Muse

You've got your hands full of yo-yos right now.

You've got, what, four yo-yos per hand, right? Right, and what I do is, it's called the Blue Flying Angel. Okay. You know, what we do, or I'll do is, the kids, I'll get into the room and the kids will be running around and they'll be all excited. And so I try to start things off on their level and try to hook them with something like a wrap. Okay. So it's, and it's kind of clever because it includes me. Okay. And it goes, hey, they're up in the sky. It's the K-Strauss, the yo-yo guy. And then I do that. You know, and I get them going, and I get them into it. Okay. And so once I do that, they are ready to learn.

T-B-T-L.

i read poetry and sonnets and he plays the upright bass he sort of feels me out i feel him out in

1971 bill greats invented microsoft wouldn't it be cool if i could remember my dingus password

from my email i have a beta sequence i've been working on would you like to see it how can they

say this about me i don't believe it i show them i record everything

All right, hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Tuesday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. In a case gone cold, could a podcast bring the heat? My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. Hi, everybody! Coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center right here in Portland, Oregon, on a gorgeous Tuesday.

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

Well, at least for now, remains to be seen what will happen this afternoon. I believe all we really deserve as a region is about six, a maximum of six hours of not wet weather on a given day. It would be just sheer madness if we were to have, let's say, an entire day or even two days in a row of sunny weather. But anyway, we're enjoying it here on this Tuesday morning. And I think you're going to enjoy episode 3700. Let the fun begin. In a collector series. That's always fun. When we hit a round number. Turning 3700 today. You know that feeling of sending a text message and thinking, ooh, that was not exactly how I wanted to or should have said that.

I made a huge mistake.

Well, Apple has announced that their latest version of iOS is going to give you an ability to actually edit a text that you've already sent or even withdraw the text. Bring it back home, baby. Bring it back home. So we'll look into the implications of that. Also, on the subject of our digital lives, you know, I go on Twitter way too much and stuff that happens on social media and really actually beyond social media, just kind of in my life. I do a lot of things that are just wringing out the dopamine in my brain. It's like someone punching your brain, but in a weirdly satisfying way. I think I might need to do some kind of dopamine reset. I've been hearing about this. I've been doing some reading on it and it might be time. So we will get into that as well, time permitting, plus emails and V-mails. And this guy, he's one of the magicians who brought you Slingdingers 2 on patrol.

I like to party. Do you like to party?

He's the longest running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. He's Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

Don't talk about your skillet. Don't talk about your skillet. Hey, Luke, how you doing? Nothing going on over here.

I don't know if you realize your mic was on for some of that.

Oh, no. Did you hear me not talking about my skillet? Uh-huh. Yeah, I did. No, it's fine. I actually don't even have any updates on the skillet. I'm trying to refurbish a really old skillet that we found years and years ago. I will tell you this. I think I've narrowed down the era that it comes from, and I think this baby could be between 80 and 100 years old. So that's pretty cool.

Is there some kind of a, I made a joke yesterday about it, you know, saying Paul Revere on it, who was, I guess, a silversmith technically. But is there some kind of stamp in the back of it that you could do some internet sleuthing on? Indeed.

I mean, I didn't want to talk about my skillet, but the fact that you brought it up. Yes. And, you know, I don't have it in front of me right now, but I'm pretty sure it's Griswold. And so I found myself on a website last night. Griswold has been making these cast iron skillets, I think, since like the 1880s. And you can analyze the type of logo that you're paying. Was that before Clark got into non-nutritive cereal coating? When did Schubert say that?

dip come out speaking of case trust um but uh so you can like kind of analyze it like i think originally it was like eerie griswold maybe because it was made in eerie pennsylvania then eventually the name changes okay yeah and so i found this website you know just like it's like a weblog kind of thing somebody wrote up and it explains like okay if it's the diamond shape logo it's from this period if eerie is no longer part of the name it's from this period now it sounds like the ones you really want the ones from the earliest 20th century is the griswold with the big cross logo but the um word griswold is italicized it's called the slant logo that's what you want i don't have the slant logo i have the one that came after that the big logo but just big block letters not italicized um which puts it between night one site said between 1920 and 1930 another implied it might be between 1920 and 1940 but either way as i clean just years i mean generations of gunk off of this thing and restore it much of the gunk being ours boy there is a whole world of ebay on this i'm now i know and the thing is not like once it's restored like i could conceivably i don't know if i could get it but i could list it for like three or four hundred bucks actually which i know that like good whoa good um cookware is expensive anyway but I'm not going to do that but I'm really enjoying the process I was telling Genevieve all this stuff about the logo last night she's like you're turning into me like what is this like I don't usually geek out on this kind of stuff but I think you add the pleasure of just like returning something to its original form and removing layers and layers of gunk from something I think that's how it caught this brain of mine you know

now let me ask a kind of a stupid question and one that you think at 46 years of age uh living in the world we live in and with a daughter who's on the record as being really into also rehabbing at least this one cast iron um you know pan that she got what is what is the deal with smart cars no what is the deal as opposed to so here's what i have here at my little apartment i have some like you know super non-stick pan that i bought nothing super fancy i probably got it at um bed bath and beyond or something you know and part of a set it's not late crusade it's not anything high end maybe at some point when i'm back in a more kind of permanent living situation i'll i'll get some good quality kitchen implements again but when you're all done with this or when a person has a really high functioning working uh stainless uh steel or whatever excuse me um cast iron skillet like that yeah cast iron skillet which i guess is aluminum right because it's griswold things as the griswold aluminum company oh um i'm not see

i think we're you're about to maybe go a little bit too far into the science behind cast iron which i don't know much about but i'm sure by tomorrow i will be an armchair expert in but

well i'm looking at i'm looking at um griswoldaluminum.com sticky note and pen set eerie aluminum cast cookware iron and it's got the it does it appears to have the um this picture has the slant logo, which I just learned about. Does it have the heat ring, though?

That's the thing.

Well, no, but I mean, I know I can find you an early heat ring if you want.

I can get you a heat ring with nail polish.

With nail polish. I mean, literally, that is a thing that, as you now know, keeps coming up on these listings I'm looking at.

I don't think cast iron is aluminum. I think maybe they're just, it says cast iron is an alloy of iron that contains 2% to 4% carbon.

Then what are these people doing with this Griswoldaluminum.com? Is that just a...

Why are they allowed to... Yeah, why are they allowed it?

Maybe they're just being silly. Anyway, here's my question. What is it about this kind of pan or skillet that is so much better than a standard pan or skillet? Does it flavor the stuff differently? Does it cook more evenly? What's the actual sales pitch on this?

So I don't think that I've ever had this in a working condition to the point where it's actually nonstick. But supposedly it's like the original nonstick surface. You have something like this, and if you take care of it and you season it and you, like, kind of let the oils that you're cooking with continue to penetrate it, it will remain nonstick, which is cool. The thing that is, like, the most practical – and, again, I am not an expert on this stuff, but I will just say the thing that is the most practical purpose of it for me that I always used it for was you can cook something on the stovetop and then throw it in the oven. Like, this thing can – you know, the whole thing is cast iron. So, like, you can't just take one of your saucepans. I mean, some saucepans you can if they're – Sure, like industrial kind. Yeah, exactly. But like, you know, like you can't just take a lot of your nonstick pans with a plastic handle or whatever and throw it in the oven. But here you can like sear a steak or you can sear a roast on top on your stove top, you know, just like a few seconds per side to sear it up. Then you throw the whole thing into the oven and you let it roast for a few hours or whatever. So it's very versatile in that. way uh okay that makes sense because i i mean i grew up we had cast iron all the time in our house but that's because it was just cheap and i don't think there was there was no youtube at the time there was no way my parents were uh you know putting um oven cleaner on it and um putting it in a plastic bag or doing any of these processes it was really because my mom probably got it at a garage sale and it was probably two dollars and it was probably cheaper than going to pennies and buying like a real set of and it always struck me a little bit as i mean ours were not grungy but it seemed grungy to me you know what i mean like it just seemed like like i was envious when i would go to like peter williams's house and they just had like nonstick cook you know nonstick cookware i was just kind of like that just seems cleaner to me for some reason

well also now see i maybe i i might have been over out over my skis on this i don't think i could list it for 400 but i see some that are totally uh kind of rejuvenated that are listed in the 300s but it doesn't mean they're going to go for that i also see almost the exact version of my pan here that might be a couple of inches smaller that is uh not cleaned up at all and quite in the condition of mine before i started cleaning it and that's just listed for um like 65 or something so my apology i was probably getting a little bit too exuberant over this

Well, you just blew the deal. I'm getting emails already from the listeners who are actually in a bidding war. Jamie in Mississippi was willing to pay $600 and have her employee match half of that. I know. You've talked yourself out of quite the windfall, my friend.

