Muse

Thanks for the coffee. Yeah. Tomorrow I'm going to get you a venti, which is two sizes bigger than this one. Twice as generous.

Well, the next day I'll get you a cuarenta.

Oh, will you?

Yeah, it's a 40 ounce.

Then the next day I'll get you a ciento.

You can get here on Friday. I'll have picked you up a guguplexia. Oh, good. Because on next Monday, I'm going to buy you an infinitia.

Damn! T-B-T-L

Rolling out of there With one thing on my mind How does it feel like? I'm serious, how does it feel like? I've only seen one person ever have it As much as you currently do

First I want you two to turn and look at each other Oh, now that's nice Just stare deeply into each other's eyes Yeah. Good. Now say the first thing that pops into your brain. I don't want to touch sandpaper.

I like the whiz.

It is evolutional. It is anthropological. It is biological.

Well, I'll tell you one thing. I'm not eating the Taco John's. That's spicy stuff.

Tacos. Hot tacos here.

Let's get one thing straight. I'm the funny guy around here. all right hello good morning and welcome everyone to a tuesday edition of tbtl the show that just

might be too beautiful to live sweetie have a good show what you do is so important my name

is luke burbank i am your host first things first i love my job coming to you from the hollywood broadcast center right here in portland oregon where i've spent the last 15 minutes reconnecting and resetting all of my audio gear here in the Broadcast Center. It's an audiophiles nightmare. Because the friggin' cat

Believe it or not, I'm a complete catch.

has apparently figured out how to get onto this sit-stand desk that I use to do the show. And it is... This is adjustable. Let me try to figure out the height. It's at 49.8. Which is the highest it goes. I'm guessing that means 49.8 inches. And for a long time, she could not figure out a way up here, but she apparently in the middle of the night figured out how to get on this surface and walked around. It is amazing the damage that her paws can do with no thought. Like, I was watching a video this morning online. I was grabbing some audio for this show. I was preparing. Yeah, I do show prep. And she walked across the computer screen, this is in the other room, and stopped the recording from happening. Of all the buttons that her paw could hit, it's quite something. Anyway, here we are, we're all plugged in, we're ready to go. I've got that out of my system, and I am ready for an absolutely stellar episode 3715 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. Oh, but, oh sir, just one more thing related to the cat. I have found a new TikTok algorithm that I am pretty obsessed with. It's the hashtag Bengal section of TikTok. People of TikTok. People of America. Grab some audio from that, which I would like to share with you. Coming up, also, USB flash drives in the news. It's your lucky day. You just found a USB flash drive in the parking lot. It's your lucky day. We might actually get to that story today. After promoting it yesterday and then running out of time, there's a decent chance. 50% of the time it works half the time. What did they say? What's the line from that movie? There's a decent chance we may talk about this guy in Japan who lost an entire town's info by getting just absolutely ham-boned and passing out and getting his backpack stolen. So we will talk about that possibly. We'll talk about this probably a near miss that I had yesterday with what I think now is a very sketchy electrician. electrician it's electric and and there's no turning back more home improvement content or attempted home improving content coming your way here on this tuesday edition of the show here's someone else who's coming your way the longest running cobro of the show may be best known for his depictions of the tall ships he's got chutzpah and broad-based knowledge he is andrew walsh and he's joining me right now good morning my friend good morning luke there's no

need for me to start the show today like this this is just like this is something i should have told you before the show because it probably doesn't translate into great podcast content but you're kind of opening the door talking about bangle tiktok so maybe i can nudge it open a little bit wider here i saw the cutest

little i'll be honest with you was it a real was it a story was it a tick tock i i you know and i'm out of my depth on that stuff right now anymore who knows anymore but i know i did only yesterday

learn from you why it is that i only see certain things in instagram and it's because i'm only seeing the stories because i guess that's how instagram works yeah and i guess i i have a

that's the thing like I don't I feel like I understand it most of the time although I will say the majority of the content I now see I believe is either a TikTok or a reel that is then shared in Instagram stories so I don't spend much time on TikTok itself but I see so much TikTok content that comes through Instagram but it comes it comes that way through like three different postings or something so anyway I'm just seeing a lot of

Yeah, because they're trying to roll out their version of TikTok, right, which is called Reels. But then sometimes on Instagram, people have just reposted actual TikToks. And there's probably a vine or two in there. It all kind of looks similar. You want to talk about vines. I'm talking about the vines in my backyard. Andrew, I've got it right here. It is literally bullet point numero uno hedge update. But first, what were you going to say? I'm dying to know how the hedge project works.

we get into the hedge project which is actually content for my life i'll just describe uh a tiktok posted to reels posted to stories for you um that is just completely visual but man what a way to wake up this morning so they have in this little video it's split into two top and bottom right two videos but it's the same exact scene in somebody's house it's a pet bed laying on the floor big flat pet bed let's say maybe three feet square something like that sitting in the sunshine somewhere and in the top one there's a big dog i'm gonna say maybe it's not it's definitely not a golden retriever it's too short hair for that but maybe the size of a dog like that medium size medium to big size dog just laying there asleep in the middle of the uh the bed i'll say i'll say what's up dog bottom screen same exact scene only there's a cat sleeping in that bed now in both of these the other animal is sort of tiptoeing around the sleeping animal right so these are the same exact animals at different days i assume um in the same location but in one the dog is napping and the other the cat is napping and i'm expecting the dog to be really sweet and curl up with the cat in the top frame while the cat is like a jerk in the bottom frame

and like wakes up the dog or something those are the typical roles right exactly sort of that we

as a society push on these animals exactly because it said something like look at the two different approaches or something but no Luke there was no nastiness there was no there was no swatting at all it was just the two different ways these animals snuggle up with the other one when the other one has the bed first and like the dog gives the cat a little bit more space but kind of spoons a little bit whereas the cat goes up to the dog of course the cat being much smaller and just like walks right up to him and sort of like settles into his belly like a little spoon and then puts his arms up on the dog's belly when Theo used to do that to us we would call it bellying up to the bar like sometimes the cat will just come up and kind of put its its elbows on you right sometimes the bar bellies up to you right exactly and again this is not like it doesn't feel like this is a professional way to start a professional podcast but it was just I will say this if I can bring it back to anything relatable in our lives it did give me that moment again of being like okay we got to get a dog I don't think i think that we're sticking with a two cat solution but um andrew by the end of this

summer i would like you to have either a dog or a pickleball court can you commit to having one of

those two things that are of interest to me is a non-starter i'd never tease you on that we've decided it's a dog all right speaking speaking of cats i want to hear about the hedge

but i just want to play this really quick i was scrolling away on tiktok recently as i am want to do, as I'm wants to do. I was throwing a pitch behind Julio Rodriguez's head, as I'm wants to do. Oh my gosh, I want to get into those suspensions. Jeez Louise, seven games.

Put him at the bottom of the show, because

we'll never stop. I'll put it below USB thumb drives in the news. It's your lucky day. You just found a USB flash drive in the parking lot. I just happened to be scrolling by some This video popped up, and it was a cat very similar to Bubbles, my cat, and it said hashtag Bengal. And I don't know why. I mean, this just tells you how over the falls I am for this whole cat ownership and now this particular breed of cat because I was like, what? First of all, I was just absolutely stoked to see a kitten that looked. basically identical to bubbles and then i was like and there's a hashtag and so then i click on the hashtag bangle and it's just it's a combination of obviously very cute kittens that look exactly like bubbles used to look apologies for randy in the background as he whirs away this is also part of cat life i have to run the roomba all the time now because the cat is always just messing the house up and i don't have when i switched over my my router settings randy was the one holdover randy is the last soldier fighting some war on a pacific island somewhere randy did not get the memo that we are using a different uh what is it gigahertz different and so i cannot send randy home from my phone as i could previously so apologies for that but anyway um so i'm it's a combination of very cute kittens which again it's the amount of joy that it fills me with to just see a cat that looks like my cat is very juvenile for me like it's so silly like why does this make me this excited but it does then there's also cats that they come on maybe they're technically bangles but they're just like dark black and a totally different body type and i'm like somebody tricked you my friend you get off this hashtag bangle tick tock wow the snobbery sets in out of here with your subpar bangle content then there are people that are just people just showing like there are cat shows and of course there are andrew like you know not unlike westminster these seem to be much smaller affairs i'm gonna be

