Muse

How many hot dogs do you eat in a day, Tim? I'd rather not answer that. Thank you, though. Did you eat hot dogs today? Not exactly. Why are you bringing this up? Well, you have mustard on your shirt, and frankly, your verps reek of hot dogs. I had a hot dog bowl earlier today. Yes, I did. And what is a hot dog bowl?

It's like a burrito bowl, but it's chopped up hot dogs in a big old bread bowl.

So like a much larger, less healthy hot dog?

Can I go? I'm starving. TBTL! Well, there's that fine line between, you know, showing emotion and being a hot dog.

Well said. Let us focus on tomorrow's show and not fan flames of this provocative scandal any more than is necessary.

A lot of times what we like to tell people is that you have to let life bounce off of you. Yep. right and so we are going to do just that literally in the literal sense we're talking

technology today the big t absolutely everyone's talking about technology these days because it's everywhere oh it is you can't escape it isn't that for techno geeks with spreadsheets mark if

they do good put it on youtube if they do bad cancel it all right hello good morning and welcome

welcome everyone to a wednesday edition of tbtl the show that just might be too beautiful to live jalapeno my name is luke burbank i'm your host i'm a professional look it up in the book coming to you from the hollywood broadcast center right here in portland oregon where i am become somewhat of a hostage in my own home thanks to this adorable but meddlesome cat

A cat is an angel that poops in a box.

Anybody who's had a kitten, I think, will be able to identify with this. But I have basically everything that's happening in this apartment now revolves around the whims of this cat. And like if I want to try to type something on a laptop, I have to hide in my bedroom right now with the doors closed. Because if I'm sitting on the couch, she will stand on the computer and then I can't type anything. She sent Andrew a text yesterday that I did not authorize. It's a whole situation here. But we're going to get through it together here at episode 3696 in a collector series.

Let the fun begin.

Nick Castellanos is back at it again. This mother**** don't miss.

In the heat of battle, he don't miss.

No.

In the heat of controversy, he don't miss. No.

He is the guy who currently plays for the Phillies, who has this really incredible knack for hitting home runs when people are trying to, when the announcers are trying to discuss somber topics. So we'll play you some of that tape coming up. Also, Cameo quietly laid off a quarter of its staff.

This is a serious message to everybody watching my update right now.

um it seemed like things were going really well for cameo it's something lots of people are talking about and i've got something like 45 000 people signed up yeah 45 000 celebrities and as the article in a variety put and lesser known folks anyway uh we'll figure out what's going on with cameo as well plus some emails and v-mails all coming up with the help of this young man the longest running cobro of the show may be best known for his depictions of the tall ships speaking of things on the internet he's got like every meme ever produced on the internet he can knock us out with his memes he's andrew welsh and he's joining me right now good morning my friend hey luke did you see how i got a speaking of memes did you see how i got away with posting my homemade meme yesterday on the internet somehow i did see this and somehow it it made it look mildly pornographic yeah i mean that's what happens when you pixelate something yep i took a um yesterday during the show uh also why was garfield anatomically correct i mean i think that might have added to this sort of slightly lecherous appearance inspired by blucifer um i had made a little inspired by blucifer meme yesterday of um the uh of garfield But instead of saying something like, I hate Mondays or something sarcastic or mean or grumpy, I changed it to a picture of Garfield that said, you got this. Because I thought, wouldn't it be great if he were an inspirational cat? What if he brought that Monday energy that you were describing yesterday, ironically, on a Tuesday? Well, I mean, let's be honest. I thought it because I messed it up. Because when I was trying to say something about Garfield, I mentioned that he hated lasagna and loved Mondays. That was where that started I need to get IP credit On Parallel Dimension Garfield Yeah, I thought I said that Anyway, yeah

Yeah, so you had said that you wanted to see him bring more Monday energy, so I made that happen, and then I posted it. And then I realized I can't post pictures of Garfield, so I pixelated it. It's the end of the story. I got lost in that somewhere, and so I'm done.

Do you think, is it, our bosses, boy, so much of this show now over the last few months has come, really just settles in on the question of IP and who can do it. Oh, I heard a wild story yesterday that I hope makes it onto Livewire. Speaking of publishing rights and the like So I was interviewing Andrew Bird The singer And he also, you know, did an acting gig He was in I forget which season of Fargo it was But he was Are you caught up on the TV version of Fargo?

No, no I think I watched the entire first three seasons And then I believe there's at least a fourth That I never even touched And I don't know if they went on after that

This might have been that season I lost track of, I really, really liked the first couple seasons. It's Noah Hawley, and Noah Hawley, I believe, is the guy who also did the first season of True Detective. And if you remember what a, I mean, until it didn't really pan out, what a really great, riveting television show that was. I'm remembering, right? I think it's the same person. But anyway, Andrew Bird, the singer, played one of the main characters on one of the seasons of Fargo. and I was asking about it and he was like yeah you know it was kind of intimidating because I'd never acted in anything before and I'm working with all these really good you know very talented actors and I go were you tempted to like bust out your violin or try to do something to be like I got this going on too he goes well no but they wrote a scene where I was whistling because you know he's known for his like really incredible ability to whistle and he said so my character is whistling because i was whistling one of my songs and then i couldn't use that because i don't have the publishing the basically the record label has the rights to where my songs get used so him just whistling his own song was in violation of whatever the publishing rights are deal is with his record label so then he whistled an improvised jazz thing which then also was their property because if andrew bird creates an original piece of music Like, there are rules about who gets to use it where and who has right of first refusal, etc.

So by the very nature of him doing it on the set of this TV show, he relinquished the rights to his improvised whistling. And now the TV show or the, you know, producing company, the producers have the rights to that.

Not the TV show, his record label. Oh. So in other words, if Andrew Bird is walking down the street and he starts whistling an original song and someone records it, be it a tv show or just a random person he somebody else someone with his record label could make a claim to that original composition because he has signed contracts and deals that sort of um i guess sort of um dictate if he creates a song where it goes who gets it he can't just like write a song and put it on the internet and make money off of it right right so in other it's even andrew bird improvising a whistling moment on a tv show his record label has some sort of claim to that original composition of him whistling jeez louise did they scratch it from the show or did they just work out a deal he had to go back and re-whistle it later something that and i he couldn't quite remember what the solution was but it was something that was basically public

domain geez it was like camp town races or something right because he could perform it but it had to be some it had to be public domain now quick question noah holly now i get these a little bit confused noah holly also did legion but did not do maniac right you and i both loved legion although i don't think either one of us quite finished it i heard the third season is just so dark so good but so dark that it's tough to watch and so i've been bracing myself for it for about five years now um but remember maniac wasn't that like jonah hill and yes um i really liked that the woman with the big eyes ha ha i can't think of her name but one of the great actors of our day i don't know why i'm doing that voice what is her name she anyway yeah i love that but that life drawing it was not noah holly who did that though i don't believe for some reason i get those confused maybe because the somewhat surreal nature of all of them i also don't think

he did emma stone by the way emma stone sure guys how about redhead you you think that emma stone's Most identifiable characteristic is the large eyes. I would say the large mouth or the red hair.

Interesting, because I think, does she always have red hair? I feel like maybe she doesn't have red hair in everything I've seen.

You might be right about that.

But she does have very big, wet eyes. Whoa. I'm just joking. Isn't that what Steve Buscemi says at one point? He says something like, they like my big, wet eyes.

And does he say that in 30 Rock?

I feel like that might be a 30 Rock thing, yes.

So, by the way, Noah Hawley created Fargo and, like you said, Legion. Okay, so he did Legion. He also worked on Bones and wrote a film called The Alibi. What he did not do was True Detective. So, sorry. I don't know where I got that from. I was loud wrong on that, everyone, and I want to apologize in front of you, in front of this cat. Is that meowing, annoying?

