Muse

We have an amazing relationship. We both have so much in common. We both love soup, and we love the outdoors. We love snow peas, and talking and not talking. We could not talk or talk forever, and still find things to not talk about.

TBTL This thing turns out to be half as important as I figure it just might be. I'd say that you're all in line for some important promotions and personal citations when this thing's over with.

Let me take off my assistant skirt and put on my Barbra Streisand in the Prince of Tides ass-masking therapist pantsuit.

Do not put that on the imaginary radio show.

Hey, I've learned a lesson here, but I hope you all have too, about the vitality of shared experience. We will all remember this moment for the rest of our lives. It was dramatic, it was visual. It was stupid. It was stupid, but it was also theater. Ooh, fancy.

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

You know, this show is like a dynasty. You hold it, and then you hand it off to the next person.

My name is Luke Burbank. I'm your host.

Darryl, hold my calls!

Coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center right here in Portland, Oregon, we're once again confronted with not dry weather patterns. I guess we're in the April showers, bringing the Mayflowers phase of life. I mean, it's in the rhyme. I don't know why I've been so annoyed this April. I mean, it has been maybe the rainiest April on the record in Portland, so that's not helping. But, I mean, it's as a child growing up in the U.S., they tell you April showers bring May flowers. So I don't know why it's getting to me, but it kind of is. Thankfully, I will focus my attention today on the task at hand, which is episode 3669 in a collector series. Let the fun begin. Big doings over the weekend. And so now Elon Musk is going to buy Twitter. You've got to be kidding me. I guess he threatened to go directly to the Twitter shareholders and just offer to buy their shares up from them and go around to the board of Twitter.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to my Twitter.

And so now it's all the indications are maybe by the time we are done recording this episode of TBTL, he may have acquired enough of Twitter to take it back to being private, which God knows what his plans are for it. Maybe it'll be good for me. I don't know. I probably spend way too much time thinking about if any of my silly tweets are getting any love. So could actually just could save me some heartache if he takes it over and puts Trump back on there and turns it into some kind of nightmare extended Rogan verse. Kind of get me out of a jam called thinking about Twitter too much. Anyway, we will explore the possibilities and give you the latest on the story coming up. So I am wondering, after some extremely sus baseball umpiring over the weekend, if it's time to get rid of human umpires in Major League Baseball.

I am doing my job here!

It seems to be the case that we can very much, with the technology that we have, we can very much, you know, what, roboticize this process. I mean, there is a way to have a much more sort of exacting result on whether a ball is a strike or a ball, or even when it comes to, you know, running the bases. There are just a lot of things that we could use modern technology to make a much more, I guess, reliable result, one that's less prone to human error. But then, of course, it would invalidate that great scene from the Naked Gun movies where Leslie Nielsen just completely loses his mind as a baseball up. That would then become irrelevant. So we have to factor that in as well. We've always got to factor this guy in. The longest-running co-bro of the show may be best known for his depictions of the tall ships. He's here to chew bubblegum and stop remembering things. Hi, Goldfish darling. And he's joining us right now from the Sweet Cream District of Seattle, Washington. He is Andrew Walsh. Good morning, my friend.

Good morning, Luke. I do not want to put you on the spot on a Monday morning go oft script, as it were. But all this talk of Twitter, which we'll get into later on in the show, the news side of things, it did remind me that somebody mentioned... I think it might have been associate producer Ryan in D.C. that we skipped his Tweet of the Week segment on Friday.

I think that's two Fridays in a row.

No, no, I think you got it. I think you got it the week before. But, I mean, is there only because we might just, like, burn our Twitter accounts by the end of the show today? No, I think that's a wise decision. Should we try? I mean, I could queue up the – I could try queuing this up. Yeah, if you're ready for this. Here we go. It's Luke's Tweet of the Week.

oh yeah boy i've got some real i i feel like i've got some i'm hold on i'm just i'm on my cellular phone right now i'm scrolling through i'm trying to figure out what my tweet of the week and there are some rules around this right which is it can't be um can't just be a retweet

but it can be a quote tweet i think you know it's anything that's your own i see where i add a little

bit of value can i uh can i put a few can i nominate a few things i thought this was a kind of a good joke that started andrew started as a germ of an idea here on tbtl as we were talking about the acquisition of twitter and i saw a headline that said elon musk had secured 46 and a half billion dollars for the purchase of twitter and i wrote on on twitter scott baio has secured $46.5 in a bid to purchase Parler. That's kind of not terrible. You kind of have to see this one, but I would say this was maybe my edgiest tweet of the week. Rick Steves from his Twitter account, he is sitting on a park bench that's clearly an art piece because the park bench is really huge. So it's out of proportion to what a normal park bench looks like so when Rick Steves is sitting on it, he looks teeny tiny and he wrote paris makes me feel both little and happy and i retweeted i said this guy

high as shit that's pretty good because is it a play on words because he's sitting high or just because he's oh well rick steve you know kind of a marijuana activist yeah it was a couple of

things going on one it looks like the way my brain feels on the rare occasion that i'm high where you're just like sitting he's he's sitting on a park bench but he seems it's like he went through the looking glass right it's like he it's like he you know he white rabbited it one time makes you smaller one of my least favorite songs by the way top five least favorite songs white rabbit it scares you jefferson airplane it sure does but the other reason was because yeah he is probably more than any other single person most responsible for legal marijuana in the state of washington and also it just seems like the comedy there andrew is that rick steves is a person Who doesn't seem like he'd ever be high as shit Despite his you know enthusiasm for marijuana He's a fairly straight laced Lutheran type fellow The comedy I presented there was An idea of him that's outside of Our typical conception of him

I was picturing a Lily Tomlin joke I thought you were setting us up for some sort But I mean I guess you don't want your references to be Too modern on Twitter So maybe that's why you avoided that Remember Lily Tomlin used to sit in a really big chair Maybe on laughing

i forgot about that until just that moment yeah yeah but this i i think this is the tweet of my week that i'm most proud of um but it got the least i don't proud is the wrong way to put it and ryan by the way you're welcome for the three free tweets well two free one you are on the hook for mike i know but isn't this the fourth thing i'm referencing only the third also i think ryan's interest is in the fact that he made the theme song i don't think ryan really cares about the tweet of the week i think he would like his excellent musical contribution i love the way it never ends i always forget there's just gonna be a little bit of hank williams jr there on the end this is the thing that i won't even say that i'm proud of this tweet it's just something that i was slightly i i was i was quite surprised by for some reason and i'm i'll be curious to get your thoughts on this andrew there was a um a really good piece in the new york times on sunday about the denouement of cnn plus and again for whatever reason i said this on the show the other day i don't know why i'm obsessed with anytime like you got a quibi or a cnn plus situation i think because i've just worked on so many failed media you know initiatives and because i've just never been other than maybe i guess being a small cog in the wheels that are cbs sunday morning and wait wait where i'm just such a tiny part of that those are both very successful things but they're not because of me and here in tbtl land we have carved out this really strange and surprising and blessed life for ourself where we get to do this so i consider this a success story but i don't know why i take great delight in watching big things that they spend a lot of money on just flop

but it has to do with my own insecurity and i just want to be real about that so anyway i can't read enough about what went wrong at cnn plus i'm reading this times piece and they're talking about how you know part of it is that jeff zucker who was the president of cnn for a long time and was very gung-ho on this project he had been ousted essentially right before this other thing happened which was this kind of corporate merger and so that really that would almost sealed cnn plus's fate before it even got started there just wasn't anybody there who was that into it but the picture they use of jeff zucker is him at some it looks like a vent i don't know what it is it's a picture of him and then there's a woman leaning next to him and the two of them are sharing a set of corded ear pods like you do with your friend if you're in some emergency situation or you're on the airplane and someone forgot their headphones i'm like we can each listen on one ear or if you have crush well i mean what was what led up to this moment in jeff zucker's career as the president at this time of a major entertainment or whatever you'd call it you know production news something company how was this how they worked this out at whatever thing they were at and how was this the picture that the new york times used without comment so my tweet was and again it's no one's that into this tweet but it's the new york times headline about the implosion of cnn plus a photo of jeff zucker sharing these ear pods with someone and me saying i wonder if the issue started when jeff zucker media company president had to share some randos corded ear pods again not the greatest tweet of all time but i i just feel like this isn't getting commented on enough that that's a very weird picture to take of the head of cnn or the then head of cnn yeah there's