Well, that's the thing. I will never. I mean, I'm really excited about about restoring this again. And this is something and I'm trying to say this in a way that doesn't sound insulting to Genevieve. Genevieve is the one who found this thing years and years ago and and kind of did the first restoration. I just think that I think that our knowledge has come a long way as to how to truly restore this. And I don't think she ever really restored it to its like, you know, gleaming glory. And so it's really fun to actually be doing this a second time. And also the fact that, like, we just have this skillet. Also, this is a there's a word or a phrase for this. And I can't think of what it is, but I love pondering it, Luke. I'm sure I've pondered it on the show with you before. i love any product any like object that gets better with use and age right like a leather

jacket i guess you could say patina in a way all the patina really is just the show it's just how you know when age sort of starts to show on anything really that gets a patina on it but i know what you mean like like something i'm with you on that i do all i also appreciate that something that is better uh 20 years later than it is the day you bought it yeah and it's well

other products often will kind of break in and kind of find the shape of whatever they need to find the shape of or what have you that's an interesting thing to think about and then to try to think of other products that kind of fit into that as well i milk products are like that

for me this sure obviously yeah the more you use them first it's milk you get to drink which is fine yeah but then it becomes kind of a cottage cheese which is better and then eventually a to the hospital right which pays for itself kind of the best uh this is not restoring a cast iron skillet or pan but um i i did an ultimate cool guy move today andrew right before the show now i apologize to you for delaying our start time i was did not i actually got up really early i've been having a great morning feeling rested refreshed having some great fun morning times

with the cat um but uh i'm glad that tickled you i did i forgot you had a cat for a second so i didn't know where that was going i thought you were just having great fun morning times with

yourself in the newspaper i was that as well that as well but um so it was like i was i was i was having a good productive morning but i just kind of didn't time things out right and then uh got out of my little jog and uh and anyway i'm sorry because i i started us a almost an entire hour late but anyway i was kind of so i was hustling in the kitchen right before the show and i've got if i'm standing so the way my kitchen in this apartment is is like it's there's the refrigerator and the stove and everything they're kind of against one wall and then there's an island that has the sink in it and the dishwasher and a little bar which is now the only place i can eat i've mentioned this because if i try to sit on the couch and have my dinner and watch my baseball games or whatever my chris hayes the cat just harasses me unmerciful so and the other thing i've learned is the position that i sit in at the kind of whatever you want to call it the bar the counter the position i sit in is critical because if i sit i played this tape the other day if i sit so i'm sort of facing the tv and my leg is kind of coming out from this chair it gives the cat the cat is able to jump from the couch to that leg just barely and i played the audio of this happening the other day but if i swivel in and i'm facing the bar like i'm at a lunch i'm at a diner counter and if i'm facing in if i'm like nicholas cage in the movie could happen to you where he just says to bridget fonda i'm gonna split this lottery ticket winning with you and then he does and then uh they fall in love and he leaves rosie perez if i do like

that i didn't say i wasn't going to see it luke if i basically if i'm sitting in the right the

correct position while eating lunch she can't jump over to me so it's like there's so many i told you this the other day there's so many calculations now in my life in this apartment that i didn't used to have to make including the exact angle I'm sitting at so as to be able to eat my veggie rice soup from vegan basil Thai in peace so anyway in the kitchen on the other side of that breakfast bar area I got the coffee maker it's on the island it's kind of by where the sink is and then in the refrigerator I don't have a refrigerator that has water in the like door or whatever so I have one of those Brita just kind of tanks and so with a spout though right you have one in the refrigerator

with a spout I should get into that yeah I just have a Brita like I have a Brita like pitcher like it's like actually a friend came over it's actually kind of rude this a while back although she was right we had gotten a new Brita probably like in the past I don't know five years or something I saw it and I was like you know let's get a Brita let's we used to have one of those and friend came over and said what is the 90s and I was like yeah I guess I don't know if it was a 90s thing but it was very much an early 2000s like i'm an adult now i got a brita yes yeah that

was a that was the way if you were i mean if you were pretty much the same age if you're our age and you were in your like mid-20s and you were really kind of you're really doing well for yourself yeah you know like you're like things are kind of going okay and you're establishing that you're not just drinking out of the tap you've got the brita there's the filters you're changing them occasionally although i don't think i've ever changed a filter in my life but you know you'd go over to someone's house and they'd have that Brita pitcher in the in the refrigerator you'd think okay things are going all right for the Walsh houses but anyway um so all of this is to say this Brita this Brita tank is kind of like it's running a little low on water which means the water comes out kind of slowly now there's not a ton of sort of gravity pushing it and so I'm sitting there and I have a like a um clean canteen powder coated little um you know, water bottle thing that I like to drink my cold refrigerator water out of after I take my jog. So I start, I open the refrigerator door and I start filling this little clean canteen with water, but it's taking forever. But I also, Andrew, I want a cup of coffee, which is, so to my left is the refrigerator that's open with the Brita thing. To my right is the coffee machine.

Okay. So we're getting into some elastic man scenario here. I'm picturing you trying to stretch

yourself it's that i mean it's kind of a reach but it's i've got i've got two potentially andrew two liquids going at the same time that are filling at different rates and because i'm realizing it's taking forever for this clean canteen to fill and so i could use this time to fill up my coffee cup okay but i've got to be listening for the change in how the water is filling the clean canteen to get a sense for how close to the top of the clean canteen the brita is because i don't want this happens actually sadly more often than i'd like to admit which is i will start filling a glass anything and i there's a little shelf that i can put the glass or the um clean canteen on and then flip the brita thing so it's actually very convenient i can

actually leave something there filling up in the refrigerator i was picturing you have to i was

picturing you having to have to hold it down you can there's just kind of this game it's a dangerous game dano but it's one i play a lot because i'm so impatient that i can't just stand there this more on my dopamine reset later but like i'm just i can't just stand there and watch this thing take two minutes to fill up because it just feels like that's i don't have time for that i need a multitask so sometimes that'll start happening and i'll go do something else and then i'll totally forget about and i'll come back and it's like dumped water everywhere so good so so i'm filling So I'm like in some kind of action movie But instead of holding two weapons I'm just holding two, a hot and a cold beverage And I'm filling the coffee with my right hand And I'm watching that, making sure I don't overfill that And I'm listening, Andrew, with my ear To where my left hand is nearby Which is the clean canteen filling And right as I'm filling the coffee And I put the coffee pot back in the thing I hear the water in the clean canteen Hitting a certain timber or a certain pitch that tells me it's a second from being full, and I flick the spout on the Brita clothes, and I got both of them, and I just walked in here, and if you hear a certain swagger in my voice today, Andrew, it's because I did it. Sorry, ladies. I pulled it off.

He's taken.

Until Becca hears this.

