

yeah definitely what this is is that the washington post to make money because of course they're not making enough money poor jeffy b you know is uh not doing well enough they have obviously like sold some of the space on the washington post website so that even though i am paying them money every month now granted people donate money to this show and also hear ads so like i understand this is the world we live in but they have clearly sold you know who actually explain this to me would be my daughter because she actually does this for the seattle times and she was trying to explain it to me one time all these different the way that these ad spaces get chopped up and sold and resold and impressions and all these like it's an extremely complicated world that i don't understand but somehow through all of this the washington post sold this space to some service that then is plugging ads in and clearly nobody realize that this is going to be one of the signs that's being offered to me and it was so out of line with like any kind of professional standards of the washington post i was really shocked by it

yeah that is shocking yeah they got to get their shit together i was reading an article about this i think too in like hot pot or something about how um other like kind of pot like audio um products like other other podcast networks have been struggling with this as well like supposedly like kind of because you and i i mean let's let's get meta i mean let's talk about our process like you and i are often given kind of a list of potential sponsors every couple of weeks say hey these people might come on board would you be okay with it and and we're given a lot of um leverage i think to say no no this this this wouldn't work for us tonally this doesn't work or like i have certain like kind of industries that i don't want to advertise uh for because i can't you know maybe verify them like i don't want people like i don't want to encourage somebody to invest a lot of money in something in some sort of financial service if i can't if i can't verify um what that is that'd be a terrible thing to send people to do so anyway we do that and then you know for the most part we are able to kind of control in a certain way the tone of tbtl but i do know and i don't know if you know this luke but some listeners have heard like this geico ad that apparently sometimes runs and people are like why that's not really the tone of tbtl just a third party voice doing a radio ad for geico and i understand that and so we kind of work actively behind the scenes to at least you and i personally to keep our kind of um to keep our thumbs on this stuff to try to keep it you know not totally random as far as the stuff we read yeah we have

a lot of say over that which we appreciate because we do work for apm so at some point they could just say look you work here your job is to read these things or you cannot work here but they're cool to let us like pick pick and choose what we think is worth promoting but then there yeah there are these other things that we have no control over these just like ads that will now pop up um that you know i if it's to me it's like geico is pretty harmless but i guess we'll just see right i mean it could be uh could be other things at some point well i don't think i honestly don't

think i i i don't remember if i was given a heads up about the geico or not if so i don't remember but i don't think it's going to be a pattern and i will say this too because people are listening

right now and i'm not trying to um uh you realize we're reaching more people than cnn right exactly but i mean really carefully consider what you're about to say but i don't know if cnn plus is

taking donations from listeners and so you know if there is anybody listening right now thinking like well if you're just getting random geico ads popped into your feed like why am i a dazzling donor like we do i mean it is a i don't know if it's fair to say it's a rounding error but our vast vast vast uh support comes from listeners and i know this just sounds like a public radio pitch but i swear to god like without the donations i mean that geico ad is not keeping us in business

i promise you yes if i mean yeah i'm not just trying to use any kind of scare tactics but if people stopped donating to this show it would go away yes very very quickly we're not here because apm thinks that this is great content we're not here because uh the geico ads are paying the bills the way that the geico ad ends up on tbtl is you know a company has contracted with apm to buy up x number of impressions and you know in the dark is getting two million impressions, and TBTL is getting slightly north of a CNN plus, but far south of it. cnn minus yeah yeah exactly cnn right down the middle like so what happens is you know geico is buying or you know but geico is buying from this other company called cadence 13 x number of impressions and so yeah if we have 5 000 downloads on a show that's 5 000 impressions but that's not why geico is buying it's you know they're of the things they're paying for the tbtl airing of their ad is one of the cheaper things that they get to do so that is just so everybody knows that is not funding the operation we would not be here because of random geico ads and i truly love grove i just

recorded a new grove ad this i know you do yeah i really do there's a right way to rock and a wrong

way to roll you can't just listen to your soul just remember that life is number one You can be having so much fun Just remember that life is much fun You can be nothing but fun