two things there like what led to this and then why this photo was chosen what led to this i almost guarantee you it's because the goddamn dongle situation in this country that apple has created i can almost guarantee that somebody's like well i don't have a headphone jack on my phone like but also i was thinking about photo choice i don't want to go into detail about what this story was but some man was finally charged for uh an act of violence that happened here in seattle in lake city about four years ago i'd actually forgotten about this kind of a rampage kind of situation really dark story and he was finally sentenced i think late last week and i was reading the story and i saw um the the photo that they used of his face for like the little thumbnail like if you're picturing me well don't picture me just picture my phone um and i'm flipping through the seattle times mobile site and there's like you know the headlines and there's like a little thumbnail image and it's kind of for some reason the the photo struck me like weird photo and then i clicked on the story and then I saw that the photo was not him sitting in court the photo was it was a it was a really cropped version of the larger photo where he was like kind of in custody handcuffed and sitting on a stretcher and being taken away and it was like actually a pretty unsettling image like kind of amidst this chaos and I was thinking like you know this thing happened for maybe even five years ago I don't recall it's just like there were probably maybe there were no photos in the courtroom I just thought it was an interesting maybe for the main photo of the story itself maybe it does if a photo like that causes an emotional reaction from me maybe that's part of doing your job as a photojournalist or somebody who lays out the paper but certainly for the thumbnail image I thought it was a strange choice I don't think this is where I meant to take the conversation on Monday so my guess would be that the thumbnail

image is auto-generated based on what the larger image is because i get actually i get caught by that a lot luckily often in less dark scenarios but as i'm reading the paper looking at headlines or my phone is presenting me uh with potential news stories i swear to god the photo half the time the photo is what intrigues me or how weird the photo is and most of the time it's because that photo is somehow associated with the original story which if you're looking at the you know digital i don't know front page of the seattle times or whatever and you're reading the full article that photo means one kind of thing but when you just when some system hoovers it up and then just re-purposes it or attaches it to something else and changes the kind of you know the context around it it can get really weird really fast yeah maybe sorry how much did i

choke on the air before i cut my mic two chokes you did hear two chokes that was yeah you're right Honestly, no. What's going on? I mean, in the grand scheme of things, I'm fine. I just... In this moment, or are you not feeling well? In this moment, I just had a wrong pipe moment. I'm struggling on a Monday, man. I'm not going to lie to you. There's no particular reason for this, but I just was sipping my coffee like a regular Kermit the Frog sipping his tea. But the next thing you know, I was like, animal, if we're going to keep it in the muffin.

Why do you keep eating the Muppet verse, though? Yeah, I went from... Just went down the wrong pipe. Yeah, just went down the wrong pipe. I'm fine that, you know, don't extrapolate from that.

Do you think that... I've been thinking about, well, over the last two years, of course, many jokes have been made, but it's also kind of a serious thing that, like, coughing in public is just... is the worst thing that could ever happen. And I had an incident when I was flying home from actually hanging out with everybody in Las Vegas. flying home and um sitting on the airplane ready to take off and you know of course masks all that we're still at that point in time and having a kind of a coughing fit but it was as everybody was loading onto the plane and i was already seated and i had this very nice woman and her baby next to me and andrew i can't even explain physically what was going on in my body trying to stifle this cough or series of coughs that if i could have just done it it would have been over and passed but i couldn't and i also couldn't get up and go to the restroom because the aisle was full of people and so i was just sitting there like i don't know if you've ever seen that viral picture that's gone around of this kid i don't know he's probably like early 20s and he's like doing this thing where he's like just like holding his breath and emphasize to every vein in his like neck and whatever is like popping i don't know if he was lifting weights or if it was it's just such an speaking of photos it's such an arresting photo that i feel like about five ten years ago it was kind of memefied and was going around that's basically what i looked like and felt like on the plane trying to stifle this cop so but this is my question i wonder if as we are you know moving into a different phase of life whether or not everybody agrees that we should be i think it's pretty hard to argue that that we're not starting to see different rules i mean the mask mandate's gone on the plane i just heard this morning it seems very unlikely that it's going to come back even with these court challenges because basically what the court challenges are trying to do and i think very importantly is reconfirm that the cdc legally has the right granted by congress to make rules to keep us all safe that being said the masks on the planes that's probably never coming back until maybe down the road if there's something else terrible that happens because that was going to expire in like a week or two anyway so what's critical right now is that we is that again the cdc is legally given not even given because they have it congress gave it to them but it's recognized by the courts that they're allowed to make rules to try to keep everybody safe which is what the mask mandates were obviously but anyway my point is life is changing do you think life is changing enough andrew that somebody can cough in a public space and it's not like a it's not a you know record scratch moment i don't know i feel even worse

coughing in public now i think that like if you're in a really because if because if you were to be unmasked you mean yeah if i'm unmasked like if i'm in the grocery store i don't wear a mask in the grocery store some people choose to and i would be lying if i told you that i don't feel a bit of guilt about that and i know some of our listeners are probably tisking me right now saying that you should wear a mask everywhere and i think you have some good arguments there but i also am living my life and i'm being honest about it like when i'm in the grocery store if i'm in places where i'm not where i'm allowed to not wear a mask and it seems like most people are not wearing a mask uh that i'm comfortable uh not wearing a mask i was on the train the other day where you no longer have to wear masks but like 99.99 percent of the people were still wearing masks this was last thursday so the new rules were in place for like two for like two days i even looked on my phone i'm like am i wrong it was king county not amongst the the transportation organizations that dropped the mask mandate no they did it's just seattle so i'm on this very packed train with a lot of people and almost everybody's wearing a mask fine i'll wear a mask like it's important to the people around me um so anyway that's kind of how i'm living my life um but if i'm in a situation like that where i am not wearing a mask and i need to cough I feel terrible actually I think maybe it happened in Home Depot and I try not to stifle them because that's one thing that I learned um back when uh like a long time ago when part of my job as a kind of a college radio student was um going out and recording classical music and like chamber orchestra stuff and like the worst thing you could do was ruin your own recording by coughing right but right you if you suppress it for too long eventually it's going to come back and it's going to be a roar it's going to be terrible it could even i mean i'm uh i have yeah i mean sometimes if i do that i will have a pretty ugly almost choking kind of cough so i just do everything i can to just like cough subtly like just try to keep the keep the beast at bay a little bit by making small little inaudible coughs as much as you possibly can ironically sometimes the mask um makes it work weirdly because it if it there's a little piece of dust or something on there i did find well it also might have just been in my head like going into a situation saying do not cough it will often

make you need to cough so you were in home depot and you had a coughing fit it wasn't a coughing

fit but i just remember being like not today satan like just kind of like oh i see like why following up on that i said all i had to say was a goddamn song what store were you in again andrew

I was in Lowe's. This is also the Lowe's song.

Where doers get more done. Get the new steel, powerless, gas. Sure. Snipper whipper.

All of that. Did you, were you doing more done and getting more done this weekend around the house? Were you getting all kinds of projects done?

You know, I had a little bit of a frustrating Saturday. So this is one big thing that has changed in my life since we've had this house and all kinds of various projects to work on is suddenly I am very weather oriented. I've never been weather oriented before, for the most part. In fact, I kind of like a rainy day because then I can be lazy as hell and not feel too bad about it. But now that I feel like I have a lot of outdoor projects to do, and as you mentioned, it's been kind of rainy and not just rainy, but kind of cold here in Seattle. I have some projects that I've started in the yard, just like weeding and stuff, but like some major weeding projects that need to get done. And like on a day that it's sunny, I want to take advantage of that sunny day to take care of the outdoor work and then save the rainier days for indoor projects. But I really need to kind of overhaul the bathroom that I use down here in the basement because it's just like the vanity and mirrors and light fixtures are just really, really just so terrible and gross in there. And so Genevieve and I had a bit of a ticking clock to go to Home Depot and buy a new vanity.

You're so lucky that I X'd out of that YouTube page.

Where doers get more done. Anyway, so the vanity is like the sink and then the thing underneath the sink, right? The place with the drawers and the cupboard and the plumbing or whatever. So that's what I'm talking about when I say vanity. And so those things are kind of big and heavy. And, you know, it's going to be a bit of a challenge to install. But I watched a YouTube video about it, so I think I'm about as ready as the next person. But anyway, Genevieve and I, usually we would go to maybe Lowe's to get that. Our customer service experience at Lowe's has been so much better. or even just a totally different place. It doesn't have to be a box store. But we got a gift card for seven, not seven, but several hundred dollars from somebody. And we really wanted to use it at Home Depot. And on top of that, Genevieve had a coupon for 15% off one item, one-time purchase. So she's like, well, this is perfect. We have a gift card and this is a big ticket item that we can use this 15% off on. Are you following all this? I'm getting some weeds here. All right. the thing is the clock was ticking because that uh coupon ended at the end of may or will end at the end of april i should say let me just restart so that's going to end at the end of april and so we've been wanting to go to the home depot uh to to pick this thing out and i'd already looked at some of the options at the home depot and i think i knew the one i wanted it's a beautiful sunny day and all i want to do is work in the yard but i'm like okay we'll make this quick we'll go to the home depot we'll pick the one up that i think we want we'll look at some other options we'll you know get out of there but we go and i just run into this home depot thing and we heard from a listener who's an employee at the corporate level of home depot and they were dismayed to hear about the the um the difference between low service and home depot service and they truly believe that it was the opposite i also heard from some other listeners who in their part of the world it's

the complete opposite home depot i honestly think it may have even been the case in bellingham i don't remember specifically but i i really think it's store by store i don't think it's one of those things that's that you can kind of set your watch by but man it was on full display this