In which case, he's available again, but why would you? No, I know that feeling. I felt very cool. cool about that i'm sorry sure now let me ask you this though i'm just like what do i want to do i want to let's just really bro down on this brita um so you have a big tank in their title bro down on a brita and then so it's got that it's got that um that nozzle i guess that i'm jealous of immediately um is it a pain to refill so like it sounds really convenient until it's time to refill

it no it it is something i put off for far too long but i can't blame it on it being particularly inconvenient because all i do is uh pick it up but you got to pick it up kind of by both ends and then i place it in the sink and then it's got a little flap on top and i have you know the the sink or the the faucet here pulls it's got a little thing that you know the the nozzle pulls down on a hose yeah and so i just pull that down and i place it in the top where the you know so The water's going into a certain container where then it will filter. It will go through the filter process. And I just turn that bad boy on and go about my next three, four minutes. And then it's full. And I put it back in the fridge. The whole thing takes under four minutes.

But you glossed over the part that I'm having trouble picturing. Is it like heavy and awkward getting it back? Maybe I'm picturing it bigger than it really is. I was going to ask if it's heavy and awkward. Are you Liz-lemoning it into the refrigerator? Not if you're strong like I am. Oh, I see.

you have functional strength like i do remind me are you available again where are we on that it's not like a call again i'll tell you the thing i would never have the confidence to do would be to put one of those water cooler water bottles on something yeah right that's i don't

know if you got that but there's a famous scene of liz lemon just hamming it up hamming it up just on on 30 rock trying to replace it i mean it gets to like almost tim heidegger levels of physical comedy it's great it's not like that it's it's it's it's easy to deal with

And it's, I have to say, it's a really, really good solution to drinking endless numbers, amounts of bottled water, which is both expensive and also, I mean, even with the attempts to sort of cut down on the waste created. And I'm not on any high horse about environmental stuff. Believe me, I need to work on my carbon footprint. But I've never, since I got this thing, I've never, ever needed to buy, I still buy bubble water. but i've never bought flat water again because i've got plenty of it and it's filtered and it

tastes really good so i would recommend yeah that's interesting yeah now that we have a downstairs refrigerator which i want to say not to brag but there's just no way to say that without bragging i'm such a braggart now that we have a downstairs refrigerator it is tempting to like get something like that um vives boy do you have any need for a giant refrigerator that's pretty

new um i don't think so what's going on well because i know one of your refrigerators you said sounds like a mac truck when oh yeah that is true our upstairs one is pretty janky what are you uh talking about well okay this little house that i bought that i'm now um really beginning in earnest i'm going to be doing the show from up there a lot this summer um which won't probably sound significantly different to the listeners but um just as a heads up i guess i'm just letting you know andrew yeah okay that um but i went up there yesterday i met my dad you met your dad i know oh my god it's crazy he's been dead for 15 years it was a shock oh i didn't mean it that way what is that show too i think that's uh parks and rec when they're doing some kind of thought experiment with um with andy andy uh he goes dad you're alive yeah what would he's taking a test

to be a police officer what would you do if you pulled somebody over and end up being your dad

um no i met walt b up there and because he's gonna help me out this summer with some stuff and of course it's pretty funny because so becca's brother and uh his wife had been staying there they had sold a house in portland and the real estate market in portland like in so many places was just so superheated that even if you have the resources and the wherewithal to buy a house it doesn't mean you'll actually be able to buy a house in the short term everyone's getting out bid all the time so they were living up in this place that i bought um while they were making offers on places and now they eventually got a really cool house here in portland and they're they're back in that but so this is like the kind of the first few weeks that it's been sort of uninhabited and i can go up there and of course my dad and i our plan is to just like kind of walk around a little bit eye a few things kind of decide on a timeline of a couple of projects And I have no tools in this house This house is totally empty What I have is a tool set That Chase Bank just mails you If you get a mortgage with Chase It's kind of like a Thanks for doing business with us gift Which it's just It got mailed to the house Because it's the address of the home Where the mortgage is right So I've had this little thing I brought it in one day And so I open it And it's got, like, a child-sized hammer in it. Like, it's one of those kind of plastic cases. And it's got, you know, very, very simplistic and probably relatively low quality couple screwdrivers, a little ratchet, a comically small hammer. Right. And we're standing there and we're kind of looking at this one wall that I'm going to ultimately try to get opened up. So there's a little bit more light and it's a pretty cool view of the river and stuff. And I just take out this tiny hammer, Andrew, and I just start pulling like, you know, the windowsill off. i just start just i just go ham i started i i demoed like half of a wall with this tiny toy hammer because i was like we got to see what's in this wall uh-huh it was also like some kind of weird so satisfying i've never had it was really doing that it was super satisfying and like um and also compulsive in a way yeah i was gonna say yeah because basically what happened was i bought this house a while ago i had big dreams for kind of spiffing it up and then i ran into the actual the incredibly incredibly um outrageous cost of trying to do home renovation now the cost of what architectural plans actually cost to get them drawn up the timeline on construction crews all of the real world things that go into trying to do a fairly substantial remodeling project all sort of like came together in one sort of gut punch for me and so not unlike that truck um i was sort of like well i got i got this little house and i i would love to try to

i would love to try to improve it and make it more livable for me and etc but like i just don't know if that's even going to be possible was this have i made in the words of michael bluth a huge mistake actually in the words of most of the bluths i think in that episode at least he and joe both say it um but uh and so anyway things seem to be moving along now actually okay i have a contractor you're hired we've got plans there's a something you know things are moving and and so now just like even just taking down starting to just with this again if you could see how silly this hammer was that i was using to just do a half hour of demo and pull some stuff down and see into one of the walls and just be like this is beginning it's starting the quickening is here release the kraken any any other sort of mythological let's go thing uh it was it felt very good it was very

satisfying i believe it also i mean there there's so much psychology here to delve into which i'm probably not the right person to do it but um is part of it too that you know i always have this i don't think it's a philosophy but i have a saying you know often you have to make a mess before you can start cleaning it up like you got to make it worse before it can get better right it's kind of like the only way i mean it's it's another version of the only way out is through sort of like you began like you could have just put that off more i didn't know that you had people who were actually living there for a while like you could have put it off some more then it could still be a place where well maybe i i go up there and i i'll just crash there one night or whatever before i start the project but by but by physically damaging it you had yes you had now it's unlivable like now you have to now the only way now the only way out is through right now you have to yes and

i loved it it was exactly right it was like it was like i blew up the bridge behind me yeah and now i have to just go win this battle because there's no going back across the bridge and by the way the amount of the actual i could it would be weird but i could totally live in this place As is with this, you know, with 20% of the kind of, I don't even know what you call it, the wall. It's not even sheetrock. It was basically like some paneling gone. I mean, it would look really unsightly. Yeah, but it would be very unsightly. Yeah, and unsettling. It would be unsightly, but it would be what I kind of can't believe. And now this is too loud and too specific and not interesting to our listeners. But the whole thing about this particular house that intrigued me, and it is a very humble little house, Is that it has this really Pretty great view of the Columbia River And the house is a hundred years old And there's one There's two windows That look towards the river One of them has that move where it's like The gas, you know, the gas seal Was sort of Penetrated and so it's just Foggy, like the interior of the double pane Glass is foggy Oh god, I hate that, yes And so that's it, and there's not any kind of The outside space is not there's no deck it's not it's like you have like the gem of this particular house is this really incredible view and for a hundred years folks have been living in this house and no one ever thought hey we should look in that direction which is just shocking to me like i just don't i don't understand that psychology so i'm i'm very excited about trying to they were waiting for the methane processing plant they were like once that And you're right. Maybe that was the thing. They were like, we're not going to build a deck looking out on a methane processing plant. Who would do that? So maybe they weren't making such an irrational decision. But I feel like I started on that stupid story for some reason. But we don't have to go back to whatever the origin point was. The point was I was up there yesterday swinging a tiny hammer and trying to make some small amount of progress on that house.