honest some of our favorite tape comes from that cat show documentary so this is just there is just

a lot of different clips of people showing bangles competitively and it's very funny because every video and it's different people doing the i guess i don't know what you'd call it the um presenting but they all do the same thing you have to like stroke these cats in a certain way i think to just get them to chill the f out and sit at attention on this table again this has more of a like whereas westminster it's you know there's i don't know a thousand people in the may what is it the the mayflower club or something um this is like two or three people stopping by a booth somewhere at a um you know holiday inn near the airport but this is what it sounds like when

you're showing off a bengal cat muscularity on this gorgeous brown spotted tabby bengal just a dynamite cat really really nicely presented gorgeous muscular feel to his body look at that nocturnal and somewhat wild expression i don't like this i've been described that way by

the way yeah having a nocturnal and somewhat wild expression this gives me a bad feeling i don't

to lie smaller ears placed well back on his head lovely shape to his eye aperture beautiful tight tight pelt lovely contract tight pelt beautiful eye aperture beautiful rosette a lovely cat he's my best bingo and then three people clap how about he's my best friend and he's got a

great personality and we have tons of fun snuggling together how about that objectifying

that cat i didn't like that at all you would totally be one of the people with a jacked up ass bangle on you know when you're trying to put professor on there trying to put get professor on

my hashtag bangle yeah not today say no that's not what i'm in the cat game for um actually genevieve did go to a cat show at one point when you mentioned when you described it as you know 17 people roaming around an exposition room at a holiday and express i was like wait a second My girlfriend's been one of those 17 people I think she and a friend

I would absolutely go to one of these Do not mistake me sir I would 100% If there was a Bengal show coming through the greater Gresham, Oregon area I would be there

I think that Genevieve Well I don't want to put words in her mouth I think Genevieve came back saying that it was less than An uplifting experience Even as somebody who really loves cats

I mean listen I understand what you're I think I'm picking up what you're putting down which is that you think cats are for cuddling. And you have that apron with that embroidered on there, which is kind of where I...

Your dad had it custom-made for me. For some reason, it's got the silhouettes of all the characters of Lord of the Rings. My friend's got that same sticker on her car, by the way. She just doesn't have the quote on it. So that image, that silhouette of the travelers is like kind of an official image that your dad found online, clearly, and then added, I'm guessing, the quote, all who wander are not lost and then turned into a bumper sticker i mean speaking of my family and

things that my dad might have didn't make this but things related to my dad did you happen to see on twitter what i i i sort of uh presented as the t-shirt that's tearing my family apart no i didn't i'll look it up now what's going on my sister hannah bought my dad a shirt for father's day and this is I

presume something that was probably bouncing around instagram where you could get your your your dad a shirt that said something like it's like thanks for being a great dad we're all awesome and then it's got like a cartoon of you can select the number of children that are in your family so of course in our case it's seven and there's a picture of each kid and there's a name underneath so it's like you know luke hannah david sam liz etc all the kids in my family and my dad got the shirt and he put it on and my mom took a picture of it and sent it around hawk squad

and it's not custom made to the i mean it's custom so that you can add names but like you're choosing from just a set of pre-made characters these people don't necessarily

yes i think i look not unlike tom cruise which tells you that it's not super it's not hyper

realistic yeah it's not like somebody took an image of you guys and then cartoonified it it's

somebody just no yeah these are like standard almost kind of i don't know what you avatars you know emoji avatars or whatever so my dad gets the shirt he puts it on take a picture we all are on hawks we're like oh that's fun of course my mom was like i want one my mom my mom never one to in any way let my dad have the spotlight for even 0.5 seconds is immediately agitating for her own version of the shirt and hannah's like sure mom for mother's day i'll happily get you one and then my mom just out of the blue out of a clear blue sky jumps back onto hawk squad and just says sorry ads just talking to my daughter sorry ads you're the next generation just pointing out that addy is not on the shirt because she's a grand child she is actually not of course the child of my which few things on this i think addy was probably fine with that yeah i don't think that she may have not even noticed if she was on the shirt or not and then the next thing you see adelaide grace has left the conversation now is this hawk squad is this the main thread immediately left hawk squad i mean this was a joke of course from her like this was this was for comedic effects she's not leaving oh okay i i believe because i'm now

flipping through and i saw that i gotta say i was kind of shocked i was like i mean and for folks who don't know i mean i think most people know but i mean it's an interesting dynamic in your family because you you were such a young dad that adelaide is only a couple of years older than your youngest brother am i right about that uh she is in fact older than yes she's older than david just slightly yeah exactly yeah so she's slightly just a little bit older than her uncle

so you know there's not even slight i'm 20 years older than david i'm only 17 years older than my

daughter right so yeah so that's so just to kind of understand the dynamic there you guys are all very close and you're all these are all kind of adult children here so um i guess i kind of understand that but i gotta say when i was flipping through just now and i saw adelaide left that conversation i didn't know that was a joke and i was oh i gasped for a second i was like whoa that is wow she really took that to heart maybe i need to delete the tweet because it was

100 played for comic effect well it would only be and i don't think you have to delete the tweet

because of my reaction to it also um indicator of something though you know this is this is you and your family i don't know how privy all of your you know i mean like how many twitter followers do you have that like actually even understand your family dynamics like the tbtl people do but

probably not the cbs people you know i mean that's even more to the the idea that's true deleting it because if it's just random people who don't know that this is like a sort of a running joke and also don't know that my kid couldn't be possibly less perturbed about it's not being on this t-shirt what's just funny is my mom just finds it's so weird that she just took time out of her day to point out to my child that she's not on the shirt right exactly it's so weird

as just a communication style right exactly if addy had said something like and then then that would be the proper response but just to just to volunteer that just like sorry classically my mother sorry there's no room at this table as you all get up with your food trays and just move to

a different one it is so strange there are so many examples of that where my mom just much like i guess this is i should be grateful that i inherited this trait from her because it's uh a key component of me being able to do this show with you five days a week people like what do you talk about i'm like whatever comes into our head but my mom is incapable of stifling a thought if it comes into her head she is going to express it very likely to my dad who will be sitting there wearing his bitchin t-shirt um but also on the hawk squad text chain she just like she had the thought and she just needed to make sure that addy realized that she wasn't on the shirt and was in fact part of the next generation now what do you think of this shirt now i don't

want to throw your sister under the bus who had this maybe it was a sarah did you say It was Hannah. It was Hannah who had this made. So it is definitely I mean, I guess that's the point of the shirt and sort of the joke of the shirt is that it's, you know, says, dear dad, great job. We are awesome. Thank you. So it's very much a it's a it's a compliment to you and your siblings. It's a very it's kind of a backhanded compliment to your father, I would say. Do you think your dad will wear this?

i i wonder because my dad is i'll tell you what if we got my mom one of these shirts she'd never take it off yeah she would literally it would disintegrate on her body my dad is not so much about the look at me stuff sure yeah in fact my dad's uh like one of his i guess could i don't even arrive if it rises to the level of joke but one of the things that he used to say sometimes uh in church was they um they gave someone at the church an award for being the most humble member of the church they gave him a medal and then the first day he wore it they took it away ah yes you know that's my dad's approach to life my dad is an extremely humble person very not show off e so i i don't know if he'll be wearing the shirt like uh you know when they go over to uh their friend's house for dinner or something but i'm sure he'll get some use out of it and i'm sure he very much appreciated it and also it's awesome because my mom is just burning

with jealousy now which is the real that's the real spirit of father's day and all holidays i love the i mean the way your dad is depicted like the avatar chosen for your dad i mean that

is that's uh well that's another thing i gotta talk about this with hannah that is that's why is my dad on the shirt i thought that was supposed to be the kids one of the people on the shirt says dad right right right is it like was it like buy seven avatars get the eighth free

how did he end up on the shirt he's in the center and because it is a tribute to him so i feel like that's a way of sort of mitigating the we're awesomeness is by like having him be the center of the brood do you like it when i refer to you as a brood i mean as this is a joke so our friend

bill radke he's from i think one of 12 children and his joke used to be that his father won the breeder's cup and i would say walt burbank came in second in the breeder's cup so i think you could say i think you could say brood you can say litter i think there you know you can use any of