weekend so we go to the home depot and i say the home depot because i think that that article is important and um sure we find the vanity the home depot state university um and so we find the one that we want and then we're like wait where's the box for we found the floor model but can't find the box for it and then like it is impossible to flag somebody down there and like everybody that you flagged down just like their their eyes just look like oh no i'm caught i've got to help you now and they have those kind of jobs they have no answers they have no so you kind of drag somebody back and then like you said they just kind of stare at the hole in the wall with you and then they just like kind of shrug and they're like well i'll go i'll go do something you don't even know what they're doing because they all have like phone devices on their belt i don't know but somebody write something down. In fairness,

their theme is where doers don't get stuff

done. Exactly, yeah. I wish they had a... theme song so this one guy he was i think he was trying to be helpful but just again like she didn't have whatever training he needed so he's like okay well let's come up to customer service now the name i didn't even want to get into this today i told myself don't get into this today the name the hanging over this area of the store is customer service like if there's one place where you're going to put like your top customer service people it seems like this would be the place flukles mcdookles it was i mean thieves and i go up there and just the most dead eyed almost drool coming out of the corner of his mouth kid is just like staring at us as if we were just like as if he worked at a mcdonald's and we were asking about buying a sink like he just couldn't have seemed less interested and more confused about it and he just keeps like kind of looking at us and then just staring at his computer and not really saying anything to the point where you're not sure if you're supposed to just walk away like are we done like what and he's just saying yeah is it possible you were in an episode of impractical

jokers and there's like three guys hiding over in plumbing that were telling him to ignore you he said i don't want to be around anymore like what do you think that makes

it too heavy it's too heavy the outfit is too heavy i'm taking it off don't take it off he had a name tag it said carl havoc anyway um it was just really it was astounding and so we're like well oh and the the third caveat of this um coupon was it was an in-store purchase only right so the guy is like okay well you can order this online and we're like okay if we order it online do we have it delivered home or to here and if we have it delivered here is it considered a in-store purchase and you're trying to ask this kid all of these yeah the customer service rep and he's just like yeah oh probably like literally said probably probably yeah and we're just like okay we weren't even sure what question he was answering and then um and then Genevieve's finally like well are you gonna get any more in and the kid tap tap taps on his computer he's like oh yeah we're getting more in tomorrow probably be available for sale by like monday or tuesday and it's just like he's like how did i have to lead you there and she didn't say that to him but it was just astounding like when i just wanted to get out of that conversation so bad i wanted to i didn't even care about the money anymore i'm just like just get let's just get out of the store let's burn it down let them start over like i was just so frustrated and i'm just like and and i'm a little cranky because i'm just like i'm in here talking to somebody who doesn't want to be talking to me about a vanity that i should be doing all of this on a rainy day not a day when it's really nice out that y'all had a nice day yes so oh i'm sorry i didn't make that clear saturday was a beautiful day i didn't want to be doing the stuff that is indoor related such as shopping or buying stuff for an indoor project i understood why we needed to get it done because we had this ticking clock of the coupon sorry i didn't make that clear but yeah so i'm kind of like and it's now getting later and later in the afternoon and then we're like okay screw this maybe we use that coupon on something else and we're trying to triangulate this and that and we're making a bunch of different stops I'm just kind of like what and by the time we get back home it's like 4 30 or 5 I've don't I have little daylight left I did go to town on one part of the garden and weeded the heck out of it while listening to heavyweight so that was good I got a little bit of that in but I really needed like four three or four hours of that and I was like you know I got maybe an hour in and I just kind of like it's just I guess my main point here is we ended up by the way yesterday Genevieve drove to a home depot in not kirkland i don't know somewhere far away and and found a vanity and just brought it back here so we are now proud owners of a vanity in our garage which is unlocked don't steal it um anyway uh it's unlocked right now i'll lock it at night anyway um so i i just think that that's a that's a new thing for me to care about sunlight and to be thinking about like what projects are we getting done based on what the weather is that's outside the norm for me

if you ever catch yourself saying to genevieve we're burning daylight here we're going from the magic hour to the tragic hour you know that you know that things have gone too far yeah so

yeah burn in daylight that's what happened this weekend so anyway that's where i am we have a vanity um we're gonna at some point i mean that is something that i'm sure i will bore the hell out of you with i mean at some point like i need to make the leap of like making the bathroom i have now which is kind of crappy but usable um into i need to tear it apart and so for a certain period of time it's going to be unusable will i be able to will we be able to do this project in an afternoon or just a weekend and and and you know just like doers get more done or will we just create problems for us where eventually it's going to be like a cartoon where uh i'm in my bathroom i have scuba gear on water is up to my knees and i'm calling a plumber well andrew i will see your home renovations and raise you a massive Thank you. project that i have no ability to do myself but i'm probably going to tackle this summer which is you know i bought this little house up in southern washington and i've been in the process of getting uh i hired an architecture firm and uh and have been through all this different stuff with getting permit plans and renovations and things like that and where it's finally landed is it's impossible to get people right now, unless you can pay beyond the premium price, beyond the iron price for folks that are, you know, work in the building and construction sort of industry. It is very, very, very hard to get folks out to work on jobs because there's so much demand still. And so I think after a lot of soul searching and pondering and phone calls with various contractors and pricing things out. I think I'm just going to tackle some of this myself this summer. My dad's going to come down. My mom and dad are going to come down and probably start doing the show from up there a lot. And nothing that you do at your house can go more wrong than what I'm about to try to do at this house. So I think you and I are going to be in step on the, I don't know, on the home projects, except again, mine may end up being a little bit more

out of my league yeah don't um electrocute yourself that'd be the first thing that i'd ask that's one thing we um also we have a little refrigerator here in the basement it's not a mini fridge but it's not a full-size fridge i don't know what to call it medium guy uh we have a fridge down here that we use as a beer fridge and i came down on saturday morning and i realized that it wasn't working anymore so i was like oh no vives the fridge broke we're gonna have to buy a new fridge which we kind of figured we'd have to replace at some point anyway um but then i realized oh it's not the fridge it's the outlet like the entire outlet went out and then i like start running a um we run various tests on it and then i i go to run an extension cord from another outlet that's nearby and that one's out too and i realized and for everybody who's gonna tell me to flip a breaker got it it's not it's not that um but uh i realized that for some reason we have an outage on at least two but i think maybe three plugs and in kind of one area of our house uh up to down and so we called a electrician on saturday or maybe genevieve put in several uh you know kind of requests online and we've heard back from one and they said oh yeah we can get out there by may 12th i was like wow i didn't realize this is my point yeah i didn't realize that it was good and it's not an emergency it's fine i mean it's a little ugly i have an extension cord running to the fridge now I'm glad that that's a solution but like May 12th I had no idea I was like oh man

we have to wait until Wednesday I was thinking I mean all of all of it across the board and there's also just the the you know how much more things cost I was talking to Becca's brother who is a he is a contractor here in Portland he's been sort of helping me out with this plan but even he and he's got like hundreds of people that work for him on various projects all around town and even And he was like, yeah, it's just going to be because this is, you know, this is over in Washington. It's a little bit north of here. And he was like, yeah, it's just like he's been personally just carrying he owns the company and he's been carrying these like hundred and eighty pound bags of granite or of gravel rather up and down these hills to like he's doing the just the physical work of these jobs because it's so hard to find people to come out. And he was saying how, because, you know, this thing that I'm trying to do at this other place is, you know, definitely this house needs a lot of love. That's why it was affordable for me to buy. Like the HVAC, right? So the kind of heating, cooling, whatever. He was like, the job that this needs to be done here, he goes, the guy that I used for this, five years ago, this was a $10,000 job. Now it's an $80,000 job. Like the HVAC is $80,000. And it's gone up by that much in five years, you know. so point is there will be no heat uh and i will um it'll be like that simpsons episode when flanders's house is destroyed by the hurricane or the whatever it is the tornado and then the town rebuilds it and it's just a re it's totally substandard in every way it's gonna be me because i think i'm gonna end up just i'm honestly i'm intimidated by this project but i'm also intrigued because I feel like I need to get some more hobbies my hobbies right now are non-existent I basically work at one of my various jobs or I watch television and drink alcohol and I feel like a hobby that's outside of all of those experiences would be good for me and so I think this is going to be if I really can actually figure this out and if I can really like put my you know throw my back into it as it were and learn some stuff and also I think it'll be fun Cause my mom and dad are always up for an adventure. So they're like dying to come down and just stay at the house. house um and hang out so it could be fun bonding for me and them i think it could be good overall i may get a book out of it i don't know i'm already calling it the house that saved my life um if mitch album hasn't already written that book i feel like there's you know there's some room there for something but you know it's it's it's really uh it's it is very very very difficult to find people to come out and work on home as our listeners who are trying to do projects know very well so uh it and also will be content for this show andrew so that'll

be good out of curiosity i was talking to somebody about this uh over the weekend this you know this for me the electric the electrician you know not being able to come out here for like three weeks or something which again i don't want to make a big deal of it because some people are facing do you say electrician or electrician i guess trician but i misspoke i'm not proud of my diction today i'll be honest listen i don't know no no i'm not andrew i'm not trying to call you