How long of a drive is that from where you live? Like door-to-door traffic? It's like 30 minutes, 35 minutes. Oh, that's shorter than I thought. I thought you were going on at least an hour-long trek every time you did this. No, no. That's better. I mean, 35 minutes isn't nothing, but it's more like a manageable commute. It is. Absolutely. It's like three quid.

Yeah, right. And, of course, like everything, it sort of depends on traffic. Like, because it's in Washington State, so the traffic getting out of Portland in the afternoon, so going north on I-5 is a total disaster. because everybody lives in Vancouver and Battleground and Camas, and then they come into Portland to work, and then they go back to Washington State. So if I'm coming back, like I'm going to go back out there this afternoon, I'm meeting with a different person about a part of the project, and I'm going to be coming back in, but I'll be coming back in at like 5, and there will be zero traffic for me returning to Portland at 5 o'clock, as there was zero traffic yesterday. So that's kind of convenient. If I time it right, it should be A-OK. So, all right. Now that we've got all that settled, let's take a quick break and then we come back. No, wait. Hold on.

So what's the deal with this refrigerator? Oh, yeah. Andrew, well, that was where this whole thing started. What's it going to take to get me into a refrigerator? Wait, don't go with the refrigerator.

What's in the fridge?

This seems like Genevieve should be a part of this conversation already. I'll tell you that much. Or not, Andrew. Or hear me out.

How much how much do you want this refrigerator situation to become so there is again I'm not you know what that's not true I am going to judge the people who I bought the house from because I get a lot of their old mail and a lot of it's for the NRA so screw you but like these were the kinds of decisions and I want to mention that this person was a commercial fisherman the house was a perfectly intact you know livable nice house. These are not people that were suffering from poverty or lack of resources or anything like that. I mean this house was – even though I keep saying it's a humble little house. A humble little house still costs a shitload of money in this day and age. So I want to be clear that this is not really a class issue or a resources issue. But they just – there was just things about this house that I was like, huh? One of them was the refrigerator is on the front porch.

Oh, yeah. You mentioned that.

It's too big. They bought – they went out and bought. It's like massive. it is like a refrigerator it's almost like it feels borderline industrial like it must have been the biggest residential refrigerator they sell it like a lowe's so big that it couldn't i don't think it could get through the door into the kitchen and certainly in this kitchen as it currently exists it's very it's a tiny little kitchen as well it couldn't like there's nowhere for this refrigerator to go if you can get it in the house i don't think there's anywhere in the kitchen where it can go so where is it andrew it's on the front porch yeah you don't like that you don't like that at all and it's like buy a smaller fridge there's actually a spot in this kitchen where a reasonable sized refrigerator or maybe even one that's like three quarters the size of a typical fridge okay um could go very conveniently and it would work you'd have a refrigerator in your kitchen it wouldn't be the largest refrigerator ever but it would it would work instead their decision was no let's go outside every time we need to get something out of our fridge so that we can have this massive massive refrigerator somebody knew somebody right

somebody knew somebody with a fridge something something fell off a truck yeah like i don't even mean to imply it's like you know hey my cousin yes they they didn't choose this refrigerator this refrigerator chose them in some way but it is one of those ones that it's got like a kind of a

stainless steel or at least a fake stainless steel outside so it's a pretty new still but that doesn't that doesn't um um refute your your theory which is you're right somebody probably there was some reason how this came into their life and they probably thought it was too good to pass up even though it meant going to the front porch to get the food when they needed it which just strikes me as totally bizarre so if i mean it might even be too big for your kitchen like it probably is we could get it in there but it would be like then most of your kitchen would be refrigerated

Yeah, no, it's a problem. We actually have a very small slot that we're able to get our current refrigerator in. And when we had electrical issues with one of the outlets, like not to – this is so boring. I'm boring myself even getting into it. But like one of the outlets didn't work for a while. We got that resolved now. But because we had to go to an alternative outlet that was just like a few feet away but on the other wall of the corner, if you can picture it, like the refrigerator almost didn't fit in there. And Genevieve couldn't quite – like the door.

We could open the door of the refrigerator, but it wouldn't stay open just because of the way we kind of had it jammed in this very small space that was completely unforgiving. And it drove Genevieve bananas. It's funny how we all have our things like I'm the one who usually let small things drive me up a wall, right, that I can't let go of. That did not bother me at all. But I would hear Genevieve swearing in the kitchen, like unloading groceries and just like swearing beside herself about this fridge, fridge, fridge, refrigerator, refrigerator, refrigerator. And then when the electrician came and we were able to use electrician came, we were able to use the other outlet. The refrigerator goes back, I'm telling you, like another half an inch or something into the wall, and Genevieve is dancing a dance of joy in the kitchen because the door will now stay open.

Oh, my gosh. Those are the little things. Okay, one last teeny tiny, sorry, thing, and then we can go to the break again. Remember when I said to the listeners a few weeks ago, buckle up for kitten talk? Well, in about three weeks, buckle up for home reno talk again. So one of the things that's funky about this house is that when you walk into the living room, the far wall, the one that looks out on what was going to be the methane plant, the window is like the top of the windows are at like six feet exactly, meaning I'm almost looking down to look out the window. you would definitely be looking down and it's just like who are the architectural wizards who came up with this one how did you build this house so that this one wall which again has the cool view and everything you want to emphasize is anyone over six feet is like looking down like the ceiling is not crazy low but it slopes in this weird way and it has to do with a roof that's above it and drainage and making sure the pitch of that roof is whatever doesn't matter but so part of what i was doing with that toy hammer yesterday was getting in there getting that wind all that framing off of the windows and looking and what i realized was there's like probably eight inches of just furring it's called so basically just kind of wood that was between where the support beam is there's a big heavy lamb beam that goes across that holds up the second floor of the house and then the windowsill the top of the windows the thing i was staring at and there's about eight more inches in there of just kind of like useless fill meaning when i put new windows and it can go up by eight inches and when i tell you i did a dance of joy in that in that little living room when i realized that it was because i thought the beam the reason that the top of the window was where it was because that's right where the beam right right but there's a little bit of i mean you're always going to need some sort of framing for anything but it's going i will be able to when this is all said and done i believe stand in the middle of this living room and stare out the window and not have to crouch and that like that was probably like vee's feeling of that thing moving back four inches like i that was a game changer for me yesterday which is funny because i don't think of views as being very important to you usually my dad was so funny yesterday because like my dad is just so go with the flow and just like i mean he's just the most bloom where you're planted kind of happy-go-lucky guy who's just cool with anything and he um i was giving my whole like borderline manic description of everything the first thing i did was when i walked in uh was and i didn't have the hammer out yet i just started ripping down these like old 70s drapes they had one of those things andrew if you don't know the difference between a valance yeah jabot don't even talk to me favorite i don't know what