those terms but i do think the big gift here is the avatar chosen for your dad not that your dad is not a good looking man in his own right but this avatar is quite is fetching yeah my dad

actually is i think a surprisingly nice looking guy for his age considering he's never spent one

nanosecond thinking about his appearance like other than making sure he took off that humblest the most humblest person award he really looks in the mirror every day to make sure he's not

wearing that he goes into the bathroom he closes the door he locks it he puts his humblest person award on he stares at it for exactly four minutes then big side puts puts it back in the drawer and goes out to smoke a cigar and drive his riding lawnmower. No, like, it's funny because my dad just, again, he's just the least vain, he's the least narcissistic person that you could ever meet. And he's like, he doesn't work out. I mean, he ran cross-country in high school, but he's never exercised for fun one second of his adult life. And he's like totally fit. I mean, he does work, you know, he still does his sign business, And that's a fairly physical thing He'll still be out there digging post holes Actually, I believe yesterday He was helping, speaking with my sister Hannah He was helping Hannah and her husband Chris Lay like some massive amount of concrete At their house in Shelton So, I mean, my dad, he's an active person But it's like, he has a full head He has more hair than I do He doesn't, he wouldn't know what finasteride was If it bit him Like, you know what I mean? If it finassed him If it bit him, I'm a finassed um never finasta question if you don't know the answer andrew i learned that from glengarry glenn ross but just kind of like he he just couldn't be less hung up on any of the stuff that i'm endlessly hung up on and it's all kind of working for him as a person of i don't know what he is now like 67 or something um which is just the kind of the irony of life i guess is that he gives zero craps about that and it's all i i hope and again i'm not biologically related to him is the problem So I don't I can't look forward to Looking like him in old age Because I don't actually have his genetics Right But you know I'm impressed It seems to be working for old Walt B Okay speaking of Sort of dad projects I want to hear about this hedge situation But I think the best thing to do Would be to take our break now And then come back And I want to hear how it's going with this with you i was thinking of you all day yesterday andrew i'm not even kidding i went for a little jog

in the afternoon and it was oppressively hot here i was i was like wondering if it was safe for me to be running in this weather and then all i could think of was you down on all fours trying to extract blackberries from your hedge situation so i want to hear how that went in a moment here on tbtl hello and welcome to top story all right andrew uh when we last spoke about your yard project you had torn out how much of this what percentage of the blackberries that are in this um intense hedge that you and genevieve have was it about half of it i'm gonna say about maybe more like

two-thirds i think i'd gotten most of it over the weekend i want to change the picture in your head a little bit though because you mentioned like on me down on all fours like trying to clip these um clip these blackberries out of my very tall hedges but it's more like it's more like a deranged um i was gonna say james of the jungle but i don't think that's it who's the guy who lives in the jungle in swings but not tarzan george of the jungle george of the jacob i was like a real jacob of the jungle yesterday jerry of the i'm putting that down as a show title jerry of the jungle it's a real jeremiah of the jungle yesterday picture me more so you can't you almost can't get on all fours i i was for one moment trying to get cut these these very very thick blackberry stalks all the way down at the ground but mostly you can't get down that far because i'm in the hedges and i can't explain to you enough how little room there is in the hedges half of this is you just like pushing your body as far into these hedges as they will go kind of breaking the first barrier and finding little entryways um and really causing some you know i don't know i don't think i'm causing major damage to the outside of the hedges they will grow but like it's unnerving to sort of see these places where i've been kind of walking in and out of the hedges but you're in there and you're just completely pinned by brambles and then what you'll do is you'll get as close to one of these really thick I'm going to say sometimes like as thick as a quarter or maybe even a half dollar for people who remember half dollar stalks of these blackberries and then once you kind of find them you can cut them as low as you can get sometimes it's as high as I don't know waist high or something sometimes it's lower ideally and then once you get that cut off you still need to pull it out but it's growing up like 15 feet tall and then going out the top of the hedge which is like i don't know nine or ten feet tall so then the rest of it is me grabbing with my work gloves grabbing onto these vines and stalks as as as tightly as i can and just pulling i mean full body pulling trying to pull it back through the topiary right but if you can imagine it this thing has found this this life has found a way to snake its way all the way up through this long hedge and then once it's up there it starts to bloom and this is the stuff that looks ugly right and so once it's up there it's like you've created almost a an arrowhead type of um situation where it's it's gotten up there and now it's living up there and it's vining up there and it's blooming up there so it's it's nearly impossible to pull it to extract it you know So I am like Jerry of the jungling it as I'm almost swinging on these vines with my entire weight to pull them down. And sometimes the only way you can get it is just by swearing.

It's amazing the power of swearing like a dad that I just I don't hear that come out of myself all that often. Not that I don't swear, but in this way of just like you're like the power team, but the non-Christian version.

What did they do? Did they just offer it up? the power team dude for my evangelical friends or kids who grew up evangelical the power team they were a group of christian strong men who would go around we've this has come up on the show it has to have in the past because this was formative in my youth they were these big muscle-bound dudes who would go around like breaking bats over their legs or one of the moves was like blowing up a hot water bottle like it was a balloon and bursting it for jesus and i went to the power what's that did jesus like it and appreciate it he did he loved it

didn't you see how everything went great in the world yeah and now 30 years there were nine of these strong men for jesus and they will eventually all sit on the court yeah exactly i'm sure that

Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh could give you chapter and verse on the power team, but they would, the whole, the, the, the sort of move was the guy would be, and they'd tear phone books and stuff like, you know, so the, the dude would be like trying to explode the water bottle and he'd be like.

blowing on and then the other guys would be going pray for him pray for cheer for him and you as the crowd you'd have to give you'd have to yell and make noise and pray and send all of your energy to the guy trying to explode a hot water bottle for jesus you were doing a version of that as you

ripped those blackberry stalks out this is astounding because you said that you must have talked about that a lot like of all of your stories from your youth i don't remember that at all because at first as you were describing this i thought you were describing a a set of characters from some sort of children's book where they go around and they have super but no no this was like something between gallagher and the blue man group and a tent revival oh yeah i mean have you

uh let me see here i'm gonna find a little bit of of course i'm sure this will completely not pay off okay but i have found something called the power team john jacobs and the power team uh this is from 1991 take this is on youtube again i'm sure this will absolutely not accomplish what

i'm trying to accomplish but just take a little listen to this this is lord use my life to win as many people as possible i want to be a great fisherman i want to be a soul winner i want to

make a difference in this world lord now what's going on behind like you're hearing this guy john jacobs i believe probably giving his sort of as we would say testimony or whatever but what's happening visually sorry oh the broadcast center what's happening the visuals are of the power team guys of course they're all in like muscle tank tops that's a power team and they're like karate chopping piles of cement with their elbows they're breaking bats they're tearing phone books they're just doing all manner of ridiculous shit in the background oh my god as

this guy john jacobs is giving his uh you know his somehow someway use me and god honored my prayer he honored my dream power connection with john jacobs oh i don't even think this is actual

power team stuff i think this well let's see here okay this is them the power team going to russia

andrew ministering to soviet russia that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever would accept him would have eternal life how many know that's good news that is not an american message this is

very sermonizing and not enough people blowing up hot water bottles but anyway i'm going to send you the link to this andrew the just the aesthetic of the power team is immaculate 90s vibration

like it reminds me of so we know the yo-yo man right what's the yeah chop and steel yeah okay yes chop and steel is one of those guys mark proche the yo-yo man is it proche am i saying

that right i believe well actually you know what the i think the dudes that do chop and steel are also the people who have the found footage festival yes i think chop and steel is a little

bit different um but it's kind of the similar thing like they pretend to be these strong men or or or like kind of tough guys who go on local tv morning shows and then you do their little

performances you say you have to let that you have to let life bounce off of you and is that

is that what they say 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 i don't

even know what they were getting i would be unsurprised if one of those people or both of them who play chop and steel didn't grow up uh wait is that double negative i my guess would be one of them grew up in a christian household where the power team loomed large because there

