Muse

for he's a jolly good fellow and nobody can do it but i can nobody i'll get this okay but i can i'm gonna look up those lyrics you got it all right that was good T-B-T-L

Guess what day it is Guess what day it is

It's Friday, Friday Gotta get down on Friday Everybody's looking forward to the weekend You're here to make friends Making friends is the name of this show

But if what you want is Superman The only way you can get him is illegally From a modern day pirate

Sometimes people say that My head is too big for my body, and then I say, compared to what?

Look, man, you know your stuff, but you're like a crazy volcano. You'd have to show me you can bring it down a notch. I'll bring it down a thousand notches if I have to!

Well, all right, hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Friday edition of TVTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. You want showmanship? You got it! My name is Luke Burbank, I'm your host. Ooh, la, la! coming to you from the small maritime village of Port Townsend, Washington.

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

It's not beautiful in the weather department. It's just a little gray, but it is just one of the most beautiful places that I've ever been. That's for sure. Looking out on the water right now. There is a trail that I got to take a little jog on this morning called the Olympic Discovery Trail. And there is this point when you're coming back into town. I went out and back, coming back into town, and you come around a bend, and to your right, just the entire bay opens up, it comes into view, the city, the ferry coming and going, Marrowstone Island, it is just absolutely gorgeous. And if you're listening to Sigur Rós, as I was, everything in your world feels perfect in that moment. And then you get down to the Boat Haven Marina. And a guy who's probably working on one of the boats says, keep going, man. And you say, thanks. And he goes, for someone your age, you're really moving. And when he said that, that shocked me. I guess that's life, right? One minute you're having a completely ecstatic moment of everything in the world being perfect. And then two minutes later you're being reminded that you're a 46-year-old middle-aged dad type. So that's the latest from Port Townsend. Here's what we're going to be getting into on episode 3723 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. And right here in Port Townsend, in fact, as documented in one of my favorite newspapers in America, the Port Townsend Leader, the what some are calling world's most famous fishing boat.

Is it too early to fish sandwich?

Has finally departed from Boat Haven. In fact, the very the very place where I was being brought right back down to Earth. This vessel called the Western Flyer, which John Steinbeck took a journey around the Sea of Cortez in and wrote about famously. After over a decade of restoration, it is finally, well, it's finally leaving Port Townsend and has left Port Townsend. It's an interesting story that I want to tell you about. And then speaking of hyper-local topics, there are three cities in Oregon that seem to be vying for a designation that I didn't even know was a thing until like two weeks ago. World's smallest park.

It's quaint. It's small. It's family. I like it. It's a lot of fun.

So we'll talk about that, too. Time permitting, plus music for your weekend. Oh, and speaking of all things nautical, let's introduce the longest-running Cobra of the show. He may be best known for his depictions of the tall ships, capturing their grace and power. He is Andrew Walsh, and he is joining me right now. Good morning, my friend. Good morning, Luke.

We are getting very close to being a home with a dark board. Just wanted to let you know that. I know. Did you think I was going to say dog, and that was a little disappointing?

Well, if I'm being honest, yes. Yeah. Like, not at the beginning of the sentence, but with the pregnant pauses made me think you were going to bring something with pause into your life.

I understand that. I actually did not start that sentence as a troll, but I definitely ended that sentence as a troll. I am excited about the fact that we are getting a dartboard pretty soon. I wasn't planning on starting the show by setting up a, oh, Luke's going to think I'm going to say dog here spoof. I don't even usually think that type of stuff is funny In fact

I think this proves it was very not funny. For some reason, though, as I was saying the sentence, I realized this isn't really interesting. So maybe if I put a long pause in there, I'll set some expectations and then send them crashing down. I have a question, though. Are you going to get real darts? Oh, God, yeah. Here's the thing. I'm a boy who has real darts and has had real darts that he carries around in his knapsack. I literally, I have darts that I take because I'll go to the Eagles and I'll play darts and, you know, maybe another, yeah, I guess the Eagles is really the only place. But now that we have some space, Genevieve has been, we're in that place of recent move-ins where we got everything set up pretty quickly and made this house pretty dang livable. But there were still some pretty big corners of the house where we had piles of stuff that we kind of just you eventually get used to it. It's that really dangerous game of like if it sits there too long, it just it just sits there and it becomes a pile and years could go by. And Genevieve, God bless her, has been going around and vanquishing these areas, including this area right outside my office where we had, I don't know, bins of camping stuff and cat supplies we hadn't put away and some unorganized books. which that really falls on me um and anyway genevieve kind of took care of that this week and now it's this nice clean area with some shelves and a big open wall exactly where a dartboard should go it screams for a dartboard um and we'd been thinking about it and now genevieve has picked out the dartboard she's really taken this project on herself she's she's picked out the dartboard it's going to be one of those um what i always call it thistle which is wrong but a bristle dartboard you know not a core okay but like so not core now why why bristle instead of cork bristles better it's the it's not the it's not talking about the little plastic i'm not talking about the cheapo plastic ones i'm talking about the really compact those are i believe better dartboards um that's what i grew up playing i think it's better than cork i mean i don't know dartboard heads get at me but i think you want a bristle board um and then here was the one little disagreement we had i said let's just buy one you know we don't want to destroy our walls and let's face it neither one of us are professional darters dart boys what do you call one who plays i think dart boys um and so tanyans exactly so uh we don't want to mess up our wall so we're gonna get like kind of a backsplash for it or whatever you would call it like a and so genevieve is gonna i said let's just buy one of those babies but they're kind of expensive and probably not big enough for our you'd like to cover a skill level 15 by 15 area exactly so genevieve is going to be making the uh she's going to get some wood some plywood and some felt which really opens up the opportunities for uh color whatever color we want so anyway that's probably i mean there's a chance that when i crack this microphone on monday and say good morning to you i may be a man in

possession of a dartboard what do you think of that i mean what a way to start a show i'm glad

to hear i mean not that it was ever in doubt in your mind as a d'artagnan who carries you in darts which always blows my mind when I remember that just because of all the things that I think you would have in that little kind of messenger bag of yours darts is just not on the list but um I'm glad that you're going with real darts because and I you know I guess people have kids or whatever peace and love but like if you're not none of those safety dart situations ever are as satisfying as real darts in fact I would just say if if if you're if it's not a situation where it's safe or prudent to have real darts just don't even mess with those other weird things you know

yeah the weird plastic things you mean or like those electric those go to a bar that has those

or you go to someone's house or like and you just like it's doesn't stick in there and it's just like i mean there is something very satisfying about a dart that flies true and finds its mark and just just cinches right into that you know whatever the cork or the bristle or what you know It's a very satisfying process, and there's nothing less satisfying than throwing a safety dart at something that is more, you know, like, again, kid-friendly, I get it. Although, you know, I had a dartboard as a kid. I grew up in a very un-kid-friendly environment in terms of any kind of safety measures. No bike helmets, dartboard, real darts, unsupervised, just absolutely.