Luke, I think we have some extra special Blur's Days today. Is that possible? Are all Blur's Days equal? All Blur's Days are created equal, but some are created more equal. i think it was george orwell who wrote that well this first one why don't you read this first one because i oh yeah this is for a very special person close to our hearts ivan in san francisco

says 40 years ago this junior husky defeated me in the class spelling bee by correctly putting an h at the end of menorah what a specific memory i still hold that h against her despite all her fancy jobs and listening to this show for upwards of 90 minutes a day she still knows everything that's going on with all those classmates from middle school she's also the person everyone in the room wants to talk to and she'll remember your birthday even if you forgot it amazingly i didn't forget hers this time happy golden jubilee blursday to phyllis p fletch fletcher heck yeah heck yeah happy birthday friend that's a really i wonder do they still do the spelling bee i love i wasn't good at it oh yeah i loved the spell did they do the spelling bee when you were

kid in school yeah i never i mean i never took part in one i think my sister might have at her school no i don't actually you know no no i do i some unofficial just in the school one i think i

might have participated in one one time yeah well the way that it worked when i was a kid was first of all the seattle times would print all of the words on newsprint it would be like i think it was an addition to the paper or something so you'd get you would get your list of all the words and then you would go home and study them and then they would line everyone up so if you were in third grade they would line everyone up in your third grade class and have this spell off and then if you won your classroom you'd go to the all school wide one and if you won that you'd go district wide and you could end up in Washington D.C. not that I ever did I don't think I ever even got out of the classroom

yeah I don't now I'm racking my brain I feel like it was probably around 4th or 5th grade I feel like I did I feel like I can picture myself in the Liverpool School gymnasium-slash-auditorium, also where I tripped the light fantastic as Santa number two, I believe. Was that also where you California raisined? That would be the same exact stage where I California raisined, yes, exactly. That was, yeah. I actually had some pretty big theatrical triumphs, but this is not about me. This is about P-Flesh.

No, it's about Phyllis defeating Ivan using the word menorah back in middle school. Or whatever Yeah, Junior Husky That would have been Washington Middle School Where I also attended briefly Anyway, happy Blur's Day Yeah We love you

Now my pal Jessica Who I hung out with In high school And she points out She was in college At the time I get it, Jessica You're older and cooler Yeah But on the other hand I was a high schooler Hanging out with college kids Yes, exactly How about that?

Are you trying to seduce me Mrs. Jessica

As a real graduate Type sit who's cool now jessica says i want to wish my five camille a happy 16th lursday whether you're creating mayoral jingles dazzling us with your brilliant poetry or dancing like a grandpa you bring sunshine and happiness to our lives every day i'm looking forward to you being able to drive yourself to cross-country practice but i will miss listening to tbtl with you in the car that's i finally

I finally got to meet Camille on my last trip to Cleveland. It was a good time. AJ says Happy Blur's Day to Brad, my bro-in-law, and TBTL progenitor. Thank you, AJ, for not saying TBTL. Daddy. A longtime Norfolk 10 from the radio days, who listens while eagle-soaring every morning. You're the best. Sorry. No hablo, Norfolk.

happy blurs day thanks for writing in aj um tiffany says here we are again a mid-april blurs day and just in case the other tens are too busy figuring out what stage of the pandemic they are personally in oh i'd like to remind us all to stop for a moment and think of our old friend lawn chair Larry by my calculations though I am not on the TBTL math advisory committee he would have turned 73 on April 19th bless him says Tiffany oh my god happy birthday to lawn chair Larry that it's been a year well that's a pretty good spoof it's been a year since the last time the listeners surprised us by remembering. So at some point, at some point, you and I were talking about this character from the past, Lawn Chair Larry, who I think flew in a lawn chair with a bunch of balloons attached to it. And one of us, although details are fuzzy, one of us said, oh, wouldn't it be funny if people remembered to send in Blur's days for Lawn Chair Larry? We immediately forgot about it because we have goldfish brains. And then last year, we had like a dozen people right in with Lawn Chair Larry Blurs Days and you forgot and now the numbers are dwindling will there be a time when this auspicious date passes Luke and nobody remembers

luckily Mike appears to have remembered as well Mike says Langley Puddle and I would like to wish another bittersweet happy Blurs Day posthumously to the gone but not forgotten Larry Walters Langley and Puddle were not born and I was but nine years old when Larry floated his way out of our atmosphere and in to that other lawn chair in the sky R.I.P. Lawn chair Larry Wait, did he die

too? I mean, he's clearly no longer with us

I don't think he's alive now, but I don't know if the lawn chair incident was the end of his life It may have been, I mean, the story was he brought a pellet gun with him, I think, to shoot the balloons. That's how he was going to descend when he felt like it was time. But then there was like a strong gust of wind and he dropped the pellet gun. And then he had no way of shooting the balloons.

He came to a very sad end that I'm not going to talk about here, but it wasn't related to the launch incident.

So he survived the balloon incident, but then other things didn't go great for him. Although, if only he could have known how he would be memorialized year after year on a podcast that is more popular than CNN.