No, I like it. It's very cute. It almost sounds fake.

she is um it's a very it's a complicated time in our relationship because as i wrote on the show sheet today i am a hostage in my own home most of my day now is just dealing with this cat and i conversely i would also die for this cat like the moments of sweetness like if i'm sitting on the couch i'm watching the mariners and she climbs up on my lap and goes to sleep is so profoundly sweet that it means that i'm okay with the fact that i have to hide in my own bedroom now if I want to get any work done because she refuses that I can't walk around the house in bare feet so I'm going on a run later today a fairly ambitious run for me I'm trying to do 10 miles and it's for reason I basically want to make sure that my toenail game was tight because if you have a a toenail that needs to be clipped and it's kind of rubbing against your other toe over the course of 10 miles that could be a bad scene I'm trying to maybe do a half marathon this weekend oh this weekend down in Oregon I'm in Oregon but I mean down at the beach yeah we're going Becca's family rented a beach house and we're going down there they're all very fit very healthy runnery people so they're the kind of people who can just go oh you know what there's a half marathon happening why don't we go ahead and do that I'm not at that level of fitness but I feel a lot of it's not that anyone's putting pressure on me but it's self-generated like i want to be in on the fun saturday afternoon when we're having a beer and some pizza and relaxing by the beach i don't want to be the one person that didn't do the fun physically challenging but fun thing so what i have to do is try to see if i can run 10 miles today as a test case because if i can't do that then there's no way i'm going to be able to do 13.1 on saturday but all of that is to say like i'm trying to clip my toenail it took me it took me 40 minutes to clip my toenails today because obviously the cat is obsessed with what's going on on my feet as I'm sitting there with my little piece of paper spread out to catch the clippings and I'm kind of you know I'm hunched over and I'm trying to deal with this thing and she's just standing on my feet anything I'm doing she wants to be exactly in the middle of it which again is not news to anyone who's had a kitten but it's certainly affecting or it's impacting life in this apartment right now um you know uh in in ways i wouldn't have imagined i don't know if this

is something that i'm ready to talk about no it's not a big deal but as i'm about to say this i'm like huh i wonder if this is something if this is part of my thought process that i need to let everybody in on but what the hell i'll just do it anyway i was having a conversation with genevieve yesterday about cats and our professor bananas i was so happy you know our professor bananas that's our um cat uh was very happy to see me and and she's a you know i think about this cat and you know she's not no longer a kitten she doesn't display those sort of kitten behaviors although every now and then she will find a little uh little toy ball with a bell in the middle of it like a jingle bell that we have laying around here and she will go to town on that and it's really cute but she's a older cat now and you know when we moved into this house there's a lot of talk of maybe getting a dog at some point because i i do like other people's dogs i never had a dog of my own but like the longer we're here and the more protective i am of my anxious but very very sweet little cat and this cat who displayed like you know she clearly like there are two people in this world there are two organisms in this world that our cat is comfortable around and i'm one of them and it was so sweet to come home to this cat who clearly missed me you know and i love that so much and i was talking to these yesterday i'm like we've been here for a little bit we don't have to make any quick decisions but thieves and i have been saying well when are we going to get a dog are we still going to get a dog we don't like the idea of being or Genevieve especially doesn't like the idea of being a one pet family I think maybe especially after losing Theo the idea is if we lost bananas like where that would leave us it would leave us spoiler alert in sad town that's the math if you follow the little dot in mind one minus one sad so anyway all of that is to say I said to Thee it's like maybe we should just you know it's been an evolving conversation but I may be leaning away from getting another from getting a dog and maybe instead getting another cat down the line oh because i just sort of wonder if there's a lot of reasons for it but like one of you want a bangle do you want like a 10 week old bangle no i want you to love that cat um i do i do i want that cat to be 11 years old and greeting you in her elderly ways some someday but um i do Part of it, and I don't know if I'm just making excuses, but part of it is that, like, Bananas had, you know, it took her several weeks, if not a month, to, like, kind of really show that she's comfortable here. Like, this is her house, that, like, every corner of it is, like, hers as opposed to, like, kind of tiptoeing around, and you could feel certain corners would still feel somewhat foreign to her. I love seeing her really acclimate to this place, and the idea of introducing the chaos of a puppy or even an older dog seems like kind of a lot for her. I don't know if I'm if I'm hiding behind that, but I am like very I'm more protective of her than I've ever been in my life. And I do sort of wonder if like getting a little kitten that she could almost like kind of if we acclimate properly, as we did with her and mentor. Yeah. Like there's a long process of kind of introducing them and kind of keeping them in different rooms for the first few days or whatever. It worked out really well with Theo and bananas.

And we're sort of thinking like maybe that's what bananas needs is a little kitten to not not tomorrow. but you know not today maybe not tomorrow but soon um maybe that's maybe that's just more our speed and i can continue to love other people's dogs when i see them and dote on them you know

raising a dog is so much work yeah it i mean you know this cat is is taking up a lot of my mental energy and my time and were she a puppy it would be it would be you know exponential obviously the amount of extra work that it would be so you're right about that also i have noticed this phenomenon i remember my um some former in-laws of mine this was in my first marriage i remember they had this really great boxer this is why i ended up with a boxer because my first ex and i well we first of all we really kind of looked up to um her sister and her sister's husband they were a little bit older than us but they just like had their shit together and had cool jobs and were smart and had these great kids and this house in pasadena so kind of i think we took a lot of our cues from them early on uh early in our kind of married life anyway they had this boxer named boz this really cool but enormous dog like a hundred and something pound boxer that was i mean i'm just a really fun energetic but sweet dog i knew these people for like i mean i knew them for years but i've been living in la and visiting their house regularly for probably two years before i learned they had a cat named tasha that lived under the bed that was 19 and it was just like tasha didn't come out didn't really want to deal with boz or other things and like so you want to avoid that kind of scenario obviously where you have basically like a secret pet like you know um oh professor oh you didn't know we had a cat because we're all just geeking out over this cute dog that's running around yeah we have a cat that just lives upstairs and never comes back oh right well now part of

that was part of that just out of curiosity as somebody who has a cat that hides when company is over i mean is there a chance that they you know doted on this cat when company wasn't around and the cat came out and lived a more full life or am i just trying to trying to force that

narrative i think you're trying to force that narrative a little bit i mean i don't mean you're really trying to force it but i got the sense it was one of those things where i mean here was the like honestly i think this was the order of events they had a cat one of them had a cat and they got married and they had this cat and the cat was probably a big deal to them and then they got this dog and now the cat's older and so it's like the cat just kind of becomes sort of less of a fun thing you know they didn't wish any any harm to it but it just wasn't primary in their thinking because now the dog was kind of more interesting and you could take the dog on walks etc then they had kids and then the dog moved down the list and i don't mean any of it to say these people were unfeeling or cruel they're actually very loving awesome people that really again are salt of the earth but i think this is also something that happens sometimes in like a traditional family structure people will tell you i have many friends who have children who are like the dog used to be everything to us and then we got kids and now the dog is this thing we have to

deal with and then they got more kids and the older kids are just exactly then the older like

then the older kids are just, like, a thing they have to deal with. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, so I hear what you're saying, and, I mean, I don't think I'm going to double down on this, but the thought has occurred to me that what Bubbles really needs is a sibling. Because when I was out of town, she was staying with Becca, and Becca has a cat, Holly. and you know they started off a little bit well holly started off a little bit sort of like annoyed i think with bubbles but by the end of their week together while you and i were in denver they were like sleeping together like becca would come home from work and they would be curled up together i know and i felt kind of terrible taking her from this fun environment where there's another living thing there that she can play with that is a cat um to like come back to dad's bachelor pad where he's mostly podcasting from a room all day oh wow it didn't seem sad until you put those words in that order what are we doing i need to get a job but you know i mean i have to say like me and this cat are extremely bonded i don't know if this is like legit pet psychology or not but what happens i get up in the morning i i usually uh sleep uh shirtless easy ladies and germs i'm taken guess i'll be um pixelating more than just garfield oh my god i don't know if they have enough pixels andrew have you heard about the pixel shortage you need a lot yes you're gonna

need a bigger pixel oh god what are we gonna what are we gonna not pixelate one nipple or the belly

button that's the question by way she has tried to nurse on me a couple times oh wow yeah which is at first i was like kind of afraid that she was gonna like bite me but she's very i'm not like letting it happen but but um she did make contact but anyway i get up in the morning and there's this my fancy rocking chair that i got for basically for free my uh rhizome rocking chair or however you say that guy's name i now put a towel down on there because it's the only place she really likes to hang out she just loves sitting on this rocking chair that's where she sleeps every night now because she's not sleeping in bed with me she's too crazy i get up in the morning i generally don't have a shirt on again it's really upsetting if you're a human being but as a cat I think it's kind of lost on her and I pick her up and she's still sleepy and I hold her against my chest and it's like very it's almost like swaddling a baby you know they talk about like uh tying the baby kind of tightly to you as the mother and that skin-on-skin contact can be very calming to them and good developmentally we have about four minutes in the morning where we walk around and I'm just holding her and like singing her some made-up song and holding her against my shirtless chest that is so great then the rest of the day is utter chaos but those four minutes are really really something chaos just mean that she's just like running around and biting your ankles and well you know what that's slightly overstating it it has to do with what is her napping schedule like um so on monday i took her out to my sister liz's property out in washington state where my sister we were celebrating my sister sarah's 40th birthday by the way great piece in the willamette week about my sister's restaurant pollo bravo people are interested yeah big spread photos the whole thing i believe it's called the willamette week as i once told excuse me as i once told a farmer in the willamette valley yes before he hung up on me but um so i took we took her out there i put her in the car and took her out to this property and she just ran around and you know there was always like three or four kids guarding her to make sure she didn't like literally go into the woods but she just played and hung out with people and ran around. And then when she seemed like she was getting a little overly worked up, I just put her in her cat carrier with her blanket and put her in the car, and she would just go to sleep for an hour.