are some real similarities there i wouldn't be surprised if neither one of them didn't enjoy the power team so anyway thank you well said the answer sadly is not yes um i uh yeah so anyway so can you kind of picture me like pulling these things out and then i end up with these huge piles and so i went out there yesterday i had a lot more to do that was on kind of the um the alleyway side of these hedges that we have and i will say i met a neighbor of mine who lives in these little apartment buildings behind our house and um and they're you know not fancy apartment buildings have been there for forever it looks like and this woman um is getting dropped off right and she's kind of walking through this kind of junky alleyway to get to her kind of back door at her little apartment complex and um and i'm i'm in the hedges as i see her getting dropped off i'm in the hedges and then she's sort of walking towards me so i sort of like try to make a lot of noise and like come out of the hedges um in a way that won't startle her and i hear her talking i can't tell you trying to make noise

before she gets to you so that she's aware there's somebody in the head exactly it being

shocking to her and this was kind of funny because um she's she's talking to somebody i can't tell if she's on her bluetooth um you know earbuds having a conversation if she's talking to the person who just dropped her off like whose window is down or if she's just talking to herself still no clear answer on that but she was kind of talking making some noise so i kind of like make some noise and kind of get out of the hedge so she can see me so i'm not jumping out right when she's uh there and uh i kind of said to her i'm like oh hey there i just want to do uh i just didn't want to startle you she's like you didn't startle me I've been watching you I'm like oh you saw me in here huh she's like I've been watching you from my window right there because I'd been doing this like two days earlier right outside of her window and keep in mind I started by trimming the hedges uh right outside of her window so it's probably I was probably making a lot of racket with my electric trimmer right um but anyway so on Saturday I learned I had an audience of this woman who was in her and however many other windows in that apartment building face these hedges they're watching me do this and she did say i kind of felt bad she said you know you're destroying the area where my bunnies like to live and i'm like oh no no i'm not destroying it i'm not getting she said you're getting rid of the area my bunnies love to live because we have a lot of rabbits around here and they like to live in the hedge and i'm like no no we love the bunnies i said we're we're keeping the hedge we love it i'm like i'm just getting rid of the uh and she's like okay and she's kind of nodding i'm like i'm just getting rid of the blackberry bushes that are going through it she's like what you're getting rid of the blackberry bushes we love blackberries and i'm like i'm gonna like that too like i love forging for fruit in the city or not even forging but just like taking a walk and like grabbing some random blackberries even though this is such an invasive weed i do love having blackberries just randomly around seattle as a kid

i felt like it was you were getting away with something the fact that this delicious juicy berry would just grow everywhere and you could just go pick as many of them as you want I mean, that's like a big summertime activity in Seattle.

And then in the fall, I don't know if this was in your neck of the woods, because I never had this anywhere other than Wallingford where there were just so many apple trees. And in the fall, I would go for little walks and I would like just grab apples. Seriously, it's like gives you a feeling of like there's something about just going on a walk around your neighborhood and just having free fruit growing off of trees. It feels like Eden, not to be too fine to point out it. I love it so much. so i i felt bad and um apparently this woman's lived here for a couple of years it's not like she's like she grew grew up in this apartment or anything um but i did feel bad i'm like oh no i'm just i'm just getting rid of the ones that are like growing up through our hedge like i'm like there are tons of blackberry bushes around here and there are like you know we'll be fine but i i did feel a little bit bad like you know being a new neighbor who's kind of like oh new neighbors coming in and getting rid of the blackberry bushes and disrupting our our uh you know peaceful saturday with his noisy thing and scaring my rabbits she told me that a friend came over one time i'm just all over the place said one of her friends came over one time and caught one of the rabbits and took it home and now has it as a pet what do you think of that i think that sounds

like a terrible idea it does seem like i don't know wild can you just take a wild rabbit i mean it's not like a um what's the uh there's they have some of those rabbits the ones that they basically breed as pets have the craziest names like uh a uh i can't remember the species you mean i just mean a particular like um carry that's what i meant to say yeah carrie's uh brother's uh ex-wife used to um it's a long it's a lot of exes in there my ex's brother's ex which makes them my enemy the ex of my brother's ex is my enemy you have to marry that person Belgian like something like a Belgian flop ear like they're just like these cookie names for these purebred rabbits but I mean those things are are bred to be pets or I guess in some cases to be food which is kind of a dark thought but that rabbit running around in your hedge putting that thing in your house just sounds like a total disaster yeah I don't know I didn't the guy with

a bangle cat that's carrying around a disposable razor currently Andrew I got the impression that this was a while ago i if i run into this woman again whose name i immediately forgot i will um i'll ask her how that rabbit is doing but anyway so i felt a little bit bad doing that but back to your point it was 92 degrees or whatever i was wearing a long sleeve shirt this time i did get some new work gloves i was using those type of work gloves that are made of like leather like they're their old school kind that everybody's dad had in the garage right and these that i had Like vice grips? Exactly. Luke at tbtl.net. No, I'm talking about some vice grips that are just resting on the workbench. Oh, right, just sitting there, right. Anyway, this is, again, how you just got to get the right tools for your job. When I started this project, I had no intention of going to war with these BlackBerry Brambles on Saturday. It was just one of those things that I started looking at them, and it started driving me crazy. I started pulling on one, and almost literally like pulling on a thread. The next thing I know, I'm obsessed with getting these things all out of my hedges and I'm pulling out like. Oh, my God. I mean, well, I have I think I have seven or eight garden bags filled with this stuff now, which I guess doesn't sound like much. But it was a lot just pulling these huge stalks out of there. But I had these old gloves that were that style, but they were so old that parts of them were like calcifying and like they were ripping all around the wrists. They looked ridiculous. I look like it's some sort of a homunculus. Isn't that the word I was looking for the other day and I couldn't come up with it? Just like they're just like destroyed around the wrists. And then inside them, there's all little bits of hardened, like cardboard or something, because these things are probably 30 years old. So I now have a wound on the outside of my finger because I was using these old gloves that were protecting me from the thorns on the outside, but weren't protecting me from the debris of the gloves themselves on the inside. Finally, I was like, Andrew, go to Home Depot, buy a new pair of gloves. You're obviously in the shit here.

I was recently in the glove section of a Wilco. Of a what? This is a farm supply store called Wilco. By the way, I bought two baseball caps because it just says Wilco. And I was like, this is cheaper than buying the band merch.

You should go just get a T-shirt, get some Wilco-style car hearts or brand hearts.

Sadly, I was then wearing the hat. I went to a True Value. This is all associated with that project I'm doing on the house. I ended up at a True Value. And I go in, and I forgot I was wearing the hat. And the guy goes, do you work at Wilco or something? And I go, no, I just bought the hat because it's also a band that I like. But yeah, the glove section, it's so great because they have every kind of glove for every possible job. Again, it's like being an REI. I'm like, maybe I could become a Wichita lineman. They have the right kind of gloves for that.

Well, when I walked into Lowe's, I did have a little bit of a lingering worry that because these types of gloves that we have in our garage now, the ones that were ripping up my hand, I was familiar with them from growing up. Like, again, I thought of them as shop gloves. They were often around, like, you know, growing up with my dad and, like, having to separate. These are the type of gloves I would wear if I were separating steel out of the shop, you know, when I had a job there. And so, anyway, I was like, are these a relic of the past? Like, will they only have, like, kind of new kinds that look, you know, because there's all kinds of gardening gloves now that might be tough, but they kind of are maybe a little bit more stylish.

Are they going to be rave green?

Right, exactly. Are you going to have rubber grips? It's like, I just want these leather gloves. Are they going to say Blue Lives Matter? They're going to be camo blue for some reason. Camouflage blue.

They're going to be color rush Blue Lives Matter. But the inside, the hand part will say, don't tread on me. The outside is the Punisher symbol where the teeth are the hands.