Yeah, the axe-throwing wall, too, right? Didn't you have an axe-throwing wall?

Yeah. Yes, we did. uh that was actually a bad idea i mean there were a number of actually it was a power saw throwing

wall that was that's right you had talked about that one time they weren't axes the parents the

other parents in the neighborhood eventually complained kids kept coming home missing a limb they were like okay burbanks but no i had a dartboard and i i loved that thing was on the outside of my bedroom while my bedroom was in the basement of our house

which was one of those like unfinished basements i mean it had a floor it wasn't dirt but it just had like a cold cement floor and then and the whole floor sloped to a drain like in one part of the basement so i guess if there was flooding which actually there never was well a couple times there would be flooding when uh there'd be some kind of problem with our like sewer pipe and it would come back up that drain that was not great but um but like uh as far as the basement itself flooding i guess that was luck considering my room was down there it was fortunate that that it didn't fill with water but anyway it was a very kind of rough space and i hung the start board on the outside of my door and i would stand in a kind of you know a ways away from it in in the like where there was just endless piles of laundry so we had this laundry table we had a washer dryer obviously and then a huge like folding table that everyone was supposed to come down and like fold their own laundry i think or something i don't know my poor mother i mean seven kids come on like i don't like dealing with my own laundry sometimes and it's just me but like so i don't want to paint my mom as being um disorganized because i will say this for all of my mom's quirks i am happy to say i grew up in a home that was relatively tidy a lot of that credit goes to my sisters who learned at some point that a good way to moderate my mother's moods were to help be mother's little helpers and help straighten things up but i didn't grow up in an over overwhelmingly chaotic home but that laundry table was chaos it was just piles of clean laundry you'd sort of go and if you wanted to fold your stuff you would but i would stand near there and i'd throw these darts at this dartboard and like you andrew i was not always i didn't always make contact with the dartboard itself that door was just absolutely destroyed

by the time we moved out of that rental yeah i believe it and now i'm even thinking we have a party here in a couple of weeks and i believe there will be some young ones here now i'm starting to think maybe we should keep maybe we should keep the dartboard um off the wall until uh after the party which is weird you'd think you'd want a dartboard for a party but i can already see like everything if we have like if we have you know rugrats throwing darts at a wall you know we'll just have a bunch of uh holes beneath our dark oh i like that you know what andrew i like that i

like that your concern was for your wall and not the eyeball of a child because when you started to say that when you started to say that i was like oh andrew just have your fun it's okay the kids will be fine but no you were like ain't nobody messing up my new walls eyeballs grow back

i mean walls don't it's impossible to replace a tiny hole in a wall but eyeballs grow back i like this yes i find myself here because i was i just suddenly you put doubt in my mind that that a corkboard might be better but no corkboards wear out and you know no no no i'm sure i'm i trust genevieve's uh internet research oh that no no that was i brought that to the table i want let's not disrespect andrew's history with dartboards i remember having a thistle dart again i always

call you are the guy carrying darts around public transportation in seattle have you ever thought uh like if you had to use them in self-defense or crime fighting could you you know i do i keep

them between my fingers at all times like a poor man no i'm serious though you know think you never

know in a big city things can get weird have you ever thought have you ever played out a fantasy where you use your darts in some kind of heroic scenario like i have to hold on one second mr

thug and i take i open up my bag and i have to assemble them and then i take out my little plastic case and i pop it off my eyes aren't super great though so it takes me a second i take off my glass and i pop open the plastic case then i'm like do i need the flights on this or not and i decide i do so then i try to unfold the flights and then you know how you got to get you got to get them perfectly into the four slots at the end and i'm just like again taking off my glass is holding it really close to me and then finally, finally I get the darts assembled and all the criminals are already gone. It's too late and that's why they call me the Dart Canyon.

That would be if you were hanging out with Phoenix Jones. I could see your outfit.

I was menaced on the bus the other day. I mean, it wasn't a huge deal but like I was... Do you know that if I were to say the E-line to you, do you know what that represents in

bus culture? No, no, I wouldn't

unfortunately. The E-line is the is like that's the that's the bus line where the shit goes down like you know i'm used to like going from like little neighborhoods but is that on aurora yes exactly like the 45 or the 40

i think it used to be the 8 or something because the only bus that i ever took regularly when i was a kid i would take the metro bus up and down aurora all the time go up to aurora village so i probably took that e-line when they didn't call it the e-line yeah and listen i mean it's a bus i

mean it's fine and kids can take it whatever but it's also where you're going to find some of the more colorful characters in the city right on this e-line and so i'm and of course i make the mistake and i i gotta stop carrying my camera around because i i uh you know i get on the bus the other day with my big black headphones on and my uh my camera strapped around these not even a big lens on my camera but it's so funny how a couple of times on aurora i've been like i've had my camera and somebody has made some comment to me people get really paranoid in this area where you know there are various business endeavors going on in the part of aurora where i live and so people see this camera and they they think that i'm up to something or i'm spying on them or something which is really interesting because if i wanted to spy on somebody or take surreptitious pictures you would do you wouldn't have a telephoto lens yeah everybody would have you know and I don't have I honestly don't have a big lens on it but you know it's a big you know classic looking camera right or not a yes the camera that I'm carrying around and so but if you won't really want if you were in if I was in if I was a investigator I would be as I'd be trying to blend in as much as possible and just make it look like I'm scrolling through Twitter on my phone while snapping pics or something I wouldn't be carrying this ostentatious thing around but anyway so I get on the bus I'm going downtown for some reason and I have my headphones on and my and my camera and I take a seat there are no seats just like one open seat all the way in the back except not quite the bench along the back wall so I sit down and there's a guy behind me then he's like he's like hey hey and I hear I'm kind of trying to get my attention but I just when I have my big headphones on I'm like there's plausible deniability at all times with me that includes with my personal relationships as well if i'm wearing these black headphones and you can't and you're trying to get my attention you don't know if i can hear you or not you're like me when i