out i'm wondering i've said electrician but i don't know if that's necessarily electrician

is right certainly that was that was my i wasn't tongue i no no no listen i would i really wasn't

trying to call you in on that i was just wondering because i there's so many like i say um i think i say massage wrong there are so many things that i just have been saying wrong because that's how like my mom or my parents said it and i just and i was wondering like i've always said electrician but anyway i wasn't i wasn't trying to get in your head on that no no it's okay i i'm just

generally speaking i i feel like i sound very mumbly today my apologies i guess i'm having a harder monday than i thought there's no reason for it i went to bed early last night i should be i should be good to go i guess i'm having a case of the mondays i already spit coffee all over myself i'm not feeling great by the way quick um quick just on this topic and don't worry i don't feel under attack by you but hanging out with our buddy ders this weekend he mentioned and by the way it was a great weekend we also burned a whole bunch of stuff we have this little fire pit now that's like an oh how fun oh my god there's yeah we've done this now like both saturday nights that we've lived here the past two two weeks it's just great just in last uh on saturday we had a few people over um just like kind of drinking beers and other things and and just burning shit and just like uh i everywhere else i've ever lived either as a renter that kind of stuff doesn't really happen or as an owner our neighbor's houses were so close i always felt like we were disturbing them like this is this little yard we have just kind of perfect it's very well protected so i we stayed out there until three in the morning listening to music and talking and i never felt paranoid about um waking up our neighbors because the sound is just so like kind of dead back there it's really great but anyway um had a great weekend um but durs said still want to come back to the electrician thing but um durs said that i honestly i do think electrician

sounds cooler like as an industry's right like it just sounds like oh what do you do i'm an electrician it just seems like you do something that's even i mean first of all people that understand how electricity works in the context of the home that is like magic to me like every time that person has come over to a home i've lived in and they've been well this is a 220 but you're trying to see you're bringing it down over here to a one like i immediately just warg out of my body but i do think electrician sounds kind of cool i like the z's you picture the z's as like

kind of lightning bolt sort of exactly exactly yeah no i get it okay um but anyway dur said that i on the show was called out for saying being the type of person who says frustrated which i've never i mean did do you remember me ever saying frustrated because if i did it was a misspeak once i it's not like you know because some people think it's pronounced that way i think like frustrated and supposedly but i'm not that person i don't i don't i have no memory of a calling you out on that or b hearing you say that yeah i was kind of shocked but i didn't want to get too defensive because i'd already been arguing about malcolm moore for the past hour at that

point um i i don't remember i want i mean i definitely i've probably said on the show that personally it hits my ear a little wrong when i hear people say frustrated but i i would be shocked if i were directing that at you because i've never heard you say i might have just maybe

just talking quickly misspoke or something but i was just kind of shocked i don't want anybody to think that i'm again the type of person who thinks is pronounced frustrated by the way i this is not an interesting place to take this but i was just like kind of speculating like what is what is the labor shortage or or what are all of the things that go into this i know there's some it's not just labor i know there's some supply chain issues for contract work as well from from concrete to all kinds of supplies there's also some labor issues here and there must the first thing i thought of is there must also just be a huge demand because people were not able to do projects or hire people to do projects for a couple of years during the pandemic or having people in their house to remodel bathrooms or do whatever dream jobs they had. And so is it mostly a demand

issue right now? I think it's a it's a whole bunch of different factors. One, there is still a high. housing shortage so because in a lot of places that are um like where most of the people are living which would be cities or the surrounding areas there are typically a lot of building codes that you know i think are good and you should have building codes but it it has this i just heard this on marketplaces so i'm just kind of regurgitating what i heard them talking about but they are our colleagues so i feel like that's fair game sure for us but so there there have just there has not been enough new housing being built to keep up with the demand for people that wanted to buy houses because interest rates have been super duper low so it's been basically free to borrow money up until recently so you also had a lot of people who were fortunate enough to not lose their jobs during the pandemic actually came out of the other end of the pandemic in a better financial situation than they were going in because they weren't taking vacations they weren't eating out as much but they were still making the same salary that they were making so people have more money to fix up their own homes maybe to think about buying another home um and so that all puts a demand on it now from the labor side this is what becca's brother has said is that so many of the of the people that worked for him um who were doing jobs that were maybe not tremendously rewarding for them like i don't think i would be good as a person who's doing labor on a construction site, or even maybe tiling or something. One thing was, you know, they just sort of, and I'm not trying to make a Republican argument here at all, but during the period of time when there was a certain amount of stimulus going into the economy for folks, let me put it this way. If I had been working a job that I really didn't find rewarding, and it was physically difficult, and there was a chance that I was going to be able to get basically government relief, That would allow me to not do that job The first thing I would do personally is stop doing that job And that certainly seemed to have happened at least with folks that work for him So some people just said I don't need to do this anymore I don't I think that happened in a lot of places They were just like people were doing jobs that honestly were probably not paying them enough And were not fulfilling and they finally got a little bit of leverage in the situation And they were like yeah, I don't need to do that So that happened to some degree a lot of because of the demand side of it A lot of people were just getting poached Let's say that you are I don't know. I keep coming back to tiling. Let's say you do tiling and you're making X number of dollars an hour on this job. Well, there's somebody else who's doing a different job and they're paying more money for it because they really want to get it done on a tight timeline. And so they're willing to pay you 10 more dollars an hour to come over and do that job. what are you going to do do the other one for less money so there's this just it's really hard to get people to stay on a job for the duration of the job because there's so many other people

offering them more money all the time and i think rightfully so that's good or understandably so they're they're pursuing like you know if someone was going to pay us way more money to do tbtl you know we would obviously get into tiling because there is no future in this podcasting so we've got to find a trade to fall back on no but anyway so it's it's that it's basically a lot of those factors and then other ones that i don't even fully understand but what it's come down to is if if if you're doing a project and you don't have like jeff bezos money to just like over not overpay but just pay the absolute premium iron price for every good service etc your project is probably not going to get the attention that some other people's projects are getting yeah

certainly yeah so yeah we will have a uh big orange extension cable or an extension cord running from one part of our kitchenette to the other uh i guess at least for the next three

weeks then and you obviously the first thing you checked was the breaker it's not that and it's not a ground fault it doesn't it doesn't have a a ground fault interruption does it um one of them

does but it's not it's not working the little test and reset thing isn't working so i think that some and i my guess is because these things tend to be daisy chained whatever is going on with the and everything just like again this was all just add-on shit when they like converted this what used to be a basement laundry room area into this kitchenette area and it's just like everything was just done i mean i i would not be surprised if that's why you know some of our friends were like we'll just get back first of all the one outlet to get to is almost impossible you have to pull the entire refrigerator out and there's not a good place to put the refrigerator and so So, anyway, we took apart one of the outlets. I will pull out your refrigerator. Refrigerator. I actually stumbled in a way that sounded just like that drop. I can't hear the word refrigerator without thinking of that guy. But, anyway, it just looks like we'll probably take it apart and we'll find more scotch tape in there. That's why I sort of thought, like, maybe it's just worth it to get an actual electrician out here and just take a look.

look at what's going on at least with the these three outlets one upstairs two downstairs right above and below each other i'm like something's going on and it would be nice to have a professional look at it even if you know our even if you know we look at the bill and i was gonna say our eyes turn into dollar signs but no that would be if we were the actual worker your eyes turn into pictures

of a guy who's pulled his pockets out yes it's a it's a kind of more busy visual yeah both eyes

are the Monopoly guy pulling his pockets out after he goes broke.

Can we call today's show Feel the Electricity? Yes. That's the sound of a man who's ready to go to the break.

I actually, let me try to salvage this. I may have just discovered some very good news on something that really doesn't matter that I mentioned on the show last week. A little update. Love it. Okay.

I'm going to be listening after the break. That's for sure. let's do that quick break and they'll be back with more a tbtl in a moment we was hoping for

some razzle dazzle razzle dazzle that's right man razzle dazzle on your mark on your mark get set

now ready ready go everybody razzle dazzle hey let's thank some dazzling donors who are making the show possible with their dazzling donation of dough this is also the time where i'm reminding folks tbtl on 13 let the fun begin it's coming up may 23rd through 27th we'll be in denver and we're gonna have a trivia night on the 27th we're still locking down that location where that will be happening but if you're in the greater colorado area or want to come on out to say hi that would be awesome also be doing lots of special events that week to try to really bring the tbtl community together you know who is an essential part of the tbtl community andrew is Susan Thaler out there in Shrub Oak, New York, who is our first dazzling donor today. Susan says, I want to thank Luke and Andrew for creating this weird, hard to describe thing that makes me belly laugh and also makes me want to throw my phone. Susan, I swear we get one more dazzling donor message at least once per episode. That sounds low. Honestly, if it's only once per episode, you're not listening hard enough. I think you'll find four to five throw your phone moments that's our promise to you Susan says all of that's worth a lot right now and on top of that I thank you for bringing into existence and sustaining this quirky creative and compassionate community life is hard TBTL and the 10s help make it better love you all from Susan along with the phone throwing this is a recurring theme Andrew of the dazzling donor messages which is how great the TENS community is, and I couldn't agree with that more. And Susan is a really big part of that as well. So, Susan, thank you for supporting the program, and thanks for being part of the TBTL ecosystem and being one of those awesome stens and tens who are so cool to each other during this still very difficult time. Maestro?