Anyway, that's what I got. You're right. Nailed it. No, I was very relieved. I get up to the glove wall and I'm looking around. I'm like, oh, no. They only have like kind of modern gloves. maybe they don't and then bingo bango boingo or whatever our friend camaro kev says bottom shelf there they are classic leather palmed leather knuckled gloves i get two pairs because they were only three dollars i thought these inflation buddy i thought this i felt like a lucille bluth i was like well what could they cost twenty dollars they were two dollars i bought two pairs of these things came back home that's a real burbs move yeah because you never know Like that worry that I had going in there, like maybe next time they won't be in here. So anyway, so I did spend honestly like I wrapped up work in the afternoon. So I'm like, it's a sunny day. I'm going to take advantage of this. I'll pay for that later in the week when I have to catch up on everything else. But I was like, today is a work day. So I got out there probably early afternoon, like one ish or something like that. And I did not leave the backyard until like 10 o'clock at night as these and I are burning some of these brambles. I packaged up most of the brambles, but these things also have these really long stalks, like really long, and some of them I chopped up and put in the bags, but you still end up with so many of these things, and we looked it up, and they say, you know, these things are, you know, fine to burn. In fact, they're very flammable. Never, you know, don't set fire to your blackberry bushes to get rid of them because they'll never stop burning, and it'll cause a real problem, but, you know, some of these stalks that I was pulling out were already drying out. Some had already totally turned into like unbreakable wood. It's amazing. I guess it's a desiccated. It's technically a cane. Yeah. Like bamboo or something. So these ones that had all the moisture leave them were like these hard wooden sticks. You got to be careful because they still have thorns on them, but they make great. They burn well. So Vives and I, I bagged up all this stuff and then we had a little fire and tried to burn down some of our supply of blackberry brambles. And, um, yeah, like I put in like a full day and a very hot heat of doing this and I've got them all except for one. I'm looking at the hedges and there's one little area. I got to go outside right now and do it. Do not leave a survivor. No, I got to do it right now. I think that this one thing that I'm seeing pop. up out of our hedge is probably already dead like i think i've already cut it i just can't find the end of it anymore to drag it down and out of the hedges i could be wrong about that but i think the best thing i can do is wait for us to get our big ladder that we're going to rent this weekend and get it from the top maybe and then i'm going to trim all of the hedges so that's where we are i don't know i don't really have a power out for that but that was my day well i have andrew i have

so many questions so did you get all of this stuff out by the roots eventually no no no

nowhere near no no no I

can't explain it like no I'm at you fix the problem for probably one season at best summer you'll be dealing you'll be dealing with this again now

I do think that and I know that like at some point I'm gonna have to figure out a way to get but these things are so and again I can't explain to you how inaccessible the roots of these things are like they are growing up in and around the laurel that is our hedges right like it is almost inseparable um and also you it's so hard to get down on your hands and knees back there like you just can't move i'm also a large man you know like this is why people have children i get it now you can send the little ones in there with some poison

doesn't your your childhood makes a lot more sense now living on the property working day

and night on yard projects i don't know how this is going to sound but um listeners if you have any children i can borrow i have a small little project i'm working on um anyway yeah so no unfortunately i'm just i'm real the rescuers vibe my friend uh rescue rangers no the rescuers one

of the many cartoons that just absolutely traumatized me as a child i believe it's the rescuers at which there are sort of they're not i think they're adjacent to rescue rangers but basically they are a couple of mice who have to go down to the bayou to save this little girl who has been kidnapped because she is small enough to get into this cave a cave that fills with water every day as the tide comes in to try to get a ruby out and the woman who is in charge of this operation is terrifying like makes Cruella DeVille seem like Martha Stewart and it's like one of those things that was way too scary for a small child to watch even though she's a cartoon and I just remember they they they lower this and then of course they make the little girl I want to say her name is Penny but I actually don't know they lower the little girl into this terrifying cave that again is filling with water slowly telling her to get this ruby i think it is and

is this the same little girl who ended up discovering that um stash of old garfield phones in the yes ocean cave in france so it kind of was a happy end yeah because i gotta say good work good work all around one other thing yeah what's your other question it's it's more of a comment

than a question i'm not feeling this neighbor's vibe i feel like this neighbor came in with a lot of negativity about something that is none none you biz she was she was um she was sweet i i don't think that she was i feel like she was not giving me a hard time no no she hit you with the you're destroying the bunny habitat right she hit you with the we love blackberries i feel like she's hitting you with a lot of you're doing it wrong in your yard and not to be you know not to cite the castle doctrine but I think that part of the fun of being able to purchase a piece of property is within reason doing projects at the property I felt like she was she a person who does not own your house was giving you a lot of feedback on your yard but as I talked to her about it like

she was totally chill and we and we talked back and forth and she wasn't like tisking she sort of said those two comments and then I'd sort of like tried to manage the situation I not to turn everything into class but to make this very clear because you might have an image of her as being like kind of a nosy neighbor who no i i you know this is a she's a pretty i feel like she's a pretty impoverished woman who lives in this you know not so great little apartment right behind our house where you know her door faces an alleyway that is filled with garbage quite a bit you know what i mean like she's like she's not sure and i don't know if you're picturing that or not but like i get a very different feeling from somebody like that than i would if it was somebody who lives in a very nice super manicured house and they're concerned about me planting something that's going to obstruct their view you know what i mean i gave this woman a lot of fascinating though because

i mean so if the if a person who you consider to be in a different kind of having a different lived experience and at a different kind of socioeconomic level said the exact same things

it would probably strike your ear differently well it depends on the tone and i again i'm trying to explain that it wasn't like this what are you doing you're ruining my she wasn't like i mean She kind of said these things, but she was in first of all, we're also meeting for the very first time. And I just it wasn't a her time.

was like extremely honest but not not at all aggressive or telling me what to do just sort of like i don't like you sort of mentioned before like you have a thought and you can't keep it in it was almost a little bit more like that you know what i mean like she was sort of talking to me sort of talking to herself a little bit and just sort of like free associating and then we got in this conversation so i again like and i it never did i feel like oh i should stop doing this you know what i mean like it wasn't it did not leave me with a bad feeling she was not going to call the homeowners association on you right exactly and and i don't know if that makes me sound like a weirdo because these issues of let's just call them class come into these things but they do for me absolutely when somebody is coming from a from a um a real place of privilege and it has a sort of a nimby-ish attitude yeah i'm going to have a different attitude towards that person than if somebody like this who lives in very humble housing in this little alleyway behind my behind my house and I feel like well I don't want to take when she says like we love the blackberries I don't know if she has kids or or what her family situation is but like I don't want to take joy away from people either and I also love blackberries and I love bunnies and again that was the whole thing I was like and that's when I was like oh no no we love the bunnies and we're talking about the bunnies and we're talking about liking blackberries like it just was not it just was not a negative situation I just

We have a lot of home improvement conversation yet to go, Andrew, because I'd have to tell you the story about this electrician. But first, can I just play you something that I promise will not pay off? It'll pay off even less than the power team. When I was looking for the Home Depot theme to play a few minutes ago, YouTube then suggested this TikTok video where this kid has an electric guitar and appears to be going into stores playing the Home Depot theme song. but this one is playing the Home Depot theme song in Lowe's so I believe the kid is named Aiden James I believe he's going to walk into a Lowe's with an electric guitar and a small amplifier and stand next to people and play the Home Depot theme song can we just

play the Home Depot theme in Lowe's let's see what happens hey do you guys recognize this song sounds like a depot song yes it is the depot told me to send a message that's pretty good too hey do you recognize the song

i would like this bit more if he was just walking around playing it um but uh anyway okay did you

see the one where he went and i think maybe this is how it started he he went up to like the actual pa system or like somebody's little like workstation at home depot i think and then picked the phone up off the hook and put it on like the the overhead announcement setting and then set the phone down and then played the song over the store uh loudspeakers did you see that

one i think yeah i think that that that video uh i'm looking at it right now and um this is this this is him at home depot

hell yeah let's go you know the home depot song no i don't know the home depot song i like it

now he's up on one of those like like sort of stair like movable staircases that they use to get to the stuff that's on the high shelf he is definitely not supposed to be on that no he's getting banned i've had to enter now a zen place andrew because the cat is on the mixing board the cat is the cat is you can't be on there that's where the mix pre is um she basically is will not stop jumping up on this table that i'm trying to use and what i realized though is she has a cat she has this amazing ability to thread through things so this table has this mixing board it has a um a mug from the state of wisconsin that a listener sent me that i use to keep like pens in it's got my clock it's got all this stuff and my fear is that she's going to knock it over but actually she is it turns out cat-like and she generally kind of is moving between these things and not knocking them over and i'm like i can either just keep throwing her off the table or i can just assume that she will figure this out and not take us off the air but anyway um okay quickly because we're already pretty long in the tooth here i had a kind of interesting experience yesterday so i need to um hire an electrician to run some power to the garage at this house that i'm trying to remodel because i'm going to turn the garage into uh my new broadcast center out there um and also um have a little like