worked at kuow i would yeah i would literally sit down on my desk at 9 a.m i would put the headphones on i would take them off at 5 p.m right exactly never even playing any audio yeah just not wanting to talk to some kind of slightly odd staffers it's amazing what bog actually admitted

to you during those hours but you just never heard it because you had your black headphones on Anyway, that was a desk mate, I believe. Anyway, so this guy, he like, I'm like, I can just ignore this. I don't need to be interacting with strangers on the bus. But then he taps my shoulder. And I don't like that. I don't like being touched on the E line. And so, you know, I turn around. I'm like, huh. And I kind of take one ear off of my headphone sort of, you know, like making it very clear. This is a quick temporary conversation. You know, I don't take my headphones off. i give him one quick ear and look sort of over my shoulder i'm like what he's like what's with the camera or something i'm just like oh yeah i just said oh yeah it's kind of old and then i just put yeah i didn't answer his question but i also didn't have to i just said oh yeah it's kind of old and then i put my headphones back on and i think he tried to get my attention some more and then i ignored him some more then the bus continues rolling south and then um i think i knew he tried to get my attention again and i ignored it and then like oh and also he's like and i'm wearing like i'm wearing like loafers or something so then he's you know he's i really like your shoes like okay thanks man um and then this is why so far this doesn't sound like a menacing this sounds like a friend to sing he was i like your shoes what's going on with the camera but the thing is he was trying to engage me in a conversation that i was not interested in engaging in a in a conversation with you know i mean it was one of those things where you can just sort of tell like either way no matter what i'm not here to make friends like i sure i'm that's fair i'm just i'm i'm just on the bus minding my own business listening to my friend nick's playlist like i'm not i'm not here to be talking to this stranger who's kind of got a wily grin and so i um so i kind of keep on ignoring and then later on you know whatever maybe 10 15 15 minutes later or something like there may be different people on the bus maybe i can hear him talking with them i don't know i don't know if he knows these people if he's now made friends with them or what it is But then I could hear him try to get my attention again, like normally starts tapping on my shoulder again. I'm like, what? And he's like, and, you know, at this point, it's pretty clear. I'm not interested in talking with you. Just leave me alone. Right. And so he asked me, hey, are you a bounty hunter? And I'm like, what? He's like, are you a bounty hunter? I'm like, no, I'm not a bounty hunter. And I'm starting to give him a little. I would have said yes. I would have gotten out my darts. Yes. They call me the dart man. I just caught Han Solo with these darts. He said, he's in cryo-freeze right now I said, he doesn't like you And I don't like you either I think that's a line from Star Wars So anyway, then I'm just like, no And I kind of give him some tood You know me, I like to throw some tood around the bus And then he's like Well then what do you do for a living? What do you do that you have to carry a camera around? Please tell me you said podcaster And I said, are you familiar with RSS technology, my friend? I work for the company that used to produce In the Dark i said well are you familiar with my friend john moe actually that's another thing do you know one

of the guys who um was it possibly john moe do you know that one of okay this is another tangent um so you know i volunteer on sundays we hand out meals and my thing um my kind of ongoing responsibility is to um bring coffee and lemonade sometimes hot chocolate depending on the weather and um there's a fellow who i've become friends with actually i think he listens to the show So So maybe he would even hear this. And he comes by every Sunday to grab some food and he hangs out and we have coffee. I actually I really enjoy that part of the day. And we'll talk about all kinds of things. He's seen the world. And the other day he asked me, oh, do you know who John Moe is or something? He was asking me about John Moe's podcast. I'm like, yeah, I know John. I know John Moe. He's like, yeah, I met him one time. And he had a professional depressed person. He had read John Moe's book And I was able to dine out on the fact That I have pressed the flesh with Mr. John Moe Anyway so then this guy is kind of like Asking me I mean that's basically the end of the story He asked me if I'm a bounty hunter I say no Throw some tood then he's like well what do you do For a living and I'm just like don't worry about it And he's like I'm not worried about it But this time oh you said don't worry about it I said don't worry about it See that's kind of first of all you should have said Stop remembering that No, he's got all these guys around him now who are all kind of like laughing too. Like he's like tapping me on the shoulder and being like, hey, are you a bounty hunter? I'm like, no. And they're all like laughing at me. Like it was not a – it was a – listen. It was a bad feeling. When I say menaced, I wasn't menaced. I never at one point felt like, oh, I got to be careful where I get off the bus. You know, I didn't – I never ever felt like, uh-oh, I'm in trouble. I never felt unsafe. I felt annoyed. Like this guy was clear. It was a teasing. You know what I mean? It was a light teasing. I'm fine. I'm not really complaining about it. But it was kind of like, you know, it was definitely a teasing. They were all laughing at me because, you know, I stood out.

And also, I mean, nobody likes that feeling. And in particular, you have a kind of not great history in your childhood of of of getting some attention that felt really bad to you. So I would I could imagine a world in which it's just you're especially not a fan of that kind of interaction. But here's a question I have for you, and I'm – please – I sure hope this doesn't sound like I'm victim-blaming at all because you should just be able to ride the bus and look how and be however you want to be. I'm talking about you now. But do you have the camera out because you think you might see something that you want to take a picture of on the bus as opposed to having the camera in a bag when you're traveling around?

Oh, well, yeah. I mean why would I carry around a camera in a bag? I mean the whole point is I would be taking photos.