On your mark! On your mark! Get set! Get set!

Okay, Andrew, and you don't believe in a god? Hmm. Our second dazzling donor today is none other than Ruby Thaler. These two must know each other. I mean, or that is a very coincidental thing, that both of these donors have the last name today?

No, one's in New York, one's in Washington. I don't see how that could be. Ruby's in Seattle, Washington.

We should introduce them.

That would be, I mean, same last name.

They have a lot to talk about.

Oh, man, yes. I'd like to dissect the way they gave us pronunciation directions. Susan said rhymes with sailor, and Ruby said pronounced like sailor with a lisp.

Oh, right. So, Thaler. Yeah. Yes. You know, honestly, we've got to put these two in touch. I'm hoping that it won't be kind of like the other Luke Burbanks who all hate me. Yeah. I mean, a real pitched battle with the other Luke Burbanks of America. And I don't even know what I did to them. But I'm hoping that Ruby and Susan will hit it off due to their shared name. Ruby says, I have been slow to fill this form out this year because I've run out of good words. I think Wordle stole all of my good words.

Are you still doing Wordle, Andrew? Of course I'm still doing Wordle. It killed me this weekend. I actually, for the first time in a very, very, very, very long time, totally struck out. There was something broken in my brain. I was there on the very, and this is a couple of days old, so I don't care about spoilers. I was looking at all of my options. So many letters were off the board at this point. I knew that the last four letters were L-I-V-E.

but I could like a was already taken so I knew it couldn't be alive I'm going I'm just like there are no more options there are no more options so finally I'm like screw it I'll type in blive b-l-i-v-e and for some reason it accepted it it should not have accepted blive it should not have been on the word list and it's like nope it's not blive and you lost and yes it was so it didn't do

the shake it didn't do the it didn't do the no it didn't shake his head at me accepted it but said

no that's twice now that out of frustration i've put in a word that is not a word you are right it was olive for some reason my brain just could not i was just so attached to it you have no good wordle ideas and so what was the other word the other one was oxide no oxide was a that yeah no that's a real thing oxidation i know that was like thursday that one was again sorry

if i'm spoiling it but that was that one was brutal i was trying to do that at like this work event for becca uh two martinis in because someone had never heard of wordle and i was trying to show off here's how and then of course they throw oxide at me forget it yeah that was a real tough

one i remember we were that was was that the one that we were all struggling with um no i think earlier this week we were all struggling with one too i told you that like my text chain a bunch of people had struck out and i ended up getting that one in five i believe whatever that one was but Yeah, no, it's been rough. But this whole thing with, and I cannot remember the other word, but there have been twice in the past two weeks where the word list accepted a word that was not a word. Now, I shouldn't be putting in words that are not words. You just get to this madness. Of course, where you're just like, you know, you're like, fine.

How about this?

Yeah, take blive. I will take blive, and then I'll strike you out. And you're just like, what? Like, blive isn't a word. I've looked it up.

Yeah, I mean, the established system is if you put in a non-word, they're supposed to just do that little vibration that says that that doesn't work but it doesn't cost you a turn

essentially yeah exactly i'm going to find this other word too i'm going to tell you what it was

later all right uh ruby continues uh that wordle stole all of her good words in light of that i leave it up to luke and andrew to choose some good words well obviously blive

to blive that's exactly what these and i were saying

blive staying blive in 95 yep love you guys and love the tens power out signed ruby ruby and susan thank you both so much for for being such great tbtl members all these years we love you appreciate you and uh look forward to seeing you irl at some point i can't remember the last time i saw both of them i do know specifically that i saw them once i believe both at the mandarin gate did we do a thing at the mandarin gate years ago that would have involved both of them some bar

are you thinking i remember we we um hung out with them at 13 coins at the old 13 coins once

i don't know if you recall that that's it i'm i'm kind of bummed that the third have you been to the

new 13 coins you know once for a brief lunch yeah what are you bummed about well it's i mean the new

location is is cool and everything it's just i just loved that like near like seattle times adjacent of course the seattle times is also no longer in that building but there was just something a classic about the about 13 coins being around the corner this kind of classic seattle restaurant that had been around forever that was walking distance from the paper that was printing you know seven robust issues of newsprint a week so it's like you know the journalists would get done with the story and then saunter over and then like sit in one of those big captain's chairs i don't know it was all part of this just kind of like aspirational fantasy life of journalism and alcoholism coming together and now that it's like in this new location it's by the stadium and the you know i don't know it just it feels nouveau seattle to me where it used to feel

like vintage seattle yeah and it is like that i went in there the one time i went in there i did like that they kind of maintained the the warm coziness of it um so i was glad of that but it just yeah it didn't it didn't feel the same but that that's one where i feel like my only complaint is just change you know and i'm trying to not do that too much but i had the same feeling to like but there's nothing there's nothing specifically worse about it other than it's not what it used to be and it's just further away and i don't go there anymore you know

i totally agree that's exactly what i'm struggling with because if if you just were to roll up to it today if you parachuted in from you know another planet and you went to that restaurant well first of all you'd be like oh can i breathe the air here and also what is alcohol like you'd have a lot of questions yeah exactly let's just say you parachuted in from phoenix so you had fewer questions okay cool like hmm what's with all these liberals so but if you just walked in there you'd be like this is a

a really cool restaurant and they do have they still have all the captain's chairs i mean they have all the same stuff and it's in a fine location it's just because it's not what i remember from when i was 24 i don't like it yeah and that is one of the coolest parts of it yeah exactly hello and welcome to top story i feel like what you just said about not liking change is actually a perfect segue into the baseball umpire conversation but i also feel like we got to talk a little bit about this twitter thing because it's just kind i was i was pretty shocked this morning to wake up and see all the headlines that like now it seems to be sort of a fate accompli that elon musk is literally going to buy twitter yeah what happened to the poison pill i guess that they've just decided they're not gonna do it because he i mean it's such a weird negotiation so i mean twitter is a publicly traded company and what elon musk wanted to do was buy enough of it that he could then take it back to being private also when's the last time that happened with a company where like you were publicly traded and then someone bought you so then they could take you off of the stock market outside of cheers i can't think of another example elon musk found a money belt that had 46 and a half billion dollars in it yeah i mean it seemed like the board was very much not into a guy who's been publicly critical of the company using its own platform just coming in and essentially buying it so that it's like you're playing in a pickup basketball game and there's one annoying guy who keeps calling fouls that aren't fouls and then he just buys the entire basketball game like huh yeah so they seemed not into it but then apparently what here's what i don't understand that everything i was hearing this morning was the twitter board was against elon musk buying it so they put this poison pill together and then when he explained that his plan was to just go directly to the people who own shares of twitter and offer them 54 bucks a share and just buy their shares directly so then he would have a controlling interest then they basically said okay well fine we'll sell it to you did they not anticipate that move was that out of left field for them yeah i don't know i mean again

this is all way over my head but i was kind of i when i saw the poison pill story last week i was like yeah of course like everybody's got an answer to this stuff like whatever life will go on he had his moment of trolling and i just sort of forgot about it until i woke up with the to the you know new york times news notification today that well looks like elon's gonna buy twitter anyway like i think that's i mean if that happens i mean what do you think this is gonna look like

well i think i may have coined a phrase which is the expanded rogan verse i mean that's what i think it'll be more and more like i mean honestly to me and i don't want to bring up a painful topic andrew but the football team that you have rooted for uh you know signed a quarterback that you and i both find odious if my version of that would be if he lets trump back on twitter i feel like i probably don't want to be part of twitter anymore i because i feel like a trump is so corrosive on there and also it's so much a part of his his ability to drive the conversation and since he's not been on twitter i mean it helps that he's not been president but since he's also he's not been on twitter i think his power in terms of how we how much of our brain space he gets to take up has been greatly diminished and to the degree that that's something that elon musk and i don't he's never said anything about that but i just feel like that's the kind of bullshit that he wants to do because he thinks that there's not enough free speech on twitter well who is he talking about he's on there saying whatever he wants who does he think is being kept off of twitter there's one looming figure that i can think of and that looming figure being allowed back on twitter would be to me a possible poison pill yeah and yeah and

i uh and it's almost it's like symbolic right that's the thing i mean not only is it like yeah it has been nice not with you know taking away trump's megaphone but i mean trump has other ways to make headlines you don't you wouldn't think that you would need twitter in order to go off

half cocked but well why do you think he had to put out a press release announcing he got a hole in one yeah i didn't see that's because he doesn't have twitter he literally released from the desk of donald j trump a press release announcing that he got a hole in one and in there there's an actual quote from him saying and then it just went clank right in the hole i remember luke i had to relax