you call that little you know that thing that's like a mini set of curtains that goes above where the real curtains are oh yeah yeah that is that is a valance i think i believe that's a valance right so this is the other thing that was wild to me was the the p somebody at some point presumably the previous owners had at some point paid probably not insignificant amount of money to have um blinds put in the kind that hang down and they're like a bunch of individual slats of plastic that you bring across real conference room energy and then curtains that would go across that and then a valance above those curtains okay and in order for the blinds now imagine this in order for those blinds because when you're when you're when you're moving those blinds they're on a track that track itself lowered the window situation by another six inches yeah of course yeah like so i walk in there and by the way i'm i can't stress this enough these windows no one could ever see you you're looking out on a valley like there are no human beings that would be able to see into this place from the angle where those windows are so i walk in there and i just like walk over and i just start ripping these curtains down the valance the blinds and i'm Like, we gotta get light in here. And he goes, you are really. your mom's son and I was like yes yes I am do you plan on having um morning cups of coffee nude standing in front of that window once it's all said and done continuing to have morning nude coffee but right now remember you live in a city and people can see you man I'm staying no I'm staying there on Saturday night and I'll probably do that on Sunday morning okay it's also really fun to let bubbles run wild in there because it's the whole place is carpeted and I'm going to take the carpet out because I don't like it but for now bubbles has never been on because i have hardwood floors mostly in this apartment the place where she grew up early days they also had hardwood floors because that's i went over there to get her she was like a kid in a ball pit she was like a kid at like a jump zone trampoline center like she just was just like jumping straight up in the air and doing like twists and like she was loving because it's like a very thick pile carpet yeah and it's it's wall to wall and it's in like every room so she was just like as happy as could possibly be there so did you do that thing where she lays down stretches out and then drags herself across the floor using her like by kind of crawling across the floor our cat will do that sometimes on our because we have wall-to-wall carpeting in our basement for the first time and she'll do this thing where she kind of like stretches out like just big morning stretch but then she'll like kind of pull herself along the floor a little bit i don't think that bubbles has perfected that move but i'm gonna i'm gonna keep monitoring that she's uh sleeping right as i realized she's sleeping in the sunbeam here which i think is kind of her new she's much like rudy had figured out when the podcast was over she's also got that figured out so like i'm talking to you she's asleep she's totally fine

but then when i say uh no mountain too tall and then turn off the microphone and recording she will wake up from now the lack of the sound of my voice yep which is kind of surprising you I think, if anything, she'd fall into a deeper sleep without me here yammering. It's like me at the end of the show. I wake up at the lack of the sound of your voice. Right, exactly. Just in time to do after these messages. Some offense, yeah. All right, we got to do this break. So anyway, you're taking the fridge, I think is the takeaway.

Blow it up.

All right, quick break, then back with more 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. Get set. Now ready. Ready. Hey, look at this.

We're still seeing a few dazzling donors and donors of the day and other folks kind of slowly filter into the system because we, of course, we sort of closed out the last fiscal year. We did the last TV telethon in Denver. Let the fun begin. And a few people heard that and went, wait a sec. Huh? And so we're still in the process of untangling a few things. But we certainly want to make sure we say thanks to everyone who was able to support us during the last year's thing. And that includes dazzling donor Ian Seafelt of Superior, Wisconsin. Now, we met, even though he's from Superior, we met Ian in St. Paul after a live wire. We had a TVTL meetup. Yes, I remember it at that. Was it Great American Brewing? Oh, right. Yeah, good memory. Ian says, sorry for the late submission. I don't have too much to say, so I hope it isn't a waste, but I wanted to say that in the run-up to this year's THON, Andrew, I think, said that all the talk of the show getting shut down wasn't intended to make listeners worry. Well, I do worry all the time. TBTL number 776 was my first episode, and since then I've listened to lots of podcasts, most of which haven't survived, including some gems like sports with Katie Nolan. Card Talk. Oh, gosh. I am a Katie Nolan admirer. I like every project that Katie Nolan launches is for me. Garbage Time, that TV show I thought was really great. It's such a good name for a show, too. One of my favorite names because it was a late-night, light-hearted sports show called Garbage Time. It was such a – I think of it every time because I still have a little pop-up on my phone that tells me when it's Garbage Time, and I always think of her show. um card talk the world's greatest magic the gathering podcast um which uh i i know andrew you were saying you knew you know ian to be a big uh magic yeah and i think we were talking pokemon too maybe oh maybe um or so i feel like we were talking about pokemon and the way ian was trying to sell me on all these things was it's basically gambling which oh right selling me on it uh unspoken realms ask me another futility closet how it got in your mouth huh i'd like that title i hope that's about food um take it with you the diablo podcast top eight magic podcast and how to do everything i know that i must be missing at least a few but these are just the ones i still keep in my podcatcher i'm glad tbtl isn't on that list We

a second. How got in your mouth is a friend of mine's podcast, Catherine Spears, or it might be Spires, but she's not a close friend. Not like good friends. We worked together in LA. I put her on KCRW. She was really good. That show, I thought that show was still going. Well,

not according to Ian. Oh, Catherine, what's going on? I appreciate the daily nature of the podcast and your imaginary friendship. Thanks for all the content. Power out. Well, thank you, Ian, for the support, And we are definitely not trying to, I really hope, I mean this very genuinely, the last thing we ever want to do is there's enough real stuff to be anxious about in the world. The last thing we would ever want to do is make folks feel anxious about this show going away or use that as some sort of a leverage to get donations. That's absolutely not what we're trying to say. So sorry, Ian, if we worried you. I guess we're just trying to be realistic when we reconfirm with the listeners that if we lost even $1, our bosses would fire us. And that is that's that's 100 percent the truth.

I sincerely don't want to unduly worry people, but it's also not bullshit when we talk about how important the donations are. I mean, that's the truth of the matter. And by the way, Catherine does have a new, I guess, a podcast that maybe picked up where that one left off called Smart Mouth. Not that I'm supposed to be promoting other people's podcasts right now, but if Ian is still kind of craving that, Catherine does have a new food podcast called Smart. I don't even think it's that new.

I think the natural sequel to how it got in your mouth is how it left your butt. I mean, if we're thinking about the beginning, how it came in and then where it's going, don't you think?

The podcast about plumbing? I think I'm just going to ignore that and say that recently in Smart Mouth was our new colleague, Jesse Sparks. Jesse Sparks has a new podcast on APM, the One Dish, is it called? I'm not great at promoting things right now. Sorry, I don't have the copy in front of me.

Yeah, it's a one recipe per episode. And I don't think that's even what it's called, but it's like a short little kind of – it's basically, my sense is, I really like – The One Recipe. It is called The One Recipe. me i i really like these kind of very quick like maybe one to two minute video tutorials on how to make something um that pop up a lot on tiktok in places like that because what it does for me as someone who's not great at cooking is it makes it feel less intimidating when you just see the mise en place and it's just like and it's all kind of like super fast so it's like the water's boiling and then the red peppers are going in and then this and then this and then this And I'm like, oh, those are all things I can do. Sometimes if I open up like a legit, like the joy of cooking or something, some really real cookbook, and you look at like a two-page process, for me anyway, it can be kind of intimidating. So the Jesse Sparks One Recipe, the cool thing is it's one recipe and it's not intimidating. So everybody should check that out.

Yeah. I agree. We have learned something about presentation as far as food is concerned and trying to make it less intimidating. And even believe it or not, I think some of those some of those like kind of boxed meal things that we've even promoted on this show before. But, you know, the things where it's like there's various levels of preparation. Like there are things that I learned in there, like honestly, like shocking a pan. Like I didn't know when I was cooking with a nonstick, like heavy bottom skillet, like you were describing the other day, Luke, not not even my cast iron one. Sometimes if you're cooking with a marinade and it kind of heats on there and it sticks and I never knew how to get it out other than scrubbing it, which isn't great for pans. one of those recipes is like just take the really cold wine and pour it in there or ice cold water or something and it comes off immediately did you know that trick that's called shocking yeah it's changed everything now often like if you do it with a little bit of wine you can then use that you know that's deglazing it right yeah exactly it's kind of shocking or deglazing it but if you just are doing it for cleaning purposes and when he said that that shocked me yeah anyway little things like that um whereas i have a joy of cooking and it's funny it kind of takes the joy out of cooking it's like so dense you know i know it's a classic but it's so dense yeah exactly so

all right ian thank you for the support we appreciate you and we're not going anywhere for the foreseeable future so you can now focus on other things to be anxious about hello and welcome to top story i heard about this story on twitter from my friend bobby allen who's a great tech reporter over at NPR. And I first started talking about him on this show when he did a really great piece about Elizabeth Holmes' father-in-law at the Elizabeth Holmes trial. I remember you telling me about that. He had no relationship to... He was just a... He fixed up old cars and he was just an interested citizen and it turns out he's like one of San Diego's richest people. He has a classic car museum.

and his son is the baby daddy of elizabeth holmes um and it's just like a great piece of i kind of feel like a style of reporting that i just wish i heard more of on npr i know that npr's mission now is to really cover important issues as well they should but all of the seriousness of the world seems to have really sort of pushed out just the quirky shit or at least the kind of shit that i used to do because lord knows i wasn't capable of covering real stories so i was the guy going Like, huh, Tom Tankredo and Steve King really look the same in Congress, and we, the reporters, sometimes don't know who we're talking to. Those were the kind of hard-hitting—even though both of those people are just absolute horrible people and politicians. But anyway, all of that is to say, I saw Bobby tweeting about this, and then he had a piece on Morning Edition today about the fact that Apple has announced that iOS 16 will let you edit and unsend text messages. Apple explains the ability to edit or unsend a message will be available for 15 minutes, and once a message is deleted, users can recover them for up to 30 days. So you can basically, like, if you are on iOS 16 and you send a message, it sounds like you can go back in and edit it, or you can unsend it. And if you delete it, you still have it, and you could then send it up to 30 days, although at that point I think you just won't go ahead and retype it, right? Like, if it was something that you didn't want the person to have so bad that you used the unsend function, probably you're never sending that, hopefully, right? Yeah.