you know kind of living room area a little kitchenette i want to make basically an adu um and so i was on the internet i was looking around for but i need to have somebody come and run the power from the pole down uh to the garage and get another um basically a breaker panel put in so i'm i'm just collecting names from the internet of of electricians in the area and um And then calling them, and I'm making a list. I'm creating a document. And one of the people, a lot of times you just get the voicemail, and then you leave a message, and you wonder if you're ever going to hear from them again. I see this one person listed. This is like on Yelp, maybe. And for some reason, I don't even look at what the rating is. I just see the name of a company, and I see the first review. And it's super positive. It says, I'm so glad I called this company. And it's like, Bob charges to come out and do an estimate, but I'm so glad I hired him because he did an amazing job with my cabin, blah, blah, blah. So I was like, well, that seems promising. So I call the number. And this is one of the few people that actually answers the phone. And he's like, it was so strange because this should have been my first indication something was off. He goes, he answers the phone by saying, this is Bob, you're being recorded, which now this will tell you how hard it is to get work done right now on houses because of the labor shortage and supply chains and all of that. This did not turn me off to this person. I was like, I'm talking to a human being who understands how electricity works. I don't mess this up, burbs. like that's how desperate it is if you can find anyone who will either call you back or agree to come out and so i'm trying to ask him because this is also involves the county right the county has to come out and sign off on the project they don't do the project they don't actually run the new power line down from the pole but they have to like allow it to happen so i'm trying to figure out do i get the county out there to sign off on and then hire someone and this guy's like no no you have me come out and look at it first and uh and he goes i go okay uh and he goes that's 150 or whatever i go oh oh so you charge to come out and do an estimate which by the way not standard in the industry and he goes yep i don't do anything for free uh i i turn down business every day now again not a good and not good energy coming off of this dude but i'm so desperate i'm so excited to be talking to bob that i'm like okay maybe i'll pay 150 to have him literally just come look at the project so i'm like all right uh okay so then i'm like well when can you come by

he goes and this is when it gets really weird i go when can you come by and he goes i'm so busy i don't schedule anything um i go i go how's tomorrow he goes he goes um basically what he wanted to do and what i agreed to at some point andrew what i agreed to because of how desperate i was was to just go hang out at this house that's 40 minutes from here to today the afternoon on the hopes that he happens to drive through the area and decide to come by that was basically where we left things and he was like my scheduler isn't here right now she's already gone home but she'll call you tomorrow and then she'll collect your payment oh also by the way because i wanted to have him come by today it was expedited so it was like he was like there's an increased charge for expedited and i was like what's that and he's like well normally it's 150 for the first hour but now it's 170 for the first hour but then back to 150 for the second hour i know and again i was agreeing to this because i'm nuts and also uh i'm desperate right because i don't know how to do any of this stuff and i need to get it rolling because my dad and i are going to work on this project in august But we need to have some power figured out before we can do this So anyway I'm like okay so I agree basically To pay this guy all this money Extra money in fact To come out and just look at the project To just tell me how much he's going to charge But I'm also I have no confirmation of when he'll be there And I just have to go I guess hang out And hope that he comes by This is the system And so I hang up and it's only at this point That I take the two minutes To actually read the rest of his Yelp reviews first thing i noticed oh he has one star and everyone has a similar story bob showed up he didn't know what he was doing he wouldn't first of all he wouldn't set up a time specific time to come by so i had to just wait for him some people were like i've been waiting three days for bob there was one that was just a skeleton with the phone it was a pirate skeleton holding

holding it like a what do you call it a flagon of ale the cobweb on it so it would appear there was one of two things that would happen with bob one would be he would never show up actually was three things one he never shows up see pirate two he would show up but he wouldn't have any of the equipment that he needed and he wouldn't know what he was doing or three he would show up when you weren't there and then he would blow your phone

up for like a week trying to get through to you oh my god that was the most unsettling it's very

unsettling yeah one person was like i couldn't get a firm time out of him and then he showed up at my house when i was at school and he's texting me and i was like i'm in class right now i'm presuming this is you know college or something or whatever um and then he just then i had 25 missed calls from him and he wouldn't stop calling me and i called the better business bureau and and also if he comes by my property again i'm gonna turn my dog loose on him whoa on yelp whoa so then i'm like holy shit bob's coming for me like what's here's what's gonna happen tomorrow bob's gonna roll up to my house i'm not gonna be there i'm gonna have 25 missed calls and he's gonna be like you owe me a hundred and seventy dollars oh so then so now i'm freaking out now i'm like okay how do i call bob back and tell him that i don't want him to come out to my house but not in such a way that i set him off and create some kind of weirdness because this reads according to these

reviews like a person who's not all there yeah i mean depending on how much you are invested in in the like because you're right you don't want to i mean you could just make up some sort of benign lie about why this is just, you know, not that you're going in a different direction or anything that could possibly be interpreted.

We're deciding to use an old-fashioned paddle wheel system where we run water over a wood wheel. That's how we're going to power the garage.

Well, the house burned down. I was thinking more along those lines. Well, I guess you could still drive by. Yeah, just a small, benign lie. There were no survivors. Okay, listen. What about this? Don't lie. Just burn the house down. Have you thought of that?

That's your way out of that, dude. I had that thought yesterday on my jog. I was like, wouldn't it be unbelievable bad luck if I actually get if I roll this rock up the hill and get this whole project done the way I'm hoping? And then there were a fire because it's, you know, it's kind of out there. It's not in the woods, per se. But then I thought, you know, what wouldn't suck if there was a fire right now?

Just because then you just have property that you rebuild.

Then I just have – then I've got a blank slate and a tidy sum of money thanks to Kevin O'Brien and my homeowner's insurance.

I can't believe you're talking about insurance fraud while you're – I'm not.

I'm saying if the house were to burn down in its current condition, it wouldn't be the worst thing ever. Watch.

I will say before we moved into this house and we had the keys already and we would come over here and do projects and then we would go back to our old apartment. And I think we did that for three weeks if not four. And boy, were we, and I think it was just like part of the new home ownership thing, but just like saying goodbye to this house every night and like locking the doors up and not, and also this house is kind of arranged weirdly, or it took us a while to kind of get used to it. So like kind of going through the house and making sure all of the doors are locked and all the windows are locked. And then I just, I'm a pretty paranoid person anyway, but I just remember just having this sense of just like, okay, still be here tomorrow, Mr. House. I call it Mr. House. I came up with that myself. That name again is Mr. House. But anyway, I just remember having a deep, maybe not deep, but tinges of paranoia, and it felt so good to be able to sleep here and just kind of be like, well, if anything happens, we're here for it.

If this house burns down, it happens with us in it.

That's right. It's a funeral pyre. The way it got intended.

But like, so now I'm thinking, like, I'm really, I feel mad. I am now angry at Bob. i'm angry at bob for saying to me i don't do anything for free and i turn down business all the time because because it's like that's just an aggressive move right out of the gate yeah to somebody who is a potential paying customer it is also like i said not industry standard it's very much his business if that's how he wants to do it but i was like i i it was like this thing where i felt kind of intimidated by him on the phone and then when i read all the reviews about how much he sucks yeah and i and i realized i was absolutely not going to be using his services i became very angry at him and i wanted to call back and say i'm not going to be using your services bob have you read any of your yelp reviews yeah but don't does the word one star ring any bells that's what i wanted to do but i also did not want to have 25 missed calls from bob because by the way he had my address at this point because he was going to be coming by my house supposedly exactly so i was like I need to

try to tell him not to come out there tomorrow but in a way that is firm but also doesn't feel insulting to him because i don't want to make an enemy out of this person yeah now without getting

all philosophical tomorrow is today right today is the day today is the tomorrow question so where are we tomorrow's electricity today okay so where are we on this right now well i called back so i i