my brain i remember what the other word that wordle accepted that is not a word was okay sorta s-o-r-d-a and i don't even think that's slang because if it was slang it would be sorta

with yeah with a t right i probably write sorta sometimes trying to be like you know cash but

sorta i've never heard s-o-r-d-a sorta is not a word but uh but they accepted it from me so i i want to see the full what was the what what was it supposed to be that i can't remember the fact

that i came up with sorta we know that it was the d right the d was the thing that you were just like hail marrying i don't know that we can deduce that from this

i don't know if we know exactly what i was trying to fill in there but um i can't recall oh i'd love to find it i can maybe scroll back later oh just when i finished one mystery another one

can we can we andrew can very quickly parenthetically can we may i ask the listeners the hive mind of tbtl to do a couple of quick research projects for us if you have the time you know this is like the low stakes version of like seti you know when they had in like the 90s or whatever early 2000s when they had everyone download a program so that their computers when they weren't using them would be searching through like a you know astronomy data looking for like life or interesting things in other planets it was called the seti project yes this is what i would like to do with the listeners if you have some downtime nothing else is going on could you look into two things a what word andrew is talking about i figured it out sort of oh i think it was

because i looked it up it was uh because i'm looking at my all i once i remembered the word I could just search my text messages for sorta because I was complaining about this with the group. And it looks like it was number 296, which if I'm right, it would be squad. Oh, wow. So you, I sort of was pretty early up. Yeah, I don't think. You needed that Q. I did end up getting this one. I got it in four, so it wasn't even that bad. I'm surprised you went to like an anger word so fast. Well, you know what I remember about this one? it was only four turns but I had been working on this for like an hour usually I just sit down and I get it done in like kind of a few minutes I'm not trying to make it sound like I'm Mr. Cool Joe with my sunglasses down over my beagle nose I don't know it's a weird Monday but I remember like starting this one I went to get some takeout at the U District and then I was waiting for my food I'm like I'll just knock this out while I wait for my food I couldn't figure it out I sat in the car and did it for a little bit then I put my phone away I drove home, I ate my entire lunch staring at this thing, and I just couldn't get it. So even though I got it in four turns, I couldn't get off of that third turn forever, if that makes sense. Gotcha. Yeah.

Here's the second project, and this is really the thing I really need help on from the listeners. there was in the 90s and the relatively early 2000s an ad that commonly ran in like the sort of back pages of like the new york times magazine maybe the new yorker but other kind of like i would just describe as relatively highbrow magazines and this ad was for a workout machine and this workout machine looked like a it looked kind of like a um a you know the bed that you would lie down on in a doctor's office what would you call that i know exactly what you're talking

about but i don't know if it has a special word that i can't think of right now it's not a

stretcher because it's right it's the thing that you sit down on yeah when you go into the doctor's imagine something that looks similar to that but then it's got these like um kind of almost bow reflex looking things sticking up from it it's got something for your feet it's got i believe if i remember it like a flywheel on it it looked what it really looked like to me was the contraption from the princess bride where they're torturing oh sure yeah yeah to the pain and the whole thing

was sorry uh you keep using that word i do not think that means to the pain in the wrong context

there sorry go ahead you absolutely used to the pain in the correct context no to the pain oh no You fight somebody to the pain. I leave you wallowing in freakish misery. Exactly. To the pain.

There's another joke about him on that table being tortured. Very upsetting scene.

Although I do have to give Christopher Guest playing, I think, Count Rougamont or whatever his name is, when he says, and please, this is for posterity, so be honest. There's something kind of, there's some comedy there. Okay, so this – the thing about this machine was it was – I think it might have been around $11,000, and it promised that you could do your whole workout in, like, I think it was five minutes a day or less. And I looked at this thing for years in reading magazines, and I was just always, like, fascinated, like, what are they doing here? this was before like people heard about you know high intensity workout and hit training and now you know there's a lot of things that are like hey you can work out for nine minutes a day and get in as much whatever uh as you might over the course of like an hour of doing look lower intensity exercise what this was that was not the conversation at this time and i just always stared at this machine and was like who is paying eleven thousand dollars and they they put the price on there was almost one of those really smart things where they're like they're not trying to like hide it from you they're not trying to be like hey this is a great machine and you can buy it only $199.99 a month they were like this is ridiculously expensive you will need a ridiculously short amount of time a day to stay in shape and then just a picture of this weird ass machine

and i want to find this by the way a doctor's thing is called an examination table thank you of course that's what it's called so when i moved to la to this is why i know that

it existed at least as up up until like 2020 or excuse me 2002 when was shubert dip was because when i moved to la to work for day to day i kept trying to i noticed that this company i saw an ad for it and i figured out this company was based somewhere in the san fernando valley where they were making these eleven thousand dollar torture machines and i kept trying to get them to let me do a story about it but i was but it was like it was almost like like i was living in a of some sort of insane world because no one else no one else thought this was weird no one else i've brought this up so many times like you never see ads for this thing anymore i assume they went out of business but i feel like nobody talks about what that workout machine was except maybe the tens of listeners maybe somebody knows what this thing is that i'm talking about and if you do could you send me a link because i want the oral history on this machine how many did they sell who invented it did it work why'd they go out of business but it starts with i have to figure out what this thing was called and i have googled every version i mean i've been googling googling torture machine for weeks with no helpful results i've been i've been here's what i've been googling san fernando

valley dungeon torture machine andrew you're you just swatted yourself i think there people are

about to tear down your door or got a link to some videos that are probably not really for me

you were saying the new yorker right not the new york times um uh i think the new york times

magazine the only reason because the new yorker used to the new yorker doesn't have a lot of single page ads oh okay yeah in the back you know the new yorker famously their back page is more like a classified ads and it's always got the guy selling hats i was gonna say that's what i was

gonna say i remember the hat one like it always seemed odd to me there's a very specific tell you about new yorker magazine hat ad that was in there forever right that was like there was one

for a beret and then there was one for the um a guy wearing kind of like a little bit of a not even a fedora but some kind of hat but this the ad for did they get rid of that no here it is european beret 22 andrew still got it wow european beret 100 wool one size fits all from johnhelmer.com in portland oregon i could just probably walk down and pick

one up for you andrew genetive loves a beret i got her a nice beret for her birthday right before

the pandemic she loves it i think this european beret ad with the same picture of this guy i don't know if he's john helmer or not this as long as i've been reading the new yorker which is you know 25 years now i swear to god this european beret ad has always been in here yes that's yeah that

stands out to me as well i feel i'm feeling guilt feelings because i was so excited when i signed up for um harper's magazine uh to come to my house well maybe well i'll tell you probably about seven issues ago and at first i was like okay you know i read the harper's index and then i read you know some of the the smaller little tidbits at the beginning and then i like it's like i would love to see a chart of like the first magazine i read like maybe 70 of it the next magazine i got maybe I got through 30% of it and said I'm going to get to you later now I just have the stack of Harper's magazines where I've read like just the index on some of them and some of them have not been cracked at all I know it's a very common thing but it's very rare that I especially in this day and age that I subscribe to a magazine and I just decided to take a flyer on it I thought I'm going to be a different person I'm going to take my Harper's I'm going to read it places and now they're just piling up it's also been a very busy time for me but still like geez Louise but look I mean

there's nothing wrong with a, with a stack of like what I consider a quality magazine, like Harper's or, or like the New Yorker. I'm a major, I mean, why do you think I just grabbed that New Yorker and had the beret ad at my fingertips? It's because I've got a stack of literally 30 New Yorkers, but I will, in the summertime, I'll get through maybe half of them, or I'll cherry pick some good articles here and there. So I don't think you should be mad at yourself about the uh the harper's thing um okay back to uh twitter i mean maybe we've said whatever it is we can say on this i just i do not like a world in which elon musk owns twitter it makes me feel it makes me feel unsafe it makes me feel worried about whatever his whatever free speech he thinks isn't being allowed on twitter i can't imagine it's free speech that i think

should be allowed on there well i mean and see it doesn't bother me as much because it's not my tool of choice.