You know, I don't have an iPhone, as we've discussed, so this doesn't affect me too much. But I have been thinking lately why technologies haven't adapted to this. Because, Luke, I saw a commercial. You know, we've talked a little bit about the software slack on this show and your reluctance to delve too far into slack culture at any of your jobs.

You apparently don't laziness, though. It's not I want to be I want to be on the record. It's not that I'm apprehensive about the technology or the app. It's just because I'm lazy.

So, well, yeah, I mean, I understand your reluctance to like you and I were working for APM, But remotely for a few years before Slack became so much such a big part of the work communication culture. And you and I are people who are like, yeah, let's do it via email or let's just get on the phone like you and I didn't even like Zoom for the longest time. We would not Zoom with our colleagues because and for me, it was just like, I don't need to look at you. I just want to pace around my apartment while we brainstorm, you know, thank you gifts or what have you. And of course, a lot of this changed with the pandemic and more people working remotely. And so, you know, I have to use Slack way more than I ever thought. I thought I could just, like, eh, I don't need Slack. But, like, no, Slack is a huge part of a lot of company culture now. It is the way you communicate. If you have teams, it's one of the ways you communicate. I mean, I know that Microsoft has its own ding-ding version of it, like it does everything. But, you know, you need this tool. And this is the way that me and John of APM fame, who joined us for the TBTelethon, this is how we do so much of our work. I think TBTel trivia fame. Yeah, trivia, yeah. anyway all of that is to say when I think of slack I think of it as a work tool I think of it as something that you know we just need it's like I don't know it's just it's another function right but they have an ad campaign going I'm pretty sure they're tv commercials because I think we talked about them on after these messages and I thought it was so goddamn brilliant you'd think like if I were in charge of advertising slack you'd point out all the things I just pointed out teams working remotely you need to bring them together you need to collaborate blah blah blah blah but these commercials are focusing on other aspects of slack and the one commercial that really gets me is why would you send an email when you can't take it back or edit it later use slack like every message you can take back or you can edit and like it's amazing how there's like one tv commercial planted that idea in my head i think about slack differently now and i think about all the other technologies like yeah why doesn't email make it easier for you to there are probably reasons for that and maybe even in some cases kind of like legal reasons like maybe you need some sort of accountability uh and paper trails for things but for text messaging why would not every text messenger on all the major platforms allow editing or or um you know recall

well that's one of the things that they're saying that apple was saying during its announcement they said this was the most requested thing from customers like of course it is everyone has sent a text that was either to the wrong person or or overly emotional or had the wrong info in it or something and the i mean back in the like i'm talking 20 years ago there was an Email. thing called like big string this was when everybody was on hotmail i'm not even kidding you and this was a different i think a different email platform or server and it was i believe it was called like big string or something and the whole point was you could send an email and then pull it back now i don't know how that even worked because like once it's on the let's say i sent it to you at your um earthlink account andrew once it's in your earthlink inbox i don't know how big string would pull it back but this was the whole sales pitch and i don't know if i ever signed up for it but you would think somewhere in the last 20 plus years somebody would have kind of figured this out and realized that we'd all like the ability to pull some of these things back if we can i am i feel kind of bad i don't want to get specific but i i sent a text to two people that i work with recently and it was asking about a certain thing and one of the people responded saying you know this actually all goes this is all approved by our colleague and then kind of did the like person with the an emoji of someone with their arms kind of like so you know and i had also put the colleague i had texted both of these folks and then i just saw in real time i saw my one colleague who responded initially saying oh you're on here lol emoji emoji well what do you think and it wasn't like it wasn't bad bad yeah but it was it was we all just know this there is a tone yep that like you and i would have with each other that we regarding let's just say some apm colleague who we probably love but if they're on the if they're on the the chain it's one thing and if they're off it's another thing and it's not even about shit talking it's just we just

comport ourselves differently yeah absolutely in the same way um i mean well i mean we're talking about it in denver like you and i were you know doing a lot of live streaming various things whether zoom game nights or the live tbtls in the morning and john was in the room with us too and you know we know that we've already started the live stream but our microphones are down but we're not like we're not saying anything that would be in any way taken badly you know we're just small talking or whatever and then at one point i think john or you thought that the mics were open and i just lunged for the board i meant to go back and because there should be actual tape of that like no audio because the mics weren't actually on it was a mistake but i apparently just like lunged for the board like a cat on a hot tin roof i just came up with that um and uh and it's like we weren't saying anything bad i have no idea what we're talking about but i promise you it was not scandalous we're probably just talking about me making coffee in the morning or something you know but it was the idea of somebody overhearing that conversation and you not knowing it

that is petrifying yeah the other thing related to twitter actually that i think is interesting is i have noticed on my account now andrew sometimes and i couldn't figure out what the rhyme or reason was to it let's say that i write a fire tweet as i often do and then someone responds to it instead of like i could give that a little heart if i happen to see it and i like it i could give it a heart now occasionally a response to one of my tweets will just have an up or down arrow i can

just upvote it or downvote it you can upvote it or downvote it okay i was i don't know i don't think yeah you and i saw the link that you put in the show sheet today that sort of explains that This is some sort of a test. I went, of course, to my own Twitter accounts, and it doesn't look like any of my accounts have that. Again, this is an iOS thing. Oh, okay. Gotcha, gotcha.

This is from Twitter's support. I'm just reading this, a tweet from them. Some of you on iOS may see different options to up or downvote on replies. We're testing this to understand the types of replies you find relevant in a convo so we can work on ways to show more of them. Your down votes aren't public while your up votes will be shown as likes. So what y'all don't realize is that sometimes like if you were if somebody replies to a tweet of mine, I they may never know it, but I have the option of up voting it or down voting it.

And if you up vote it, they see that you liked it. But if you down vote it, nobody sees anything. It's just you training the system what you want to see and what you don't want to see. Yeah. Which is it's open season on me tweeting about cake again. is it cake though i'm not sure oh oh i'm sorry i thought you're making a joke about objects looking or cake looking like objects no you're talking about the band cake that you got some

blowback on right right which if i could have downvoted a few of those responses i probably would have um i am tempted here andrew to talk i keep alluding to it about this dopamine reset but maybe just because we're already kind of you know we're an hour into the show and it is a fairly it could be a potential

lengthy topic um maybe i'll push that to tomorrow but um it's a it's an interesting concept that i feel like is you're about to start hearing a lot more about it i feel like it's just kind of it's doing that thing where it's percolating up in the sort of consciousness and the various people that i follow on social media and place ironically some of it involves social media and getting away from it but maybe we can talk about that i would actually let yeah don't let it don't

let the topic slip away i'd like to talk let's prioritize that for tomorrow because i don't

anything about it but it sounds interesting okay 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 all rightly an email or a v-mail did

anybody email in about scott service just going papa bear on it yesterday no about that that's

what i want to talk about that's so um i was so confused while that was happening because i was Only listening on the radio Were you watching it on the game?