i got myself together and i basically decided what i was going to say is i need some more time to think about the project which was more or less true um it wasn't the house burned down it wasn't you you a-hole why are you why are you this way to people and also you know i can smell you from here dude look at your reviews on you have you have the worst reviews i've ever seen for a business um and i also started to think he probably wrote the first review himself yeah sure yeah because it was it was it was amazing how much the first the highest ranked review so the first one that i saw and the only positive one it was amazing how much that played into my decision initially to to see if i could hire him it was like he charges for estimates but i'm so glad i hired him it was well worth it and i was like and that when he's saying i'm going to charge you to come out and look at the project i was like well someone else also paid this and was and felt felt like it was a good decision you know like it was it was a hundred percent causing my brain to think this was an okay plan yeah um so i called back thankfully i got the voicemail and i said hey i just uh talked to you about coming out tomorrow which is today and uh actually i'm gonna need a little more time to think on the project so i am canceling tomorrow's visit thank you and then i got a call this but he did not listen to the voicemail because i got a call this morning from his scheduler who was actually very nice and i said hey i'm actually i need some more time to think about the project so can we please not have bob come to my house ever uh i didn't say the ever part and she was very nice said okay well just call us when you're um call us when you think you're ready and i hung up now in the meantime andrew after i had broken up with bob yesterday i got a call from a guy named austin who has great reviews oh and he was like oh i live i live right by where that house is do you want me to swing by this afternoon and i can just facetime you and we can talk it through and i was like that would be great he goes first i just want to stop home though and uh say hi to my family and then i'll head on over and i said that sounds perfect and then he called me at exactly the time he said he was going to and then we talked it through and he was just couldn't have been uh he could not have been easier to work with nicer did not charge me to look at the project and um it was a completely radically different experience wow it kind of turned out

that and it turns out it's the same guy it turns out it's golf man i uh this is not no you know what i'm not going to say the stupid thing that i was about to say because um it's not really helpful and is it imperative that we get to the usb story today or do we know i think it's funnier Or if we push it every day. Okay, all right, fine. We'll push it.

That's my move. 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.

Emails or V-mails that are of interest? I just saw this one. It looks like it just came in. When I say just came in, I mean about an hour ago from listener Scott. And I could reply to this email directly, but I figured let's just do it on the show in case anybody else is interested as well. yesterday on the program i played some tape of some mariners announcers some seattle mariners announcers kind of stumbling around reading some copy uh for some kids event where kids were going to receive a free moose poster but i believe it was aaron goldsmith who maybe stumbles and says something like kids will get to eat a free moose and then they sort of try to riff on that a little bit with um rick rizzo's famous riffing skills and i just got a sweet note from the south side of chicago dude i heard you know he used to play um stickball in the yard all we'd just get together

it's just dusty like i was walking listening to the game the other night and rick chris i mean the listeners of this show can also do this they can sing along so like with because i only say the same well i said four stories but as you pointed out the other day you have four yeah you know what the fourth one is the power team andrew there it is no but like i know that i'm so repetitive on this show so i i'm really in a glass house but it was there was i don't know if it was father's day or if they were talking about some toy giveaway at the game but rick was like what was your favorite toy you ever got blow and i was like um that was the statement his favorite toy ever got was some blow there's a rick riz has a real wild side no mike blowers they call him blow so so And I knew he just I knew Rick just asked the question Because he wanted to answer the question And I was like I know exactly what this guy is going to say He goes mine would have to be My first real Baseball mitt Used to play on the south side of Chicago Used to have a catch It was a Nelson Who was Nelly Anyway he was Talking about this mitt god bless him But it's like I kind of know what I generally feel like I know what Rick Riz is going to say before he says it, is my long-winded point.

You know, I will say this. So we have Rick Riz, who's kind of an old-school announcer. We have some younger announcers who I like a great deal. And then we also have Dave Sims, who's usually on the TV side, who's, again, more of kind of an old-school announcer kind of style guy. He likes to do the delivery. That's right. In fact, I was going to say, we could empty out all of my Mariner's tape here. Lloyd, do some delivery for the truck to the airport. So anyway, we probably already answered the question of the so that was some just some random tape from the Moose thing was some random tape from a Mariners game. And I'm sure it went viral because it was somewhat funny. And I probably grabbed it at some point years ago. But I was going to say, I usually don't like it when when Rick Riz and Dave Sims are doing the broadcast together because sometimes they just pair them up because they're both kind of coming from the same place. Like neither one of them is like the younger stats based person. They're both kind of, you know, kind of old school baseball guys, and they just bring this too much of the same energy for one broadcast, I think. However, I will say while listening to that just abomination of a ball game yesterday against the Orioles, who have the best logo in baseball for my money, I will give them that. They just went on Rick Riz and Dave Sims just went on some sort of a rabbit hole where they were talking about some amazing Baltimore team from the 70s. Maybe you're even familiar with this team, Luke But to me, none of the names mean anything to me Because I just don't know baseball history And I try to guess But hearing them bounce back and forth Just like, and who's the other one? The catcher, and then the other one knows the catcher And they're just like geeking out And it means nothing to me But it brought me so much joy Just listening to two old heads Just like listing the entire roster And then they're like, and we haven't even gotten into the rotation And they start getting into the rotation And I got to say, it was them talking so that they didn't have to talk about the game in front of them, which I appreciate. But, man, I really enjoyed that. Thank you for that.

Yeah. I bet you Earl Weaver was the manager. And I bet you they mentioned Fred Lynn, who was an exceptional hitter for that era of Orioles. And maybe even a young Cal Ribkin, although he may not have.

I think it was prior to that. Pre-Cal Ribkin. Yeah. This was 70s. This was like mid to late 70s, I want to say. And they were And yeah, I don't know I wouldn't be able to tell you any of the names They just kept going and going I swear they listed the entire 40-man roster At some point, but anyway That's how bad the Mariners were playing So that's where That tape came from And then I guess This voice makes me uncomfortable, but I'm going to play it for you We were talking And I think a listener told a story too That we played on the show about People mistaking people for being pregnant and commenting on it and how that can lead to some pretty embarrassing moments. Well, this is sort of one click next to that. Take a listen to this from Rachel.

Hey, guys. This is listener Rachel from Pittsburgh. And I was listening to you guys talk about pregnancy and listener Laura called and shared what is probably that guy's most embarrassing moment. And I had to share a friend's story. She works in a male-dominated field. she was leaving work one day at lunchtime and um her boss and a bunch of his male co-workers or her male co-workers were going out to lunch and they saw her go into her car and they said oh where are you going and um she said oh i'm going home my husband's there and they said oh what's she gonna have and she said oh nothing i'm just gonna nurse the baby and the guy said well i'll have what he's having like he had maybe pre-thought what his response was going to be before he heard her answer because his face then just turned bright red and he started just going back on no no no that's not what i meant oh my god i thought your husband and you were going to have lunch together oh my god and he like started stumbling and then called her into her his office to apologize to her for saying this, and how he wanted her to know it wasn't sexist. And it turns out he was sexist, but she said not for that. So, you know, sad porn, womp womp. Love the show, guys. Hope to see you on our rest belt tour.

Turns out he was sexist, but not for that. But here's what... So, I listened to that yesterday morning, and I've been thinking about it. you gotta trust the source material like now this is like a third hand story to me right this is Rachel telling her friend's story so I'm I could not be further away from this but like even if he thought he was making a joke about what they were gonna have for lunch together I still don't understand how I'll have what he's having is anything but a creepy thing to say right well what does that mean Hey, I'm going home to have – I'm going to go have lunch with my husband. Maybe even say, I'm going to go home and have bologna sandwiches with my husband or whatever it is. Like you say, I'll have what he's having.