You didn't have her tied up, or you just kept a close eye on her while she was outside?

I just kept a close eye on her. I have a harness, but she is not into that right now. Like, I have a little leash thingy, but she's very not into that. But again, this is all part of this master plan of mine to try to just get her really okay with being in the carrier which she is to get her okay with different sorts of environments which uh you know she seems to be like she just is a very she's she is very much not a head case so that's kind of nice but as far as is it total chaos around here oh my point was when i got her home on monday night she you know slept like a rock because she had been you know doing things all day if she has a day where she can mostly nap then the night is going to be a little rough is kind of my point because she's you know um she's got a lot of energy but if i tire her out if we play a lot in the daytime or if she's just been doing stuff uh then she she sleeps the whole night and she doesn't meow very much she's like but in the daytime the thing is she'll get kind of she'll get amped and she'll just want to like run around like she'll get the zoomies or she'll want to hide under the bed and then like attack my feet as i'm like walking around the bed like making the bed or doing whatever that means when i say that cream cats rule everything around me right now i can't like walk around with bare feet i have to have on socks and shoes even if i'm like my running shorts like i right now i have my i have my running shoes on so that if she decides to like attack my feet i'm protected so these are the kind of small decisions that i'm now making on a hourly basis i'm trying to remember like i

think that my experience was very different than yours and also i guess i was just it was so long ago like because you know having a my first little kitten that i mean not my first kitten of my life but like kind of as a young adult like bringing a kitten into my house when i was the when i was the what do they call the head of the household um theo i mean i was 22 i mean i just remember i just remember playing with them and like i remember i'm a big cat snuggler so maybe i sort of set the agenda like i just remember picking theo up and kind of holding him like a baby

Thank you.

sort of which is an interesting move but he would put up with it and so like i remember like my earliest memories of him were being like a tiny tiny little kitten i would lay down in bed and he would come up to me and he would sniff my eye he'd put his whole face like right in my eyes yeah my just my big wet lizard like eyes and um i remember loving that and i remember saying to him out loud like if you ever go crazy i better protect my eyes like if i would never want a crazy cat being this close to my eyes turns out theo went crazy later on in life like straight up bonkers um which he then kind of recovered from sort of but um yeah but even even to his last days he would sometimes come up and sniff my ass like i remember that yeah that was kind of nice but it was really more of a kitten thing that he would do i remember taking him on drives sometimes in a ridiculous manner again me and v's like driving around new hampshire because we wanted him to feel like comfortable in cars i'd drive around my big 83 olds we'd put him on the bench seat between us and listen to public radio um drive around bog road uh anyway like i remember that stuff but i never remember him like and it could have just been you know i was going to work i wasn't working from home then you know i'd maybe come home and you know play with them and change the litter box but i just don't ever remember him being kind of in the way or taking over my life in that way but it could also have to do with the fact that he's not a bangle i'm you know listeners are writing and to say oh yeah bangles are known to like need a lot of attention and they have a lot of energy and need a lot of stuff maybe that was the difference and then with bananas which again was 11 years ago that was just such a different scenario because again she was a little shy and also just wanted to spend all of her time with theo you know so like any any yayas she had i think she already had like a playmate like you were saying so it's interesting like i'm trying to put myself in your position maybe when i was house sitting our friend's cat pretzel a little bit pretzel has a lot of energy and maybe it would be maybe it was like that like you can't just like kind of sit down and ignore pretzel pretzel will not be ignored yeah i mean this is technically

the third cat that i've had in my life because there was pagoda which van already had for many years so pagoda and i just were sort of like roommates things were fine but you know uh sometimes pagoda would um attack me for reasons i didn't understand which made me a little leery

not as not as a kitten like that was actually scary kind of like as a cat protecting it as

yeah like like are we just sitting on the couch and then i just like move wrong and I commonly use the analogy Of whichever Of the Baggins it is When one of the other ones Tries to take the ring And they have that moment And I don't even want to give Specific names Because I'll get it wrong Oh another thing Sorry I'm all over I'm all over the map But speaking of Loader I wrote a tweet the other day You know My dad's love Of Lord of the Rings Is well documented On this show But when we were out Of my sister's House i just happened to catch a quick look at the back of my dad's toyota tacoma that he drives and he has made because you know he's a sign painter and he has all these computers that can cut like you know vinyl graphics and stuff he has made his own lord of the rings bumper sticker

oh wow this is like tens before we gave away our uh our new uh tbtl bumper sticker people

were making their own it's sort of but it's like a it's sort of a a portmanteau of sorts first of all it's really big like it's it's it's bigger than any bumper sticker i have ever seen and it says not all that wander are lost which as somebody pointed out on twitter is kind of a grateful dead thing oh okay i've seen that around i forgot i didn't know what it was affinity or it's just i mean maybe it's not specifically grateful dead but it was just kind of a hippie you know that was like in the in the 80s you'd see the same kind of car that would have a not all who wander are lost would also have probably like a green piece bumper sticker or visualize world peas or you know what you mean there was like a certain kind of person who'd have a not all who wander are lost so this thing says not all who wander are lost but then it's got above the words all of the main characters from Lord of the Rings walking behind Gandalf like he drew it he made I mean he designed it on a computer I want to see this well it's on Twitter it's if you go back past my if you go I can

also just send you so I'm trying to figure out though is that I'm looking around and I see that you know even even our old pal and colleague Chris Thiele has a song or an album called not all who wander are lost but I'm trying to figure out are the origins from the

fellowship of the ring and i'm thinking yes is that maybe the case and it sort of it has become its own standalone thing because i when i the first you know i've heard that or seen that represented um a lot in my life and i never identified it as a lord of the rings thing but

if it it seems to be by the way i would love i mean is there any chance do you know what your brother is your brother david is doing these days in his afternoons new Thank you. minted realtor david burbank because is there any chance we could just call him really quickly just like on your speaker phone i don't have to talk he wouldn't be able to hear me but i wouldn't i wouldn't mind getting his um take on this because it looks like it might be originally a line from a poem that was embedded in one of the lord of the rings um tales i i think we should not call him at his high stress new job oh is he actually is he like kind of in the middle of a

high stress new job i didn't realize yeah he has a new job and it's i and i think that's a lot of pressure so i think probably maybe we should and like i think it's a shared office situation so maybe he's going maybe we shouldn't call him out of the blue but but this could give us something to research before tomorrow i can call him after the show yeah text him and find out because that would be really interesting to me my dad is such a like deep diver on loader that i thought he had just like seen that not all who wander are lost bouncing around and then in his mind he kind of thought oh that sort of seems like lord of the rings related and then he just kind of combined

these two thoughts so maybe maybe second line of a poem called the riddle of strider which originally appeared in the fellowship of the ring i'll read this poem oh well you know what

props to walt b so he's being like that's canon this is like this is real originalism i had a

feeling when you said that i was like oh i didn't know that was a lord of the rings thing all that as gold does not glitter not all those who wander are lost the old that is strong does not wither deep roots are not reached by the frost it goes on from there but i i won't have you received this photo i just texted it oh let me take a look here the photo of i want to hear your reaction to this thing yeah i meant to look it up and then i went on a i went on a little journey of my own i started wandering through the internet loop but you weren't lost i was not lost now i'm kind of lost

You were helping, you were clarifying, you saved us getting like 5,000 emails tomorrow from people going like, it's not Grateful Dead, it's Loader. It's taking forever to open, but I love this.