Like, I just don't I don't care about Twitter too much. So it's easier for me to kind of take the attitude that I took towards Facebook a while back, which was, oh, that would be kind of cool if he just ground it to the ground it down to the earth. And like it just becomes parlor, basically, like parlor with a bigger, bigger megaphone. But essentially, it's the place where all of these, you know, I mean, like all the people who are praising him, you know, in trying to make this move were just like the ridiculous far right politicians who are saying, like, finally, somebody standing up for freedom of speech. I'm like, wow, the fact that you think that that is what freedom of speech is, that a publicly held company has to let every radical, untrue idea and bit of false information get published like that is not what free speech is like any anyway. It's you and I have already talked about that to death and I'm not being super articulate about it. But just like the people who are celebrating the Musk takeover here are obviously the people who are like the ones who tweeted out four years ago. i'm leaving this website follow me on parlor like maybe it just like drags the whole thing down and people stop putting so much into it and maybe a lot of like the mainstream um you know uh reporters and journalism institutions feel less obligation to like kind of stay plugged into this platform that is you know like even for me as not a huge twitter user but somebody who has on my phone i'm You know, I do you know, I do kind of keep an eye on it throughout the day. It's often pointed out how there's a vast divide between what happens on Twitter and how the actual populace of the United States sees the world and the conversations that people are having. It's heavily, heavily leans towards the reporters and journalists and people who are uber plugged in on all ends of the political spectrum. It's not real life.

yeah and you know to that point it might not be the worst thing if if i were to uh unplug from it a little bit or even if it were to lose some of its uh influence at least in the minds of the people who buy into it because you're right it's all people that are in in sort of my same it's media people it's stand-up comics and it's podcasters and then like mina kimes or something Like, it's just like the people that I'm following are all kind of in the same world. And when something bad happens, we all get really worked up about it. And even if I'm not out there publicly tweeting about it, I'm reading it. I'm consumed. I'm waking up in the morning and looking at a massive amount of hand wringing about, you know, a particular Republican initiative in some state somewhere that's going to strip some group from of their rights. and it is it can be very stressful for me to be as into it as I am so maybe it'd be better for me and even the nation if it loses some of its I mean I also just wonder what the response largely would be if he does successfully buy it and then does actually start to change the rules in a way that's really negative I wonder if you'll see a lot of people at a certain kind of level of media or influence just start to step away from it yeah that's kind of what I'm sort

of hoping for what i'm also hoping for is that this email will find you i am um i'm just sending you something luke via email this is a um an image that i found that if this is the right exercise machine this is going to be so ironic because i found a small small image i think this is more from a newspaper and not the new york times magazine so i'm thinking it might be wrong but i if i found the right ad the irony will be it is such a small image that you can't actually read what it's called it's like i'm zooming in so far that it's totally potato quality by the time i see it but do you see the thing that i sent you it says the headline is something like a home exercise machine for a something workout and i do know but i think kind it's kind of like

what you were describing i think i've actually found i think i've actually found what i was looking for andrew as we were chatting okay um four minutes fourteen thousand dollars this is the headline from the washington post in 19 this is such an old article that it's not even telling me when this person wrote it but it's about this thing that's called the rom for range of motion sold by rom fab of north hollywood california okay it resembles an amalgam of a classic cruiser motorcycle and a space age rowing machine and ostensibly forces users to employ significantly more muscle fibers than they would doing traditional exercise. This translates into higher oxygen demand on the body and increased caloric burn, but a full workout in 240 seconds. So I guess the pitch was, this is definitely it. The pitch was you could do the workout in four minutes a day. And the machine was $14,000. Oh, $14,000, $14,000. And I was wrong about the, I'm looking at some pictures of it now I think that maybe they've Updated it I

My memory is that the old one that I looked at had more of an examination kind of bench vibe. But this one looks more like you're – it's sort of like a recumbent – it's almost like a recumbent bicycle. So it's got a kind of a fan wheel that you would presumably pedal that would provide resistance. It's got – and then just all manner of weird things coming off on it. I'll send you a picture of this, Andrew. Tell me this doesn't look like the thing they would put Wesley on to just torture the living Tweedle out of him.

It's driving me crazy. Whatever I said to the pain before, what I was thinking of is what the levels of punishment and pain were on the dial that the torture spins. And that's what's driving me nuts. I'd also love, now that we know the name of this machine, I would love to find one of those classic ads. But it's weird. It's like, that's what I really want to find. Exactly.

I want the vintage magazine Probably this involves microfiche Andrew's problem Also I'm trying to send you this A photo and my Apple account that I pay God knows how much for per year Will not let me send it to you Because who could send an entire photo Over this series of tubes Known as the internet My I swear to god My whole server system and everything just gets so weird sometimes okay uh i uh if somebody can find the original magazine ad of like fourteen thousand dollars four minutes the picture that would be cool but i am i actually feel who i feel much relief andrew that i have actually gotten to the source of this problem it's it is called the rom machine the range of motion machine and i did text it to you so you

should be able to see it pretty soon and it is as weird as i remember it i will keep an eye out for that but i gotta point out so i am all over the place looking i'm doing image searches on google right and i've put new york magazine um oh that's messed up that should be new york times magazine so i'm already making a mistake there but just to be transparent i wrote new york magazine and i put that in quotes and then i put rom in quotes right and so obviously that's not getting me what i want because i put the wrong name of the magazine in there but i'm seeing along the top and i'm doing image searches see if i can find the old ad a lot there is something close to erotic about this search because i am getting suggested searches for a beefcake in his underpants and it says gabriel mac i don't know who that is and then for some reason it wants me to search matt damon new york city and then sergeant sexy pants is another thing that it wants me to search sergeant sexy pants looks like a beefcake i can't tell if he's um wearing a he's like got a a shirt that's open and then ponderosa resort is that the one that's in um is that the one that's outside of vegas the ponderosa resort no i'm thinking i don't know i'm thinking the bunny house so anyway i'm close to something dirty here and i don't know what it is and you don't want me to play the

boner tape from the other day and yet you set me up with things like i'm close to something dirty

and I don't know what it is. I want to click. I'm just going to do this. This is my own private computer. Nobody cares about your boner, dude. Don't do that.

Don't do that. That's it. That's it. One time. One time.

That was it. Okay, I did it. I clicked on... Don't do it, girl. Captain Sexy Pants. Don't do it, girl. I clicked on Sergeant Sexy Pants and now I'm getting... It looks like... Okay, it's taking me to Amazon. This is going to screw my Amazon. Don't do it. No, I'm doing it. I don't care. I don't care. All right. Is this a series of novels? Sergeant Sexy Pants, A Small Town Cop, Forbidden Romance, Rom-Com. I see. These are like some sort of very steamy, I believe, DVDs.

Girl, don't do it. It's not worth it.

Nope. They're books. Yep. They're books. Sergeant Sexy Pants. And there's a whole bunch of them. You also have Stud. Sergeant Sexy Pants series? You have Stud Muffin Santa. You have Stiff Suit. You have Hottie Lumberjack. There's not even any alliteration there. Captain Dreamboat. And then there's a chef in here, and they're all part of the Ponderosa Resort Romance Collection.

Wow. The Ponderosa Resort Romance Series. I did not think we would end up there today.

I cannot wait to log on to Amazon again tomorrow and see what it's got.

Yeah, right. Have fun with that. All I get now, Andrew, are just various cat-related things because I've been doing recon on stuff that I need to get for bubbles. bubbles is still with her uh with her you know original family because she's still nursing and they were like hey uh you can come excuse me you can come get her this weekend and i was like they were like but you're gonna need this was this last weekend and they were like but you're gonna need um to definitely get her some kind of like replacement formula and i was like is she still nursing they said yeah i go could you could we We'll be right back.

Let her finish nursing before I would like her to, you know, have as much of that important developmental time as possible. And they were like, oh, yeah, totally. We just thought you wanted her right away. I was like, yeah, not at the, you know, not in such a way that she's going to be kind of, you know, ripped away from her mom too early or still basically be a baby that needs their mom, you know?

Yeah, I heard from a lot of listeners who said, like, don't worry, like the cats definitely the, you know, the mother cat definitely gets to a point where you're not going to have like some sort of traumatic separation. for either the kitten or the mom at a certain point. Like, it just is the natural way of things.

Yes, but don't you think, and again, our listeners, and Andrew, you and Veeves have owned way, well, that's not true. I guess I had Olive, and then also technically I was sort of half of Pagoda's, you know, parental figures, although Pagoda and I never were fully bonded. But, like, most people know more about raising cats than I do. That's a given. But my sense of it is, to the degree that it would bum the mother out about having a kitten taken to live at a different place, if that is even possibly a thing, my sense is it would be heightened when the kitten was still nursing versus when the kitten was not nursing and onto solid food. Just because of what I think I know about biology, just basic animal biology, which is there's probably a symbiosis there when the kitten really needs the mom because the kitten can't really eat food that's not being produced by the mom's body. And the mom probably feels a strong maternal instinct, which is just evolution, to take care of the cat, to teach the kitten sort of some life skills, and to feed the kitten. Wouldn't you think – does that sort of seem to make sense?

Yeah, to the degree – and I just – I can't weigh in because I literally don't know. Like, honestly, if one of her litter disappears tomorrow, I don't know if the mom is – I honestly just don't know, like, if the mom's kind of like, hey, where's that other one? Like, I just think that, like, nature finds a way. I don't know. I am trying to figure out. Here's a little article here. Like when are I'm sure you've looked at this a million times. When is it OK to separate them from their mothers? I see some kittens will continue to nurse up to 12 weeks, though. Usually that's pretty extreme. It looks like.

I think that I'm going to get bubbles when I get back from this trip that I've got to take, not this week, but next week, because I also didn't want to get her and then basically be gone for a week and have, you know, Becca watching her or a variety of people coming and checking on her. And so I'm going to get her like May 8th or 9th. And that, I think, will be about the eight-week mark for her, maybe.

That seems about perfect, according to some of the stuff I'm saying.