Lisa says, happy Blur's Day to Deb, my first 10 in the wild friend. I hope you have an amazing Blur's Day week. And since you live in western Washington, say it, Luke. Western Washington. I don't even. Western Washington Hyundai dealers. I cannot hear the words. I cannot hear the words Western Washington without hearing you do an impression of K.J. Wright that I don't even hear. I don't even know. I don't even fully know what you're doing there. But my brain does it now.

The Western Washington Hyundai dealers had hired K.J. Wright as their spokesperson years ago. And I just thought it was funny how he said Western Washington Hyundai dealers.

I think it's funny that you have K.J. Wright as like a butler. I think he's from Texas.

I think he has a Texas, although I believe, well, Bobby Wagner played at Utah, right? I forget where K.J. played in college, but I feel like K.J. might be a Texas dude.

I'll look that up while, boy, I'm supposed to read the next one. Okay, I hope you have an amazing Blur's Day week, Deb. This is from Lisa. And since you live in western Washington, may it be full of snow, rain, 85 degree weather, light breezes, and hopefully no tornadoes. Looking forward to celebrating soon. olive branch mississippi is where kj is okay interesting olive branch that's nice it's sunny outside my window right now it was not when i uh first started the show luke it was very cold out there with uh little bits of snow in the air uh yesterday we were recording some live wire and i

swear i mean this is like it's not interesting content andrew but it was hailing so much it looked like it had snowed like the ground was covered in like what seemed like golf ball

size hail at the beginning of the recording session and by the end it was beautiful blue sky and the hail had melted it was just i mean the weather has been wild it is wild happy birthday to my amazing dad christian he's had a great year being 43 and i'm pretty sure the next one will be good too here's to a fun birthday to the weirdest of tbtl listeners from zady the weirdo

I have it on good authority that Zadie's around nine years old. I see. Zadie, thanks for reaching out to wish your dad a blurs. Yeah. Happy Blurs Day, Christian. Keep Christian weird. Grace says, I'd like to wish a very happy Blurs Day to my mother, Diane. She's constantly inspiring me by how smart, hardworking, and driven she is. I hope she enjoys her well-deserved break spent relaxing at the South Sound and maybe even spots a whale or two. Yes. Go whale watching. Love it. Happy Blur's Day, Diane. I need to do that. Oh, I've done that so much.

I've never done that formally. When we lived in Port Townsend, I would see occasionally, I would see some whales. I saw some orca one time, but I've never been out in a boat at the water level. You and Genevieve did that. It was cool, right?

Oh, all the time. We don't take a vacation anywhere near an ocean these days without going on a whale watching tour. Just Genevieve is one of her favorite things, yeah.

Lisa says please wish my dear friend Farron a very happy Blurs Day although her actual Blurs Day was a couple of days ago she was visiting Chicago last week and I am hoping by today she's all caught up on episodes I got to see Farron while she was in town but I'll get to see her again when she's let's see I got to see Farron while she was in town and I'll get to see her again when she's here in a few months to see they might be giants it's possible I will see her more living in illinois than i did when i lived in california of course this is our friend lisa who was in oceanside yep we did the show at lisa's house and farron came up uh and they were friends because they were in the same comment section of i forget the band now was

it they might be giants i don't i feel like it was not they might be giants i could be wrong about that um but it was definitely yeah and it was was it just yeah it was about a band but it was about their live music experiences right they went to a show yeah there was like a there was some kind

of a comment section related to a show and they were both in there commenting it up and then i forget if it was lisa or farron one of them had an extra ticket to go to a thing and so they they they connected up and i think it was lisa said hey i got a free ticket to this thing do you want to go with me and farron said yes and the rest as they say is history yeah and when we found out

That Lisa was moving to the Midwest I remember saying I hope their friendship remains strong And it sounds like it's stronger than ever

I didn't think it was going to happen I thought it was definitely going to fall apart I know

I feel a little gross That we had an office pool on that Now, kind of in hindsight You took the under? Yes, the way under But no, I'm glad It's working out And I hope Chicago's working out for Lisa too

Yeah, she's ever closer her beloved Packers and their scam artist Brett Favre yes exactly such great quarterbacks boy I'm turning I'm really turning wait let's be nice to these people that are donating money for this thing you're calling one of them a supporter of the South in the Civil War we're like being mean to the Packers let's just we need to wrap this up before we alienate any more listeners yeah exactly all right all right thanks everyone for listening happy Blurs Day to everybody this week especially lawn chair Larry We're going to be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you. So please do join us for that. Until then, have a great Thursday. Take care of yourselves. Stay safe. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all. Here's a 1-0. Swung on, there it goes. Deep left center. That ball is high. It is far. It is gone, but caught. Power out.