And you're right, it's like, the fact that it's like on the back, it's like on the back of an old Tacoma, is it, who makes the Tacoma? Toyota. Toyota Tacoma. You know, it is a little bit oversized, but it fits well there in the corner of this older like kind of work truck type of thing and it's they're all in uh they're all in profile so it's not overly complicated it's just white on black you don't need your gestalt to work here but it helps just let it go just let it go don't explain it don't explain it um and you just see on this white background these black silhouettes of them all marching from um from left to right and then in white on the black mountain it says not all this i like this actually i'm not a loader head i wouldn't put it on my own car because it would be a misrepresentation of my passions but um then

people would come up and want to ask you questions about the cleveland guardians yeah wasn't that a

wasn't that a lord hill record by the way a misrepresentation of my passions anyway um i'm really impressed with this but of course because i mean your dad there's an art to what your dad

does as a sign he is a professional at doing this kind of stuff so like it's i think it's well done but it's also just really funny that he was like i would just like to put this out into the world And then when I tweeted it out and people had a pretty strong response and people were like, I really want to get one of these. I mean, I don't know what the marketplace is for these, but also I don't know who owns the IP. Again, back to IP.

That's probably Andrew Bird, weirdly enough. Did he give one to your brother, David?

He better have. Not that I'm aware of. Not that I'm aware of. But yeah, so anyway, again, sorry that I'm just a whirling dervish of thoughts today on this Wednesday. But that's just what's going on

You know, speaking of And we don't have to do this now Especially if you are transitioning into something else But I didn't have a bunch of emails and voicemails Ready to go today like I usually would But I did have one voicemail that I heard the other day That I'm just remembering now That maybe we could play later in the show Or now if you want it But somebody did go check in on your orange truck, Luke I forgot about this Are you kidding me? No, I need to find this thing Because I didn't pull it off of the wire but i'm scrolling through here i'll play this for you later yeah yeah yeah why don't we take a

break because otherwise i think we'll end up crossing the river again uh which river um i'm trying to think of a loader river yeah i was also thinking a fun exercise andrew could be you and i trying to name these characters that are on this bumper sticker i'm kind of tempted um okay so the

first one is definitely gandalf and then there's one hobbit between gandalf and legolas right so that must be bilbo or no no that would be frodo because frodo is the one who goes on the main adventure so it must be gandalf you frodo legolas but then i can't tell what's after legolas what is that guy holding i can't zoom in i can't enhance but that could be the battle that could

be the battle troll that could be our boy is he holding an axe of some kind that would be the

battle troll then i think and then you have two more hobbits so that'd be pippin and mary oh wow andrew i'm getting this all from your brother i'm in a flow state man i didn't even

you are really the game is slowing down for you now who's next is that is that like aragorn or

either that's aragorn or all the way i feel like or aragorn might be picking up the rear there

bringing up the rear so is there another person who's not an archer but who is not aragorn who would have and this is the other thing i don't were these people ever on the same they weren't all on the same journey i don't think aragorn was ever like wandering the wilderness with the

hobbits right yeah yeah he was wasn't he oh he was wait am i am i confusing him he's the handsome man right yeah yeah yeah i guess he defended them a lot but yeah i guess i thought of it more as

being like he would just show up and kind of save their butts as opposed to like we're gonna walk across middle earth together but anyway i think he showed up and saved their butts once and then he stuck with them but i could okay cool and also i'm i'm deferring to you i am pippin and mary i'm

already i am that i don't know that i don't i that that came from a deep well within me honestly and i don't know but now i am i'm stalling out because then it looks like you have a human then another little person with a pony and i don't know who that would be assuming that the other ones were pippin and mary so i don't know who that other one is what we really need to do is

get my dad on the horn yes and just be like dad what's the story well no he's in semi-retirement he's got time for us he's got nothing i mean does it seem like the guy who's making a homemade lord of the rings bumper stickers is his his burning the candle at both ends i can't remember

ever having him on the show i know we've played voicemails of him singing happy birthday that would i would love to get him on the show and talk i think we've maybe had him and my mom on but as

you might imagine when we've had both of them on it really kind of turns into the suzy b show anyway work those you know smile and dial luke work those strings see if we can book a walt will do all right let's take a quick break and then we'll be back i i oh my god i'm like i'm nervous i'm excited but mostly nervous to hear also what's going on with my truck coming up in a moment tbtl hello and welcome to top story all right before we get to this castellano stuff what is going on with somebody peeping this big orange truck that I purchased that I have been avoiding now for months because it reminds me of my own impulsive ways.

Well, that's what I'm trying to, my apologies, I am trying to find this voicemail as we speak by kind of going through the Google voicemail and looking at the transcriptions of these things. So you might need to start with Castellanos while I look for this,

and then we'll come back around to it okay so there's a guy named nick castellanos he plays right now for the phillies the reason that i mean uh he first sort of got on our radar um as you know sort of casual baseball fans was because when i believe he was i don't know if he was playing for st louis or if he was on a team that was playing against uh against st louis but I do believe the announcer, Tom Brenneman, was the announcer for the Cardinals.

I feel like if I weigh in here, it's stupid because I'm just going to be wrong. But I feel like Castellanos was playing for Cincinnati at the time. Was he not? Was he never a red?

Well, maybe he was a red, but wasn't Tom Brenneman the guy for the – oh, no.

He was the announcer for the Reds.

He was the Cincy guy.

That I know for sure. He was the announcer for the Reds, and I'm pretty sure Castellanos was playing for the Reds at the time.

Sure. Okay, good. But that's actually helpful because I didn't even have the right team. And honestly, since this is a poor reflection on Tom Brenham, it's also a poor reflection to some degree on the whole franchise. So I want to have the right franchise. So this guy, Tom Brenham, this was a few years ago. He was a longtime announcer, and they came back from a break, and he said something really awful into a hot mic that was basically homophobic.

Yeah, he used a gay slur.

yeah and um it was i believe that the the team was going to be playing in san francisco and he said something you know really awful related to that and so that went out over the air and then i don't know exactly how much time went by but you know calls were made somehow it was decided that this guy tom brenneman was not going to finish this game and so when they come back from a commercial break i'm gonna just guess and say a few innings later he sort of does this hastily assembled quasi apology slash i mean what would you call it just thoroughly unconvincing sort of defense of himself as a person as a quote-unquote man of faith and i don't say that to be critical of our listeners who are religious or have a personal faith but this does not seem to be something that should get you out of the responsibility.

of the fact that you used a horrible slur on live television yeah i don't know if you plan

on playing it or not but i remember being especially frustrated that it was like if you're playing the whole thing it was unclear like he was it was such a bad apology the thing that i got hung up on and probably in a way that i wasn't taking away the right takeaways but like it was unclear if he was apologizing on behalf of his employers or to his employers like he didn't know what he was saying it was a it was a word salad of saying a bunch of stuff now listen i offer a lot of word salads myself on this show under much less stressful circumstances because I didn't just say something hateful over a hot mic that I thought was cold so I'm not saying that like in the moment on live tv apologizing and also like in the back of my head realizing that my career just ended and is continuing to end as I'm speaking like that must be a mind f now I'm not giving him I'm not giving him any leeway there I mean he deserves what he got terrible terrible thing to say probably a terrible human being frankly if you yeah as trust me if you that's not the only time he said that you know what i mean and then saying like i'm a man of faith what the fuck does that have to do with it like anyway hot mic andrew you know i know i stand by that anyway um my point is it was an infuriating thing to listen to because he's just throwing all these words of kind of contrition around but they made no sense and it's like are you apologizing on behalf of your employer or to your employer because i feel like you're trying to do both because you're just saying words that sort of sound soothing to you yeah let me start playing

it because everything you said is accurate but then of course the part of this that really got everyone's attention was as he's doing this extremely unconvincing whatever may a culpa again etc he then then this guy nick castellanos happens to hit a home run and so he announces

that in the midst of his apology Castellanos to lead things off Jim Day is going to be taking us the rest of the way through this game as Holland takes over on the mound I made a comment earlier tonight that I guess went out over the air that I am deeply ashamed of if I have hurt anyone out there I can't tell you how much I say from the bottom of my heart I'm so very very sorry i pride myself and think of myself as a a man of faith as there's a drive in a deep left field by castellanos it will be a home run never not funny it's just you just don't see it coming