Yeah. Okay, I didn't see – well, I just – I mean, this – and this would also explain, of course, why when you were running for the bus that one time and you had your fall, you were saving the camera because you had the camera out. I guess I think – I mean, I'm not a photographer and certainly not of the kind where I would have a camera in addition to my phone. But I guess if I were to imagine – if you were like, I'm going to go out and take some pictures, the way I would imagine it would be you're going to go walk around, maybe stop by a bar you like or whatever. and then at some point if you see something interesting you take your camera out you put it together you take pictures but i guess that's really not how it works because if the something interesting is happening quickly you kind of have to be ready to go yeah i mean if i if i'm out with

my camera it means because i want to take photo yeah i'm not like i'm not going to do photo shoots in like a cemetery or something so yeah i mean and again like and i'm not this camera does not have some huge lens hanging off of it you know i mean the thing is the size of a soft you do have to support it though with a stand i do have that yes i have you look like you're taking pictures for sports illustrated circa 1992 now i will tell you this this is sort of on me i also have one of those uh parametric microphones not oh yeah parabolic parabolic microphones that you see

on the sidelines of football that's an injury waiting to happen it is only i feel like there is something in the universe there is some kind of molecular attraction between huge football players and that poor sumbitch who's holding that parabolic microphone's knee like luke that was

actually taken out so hard that would actually be a pretty hilarious video or cartoon or something where you just see that guy setting that thing up like out in a field somewhere where nobody is around but the second it's unfolded just like three dudes just slumbled through exactly yeah no i don't know yet so i mean yeah i don't want to and again i want to make it clear nobody made it i didn't think anybody was going to take my camera break my camera hurt me do anything i was just and i thought you were going to say like did i kind of bring this on by being rude and i promise you like i didn't i don't start off with rudeness i'm just kind of like you know i will give somebody a brief smile and give him the benefit of the doubt but when you keep on tapping my shoulder and stuff like that you know give me some space my absolutely anybody yeah no no I'm not I don't

think you did anything at all to encourage us or did anything quote-unquote wrong in this scenario I think I just sort of like because I see your pictures on Instagram you take really good photos but I think I've just even though you've again described being out with your camera and again the whole finger incident was because the camera was was around your neck or whatever like this should be obvious to me but somehow it wasn't i guess i just didn't imagine you because i will say this that is a fairly rare sight in this day and age because of the ubiquity of phone cameras right like to

I'm trying to think of the last time I saw a person who was not part of a professional photo shoot just out and about in the world with a camera that wasn't their phone. That's actually – and again, none of this is to say that person should have given you grief because they shouldn't. But it is – I will say that is not something that I see a ton of anymore.

Yeah, there is one moment where – and again, not a huge deal. It was something that lasted like 10 seconds in interaction, but where was I? I mean this was maybe a little bit more on me realizing my surroundings. This was in the middle of the day, I don't know, a couple of months ago or something, but I had my camera and I realized that like, you know, I'd been carrying it around the night before. And so I had this setting on it set so that I would take nighttime photos or whatever, like the ISO setting for people who know that. And I was and then I was like walking with my camera. I was just starting my walk heading south on Aurora for some reason. And I remembered, oh, I need to change the ISO in case I do want to take a photo of whatever, a sign or a cat or whatever. and so I stopped for a second on the sidewalk and I you know maybe I stand there for I don't know maybe I stand there for 30 seconds tops or something which is kind of a long time to stand on the sidewalk messing with your camera in a day and age where people don't have a lot of cameras and I didn't really pay attention to where I was and then I get it set and then I realize somebody's talking to me again and so I think I again I give him maybe the one ear with my um I take off my headphones on one ear and I realize it's like a proprietor or somebody who's like on the street And I'm like, I'm basically standing in that area right below that strip club sign. Can you picture the strip club sign I'm talking about in my neighborhood? We don't have to go into more detail, but there's a strip club and it's like kind of this whole area of kind of like shady ass businesses right there. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I know the one I got to say at a certain point, a fella needs to acknowledge his surroundings. Right. And I remember some guy kind of was standing on the sidewalk outside of his business. Like, what are you doing with that camera? I'm just like, oh, just changing the settings, sir. which i don't know if that really fulfilled whatever is i don't know if that fulfilled his query but i just kept moving i didn't feel like explaining it because that i mean there is i will acknowledge that too like you know i'm not even when i carry the thing around like i'm not trying to put it right in front of me so it's sticking off of my belly like a tourist you know what i mean i kind of sling it around me keep it kind of under my arm like i'm not i'm not trying

to be ostentatious with this thing sure of course not yeah well i'm i'm that sounds annoying what happened on the bus i'm glad that uh i'm also glad you still use that camera because i because your whole finger drama was in the preservation of the camera yeah if it was me if it was me i would like bought the camera lost interest in the camera and then like or i would have bought the camera i would have injured myself preserving the camera and then i would have lost interest in the camera and then it would have been better off if i would have just trashed the camera in the first place but it's good that like it's good that you're saving of this camera uh was it was important because you still use it and it still brings you a lot of enjoyment yeah although i would say that

i the medical bills did end up costing more than a new camera would have having said i'm just trying to find a silver lining but i am happy that actually you know what my bigger concern was so i had a camera when i was more into photography like years ago like 15 15 20 years ago and that camera i had it forever and then it just got so old it finally just broke on vacation maybe about I don't know whenever I bought this new one three years ago or something and I was so on the fence about buying a new camera because I hadn't really used my old one that much and I'm still I think you know I'm like this that for some reason anything that I consider a big purchase which is I don't know anything more than a couple hundred dollars or something or a hundred dollars maybe like I which is maybe old-fashioned in this economy but like I'm like I was really struggling with should I invest in another camera or will I get this camera and it'll just sit and collect dust kind of like my old one did like that was a real worry for me and i would be really self-loathing if i ended up buying something like that and never used it and actually i gotta say and i don't i don't know if you recall but i ended up buying this off of craigslist and got you met a guy out at like uh the the mall out in like lake forest park or something right exactly and then it turns out i found out later from describing this interaction on tbtl somebody pointed out that hey i think you bought that from a former kuow employee a guy who i never even worked with before But did you remember that part of it? He was some guy who had worked in the tech division of KOW. But anyway, I love it. I don't have a power out. I'm getting a dartboard, and I like my camera.