Like I don't understand that. Well, I mean I don't know if this is in any way related, but that is famously a line from When Harry Met Sal. Yeah. But the problem is the context of that is also sexual. That's what I mean. Yeah, Reiner's mother, I believe, saying I'll have what she's having after Meg Ryan, you know, sort of enacts a faux orgasm in the diner. So, yeah, it's it is a very odd thing to say, even if even if you're not trying to be a creep. It's it's a weird it's very weird to joke. And again, a very weird joke to have kind of already prepped and ready to go. Like walking around Getting ready all day It's like 10am Blasting out emails And you're taking calls and you're doing things But really your mind is just on this fire joke That you're going to deploy in about two hours Like very weird to have that one Queued up

I'll give the benefit of the doubt You're talking to a guy who You even mentioned this on the show yesterday Sometimes in quick moments of small talk Or just a quick greeting to a stranger Actually I don't know if you did say this on the show We might have been talking No it was before the show

About an incident with the person in my building That I shall To the listeners don't worry everything's fine But anyway yeah we were off air Kind of talking about something

But you had mentioned that sometimes you just say hello to somebody Like somebody you don't know Or maybe somebody you bump into at the office You just want to say a quick hello But for some reason your brain will freeze between hello And how are you doing And you say something like Hello you doing Or Hodor Sometimes I'll say Hodor Yeah exactly Like that does happen to me Plenty of time so I understand Like maybe just a small talk just being like You know you're just going to say this thing and not really Thinking about what you're saying or it comes out weird So I guess I'll give him the benefit of The doubt on that but it just Still seems like I don't understand how you would ever Say I'll have what he's having without it Being yeah it just doesn't make sense It doesn't make sense unless There's some sort of um some sort of I don't know sexual context

There also I have to say if you Do something that stupid you need to apologize in front of the people that you did the stupid thing interesting yeah I don't feel like uh calling that person into your office is the right move like hey I just said something incredibly creepy to you could we please step into this private chamber and close the door

I know elaborate you know I was sort of thinking about that too now it sounds like he was like very apologetic in the moment too and embarrassed and bumbly and so maybe wanting to follow up and that's actually it's funny because I was thinking the same thing Luke like there's such a weird power dynamic when one person has an office now i don't know if rachel's friend also had an office um i'm gonna guess not in this case but you're right like even if even if your intents are totally good if this person is just like the best co-worker colleague right whatever

even if they just they just abs they just said something boneheaded totally unintentional and

they want to apologize but if there's anything that is even a hint of a sexual dynamic in that way there it's weird where do you have that conversation because you're right like as soon as Rachel was describing that I'm like oh and maybe it's just we hear horror stories of the way men you know sometimes treat women at work and behind closed doors like it's just like oh even if your intents are great I was actually picturing it's funny you bring that up so I was like if this were my office and I felt like this is the best place to have the conversation would I maybe not sit behind my desk would I come out and so we could be sitting you know but then I'm I'm like, ooh, then does it really seem like I'm trying to get closer to this person? Like, I don't know, man. Offices are – well, office culture is changing. I mean, obviously that's an obvious thing. Well, thank God. We'll never have to worry about this again. Yeah, exactly. But it is weird.

Presumably harder to – I would say that except we do have the incident of one Jeffrey Toobin. but i was gonna say maybe maybe one of the nice things about the fact that you know remote work is will is with us to stay i think would be that there would be less chance for that kind of creepiness because of the fact that people aren't physically together but you never know you know

life finds a way yeah exactly creep finds a way absolutely yeah it's interesting and this just this is a quick aside to this and then we'll wrap up it's like i have a friend who just recently got a new job and he's going to be he's not working for Cairo radio, but he's got a little set.

up at Cairo radio where you and I used to work and he's going to be going in to Cairo every day I don't know if he's got a little office or a desk there or something a workstation that they're giving him to do this other podcasting job and he's so excited about that and he's more my generation he's a bit younger than me maybe maybe five maybe a little bit more years younger than me but you know kind of like my generation and he loves it he's like oh yes because I can't I just can't do this at home and it's funny because none of his team is at Cairo radio it doesn't bring him actually closer to any of the content but it just for him and i totally understand this he just likes to wake up and go to the office especially i think radio stations are especially fun places to to work and i really miss that too and i totally understand it and i have other friends who are significantly younger who are appalled that their bosses want them to start working from uh the office again i have a friend who got a job during the pandemic never had to go into the office, now has to go in the office and really feels like that's a complete unfair situation. And I don't want to say that everything is generational, but there's got to

be something generational about that. Absolutely. Well, I mean, I think I can say this. Addie just got a new job. She just got hired by a firm in Chicago called Walker Sands, and she's working from Seattle. They have offices in Seattle. But I was like, so are you going to go into the office? And she was like, maybe, you know, I probably want to meet my colleagues. But it was it was like one of the lower things, like lower priorities in her mind was how much time or, you know, it was it was something that was just it was such a given that she could work remotely for a company that's in a totally different state, you know, and that she would go into the office, you know, when it worked for her, but also work from home. I mean, it is such a fluid environment.

Yeah. And maybe and again, maybe this is a good thing to maybe put this more in the past. But the funny thing is, and maybe this, again, has something to do with public radio, where I remember moving to new cities, and this happened to me several times, you know, you'd move to a new city to take a new job in public radio, and you always sort of, I felt like I always had a leg up at making friends because usually the people that I'd be working with, even if, you know, if I was just meeting them for the first time, I'd feel like, oh, this is friend material here, right? Like when I came to Seattle, I don't think I had much problem making friends. I felt like I had a community here that I met immediately as soon as I started working at KUOW. And that's where a lot of my friendships blossomed from. Not all of them, but some of them. And and so for me to picture Addy kind of being like, well, why would I work from there? What's the what's the benefit? You know, I'd be like, well, I'd want to meet all I'd, you know, I want to start to meet these. Not that I'm like looking to make friends at work or it just sort of seems like it just feels like I would be just want to have what they're having.

i just want to have what they're having i don't know i would just sort of feel disconnected a little bit well yes but you know what this is another thing that's not just addy but other people i've talked to um who are working in corporate america there because of the way because of what the pandemic did and also i just think because of certain cost saving measures there's this thing called hoteling do you know what this is no so the move in corporate america in a lot of places is that nobody has a designated desk anymore oh yeah okay yeah you come in and you use the workspace that is available and and so that and it's just called hoteling and it's weird to me how much i think my liking jobs like going into my um you know physical workspaces that i could sit at my desk with like the random i mean it's not like i was a big i didn't have any hang in their kiddie posters or whatever but having my desk where i sat and drank my coffee and got weird back rubs from brock keyword there was something reliable about that and going into a big very uh technologically advanced workspace where you could just plop down wherever and start

doing your work does not feel as appealing yeah yeah me too and again i i do think that these are you and i just kind of grew up in a different workforce and it's going to change and and again it's funny because you and i are reminiscing about that yet you and i long before the pandemic got on career paths where we have not gone into an office regularly for, well, for me since 2015 when I quit KCRW and started doing TBTL full-time. So it's funny, like I was one of the, I was kind of on the early wave of people who didn't go into an office, yet I still miss it probably a lot more than some of my younger colleagues.

I think I miss it as well, but you know what I think? I just miss being 28.

Sure, yeah.

I have very fond memories of each and every office environment I've worked in, but I wonder if it's the office environment itself or if it's the fact that I just was a younger, had more of my life in front of me. I sort of shot out of bed in the morning. I don't know. I'm not trying to act like it's over for me at 46, but it feels different to be 46 than it felt to be 20.

And I think a lot of my positive associations with things in my life, such as working at a conventional office environment, is probably because I was just pretty happy as a 26-year-old.

Yeah, I think that's it too. And the excitement, and you and I have kind of similar, I think, feelings from that time in our career where everything just felt like everything was progress towards a more exciting job in radio sort of and kind of like working our way up the ladder rung by rung. um and then i uh then i just got higher on the ladder than you and you never caught up and here

we are yes sir here we are wrapping up the show wait is it okay if we wrap up the show yeah i just

meant literally on the ladder as i'm pulling out blackberries while you're doing work for a major

tv network is what i meant by that ladder oh that i thought you meant i would be unsurprised to find out that you are my supervisor and i'd be fine with that i think you're i feel like you're a very Fair And you really go out of your way I mean I do think you Have been the times when you've managed people You have been a very good manager so I don't mind Managing people yeah No I think oh my god

What happened The cat was trying to climb up a George Saunders book

And uh a swim In a pond in the rain just came Down on top of the cat

Not a fan huh Bubbles not a fan Of Saunders

Uh well no such a fan that she was trying To pull it off of the bookshelf to read it Oh, I misunderstood. Yes, of course, and she's still trying. Oh, my God. This is not interesting. I'll stop. She does look right now like she is literally trying to read this George Saunders book, which is actually pretty funny. Hold on. I'm going to take a picture. And she moved. So anyway, that's a sign that it's time to wrap the podcast up. Let's do it to it. I'm stopping the broadcast to take a picture of the cat. So, all right. That's a sign that it's time to say sayonara. Thanks for listening, everyone. We're going to be back here tomorrow with more Imaginary Radio for you. Until then, have a great Tuesday. Go Orioles. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all. I'm switching teams.

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