you know you just don't see it coming and it is birthed just like the greatest kind of memification of that which is any time now in like baseball circles in the comment section of you know anything where people who are baseball heads are talking you will see someone saying something that seems kind of serious and somber and then when you least expect it it will transition into a drive to deep left by castellanos and i hope it's okay for me to insert this dazzling

detail here in the narrative because i mentioned this on the show yesterday that i was going to tell you about this there was a so this has been going on now for i think this was two seasons ago although yeah i think it was two seasons ago um maybe one but either way this has been an ongoing thing for a while now people kind of starting to apologize on twitter and then and then veering off into and that'll be a home run um and this long-running joke at one point castellanos is nick castellanos's um wife i believe maybe partner uh took to twitter to sort of like chastise people for doing it just saying hey listen this is disrespectful please stop doing this and of course everybody was like you know what i had not seen it through your perspective and i apologize and that's gonna be a well hit ball into left field i can't get the quote down exactly and everybody just piles on with these i'll read a couple of them for you yes yes so

i'm really sorry for y'all i personally don't think the joke is funny and i pride myself as a man of faith as there's a drive to left field by castellanos it'll be a home run so that'll make it a 4-0 ball game and somebody else responding to Castellanos's wife I'm so sorry you're bothered by this joke as there's a drive into deep left field by Castellanos and that'll be a home run

so that'll make it a 4-0 ball game again and like never this is such a harmless joke like the joke is not on Nick Castellanos himself you know what I mean like and I'm not saying that you can never go to Twitter to be earnest and request maybe privacy or respect or whatever but in this case it was like so it was just like not thought out like how do you think people are going to respond these are a bunch of sarcastic baseball people and again i don't think this is toxic in any way for them to respond in this way it's like come on you're dealing with a bunch of sarcastic baseball nerds how do you think this is going to play out well the thing that's so wild and i've

only um our our friend televisions chris hayes was texting us some of this stuff yesterday and then you actually were doing some independent research on this andrew but i did not really fully realize What a weird knack for this kind of thing Castellanos seems to have. And that is not to say that, again, he's in any way responsible for I mean, he's a guy playing baseball. He's trying to hit it. He's just here to hit dingers, Andrew, and he's doing it. But it seems like it's weirdly happening during somber times. This was Memorial Day. So this was Monday of this week. And this is I believe this is the Phillies now. and they are the announcers are kind of in the midst of their you know the stuff you say on memorial day about saluting our fallen heroes and nick castellanos back out of here at citizens

bank park honoring uh those who pay the ultimate sacrifice castellanos rips one to deep left field

it is gone solo home run for Castellanos we really forgot about the um fallen heroes very

fast yeah that one didn't they didn't they didn't transition softly on that no they were like okay

we've done the we've done the the sort of you know obligatory stuff around this holiday and of course Castellanos is a Philly right now and I believe this is in Philadelphia um so you know the crowd's excited the announcers are excited if it were our announcers and ty france hit a home run it would be understandable that they were that they were excited it's just funny or just it's funny is the wrong way to put it but it's coincidental that again they're trying to talk about memorial day and this guy hits home run now i just want to let this play out

because um he's sitting five straight it's one nothing builds somebody's getting hot

good lord that bat was flying through the zone good guys up one nothing that is a brutal delco

accent on that color that bat was flying through the zone oh yeah he's gonna go down to wawa like just brutal just real mayor of east town brutal delco accent coming from whoever that

color commentator is for the fills uh now this isn't so then there were some fakies that were going around right after this thing happened on monday there were some fake videos going around of that were kind of funny honestly yeah of mashups of him like hitting home runs but seeming like he was doing it right like there was one where um somebody sent this to us where the announcers were apparently saying which i don't even think this happened in a baseball booth did it they were saying that um they were announcing that bin laden had been caught and killed by the navy seals And then they spliced it with a home run from Castellanos, which was actually at first blush kind of believable.

But you had to go back and be like, no, no, no, no, this is not because I remember that's one of those things that you remember where you were when you heard it. And I remember Van and I were sitting in the TV room of our Mount Baker house and it was a Sunday night, I believe. And it was already dark in Seattle and it was like breaking news came on. So it would have been really late for a baseball game to be going on, and particularly that clip, which was a daytime clip. But also, this is something that I think you figured out, Andrew, or at least the Internet is saying this. Coincidentally, Nick Castellanos did hit a home run on the day that they killed Bin Laden.

He was playing for the minor leagues at the time, so there was no broadcast element to it. He didn't interrupt another somber message regarding that, but apparently it did happen. And then so I found this article on Deadspin called Nick Castellanos has mastered the untimely home run. And they kind of go over all of this stuff. This is from July of 2021 by John Heffling, it looks like. And unless I'm being fooled by the Internet and Deadspin, there is more tape. Can I play this or do you have? I've actually got it right here. Okay, cool. So, yeah, this is another one. This is he's this is a Royals broadcast. Now, Castellanos is playing for the Reds here, I believe. and it's a royals broadcast and they're eulogizing somebody on the air i believe the father of one of the broadcasters and then what do you think happens yeah i believe this was um somebody i

don't i think it was the father of somebody who worked within the kansas city organization um and who has was a military again it all seems to go back to military veterans like this person was a military veteran and they're honoring this person well we're going to tell you about a great

man, and it's a loss for the Royals family. This is George Gorman, who passed away at the age of 96. He served our country in World War II. He went to the University of Kansas, and so did his son, Pat Gorman, who's been working for the Royals in the clubhouse for 26 years and that was Pat's father that's a great life 96 years and Pat just

like his dad, went to KU. He also went to Bishop Ward High School. There's a drive into deep left center field and there's never a great time to eulogize someone during the broadcast, so we apologize for the timing, but our hearts go out to Pat who's just been a tremendous loyal employee

to the Royals. In the words of Snoop Dogg, this guy don't miss.

this guy don't miss did i show you the meme of somebody like took a took a screen grab of like a fox news broadcast from a long time ago that says like it's listing the biggest threats to the united states like world leaders who are the biggest threats to peace i guess it's like actually the biggest threats to peace as compiled by some sort of think tank or something and somebody scratched in castellanos's face and name as the number one threat to peace in the united

states certainly the number one threat to any kind of somber moment during a baseball broadcast i know wow anyway um yeah the kc one again and you know uh i hope everyone understands the the joke is in no way on any of the people who are being remembered etc the the the thing that's just wild about it is the the the very very bizarre coincidence of all of these different times with this guy's but he also must just hit a lot of home runs i don't know where cast do we have

him is he on your fantasy no he's not on my fantasy team um i do i i was gonna say i wonder if some announcers will start like looking at where he is in the lineup and maybe saying let's avoid doing the somber talk here and then i thought of our own broadcasters here in seattle and i'll be i'll bet you a million bucks castiano's plays for the phillies now is that right yeah you just said that yeah um if we face the phillies again i can totally see aaron goldsmith our seattle announcer saying well we are not going to be saying anything serious until this man

is done with his plate appearance well i mean it does kind of i mean obviously it's like it's you can't sort of i guess have your sort of perfect situation as the announcers necessarily like this thing in kansas city was i guess probably scheduled for when it was scheduled but you do sort of wonder like if you're going to launch into a what's planned to be a maybe a four minute somber thing try to do it with between the seven and nine right right or anywhere in the mariners order or or with any of the mariners try to use try to apply your baseball iq to this and like don't do it in the don't do it three through five on in the lineup with the castellanos of the world and the other people who you know can really mash it's like try to try to schedule this around sean figgins if possible right someone where there's zero chance of any kind of uh offensive although i'll tell you what i'll tell you what big fireworks yesterday for those mariners

definitely um playing a pretty terrible team that's doing a bullpen day but we'll take it any one of these could be the turnaround point right yeah right i mean we have now won three

out of four if you go back to the astros series so little you know slow and steady wins the race We're now a mere seven games under 500, I believe.

Well, we got some work to do, Luke. Yeah, we sure do. All right. Do you want to hear this voicemail? I do. All right. So I mean, I don't. I should have probably saved this for the voicemail segment. I don't know what I'm doing today. We're all over the place. But you know what, Luke? This show is like jazz. Like we've shown that we can do it within the constraints of the format. Now we're breaking that. So take a look.

But we're like the H. John Benjamin of it. Yes.