That's good. Okay. Well, this is a good place for us to take a quick break. But when we come back, I do want to tell you, Andrew, about the – purchasing the Western Flyer would bring a lot of anxiety for you because it's much more than $100. Is it? Are you sure? Oh, it's like $1.50. I like that. You're like, purchases of $100, it's like, I'm imagining you standing in the milk aisle at the grocery store, just agonizing because milk is currently $100 a gallon. I know a hundo doesn't really make sense there. I don't know what my limit is. Listen, $100 is $100. I mean, I spent an extra 40 minutes. in that Home Depot trying to negotiate with Coach so that I could get $200 off of this thing. Like, I mean, that's real money, but it is wild how many things are now $100. Yeah, exactly. Would not have been some time ago. But anyway, okay, let's take our quick break, and then we'll come back with much more TBTL. Thank you, baby. Hey, let's thank some of our daily donors. These are the wonderful, generous people who responded during the most recent TBTL-a-thon 13, Let the Fun Begin. They let the funds begin. Would you say they put the fun in fundraising? I believe they did that, and we want to thank them today. We want to thank Kat Getting of Eugene, Oregon. Track City, USA, Andrew. Yeah? I think that's what they, maybe track town. I was staying in a hotel in Eugene because we were doing Livewire at the Holt Center. By the way, we're going to be doing that again, I think, in the spring or something. We had a great time. So if you live in Eugene, maybe we'll see you at the Holt Center. But I was like, what is going on with this hotel room? Everything was like track and running shoes. There was a waffle iron. And I realized it's all about the track, the storied history of Nike and the University of Oregon and Eugene and that they made the first Nike is supposedly, you know, the soles of the shoes they made in a waffle iron. Oh, I have heard that. Yeah, probably from you to kind of get that certain effect. And there was a pillow on one of the beds that said track. And then there was a pillow on the other bed that said town or something. But I was in that room for like six hours before I realized, oh, that's right. Right, right, right. Thank you, Kat. Also, thanks to Nancy Heinrich of Olympia, Washington. Charlotte Meyer is in Summers, New York. Thanks to Colin Richard in University City, Missouri, or Missouri, as my grandmother would say, who I believe was maybe did she spend some time in Missouri? I think she might have lived there. Never learned how to say the state, though. Or did she? Old Virginia Burbank, or maybe she did. Becky Jeans is in Carnation, Washington.

And then Hannah Clayton is in Martin, Tennessee. Thank you so much to our donors of the day. Thanks for keeping TBTL going. We absolutely would not be here without you. But everything's going to be all right.

Thank you, babe.

hello and welcome to top story andrew when i tell you how much i love the port townsend leader do you hear this this is the sound my friend of print media i walk into the hotel yesterday afternoon and they have complimentary editions of the leader i love that i do love that it's just it just makes me so happy because i haven't been here in a few years now and you know obviously it has been a challenging time in the newspaper business for newspapers that are not called the new york times and the washington post basically um and i was so heartened to see that they're still publishing the leader because it has a decent amount of original reporting Two, including this story by Brian Kelly Restoration effort at the Boat Haven comes to an end This is a headline for you, or this is a lead, what do they call it? A lead? This is a nice, I was never really My foray into newspaper journalism was The University of Washington Daily And then the Seattle Times Entering the high school sports scores into the back of the sports section On Friday nights So I don't know all the terminology with print media, but this is a great opening paragraph from Brian Kelly. Croatian lavender, 20-million-year-old shark teeth, and the western flyer. All three went into the water last Wednesday as a crowd of more than 200 gathered at Boathaven to see the fishing boat, made famous by literary great John Steinbeck, reunited with the sea after a nine-year restoration effort at the Port Townsend Boatyard. So basically what happened was this boat was called the Western Flyer. It was built in Tacoma, Washington back in 1937. And it, as a lot of vessels like this, it went through a whole variety of different kind of uses and iterations. Some like it was like a fishing boat in Alaska for a while. John Steinbeck, though, spent time on it traveling. around the Sea of Cortez, and then he ended up writing a couple of different, I think, nonfiction books that were based on that experience that are pretty beloved by particularly people that are into boats and stuff like that, which was why this kind of, this boat was thought to be worth saving. Now, at some point, somebody changed the name to the Gemini, and that, according to this article, is when the real trouble started. When it was called the Gemini, it sank three different times. oh so that was a bad luck situation when they changed the western flyer to the gemini some uh doctor i think or was it a hotelier some some doctor person was going to buy it oh sorry a california real estate developer wanted to buy the boat and use as a decoration for a cafe

that was going to be part of a new hotel but that never came together eventually the boat sunk and you would just think like in in anacortes the boat sunk i think in 2012 at that point you would just think well the story is kind of over but i guess not they floated the boat they went and got it from the bottom of the bay or whatever in anacortes and brought it back to the surface and dragged it down here to port townsend this is the other thing i would not have expected somebody still paid a million dollars for it at that point for this boat that had sunk three

times and what yeah i'm sorry what era is this that they paid a million trying to figure out This is before or after milk cost $100.

This was before milk cost $100, but in around, I believe, 2013. I guess I don't know what boats are worth, because if you told me a boat had sunk three times, I wouldn't give a shit that John Steinbeck had been on it. I'm not paying. Like, even today, I would be jogging through boats.

You would just scratch the boat number off of it and leave it, probably, because if a boat sinks three times, there's a good chance.

Kevin O'Brien, what's my – am I insured for this thing? No? Okay, we're giving it a Viking funeral and pushing it out into the bay and scuttling it. Oh, my gosh, dude. As I was, like, on my little morning run today going through this exact marina called Boat Haven, it's amazing the scale of these vessels that are up on – they call it being on the hard. They're basically up on, you know, blocks and things and being worked. I mean, some of these boats are just so massive and so old. Port Townsend is really kind of an international center for a certain kind of restoration of old, particularly wooden boats. But, like, I will see a guy, like, this morning I saw it. It was, like, 8 in the morning. And a guy is just sanding one section of the hull of a boat that is so goddamn big and wooden. and like it's like this is point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero one percent of the labor that is going to need to go into bringing this thing back to being seaworthy and is he doing it by hand like in a movie or does he is he using a sander i mean really now i'm talking about different now the western flyer has it's on its way to seattle to get its engines put in so the western flyer is now gone but these are other boats that you know if you told me they were also historically significant i would believe you like they appear to be from you know built in the sort of mid-century they're like big uh sturdy kind of i don't even know you'd think having owned a couple of boats and being obsessed with them i'd know more of the terminology but this is a kind of a blind spot for me but it's impressive that people will put in the work on these things because it just seems so sisyphean to me just like oh my god i can't believe so that's why i was shocked that this boat was still worth a million dollars they put two more million dollars into fixing it up, Andrew. And it's going to be a research vessel. And it's going to be like a very futuristic... They basically rebuilt... I get the feeling that they almost rebuilt everything on the boat. Like 80% of it is new wood or something. So it's still the Western Flyer, but it's gotten a serious rehabilitation to where it's actually like a pretty cool working vessel now.