That feels good to me. I didn't want to, I just, again, to the degree that there was any kind of, like, just what we know about animal life on this planet is that there's a lot, again, there's just a lot of sort of ways that nature has designed stuff. And part of it to me seems like as long as an animal is nursing from their mother, if that can continue going on, you know, within reason, that seems like the best case in terms of all kinds of important things that are in the milk and this and that.

So do you get the impression that these folks are kind of like worried that you're going to flake or that this or that they're they didn't expect to have this kitten so long?

I don't think so. They we've been in close contact and I don't think I mean, I don't get the sense that it's costing them money, per se, because unless you factor in like feeding the mom more because she's nursing. but i and also i when we met up with them it was a a mom who is maybe like my age uh and then her daughter who was struck me as being maybe 15 or 16 and that they were from the the the sense i got from the name and the accent was that the mom was from eastern europe somewhere and um and the daughter was doing a lot of the explaining and also seemed to be really plugged into what was going on with the cats and the kittens and the sense i have is that this is a fun thing for the daughter to have these kittens around and to be kind of taking care of them and sending me pictures and things like that so i'm hoping that it's not annoying them that bubbles is living there a little bit longer it's really truly just out of you know wanting for her to have the best you know early experience she can before she has to come live with me and basically watch the mariners all day

and um yeah eight weeks seems like a good um a good that was what the internet said

yeah that's what it seemed to time out it seemed to time out they said on ask v

here i go once again with the email every week i hope that it's from a female oh man

it's not from a female we didn't get to talk about umps but maybe we maybe tomorrow we can get into that a little bit um because i do think it's it's a i mean i think it's an interesting question even if you're not a baseball fan the idea that we might just have like robot officials in any major american sport is baseball seems to me andrew to be the one that it would be most doable with

versus football and basketball at this point and like like maybe say soccer actually me soccer would be tough with fouls baseball is the one where there's the least like a foul where somebody on a basketball court fouls someone or in football when someone you know blindsides somebody or whatever you don't have that in baseball very much like that's not a big part of what the officials have to weigh in on which why it seems to me to be a a unique sport that you could really

have robots do it and it could work for behind i mean maybe we'll just talk about this tomorrow Marks, I have a lot of thoughts just on what you said, because there are technologies, obviously, you could bring to football that would take away some of the rulings of referees. And I think that's the same. I don't think you could get rid of all of the officials on the field in baseball, but certainly some of the behind the plate stuff could be taken care of. But let's talk about it tomorrow. Exactly.

Are the M's playing today or do they have today?

Today should be a day off, I think. Yeah, because then they're going to start. They're finishing up. They finished up their homestand and now they're hitting the road. quick update on a story and our first voicemail will be somewhat related to this uh anyway i was telling you on the show last week that i've been kind of organized like unpacking our book collection and kind of organizing it around the house by genre and other various things and um one of the things that i noticed when i was unpacking my books was we have three books in the series of the foundation isaac asimov's sci-fi series the foundation which somebody said that he ended up writing more prequels and stuff too so it's actually a six book series now but i i

think that the trilogy is the original foundation what if isaac asimov's side project under a nome de plume was the ponderosa club yeah sexy sexy stories i actually think way back in the day

And I maybe I get this impression from reading a bunch of Vonnegut, but that like there was a finer line between I'm talking about way back in the day, like maybe like 40s and 50s or whatever. If you were like a sci-fi, like a nerdy sci-fi writer who was trying to get published in these various magazines and pulpy kind of magazines, you might have also just been making your money by writing steamy romance and getting. Oh, sure. I could see that. Yeah, exactly. But like really, you wanted to write about multiple universes. But that was my imitation of a nerd. Apologies to all nerds. But anyway, I was talking about how I was putting away our little collection of, you know, the books in the Foundation series. And the third one was in pretty bad shape. But I like the fact that all three of these books were kind of from the same era. They were published by the same publishing house in the 70s. And I wanted to repurchase this third paper back, get one that's in better condition. And so I would just feel better about that little collection of that that trilogy. But the problem was I ordered it possibly while a little tipsy and just doing it too quickly and not checking my settings on eBay slash PayPal. And the next thing you know, I'm hitting I'm hitting go on something and it tells me that it's shipping to my old address. Right. And now I was in this dilemma of it was like a five dollar book. it's not going to break the bank if I don't get this thing, but I was a little bit concerned about this. Well, I didn't know. I thought that they were shipping this thing to my old, old apartment, like two apartments ago in Wallingford. I don't know if something got changed or what happened, but actually it turns out this book is being shipped to the apartment I was living in just a month ago, right? In the Roosevelt district. But just as we were recording today's show luke i have another update which is this book is being shipped via the u.s postal service not fedex and not ups so do you know what that means i'll tell you anything please that was like

the audio version of waterboarding me what do you want to know it means it's gonna go in your mailbox it's gonna go in the locked the locked mailbox at your old house which you could break

into because he wouldn't put a proper mailbox in yeah i did it i did 9-11 um it means that my mail is still being automatically forwarded by the u.s postal service if it was fedex or ups i would just be shit on a log as i used to think sol stood for um but it turns out also not a great situation no it's not great for the log for anybody involved really um so i think and i am now looking at some tracking things and i see that it says this book is out for delivery right now and it doesn't have my old zip code it has my current zip code attached to it so i think all of that is to say i think this book might be arriving in my own mailbox potentially today isn't everybody just so happy i paid that off my apologies um see this is what i'm really sort of

What I'm interested in is, will it be the book, the particular book jacket you were trying to get? And your thought is no, because they have a disclaimer on the website saying, the books we send you may not look like the picture that you're seeing on our website.

Which I didn't see that until I had already purchased it. I'd made several mistakes. So I will let you know. And, yeah, I think that's a real kind of bullshit policy. We have a voicemail here from Stephanie in Portland who really got into this idea of organizing books. I'm going to play that for you now. She also left a follow-up voicemail, which I do not have in front of me, where she was, as I like to say, ripshit over the idea of a bookseller just using a random photo so that when you buy a book, you don't know which version is coming to you. Because if you're at all any kind of a book collector, which I am not, but it's important that you know which version, which publication you're getting, right? So anyway, here is a voicemail from Stephanie in Portland who also gets into organizing books.

Oh my gosh, hi, it's Stephanie in Portland, Oregon, your book correspondent, question mark. Anyways, I'm listening to Andrew talk about how he gets to organize his books and go there with so much joy. I just want to say to you about the record that I keep my unread and read books separated. And my unread books are organized by geographical regions, so all of my U.S. authors together, all of my French authors together, all of my Nigerian authors together, et cetera. And then within, you know, within region, I obviously have the most books from U.S. authors. Those are alphabetized. And then my red books are by genre. And within the genre, specifically fiction, because that's the one that I read the most of, it is chronological. So by publication, by original publication date. So, you know, my anachronina is up at the top and then my severance is down towards the bottom because, you know, obviously you start at the top left and then work your way down. So, anyways, oh, my gosh, I love that this author is super jealous because Kurt Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors, and I'm really jealous that we've got to meet him. Anyway, I am so excited about this conversation. Bye.

Wait a second.

I can't tell if Stephanie's excited about this conversation.

If you could bring at least a little bit of energy in the next voicemail, we would appreciate that. You know, this is supposed to be entertainment.

And also, time is money. Can we speed it up a little bit, please?

Did she mention, did I hear correctly, severance?

Yeah, but I don't think it's your severance.

There's a different severance. And I like that it's my severance, even though I had a limited amount of influence on its existence. But there must be a famous book called Severance that I didn't know about.

I was thinking that that was a modern kind of literary fiction book. But no, I think it is. Severance is a 2018 satirical science fiction novel by Ling Ma. So it sounds like the TV show must be based on this novel.

I don't think so, only because—well, I could be wrong. I don't want to get into this at this late stage of the show and also be extremely wrong. Oh, no, you're right. This is not the plot, as I understand it described. Yeah, because the only reason that I would be in any way up on the origins of Severance is because I think it's a kind of interesting story. The person who wrote it originally, the original concept, was this guy who went to Evergreen State College in Olympia. and then I think went to the Tisch School in New York, and also maybe I think went to Western for a minute. I think that was why I noted it. The guy who was the, and he created this, I don't know if it was a short film or an indie film or just a screenplay, but he was accepted to the Sundance Film Writing Lab with this project called Severance, with this thing called Severance, and then it went from that to being this TV show that like Ben Stiller produced and directed. I don't even know how much the thing that you see on television mirrors the original version of this if that makes any sense um but i just had noted that it was somebody who had some association with western and bellingham and so that was that was why i was mildly digging my heels yeah still driving me crazy though because i don't know

what i was thinking of when you're thinking of a book that sounds like severance yeah it doesn't matter i think that genevieve has a deliverance it's not deliverance anyway it doesn't matter i I don't know. Deliverance. It is electrician, I believe.

Feel the electricity. Exactly. Okay. Let's go ahead and wrap things up for today on the program. We will be right back here tomorrow, though, with more Imaginary Radio for you. So please do join us for that. Until then, have a great rest of your Monday. Take care of yourselves. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

We'll be right back.

I will come to your house, I will go to your refrigerator, 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 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 power out