I listened to this a couple of days ago. I think this came in last Friday, for whatever that's worth. So you and I are in Denver. We've already probably done a podcast, and now we're getting ready for our trivia night in Denver. And this voicemail hits the voicemail.

Ahoy, hoy.

It is Buffalo Bill, by the way.

Ahoy, hoy. This is Jake, 11, in Portland, Oregon. I'm just currently here on Burnside while waiting for lift rides. And I'm looking at an orange truck. And I think a detail that was left out of this conversation that I think is pretty crucial is the mud flaps on the truck. The Yosemite Sam. That says back off. I forgot about that. Pirate pistols, vaguely in multiple directions. So, yeah, party on.

That is a perfect description of those mudflags. I think that might be the guy who picked me up that one morning when I was a little out of my gourd.

Oh, so he's not waiting for a car. He is in the car waiting for maybe a customer. I see. Maybe so. I could be wrong about that, but I remember it was an 11. I thought the person's name might have been Jake.

but again i see state that would make sense gotcha so anyway so um yeah you didn't mention that it has those classic mud flaps i love that i do you know that the the the stick shift the gear shifter is a skull oh nice nice and that's like some more right well it's i mean you know it's like a gear shift yeah it's so it's like a but it's not on the steering wheel gear shift it's like the

this is this is this is believe it or not a manual yeah but you can have that on three on the tree

my dude you can have four on the floor three on the tree but uh this is four on the floor

this is what's flooring us today um but but i'm saying the guy somebody in the life of this truck had screwed a skull onto where the you know standard i will be taking that if i ever retake possession of this vehicle and it's in working order i will be removing the skull really off of not my vibe but it doesn't have it doesn't even have a little bit of like it doesn't have a little bit of campy quality to it i don't know it's just not i mean how about yosemite sam mud flaps how

do you feel about that i feel good about it like listen i'm not somebody who feels like we need more gun propaganda in this world but that is just classic and also if we want to replace all the modern guns with as jake would yeah right pirate pistols and i'm actually all for that that's actually what i would call sensible i never thought that yosemite sam would be offering

sensible gun control i mean i have always said i believe that the founders wanted you know uh as they say a well-armed militia and were okay with people owning firearms i think you should be able to own any gun that was available when they wrote the second amendment right exactly i'm babies can have those guns if they want good luck loading that blunder bus or whatever happy like happy birthday bubbles do i stutter yes i mean like like seriously like i mean i don't think i need to i'm not saying anything that's gonna change the minds of our listeners who i think tend to kind of come down on this where you and i come down on andrew but it's like the idea that those the idea that those bewigged men reeking of whiskey and body odor sweltering away writing the constitution um or amending it i guess as the case was that they could have ever conceived of something called an ar-15 right it's just i mean it is on its face an absolutely ludicrous premise yeah so i do think that they were into people having the right to defend themselves with guns or keep this country from being sort of reacquired by england or something but i so but we just have to keep using those guns is what i'm trying to say right exactly um all right do you want to talk about cameo real quick before we um oh yeah i haven't dug into this i just saw your headline here i was just surprised by this because i felt like cameo was like really blowing up like i feel like people were talking about it they're adding people left there is a truly bizarre video of rudy giuliani offering his services oh what are his where he's well i mean for as far as cameo goes i mean his services are basically going around drinking scotch and trying to overturn elections which you know yeah minus the overturn election part doesn't sound like a bad life but he's also desperate for money now because you know like there's nothing more fun than watching these dogs lie down with each other and then wake up with fleas like because of course you know uh giuliani was running around the country trying to overturn the election on trump's behalf At places like Four Seasons Speaking of brutal Delco accents Like Four Seasons landscaping But he was also billing the You know, Trump campaign Or whatever particular pot of money Was coming out Like 30,000 bucks a day or something And so Trump stiffed him Because Trump stiffs everyone Which again, there's just nothing more beautiful Than someone getting stiffed by Donald Trump Because it's like, what did you think he was going to do? Like, oh, I climbed inside this alligator's mouth And then he chomped down on me Yeah of course that's what they do So now he's kind of desperate for dough So he's on Cameo And he's standing on like a golf tee Wearing a ridiculous looking golf outfit

And he's swinging this golf club Like a broom or something He's swinging the golf club Like a person who's never held a golf club before

Clearly you're not a golfer

Which is amazing Because presumably Rudy Giuliani Has golfed a lot in his life I just assume dudes like this that's one of their big things now Giuliani's from New York it's not quite you know it's not quite the same scene you know you got to drive a ways to get to a golf course maybe it's not his thing but he looks so ridiculous awkwardly just broom sweeping this golf club offering his services on cameo but that being said I was um you know I was thinking that that

This cameo thing must have really been taking off. Well, they had to lay off 87 staffers, which is about 25% of their total staff. This is really something that just absolutely crushes one's soul. The CEO is not describing it as laying people off. He's describing it, Andrew, as right-sizing the business.

Well, see, that's what I was going to ask you, and not to put you on the spot because I haven't read this. I don't know if you have an answer to this. But like, is this really like, oh, a sign that the company is doing poorly or is it a sign that the company wants to make more profits by having the existing workforce do more work?

That's a great question. In 2020, Cameo claimed it generated about 100 million in gross revenue, which was four and a half times up from the previous year. But evidently, this is a piece by Todd Spangler, by the way, in Variety. Evidently, its pace of sales has cooled off considerably since then. Senior executives who were laid off included Chief technology officer Rob Post By the way, former CTO of Quibi So this guy can really pick him In a statement from CEO Stephen Galanis Provided to Variety, he said To support both fans and talent demand During the pandemic lockdowns Cameo's headcount exploded from just over 100 To nearly 400 We hired a lot of people quickly And market conditions have rapidly changed since then this though and he said accordingly we have right-sized the business to reflect the new realities can you imagine losing your job and the ceo's just looking at you going you know what don't think of it as a firing thinking of think of it as a right sizing of our business did you get laid off no i got right so i got right sized um this i'm going to read you a line andrew that will just chill you to your core galanis continued the decision to reduce our head count was painful but necessary course correction to ensure that we regain focus as well as achieve the agility to navigate new challenges, the ability to optimize our financial resources, and time and space to nurture newer business segments like Cameo for Business, Represent, and Web3 that we believe will be as big as the core business that put us on the map. We are bullish on the intermediate and long-term future of Cameo, and the actions we have taken to balance our costs with our cash reserves will best position the company to take full advantage of those growth opportunities. Wow That actually makes me feel a little bit better Deeply human language From the CEO of that company

I think I've said this to you before I know that Scott Adams The author, the cartoonist Behind Gilbert is a terrible Terrible human being What did I say? Gilbert Do you not know about his other project Gilbert?

You know what? That's fair I assumed That he didn't do a comic named Gilbert But I haven't researched that and I apologize

But growing up I loved Gilbert And I think I even maybe told you about this one recently. Like, there is a Dilbert cartoon that goes through my head constantly, like constantly. And I just thought it was so funny when I read it at, like, age 14. And it's the boss with the pointy hair, right? And he comes in. He's talking to a couple of his employees. And he says, listen, for a long time now, we've been telling you that humans are our greatest resource. Or employees are our greatest resource. And he says, turns out we are wrong. Money is our greatest resource. Get back to work. And he just walks out. And I'm just, I think about that all the time. Something refreshing about that. You know what I mean? Like, you're not in the business of actually making your employees happy. You're in the business of making money. Right.

And, I mean, to a certain degree, that's capitalism, right? So it's like, I don't think that a company should not be allowed to run its business the way that they decide they want to. But it's when they use terms like right sizing that that would be the thing that would stick. i mean and i've been i have been well i've been fired once and laid off once you were right sized ones i was right sized once and i was wrong sized the other time there's a right way to wrong size yeah well the ratings were the wrong size for cairo yeah it turns out your paychecks were too much the right we wanted these ratings to be larger and they were smaller than we then then we wanted them to be so now we're right sizing you right out the door dude yeah no but like i I've been laid off and I've been fired and surprisingly in both cases I've now by the way I was I had the confidence of a much younger woman at those times the boldness of a much younger woman in those days Andrew I just remember being very unfazed by it which is crazy because I think I would be very phased by it now you know like I think there's something for me about being in my 20s and like getting laid off from KUOW because I worked on this show rewind and it ran out of funding and there was five or six of us that worked on the show and they basically pulled us into a meeting and said yeah the show's shutting down and uh you know you're gonna most of you are gonna be let go and i just i don't know why it didn't i was like okay

I guess I'll just do something else I was considering becoming a firefighter by the way But I was already a little Like late to that game I was probably 25 at that point

And NBA was out? NBA player was out?