So it's like the George Washington axe issue that Genevieve always uses. Exactly. If you replace the handle, is it still the axe? Then later on, if you replace the head, is it still the axe? Was it still George Washington's axe? I might be. Is it George Washington even? Is that even the right? I think so. Okay, good. I believe so.

Yeah, I think you're right. That's what we used to use in the axe throwing room in the basement. Oh, right. We called it George Washington's axe. You used George Washington's power saw. Yeah, right. Table saw. Yes. This is what I thought was really kind of funny about it, though. They wanted to change the name back to the Western Flyer because Gemini was clearly bad Grigri on this boat. Sure, yeah. But there's a whole thing, right, with renaming boats. Do you know this? Oh, you have to break a bottle over it? No, no, that's christening a boat. And that does happen when you're launching a new vessel. But when a boat has been given a new name, the lore is, the superstition is, you have to change the name, but you can't let it touch the water until it has its new name.

didn't know that because once it touches the water it belongs to neptune oh my god that's the guy i know i know i know you don't like this kind of stuff but i think it's kind of charming this guy uh who rehabilitated his name is chris chase he was the guy who has kind of been responsible for this whole project um he said this was like 200 people gathered to watch this boat get lowered back into the water once neptune gets its hands on the boat it's neptune's boat and we don't want any mishaps so they're going to change the name of the boat so somebody has to come out and pretend to be poseidon um a guy named joe petrich a boat builder and the grandson of martin petrich took on the role of poseidon for the renaming ceremony prompting laughter from the crowd as he approached the bow of the western flyer holding a plastic trident i well remember the day the western flyer first touched my waters at western boat building company she was a sound yar vessel he said i want to start calling more things a sound yard vessel as you're padding what kind of car

do you drive now as you're padding the dashboard of your ah she's a yard this mazda cx by she's a

yard vessel so this dude's like he this guy is portraying he's he's portraying poseidon who is now they're gonna this somehow is part of the process of renaming the boat back to being the western flyer before it goes in the water so now he turns to the crowd so i ask you speak out and answer me now have you purged all traces of her old name gemini and then the crowd yells yes what do you propose we return her to and then the crowd yells western flyer they shouted norah petrich of port towns and then led the well-wishers in a call to the rulers of the four winds and wine was splashed on the hull of the boat but wait andrew it gets better the ceremony was temporarily interrupted by a fauna quinn great dane that walked out from the crowd the dog wandered up to the front of the boat launch stood next to petrich and started drinking from an open plastic container

that was holding the holy water so that is the holiest dog yeah what happens to the dog now i'm scared to ask all of this is getting a little too game of thronesy for me so i'm a little bit worried about what they're gonna have to do to the dog who drank the holy water the dog is now the mayor of it's either yeah after the dog drinks the holy water something really good or really bad is

going to happen to that dog i'm hoping good i mean first of all i am when i was picturing the dog even though it's i've never heard of the term fauna quinn i guess that just must have to do with the markings it is a great dane but i imagine the dog looking like santa's little helper from the simpsons i don't know why that just seems like that would happen on the simpsons is they'd be doing some elaborate thing with this ritualistic water and then they'd look away for a minute and they'd turn back over around and santa's little helper would be over there licking drinking the holy water um but this also explains to some degree also just laziness why i never changed the name of my boat that the boat that i had that that we took you know a trip on we recorded a show and i eventually crashed um that was called the general lee yeah which not a good name for a boat i don't know if these people meant it as some kind of confederate thing but definitely not a great look and every time i talked about changing the name the people the the jerrys the people they take it seriously they'd be like okay but you got to go out you got to spin the boat around three times you've got to like drop a thing like i heard that from multiple people basically saying like you can't just go out and just start calling your boat a new thing or just change the lettering on the back of the boat there's this very like people see people take this shit kind of seriously yeah

See, I have mixed emotions because when you tell me about, like, that kind of thing, like, that kind of annoys me. Like, listen, it's my boat. Like, is Neptune going to help pay the monthly payments on this boat? Is Neptune going to cover any of the insurance costs or whatever? No? Well, then I'll tell you what. The boat belongs to me until I see some paperwork. So that kind of annoys me. Oh, you'll go down to the briny depths thinking that way. But when you but when you describe this actual little ceremony where, you know, people are having a great time and not taking it too seriously and laughing at at, you know, their their their friend and neighbor who's dressed up like who is he dressed up like Poseidon, like, you know, that sounds incredibly, obviously charming to me.

i know i have to say being in this town and i've only been here for like less than 24 hours i was i'm here because last night i was helping out with this um fundraiser for something called the jefferson county land trust which is an incredible organization what they basically do is preserve they'll they'll like go in last night we were celebrating a particular family oh my god this story was wild so this um woman and her brother the kawamodos is their last name they've lived in the area and their family has farmed here for like a hundred years they're like great great granddad came over from japan uh was not allowed to live in the

u.s because of you know racist you know immigration laws went to canada then eventually was hired on a farm here in the area and was allowed to come to the u.s to work at this farm and he learned farming and timber and all this stuff so he then just works his ass off i think brings his brother over or something and they just with like hand saws clear like 40 acres to make a dairy farm then world war ii comes guess what they do they take this family and they intern them and the incredible thing and not to turn it into any kind of white savior narrative but the local community actually continued farming this land for their the kawamodos their their neighbors and and you know because they the local people realized that this was a really good family and that what was being done was an injustice so they continued farming the land for them while they were interned and then when they came back they were able to take their farm back over which by the way was fairly rare i learned last night you had a lot of japanese americans who just had their whatever their possessions were whatever their land was business etc it was just not there for them when they were finally released from internment so this this the survivors you know the the descendants is where is this particular woman heather kawamoto and her brother they are the owners of this farm and they were going to sell it they don't work at the farm they do something else but they were going to sell it but they didn't want it to just become apartment buildings yeah which is what's happening with so much land so they reach out to this thing the jefferson county land trust and they say like what can we do here to ensure that this thing stays a farm and so then the jefferson county land trust comes in and they basically they raise money to help offset some of the lost income because if you sell it to a farmer you're making way less And if you sell it to some condo developer And so they get people to donate money To basically make sure that this is something That in perpetuity will be agricultural land That's cool And they do this all over Jefferson County It's a very, very cool organization So anyway, that's what I was doing here last night But just this morning I got up and just, like I said Being on my little jog and going and getting coffee The pull of this town To me, it's like I totally remember Why I wanted to move here in the first place I was going to make a joke early.