It was not any more Apparent if you were watching it on TV Baseball is such a weird There's so many weird ass Unspoken rules that All these, the players The coaches, especially at times The umpires are just so sensitive As I wrote on Twitter There is just nothing more exquisitely Fragile than the ego of a Major league umpire when they've messed up It's just like

What's that one guy saying? I want to say Angel Olsen, but I know it's not Angel Olsen. Angel Hernandez. Angel Hernandez, yeah. Oh, yeah. There was a quick tidbit about that. I think he was the umpire that Schwarber, do I have Schwarber right, was yelling at. And so he kind of made national headlines for some really bad calls during a game, as many umps have. I meant to tell you, did you see the video of fans filming him driving away in his very normcore little car after the game? And they were yelling at him And I could not believe there's not more protection For Major League umpires Especially him after a game like that

I think I might have seen a quick clip But I don't think it registered to me About that, about the safety implications I guess you're right I mean, you know what they should do They should just have robots And then they don't have to protect the robots When they leave the stadium Well, you have other robots that protect those robots Last night's game I mean, the Mariners ended up winning Which was remarkable But it was And I only might this might have been somewhat in my head. And by the way, I wasn't drinking alcohol and I wasn't rage tweeting. I was sort of mildly annoyed texting you all the criminals. But like there must have been at least seven or eight pitches that were clearly outside the zone that were called strikes against the Mariners by this umpire. And I don't even think that this was a particularly bad night. I think this is kind of typical. And it totally affects the count. It affects how the batter behaves. I mean, luckily, we managed to overcome all of that. But I just, like, I don't, I feel like this idea, at least for when it comes to balls and strikes, it seems like this is a very knowable thing now. We can know it with a level of precision that would be, I think, more of a relief to me than having somebody back there. who then, if you take too long after the third strike, or if you do what Rodriguez did the other day, where you kind of mark the inside of the strike zone with your bat in the dirt, you get tossed. They're so fragile, these umpires.

Yeah. I had a thought. Oh, I know what I was going to say. I heard something recently that really sort of changed my perspective on the balls and strikes and balls. calls um because scott service our manager had covid um several weeks ago and i think maybe missed a full week of games right so he was at home watching the games and he said that's such a different experience when you're at home watching the games he's like i understand now why you fans get so hung up on each bad call like each miss strike or whatever interest is it not And it made me think about like when I was producing that talk show for KCRW in Los Angeles, I was so harried all of the time and I was always in the trenches. Right. And we were making editorial decisions, but always with my head just above water. Right. And it was the rare occasion that I would take a day off, but still be in town running errands or something. And I had no idea what the morning meetings were like. I had no idea what was going on, and I would just turn on my radio show on a day when I had nothing to do with it, and I could actually hear it. I could actually hear the radio show for what it was, something I couldn't even do going back and listening on the podcast because I just knew too much of what went into it. And it was an amazing experience. And so I was thinking about Scott Service at home, you know, a man who's – it's literally his job to defend his team and know when to – that's the other thing, too, about, like, when a manager decides to get kicked out. out of a game is kind of like right was it real emotion was it strategic was it to fire up his team does that really work etc but like it was interesting to hear scott service say yeah now i kind of get it you're watching that little box on the on the tv broadcast and you're seeing every single pitch he's like it's just not like that from the dugout it's just it's a totally different

way of experiencing the game right and it's also you don't have as good of an angle yeah from the dugout yeah you're looking at i mean because of depth perception because of all these other factors you have a sense you probably have a better sense of if it's high or low but you do not have a great sense of inside or outside um the strike zone because of your perspective and again it's it's a i think at this point it's a fairly knowable thing you can send in some kind of radar box that that is very precise and it's customized to the particular batter where their knees are and where whatever you set the strike zone at um i wonder if we'll ever get to that point but um I know that's not what anyone emailed about.

No, I'll get to the emails. I'm not against that, by the way, and I'm not some sort of baseball purist. I'm too new to the game to care about that stuff. Although, I guess my takeaway from what Scott was saying was it's like where it can feel, especially this season with so many stories of bad calls, it can feel like the umps are getting worse. But it's probably just, no, the technology is getting better, and we now know.

Yeah, I mean, that's clear. I mean, I guess, you know, I think that's fair. I think that's no, no, no. But I mean, I think that's a fair assessment. But I think as the technology gets better and as we have, I mean, believe me, if I were an umpire, I would if I was part of the major league umpire, you know, whatever union, I would say, OK, we're going to designate one umpire. and your job is to go to wherever the brain center is for those strike zones and your job is to go in there and blow it up and this is a kamikaze mission but we're going to remember you fondly and we're all going to speak your name with reverence but one of us, I mean, that would be public it'd be like in a sci-fi movie where, you know, somebody's got to go crash into the alien ship and the only way to do it is to like you know, basically just fly themselves in there

You mean you want somebody to do such a bad job that you're forcing the hand of...

I'm telling, I'm saying, the joke was, and it was a good joke, as you can tell, because I'm now getting explained more. The point is that the bane of my existence as an umpire in the major leagues would be that little superimposed strike zone box. And I would, I would be, we would be like the Rebel Alliance, and it'd be like someone has to, someone has to go to Endor and turn off the force field of the Death Star, then somebody has to fly in there and shoot a bomb into a small slot because they've been shooting womp rats on Tatooine, like somebody has to take down this strike zone thing is the point of that extremely efficient joke.

Alright, speaking of efficiency, let me play this voicemail, which is efficiently winning over my heart. That was a terrible transition. This is actually a, this is somebody who kind of wants our advice on something here.

Hey boys, it's Zach in Olympia. I've got a bit of a situation here that I thought I might bounce off you. We have a neighbor and actually she passed away last year and we've gotten to know her son who's a good guy he's trying to fix the place up he's going to rent it out next year and that property next door to us has a fairly large yard but obviously nobody's living there now we also have another neighbor across the street who's a good guy he's a little older has a little dog he's been good to us he's helped us out we talked to him from time to time etc guy across the street neighbor walks his dog down to our next door neighbor her house and lets the dog do its business on the side of the house in the yard all the time first of all it drives me nuts second of all it's not really my issue except for the fact that i've been i've got a riding lawnmower not to brag and i've been driving over there and mowing the lawn next door it's probably about at half maker so i went over and did it yesterday and was just rolling through um doggy number two you know i'm not one to shy away from confronting someone in a situation like this but it's also not my fight necessarily but i feel like i could probably talk to the guy across the street and say hey look i'm on the lawn i know what's going on over there you know just a heads up or i could talk to the son of the lady who passed away next door and say look this is what's going on i don't know if you care but you know just so you know but it does drive me a little bit bananas because it seems like a completely inappropriate thing to do but i also don't know if i necessarily want to get involved in this anyways i thought i'd run that by y'all maybe you've got some good advice either way power out