Well not in my mind But in the minds of the coaches

You were going to join the NBA Become super famous With your abilities and they were going to call you The firefighter Was there ever an NBA player whose nickname was the firefighter Because that's a good nickname

No there was a guy named Vinny Johnson who was called the microwave because he would heat up fast. Ooh, I like that. That's a good nickname.

Yeah, what about the arsonist? Has anybody ever been known as Andrew the Arsonist?

There was a guy who was called the Rifleman. Chuck Persons, I think, was his name. I think he was like a San Antonio Spur, the Rifleman. Because he was a good shooter, I imagine. Yeah, well, then you had Dale Ellis, the silent assassin. Wow. Longtime Seattle supersonic. like a holder of many, many three-point records before the league went completely nuts on three-pointers. I'm trying to think of some other notable nicknames.

Silent but Deadly, that was a big one, yeah. Silent but Detlef, that was Detlef Schrenk. You had the Crop Duster.

A lot of fart-related nicknames. You had Xavier McDaniel, the X-Man, which was, that one kind of writes itself. I'm trying to think I mean of course My knowledge of the It's a Dutch oven Sorry Actually you had George How about George The Iceman Gervin That's a pretty solid nickname Yeah Iceman I don't like you You're dangerous Yeah So anyway No I did not I did not join the NBA I also did not Become a firefighter I just sort of Bounced around Until somebody called me And said They're hiring someone In LA for an NPR And you should apply For the job And I said Well I did apply For that job Six months ago Through HR And heard nothing But anyway, all of that is to say, I've been laid off. I've been fired, whatever. I was fine with it. But if someone would have called it right sizing, I would have been mad. That would have been enough to make me really resentful in the process. I'm with you.

Here I go once again with the email. Every week, I hope that it's from a female. No, man, it's not from a female.

Andrew, you know how we have been talking incessantly about the Airbnb situation in Denver last week when we were doing the TB Telethon. And I actually reached out to the owner of the property, and we actually had a very cordial exchange on the messaging part of the Airbnb app. And I just told him he needed to right-size some of his directions about the use of the property. And we got this email from Kendra You are super serving this P1 As I listen to your list of Airbnb rules I agree with Andrew That at least some of these rules Resulted from a less than ideal guest Which we kind of got some clarity on yesterday Because he was saying that They used to have a lot of bachelor And bachelorette parties come through Which just, I mean Just sounds like a real property damage Situation waiting to happen

I was reminded I'm pulling mini penises, mini phalluses out of the floorboards for just generations.

During my very brief time trying to be a stand-up comic or doing more stand-up comedy, there was nothing that struck fear into my heart. Like when that bachelorette party would come in with the woman wearing the, like, I mean, what would you call it? It would be like a head thing that would have two springs coming off of it with penises on the end. like a headband that had penises coming off of it and then a penis water bottle. And then they would sit them right next to the stage.

And they're ready for a good time.

You would just be like, this is going to be a bad scene. I'm sure they would sit there respectfully and listen to the jokes and laugh. I think it was mixed. I think it was generally... The few times that I remember getting heckled or really having a hard time on stage in terms of the audience, it was all bachelorette party related. Anyway, Kendra continues I was reminded of when my husband and I used to rent rooms out in our house on Airbnb We generally had a great experience and even made a couple friends that we still keep in touch with In the year we rented out rooms, we only had one group of three who were not great Not terrible, but just kind of weird It was a dad and his two adult sons Or just kids, I don't know if they were sons or not Now in this family's defense, they did not speak English as a first language But that does not explain some of the odd stuff that they did one one day when we came home from work there was a semicircle of clothes and food like groceries spread out on the floor in front of the door the guests were not home a semicircle of clothes and groceries spread out on the floor in front of the door with the guests not there despite having clearly labeled shelves for guest use these guests

apparently dug through all of our drawers and cupboards and pulled out my grandmother's china to use for themselves i didn't particularly mind since they washed their dishes and nothing broke that stuff was not easy to find we never use it so they really had to look for it huh so this space

is is kind of like where we were staying where it's a space where the renter here is somebody who usually lives in this space but was just renting it out maybe that's more common than i

realized well i mean this is a whole other level it sounds like kendra and her husband were living in the house along with the people they were being okay gotcha and that's a thing that people do you know when you're making the reservation you can choose entire house or you can you know rent a room in someone else's house which is not something i would ever feel personally pretty very comfortable with nor would i feel comfortable renting my house out to people i didn't know to come live in my house with me yeah but it happens a lot on airbnb yeah what am i talking about i mean i guess my

first airbnb experience was living for three months in los angeles just renting a room french lady french woman's um apartment yeah that's weird um number three they left an egg

a pile of blueberries and a hot dog on our table on one of the fancy dishes twice. Huh. Different egg and hot dog, presumably.

Huh. Huh. Presumably. Being the key word there. That's interesting. Yeah, it's almost like these feel like um, these feel like uh, what's the word I'm looking at? Like, not incantations, but it sort of feels, these feel, right. They feel like some part of some sort of a

process. A cult ritual. Yeah. Like, you will make the semicircle of laundry, and then you will leave the egg and the blueberry out for the night priestess. They washed their shoes in our washing machine.

Our washer had sand in it for weeks. People don't like you drying your shoes in their dryers. I'll tell you that much right now. Have you run into that before? No, but I mean, there's a lot of signs when you go to a laundromat or any kind of shared facility. It'll be like, do not dry shoes in the dryer. And you're like, ah, relax. And then you at some point own a dryer and you put your tennis shoes in there. It's like clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk. I mean, you can hear from blocks away and you're just like, what am I doing to my dryer? But I do it anyway, because I'd like them to be dry. I don't trust, especially in Seattle. I don't you wash your shoes every now and then. Yeah, tennis shoes or whatever. They start to I mean, it's usually near. It's kind of like it'll give them a little bit of extra life, maybe kind of near the end of their life, depending on which shoes. I also have I usually have two pairs of slip on kind of Sperry Doxider type of things. The ones I'm wearing right now are very generic. But I usually like to have two pairs of those as my tonight shoes, things I can kind of slip on and wear around the house and usually not wear outside very often. But just by wearing them a lot, especially in the summertime, if I'm wearing them sans socks, I like to keep them fresh by throwing them in the washing machine every now and then. But unless it's a really hot, sunny day, I don't trust the Seattle air to fully dry these things out all the way at the tippy tops of the toes. You know what I mean?

huh yeah i guess i just don't really well i kind of do a different thing with my shoes which i actually do clean my shoes a fair amount but i just do it using a rag and some soap and i try to keep the like outer part of the sole there's something about the sole of a nike yeah that i try to keep that relatively clean and then i use a lot of foot spray things like that so i'm trying to kind of extend the life of the shoe but short of just throwing it into the washing machine which seems to me like really the beginning of the end for a shoe.

Yeah, it is the beginning of the end. Like, I'm not washing new shoes. If I have new shoes that need a little tender, loving care, I'm doing similar things that you're talking about. But when you're kind of like, okay, I can already see the end is nigh for these shoes, but I can get a little bit more life out of them by throwing them in the washing machine. Sometimes it's kind of a nice little... It gives them, like I say, a little bit more life.

You know what is very satisfying on TikTok are these accounts where people buy old pretty jacked up you know like nikes um that are of some kind of note because they're original you know air force ones or whatever and then they clean them and like they basically restore these old shoes that they got you know like a goodwill or something oh god it's so satisfying because this one guy that i follow he'll like of course he cleans the whole shoe like immaculately but then he goes back and he hand repaints like the swoosh and everything else so that it's exactly like it's about as close as it could have been to what the

original version was people are always commenting i feel like on how clean uh your shoes are you were wearing those um i believe there were nikes that you were wearing uh when we were in denver and some people uh got a little view of them on the live video stream and said you know boy keeping those kicks clean or whatever, and I look down and

And I noticed, I wanted to ask you about this, actually. I was wondering, is that a design thing? Or are those shoes reaching maybe the end of their life? The tongue of the shoe had some foam coming out of it, which didn't look bad. I was noticing they both look very pristine, yet clearly the foam is starting to pop out a little bit. But maybe that's how it's supposed to look. I don't know.