I almost started the show by asking, have you bought a house in Port Townsend yet? Oh, my God. Because that's the thing. I was also surprised when you were mentioning the fellow who is hand sanding part of the hull of a boat. I mean, the task – I'm blanking on whatever adjective I was trying to think of, so I'll just move on. But like the – Enormity? Yeah, the enormity or the Sisyphusian – what's the – Sisyphian maybe? The Pacifician task of that is notable, but I thought you were going to say that it was like living inside of a movie. That it was like the most romantic thing you could possibly imagine is you just spending your days sanding the bottom of a boat.

Well, I certainly had that phase. I think when I moved here, I thought that I would become a different person and just become a wooden boat builder or something. i i i understand that that's just not my wiring and that i would get bored after probably about two hours of that sanding i could probably i wouldn't mind being in like a andy dufresne situation at the end of right exactly a shawshank yeah just down on that beach sand in that boat as morgan freeman rolls up but um that'd be about the size of boat that i'd be into dealing with yeah something on the smaller side but like um no just i i don't know this there is something for me really magical about this place and just like the you know the being of the water and it's like the the funky businesses and the funky people like so i stopped off to get some gas in southern washington yesterday and i was gassing up and there was a car maybe a jeep of some kind kind of a sort of rundown older jeep that was getting gas across you know at a different pump and andrew the bumper stickers on this vehicle were just so unhinged it was of course i'm just gonna say a bad word here fuck biden but the weird part is and i've seen this before they bleep out the e in biden i don't i don't get this so you're putting the f word on the back of your car but biden you're you're putting you put a block over it or something i kind of can't picture that i'm well i would say we could use it for a show pick but i don't want to i don't want to pollute i want to pollute the atmosphere it's just weird they've done something to obscure the e in biden and i don't understand why that's the thing they're messing with and then it's got an american flag i'm gonna say something here that is it's pretty offensive so i i actually i'm not gonna say it he has another one that says joe and the

Something else got to go. Now, imagine something that would rhyme with that as an incredibly offensive way to describe, I presume, Kamala Harris. He's got a FJB, which is, of course, F Joe Biden again in like American flag. It's just FJB, but it's American flag colored letters. And then below that, of course, it says, let's go, Brandon.

And the amazing thing is this is a Bernie Sanders supporter. This is coming from the left. That's the thing. The Bernie bros, that's why the polling on them was always so misleading because you thought they were in one category.

You know, he's just got – it's just this kind of stuff. It's just so aggressive. Also, by the way, he does have the Jesus fish.

Oh, good. You know, he sounds like he's living up to Christian ideals.

I mean, I was like sitting there. I was like – I took a picture of the car. Obviously, that's why I'm reciting this. I took a picture of the car. I was thinking about trying to put together – like the way that I was – I was so upset. And this is just like typical America right now I was so upset by this At just the level of aggression And like the men I felt like it was menacing I just started shadowboxing in my head so hard By the way Andrew I shite thee not When the guy finally came out Of the AM PM in Kelso, Washington He was wearing American flag board shorts American flag tank top And I'm not I am not making this up And like you know some Oakley Blade sunglasses Oakley Gargoyles Whatever wraparound shades And a hat that I'm sure also said something Negative about Hillary Clinton or something And was holding like a couple of hot dogs And whatever soda And he got in his car and drove away And I just I was so upset by this And yet this goes on all the time The asymmetry between the aggression I was listening to Mike Peska's show just the other day and he was talking to a woman who is a pollster with the bulwark and she polls a lot of Republicans and Democrats and the focus groups rather is what she really does and she said she just the level of vitriol that the Republicans feel towards the Democrats she said and by the way this woman is a Republican she said the level of vitriol that shows up in the focus groups from Republicans directed at Democrats is so unequal to the level of vitriol from the democrats to the republicans she's like the democrats are harder on the democrats than they are on the republicans yeah no that's for sure there's just a real that you know like like she's like yeah i'll talk to a democrat in pennsylvania and they'll say you know i understand why republicans kind of like think this is the way i don't agree but you know and then she'll talk to republicans and they'll just be like hillary is a pedophile yeah and democrats are making it possible like it's unhinged and like i said very asymmetric and that just like really was dispiriting for me and then i get to port towns and andrew and i get to the finn river cidery which is it perpetually um protected by the jefferson county land trust and it's just this big unbelievably beautiful orchard and farms and people are just standing around drinking wine and cider and being nice to each other and this very talented musician named samara jade is like playing acoustic guitar music and singing and i was just like this is where i belong yeah get me away from the fjb people at the gas stations and let me just

please live in this orchard with these people in port townsend this is something that i've been thinking about lately only because we kind of we should move on because you ended that in a nice place i don't mean to take it back to the the weird world of social politics now but um you know me i'm not somebody who lives in the hot take zones of the internet right on either side of it like i mean even on instagram i follow a lot of people photographers other uh tens like i follow people in like when you flip through stories it's very clear you know like everybody i follow is is you know pretty dang far left as am i right um but you know so i guess you know i'm exposed to to all of the those comments and stuff but i don't like i try to avoid shadow boxing i try to avoid the like hey i'm gonna retweet something you know some people on the left will sometimes retweet something absolutely awful that some some troll on the right is tweeting so that they can respond to it but then all they've done is kind of put that poison in my brain too

but i try to kind of avoid that trolls the ben shapiro's of the world take that as a w of course If you've riled up the libs, like nothing that we say dunking on them changes their opinion. It only makes them feel like they're accomplishing their goal.