I mean, you are involved in this. If. you're running your lawnmower through the dog turds, right? Yes. So you could say, I don't want a part of this and stop mowing the lawn, but I like your neighborly deeds. And I don't like your neighbor's unneighborly deeds. So I think that, and it sounds like there's no bad blood or anything. It sounds like there's good relationships all around. It sort of seems like, and I'm not saying that I would do this because I'm so non-confrontational, but it sort of sounds like if you see the elderly neighbor go across the street and and you happen to be like looking out your window when he's walking his dog in the neighbor's yard and you see the dog go to the bathroom or even not you can just kind of meander over and say hey i was mowing this the other day and it's just like all the dog poo is kind of getting getting in my tires and everything like would you mind cleaning up after the dog that doesn't

sound like it would be too confrontational i agree that was going to be my advice i mean i was going to and again i also do not like love confrontation so uh this isn't you know doesn't sound like a completely fun situation uh to go talk to this person but what i would say is hey uh you know i'm i i'm i'm kind of mowing this yard just to try to keep the neighborhood you know nice and looking good and stuff and like you said andrew like the other day when i was mowing there was just so much dog poop that was i was rolling through and it was pretty gross and i know that that's mostly from your dog so uh i'm i'm just do me a favor can you pick up after the dog or could you start mowing the lawn yeah now the could you start mowing the lawns maybe a little bit of twisting the twisting the knife but the other thing you could do if you wanted to go seriously non-confrontational while addressing the issue you could go over there with a bag to the elderly neighbor with one of those things you can buy them at any pet store and it's like 30 rolls of poop bags you go over with that and you just say in a nice way not in a passive aggressive way but you say hey i'm kind of trying to take care of this yard just for the sake of the neighborhood and there's been a lot of your dogs poop in the yard which is kind of gross to drive through would you mind just picking up after and look here even some bags just to kind of make it an easier process because this person being elderly i'm thinking there are two things going on one they could be still operating from the era where it was not so socially unacceptable to let your dog poop stay somewhere, we now live in an era where it's very much frowned upon which is why I think little kids don't spend their whole life digging dog poop out of the treads of their shoes with a stick like I did because we just don't live, thankfully, in a country that's full of dog poop and also, he may not know that they sell these very cheap and very effective poop bags that you can buy by the thousand and so maybe, I mean, again if you wanted to be super nice, bring them bring him some poop bags and say hey could you just do me a favor and kind of like pick up after your dog that seems very very solutions oriented and bring him some candy too

just to sweeten the deal you said at first you said take over a bag and for some reason i was picturing a big bag of jelly beans um which would also be a nice thing you know you know i'm not a big fan of the websites like next door or what have you those like micro community websites which i think tend to get pretty toxic pretty quickly but genevieve ran into a neighbor genevieve has really been enjoying kind of meeting our neighbors as they kind of walk their dogs or walk with their kids or whatever around the neighborhood a lot of strollers in this neighborhood um and anyway so genevieve has been meeting some folks also because genevieve has been outside like working on all these different projects like staining the fence i swear she met half the neighborhood when she was staining the fence but um anyway somehow we she and I are both individually signed up for our tiny little micro neighborhood has an actual email list serve it's not even next door it's like proto next door and it goes back to like I don't know 2008 or something like that and we got uh Genevieve had them add our emails to it now it's mostly been quiet I went back and snooped on some conversations that I had heard like some arguments that are that I had heard our neighbors had gotten into years and years ago and i of course wanted to snoop those out right away but aside from that i just have not you know it just doesn't affect me but then yesterday or sunday i guess i got my very first email like a new email pinged on the list serve at first i was like what the hell is this email offering cupcakes am i in somebody's and i was like oh this is our neighborhood this is somebody pinging the email list serve saying hey i just made a bunch of what do you call them red satin brownies or cupcakes or something like that um yeah uh no red velvet red velvet with the the little and they were and there was a picture of them and they looked very nice um and said hey if anybody wants uh any cupcakes come on by i made too many um and so i sent that to genevieve i'm like hey here's your neighborhood at work and she's like yes so she goes over there we have uh we're learning what is growing in our new yard and apparently we have a couple of big peonies Bushes. Yes, I love peonies. Did you hear the one about the guy who...

had three wishes and the first thing he wished for was a bigger peonies anyway you haven't I'm going to take it anyway Genevieve went over there and you didn't want my how it left your butt podcast idea interesting very interesting just flower humor man I don't know what you're talking about but anyway so Genevieve like wrapped up you know made a little bouquet wrapped him up went over there got us some cupcakes and brought him back and got to meet a new neighbor and she's just like i don't know what it's kind of nice it's just nice to have it's nice to have neighbors and to can i all right can i tell you one quick story of weird neighborliness very very quick i um there was one night when genevieve was out and i don't think i told you the story yet genevieve was out somewhere and i was relatively new to living in this neighborhood and i was several beers into my evening and not in a place where i really felt like talking with folks i think genevieve was out of town or something and i was just standing in my little backyard burning some things and our tiny little um portable fire pit thing which is very safe by the way and it's like our little neighborhood is pretty like kind of secluded in its own little world but it is just a couple of blocks away from aurora where some pretty like you know all kinds of business is being had over there and um one day somebody who i associated more with the aurora scene is walking down our street it's late at night and I hear this guy talking out loud to himself really loudly and getting closer and closer to me and I'm just in my own backyard thinking like yeah he probably won't engage with me and I just like I did not want to engage with anybody I wasn't worried or nervous I was like I don't feel like dealing with this but I hear Camaro Kev it was Camaro Kev and Genevieve no this guy's getting closer and closer and then he sees me and I don't really I make a second of eye contact and then he kind of keeps just talking but now I can tell he's talking to me and he's making comments about something on my neighbor's house some sort of awning or something he's like I told your neighbors with all this rain the rain's going to come they got to take care of it fundamentally they got to take care of it otherwise they're going to ruin the structure of their house going to ruin the foundation and like never took a breath like clearly this guy's in his own world right and I'm just kind of like all the weirdly useful kind of architectural and weatherproofing maybe depending on depending on who he's you know depending on whether he's right or what the hell he's talking about and i'm kind of like and often if somebody is talking directly to me if it's the middle of the day i'll nod i'll give them some sort of humanity but in this case i was like i don't feel like engaging with this person at all i'm in my backyard they're just talking to themselves now they're kind of talking to me but they're not really acknowledging me they're in their own world whatever so i'm just going to kind of ignore him and he just keeps walking by and then he's walking by my fence and i haven't said one word to him and i haven't really looked at him much and then he says i do like what you do with the fence though and he just kept on walking and

i felt like the biggest jerk for like yeah like he was clearly off his meds or something but like he really is interested in what's going when he sees it he does and then he says well like i like what you did with the fence though and then he kept walking and that was the end and i did you try to yell something after i'm like thanks no but i did feel really bad for withholding my humanity again i didn't give him a dirty look i didn't say get off my property he never even stopped i didn't do anything rude to him i just didn't go out of my way to be polite like maybe i normally would but it was probably like i don't know after midnight and i'm just like out there by myself

and again that's an understandable that's an understandable response yeah moment but that I also just think it's really funny. That's what's going to happen, Andrew, when I go off my nut.

You're just going to be giving people advice about their property.

It'll all be home reno related. It'll be me just going like, I like that fence. I would have maybe gone with the South Pacific Redwood, which is a little cheaper, but behaves more or less like the Ipe. I'm just telling you, you could dove joint that instead of having a whatever. Like, where my brain will go when it's reaching the end of its, you know, probably functionality will just be home improving and building materials. And, you know, so that's interesting. I wonder what, I mean, the person, despite whatever was going on for them, they noticed that the fence looked better, which it does, by the way.

And he's like, do you like what you do with the fence, though? Anyway, maybe I'll see him again someday. All right. Thanks for letting me jam that last story in at a mile a minute here. Sure.

That's going to do it for today's episode. But we will be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you. And then later that night, I'll be heading off to Chicago where I'm going to do Wait, Wait on Thursday at the new at the Studebaker Theater. No longer will we come to you from the Chase Bank Auditorium.

So that'll be it's an actual different location, not just a name change. Different theater altogether.

It's the beginning. It's the dawning of a new.

New era of, wait, wait, don't tell me. So probably have lots to report from back there. So anyway, thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. Until then, have a great Tuesday. Take care of yourselves. Don't throw behind two batters and then act like surprised you got kicked out of the game. And please remember, no mountain too tall.

And good luck to all.

Scenario, you pull a car over for speeding, you find out that it's your father. How do you handle the situation?

Well, first, I would be like, Dad, you're alive? Power out.