It is supposed to look that way, but that is a design flaw. So those are some, like, they're basically reproductions of, like, a kind of a Nike running shoe from the probably late 70s, early 80s. And I forget the exact name. I got them at the Nike store. Becca bought them for me because she had a family hookup there. And I have two pairs of them. So the pair that I was wearing when we were in Denver, those are the ones that have been aged. They're aging out of the demo, as it were. You have to switch over to the nicer ones. But yeah, they have this tongue that's got foam in it, and right when you break them out of the shoebox, it's contained, but over time, the nylon frays a little bit that's kind of holding the foam in, and the foam starts to kind of expand and become more visible and kind of basically outgrow the bounds of where it's supposed to be.

So you are supposed to get a little peep of it, but then it gets to, I see.

Yes, even when they're brand new, you can see the foam. Like, that's always part of the design. But it just becomes a little more threadbare over time. I see.

Well, it didn't look bad. I was just curious.

Yes. It's wild, though, to, like, you know, for, like, my jogging stuff, I wear these shoes. They're called hokas, and I think a lot of people know about these now. And they just have, like, they're like platform shoes. They are so cushiony. They're so engineered. And you're, like, running on pillows. And then to put on something that was like the original, like Steve Prefontaine was running in these, you know, early Nikes and just like zero foot support, a hard ass flat rubber. So I mean, the big, of course, famously, the big like innovation was that they were making this kind of waffle patterned shoe, you know, sole, which they were made in a waffle iron. the legend goes but even those like if you wear some of these og nikes like i can't believe this is what people were like running in the olympics in so kendra finishes up the last and most relevant to your experience is in their two-night stay three people managed to use every single towel in their room yellow about 12 bath towels a bunch of hand towels and all of the face cloths again i wasn't too upset about it but i was mystified Despite these oddities and more that I didn't go into, I was not inspired to put signs around the house or add rules in our welcome binder. Kendra says, I'm looking forward to my tonight pants. Thanks for all the great hashtag content power out.

It is interesting. Like, I chafed a little bit at this. Like, don't just use all of our towels because YOLO. And I was like, we're renting this place. Like, we'll use as many towels as we want. And also, there's a washer and dryer, and I like doing laundry. I also have no problem washing the towels and folding them for you. I just didn't like the tude.

I didn't want to fold them. I was going through my own personal life.

It is a little bit different, though. That's one thing I've got to remember. There are different types of Airbnbs. There are the types that are bought and maintained strictly for visitors. Some of them are on the property where the main house is, but you have your own kind of boundaries. You have the kind that we rented where people are often living there, but when they're out of town for long stretches, might want to make some money by renting it out and then you do have this kind and the kind that i i had forgotten that i had had rented for quite some time in la which was you're basically somebody's roommate for a period of time and i gotta say the rules do or at least my my view of the rules do change based on that like because there are certain rules that one does follow as roommates you know what i mean and like using all of the towels in the house when other people are living there with you is is kind of rude and again it sounds like kendra isn't like upset about it but like i gotta kind of adjust my thinking depending on what kind of a rental it is i guess

is my point absolutely but also then the cost is commensurate with that sure yeah like that's the thing like if you're going to the the the more that you're going to just be like living along with um some folks in their normal house and you're just kind of a your lodge you're you know you're renting a room you're going to presumably pay way less for that yeah true which is which is why it comes with more responsibility to sort of be a you know good roommate and not just like i mean so the when you get your entire run of the place that's going to be the most expensive version but again that should be the version that comes with the most autonomy benefits and autonomy yeah

absolutely yeah hey i wanted to are you done with that email because i wanted to jump in here with one little mention of my own here you know we've been thanking dazzling donors for quite some time now on the show and of course we just wrapped up

our latest tbtl-a-thon there were a few people who um were either like kind of daily donors um that we were thinking you know quite some time ago that maybe we missed for some reason or um maybe i thought we missed just some some folks here who support tbtl at some level or another that i wanted to give a shout out to even though some of these people are dazzling donors who just chose not to submit messages uh we have jessica lucas in new jersey i think now i made this note to myself a long time ago jessica lucas in new jersey and then parentheses i think i don't know why i think that chances are i might have looked up maybe the area code or something but jessica lucas has been supporting tbtl as has andrea carter from somewhere on the highways of the u.s in her rv now that i couldn't have looked up that must have been a note we got from andrea carter who didn't hear her name thanked because i probably skipped her accidentally sorry about that and also nicole keith is a dazzling donor who didn't want to submit a message this year But I just wanted to give a shout out to Nicole Keith and thank them and everybody who has been donating to keep TBTL going. And again, these were people who donated last year when we were in the van, Luke, driving around this great country of ours, sometimes pulling the van behind us in a tow truck. And of course, to thank everybody again who donated last week during the TBTL-a-thon that we just did. And, you know, I haven't gotten any official numbers, but I guess we still have a job. I was able to check my email today, so that's good.

And by hearing, I mean, I haven't checked my email in a while, but I assume that they would let us know if they were right-sizing the company away from TBTL being on the air.

I mean, the good news is we have a job. The bad news is it means I really do have to write the rest of those Mad Libs, which I'm going to start on today. John, John, don't email me about that. I know I got to do it. I'm going to have them for you by early next week. And I'm also going to write a Mad Lib, I think, about my Mirage rental. Yeah, add some timely. stories in there so yeah we'll get those written and out to you guys as soon as possible and I guess this

is something that sort of happens each year where we do a TBTL-a-thon and then it's over and then it's like we're kind of looking forward to the next year and then there's usually a handful of people who are like oh wait I didn't hear my name or my message and sometimes that's because maybe they didn't tune into the show the episode where we thanked them or because of some glitch with our system we actually didn't get the information so we'll just be trying to tie up as many loose ends as we can here related to last year before we jump into the next year's list which of course

it's already on the horizon there's always this moment of like kind of space where we're in between like we're because right now you know everybody who donated at a level that will get a kind of a a daily thank you um those lists are being compiled i assume at 8 p.m right now and there's this period of a few months kind of where we don't have anybody to thank and it feels a little bit like floating in space a little bit you know it's like again we have we're used to the format of the show and that goes away what do you do with all the extra time well that is why i have been writing some uh some poetry that i'll be sharing with you starting tomorrow

i have a really i want to tomorrow on the show andrew i want to ask you about uh speaking of a lot of this content lately speaking of what i think are homemade bumper stickers or window stickers i saw a car in a parking lot that had two what i think of as very contradictory messages on the back window it's a hatchback it's your favorite kind of vehicle and some kind of little subaru and on one side of the glass of the hatchback it says one thing and on the other side it says a different thing and tomorrow i want to get your take because one of the things that they're saying is something that you have expressed on the show many times things are hard nope uh it's actually just says

i just got you know what maybe we can go out with this i haven't i have not checked this out yet but speaking of that noise you just made which goes by the the term the marsupial gurgle we just got this email like literally about a half hour ago while we were doing the show from uh listener ryan who says i've been known for making little things and sending them into you guys uh and uh here's a little music i made uh i can explain myself in the video but this is the marsupial gurgle clip looped with me playing guitar on it do you want to take a listen to this and then maybe we can go out with it because it looks like you'll explain it i feel like this of all the

things we play we do if we i mean ryan has the rights to it but i feel like this is not going to get us pulled from Spotify.

Certainly. If this is a trap. If you're a Spotify, Ryan, you have to tell me. Okay, so here's what we'll do. How about we wrap up the show in the clear here, Luke, and then I'll just hand it over to Ryan. Does that sound good?

All right. Yeah. Thanks, everyone, for listening. It's going to do it for today's show. We'll be back here tomorrow, though, with more imaginary radio for you. Please join us for that. Until then, have a great Wednesday. Take care of yourself.

uh and please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all hey luke and andrew i'm wearing

my tbtl hat to prove that i'm a real fan and um i recently got a guitar loop pedal and it didn't take me that long to start getting really weird with it including plugging in my ipod um which i preloaded with some marsupial gurgles marsupial gurgles and i wanted to demonstrate what i can do with it. Here we go. Here's a little ditty for you. Whoops. Here's the weird stuff.

Good, Lord. Good, Lord.

Good, Lord.

Good, Lord. Don't kill me! Good, Lord. Power out.