Exactly. But it's really hard to completely avoid some sort of a back and forth on a Twitter thread or something every now and then. Maybe out of some sick fascination, I'll pull on a thread or something, and you start seeing a back and forth or whatever. And again. It just upsets me, so I don't really get into it. But the one thing, and this is my point of all this, the one thing that I seem to see a lot, not a lot, but on the occasions that I'm in these things, it's like somebody will inevitably, somebody on the right, you know, kind of a trollish kind of person will just be like, operating under some assumption that we libs just love Joe Biden. And that to me is so funny. Like, if you want to say, like, hey, you guys just loved your Barack Obama. I'd be like, yeah, guilty. Yeah, I did. I mean, there's some drone issues. But yeah, yes, I did. I was I was probably never prouder to be an American than when he was the president. But like, we're not like you are so fundamentally misunderstanding what is going on. If you're starting your argument with, well, you libs just love your Joe Biden, because like, whatever. Like, I just I've never heard anybody on any side. I mean, maybe with the exception of Joe Biden himself, like I have never heard anybody say I love Joe Biden on the right or the left or the middle. Nobody loves Joe Biden.

And nobody even wanted Joe Biden until until Joe Biden basically won South Carolina. Nobody even then it just became like, well, if it's going to be this guy, we'd much rather it's this guy than Trump. But yeah, there is no enthusiasm around Joe Biden. I mean, he seems like a fine enough person. But again, see, that's the problem is it's like that's how we, the Democrats, tend to talk about our people, which is sort of realistically and without it becoming cultish, whereas that's not how it is on a lot of the right. Although one thing I heard that was heartening on Mike's show was the January 6th, one of the things that this woman, I'm doing this from memory, but I think her name might be Sarah Lawrence, but that's also a college. So I could be wrong about that. But she said that the January 6th hearings have actually moved the needle for a lot of Republicans, not that they are like think that it was an insurrection, not that it's convincing them that that Donald Trump is an insurrectionist and should like literally. go to jail but just it starts to feel like baggage to them and it starts to make them doubt that he can win and the other thing i thought that was interesting i don't know how this started with port townsend is beautiful and is ending with me trying to break down politics but the other thing that this focus group person who knows about the stuff was saying that was coming up a lot was republican voters are tired of donald trump talking about 2020 being stolen they might think it was funky like they might think there were some irregularities they probably do but they just would she said if he were to just talk about joe biden being senile they would love that shit like him and this the reason it gave me some hope is because maybe this will be the ultimate undoing of donald trump and to a degree this was part of why democrats were able to pick up seats in georgia after the uh 2020 election was because donald trump said that the elections in georgia were rigged and unreliable which of course then depressed the republican vote there if donald trump because donald trump is so obsessed with not being able to admit that he lost 2020 it's all he wants to talk about but it's not interesting anymore to a lot of the republican voters and my great hope is that he will just take himself down with his obsession with disputing the fact that he lost to his ultimate detriment you know what i mean like that would be kind of it would certainly be satisfying to watch him just like continue to self immolate and just like you know in the end of the movie when the bad guy like he thinks he got the good guy but then like the good guy actually like left a dynamite thing in his backpack or something or like i'm just gonna mix about 40 metaphors here i haven't seen it yet luke why do you always do this it's like it's just that that moment when the bad guy is just going to finally be vanquished and they're realizing that like oh

what's the movie where like somebody has the pin of the grenade like the the you know the bad guy thinks he's gotten the good guy but then the good guy is actually holding the pin which means the bad guy has a grenade you know on his purse or whatever yeah i forget what movie that is it might have been what was the mr rogers movie called welcome to the neighborhood punk i think was the name of that the one you're thinking of yeah anyway all i'm trying to say is uh i really like it in port townsend and as much as i want as much as i want to be i want to be a person who is not in my bubble all the time because i don't think that's necessarily great for any of us i it felt really nice to get into this bubble and i just like it's just nice to be in a place like this where you just don't have to do so much battle with so much you know because even in Portland I mean Portland is a very progressive place but it's also a big city full of a lot of people and it means still a lot of chances to encounter someone with two giant freaking american flags hanging off their truck as they drive down weidler street you know it's just like being around more people it's just more chances for me to get i guess i'll use the term of our time triggered in some way and i sure do like being in a place where we just all agree that we should try to be nice to each other and that there is you know science is real and there is some objective facts of the world you know like I have to say it's been a very nice 15 hours being here yeah I and that that does sound

nice and I we we can just move off the topic I will say I don't know if I've thought about it in that these exact words before but like especially over the course of the past several weeks and just be and, you know, the I can say confluence in this case of the of the road decision coming out like right before the Fourth of July and just thinking about all this stuff in big picture and everything our country has been through politically in the past six years. You know, I think I'm just ready. I was always ashamed of this idea of living in a bubble or that had some shame associated with that. In fact, a conservative member of my family one time just shook her head and said, well, you know you live in a bubble and i was like well i still think i'm taking in more information from more sources than you are this person takes in information from one source well i guess tv and radio but the same three letters um and weirdly the band tv on the radio right exactly and i was like okay whatever like all of their info i don't need to argue that but also like but you know i don't want to be accused of that and but now you know what like no nothing i just don't believe that anybody's arguing good faith on the other side anymore so i'm like done i'm like yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna stay with the people who believe facts are facts and um and and i don't i don't need to mess around outside the bubble anymore like i don't care because they're not operating in good faith and i don't need to bend over backwards anymore to try to twist their lies into something that is relatable to me or try to get them like screw it like i'm whatever i'm kind of done sounds like somebody's ready to move to port town what's the dart situation there

all right let's do a little music for your weekend before we ski daddle um we didn't get to the tiny park it's here's the i'll just do that story in two seconds portland oregon i guess had the world's smallest park the guinness book of world records recognizes it just the other day becca and i were just driving down nato parkway and she goes you know what that is and i was like no she goes the world's smallest park and then news this week that talent oregon says that they have now made an even smaller park so they want to claim that they have the world's tiniest park but then what i thought was kind of funny was uh this little park uh which is actually like um it's biodynamic and it involves something having to do with bees uh it has a dwarf hybrid mock orange uh tree uh in it or plant it's um 374 square inches by the way if you're wondering what the world's tiniest park is but they were very excited to set this biodynamic park up and they're calling it the world's tiniest and at the end of the story because again this park in portland is called mills end park it is the guinness book of world records says it is the smallest park so then they ask the people in talent oregon if they're going to actually try to get this recognized by guinness and their response was uh that's kind of a long process

you have to like take it out to the water you have to have somebody like you gotta probably

nail something i just think it's funny that they're like they were invested enough to make what they were telling the local paper was the world's smallest park but then it was like do you want to get the actual record they're like ah that sounds like a lot of work we're just gonna go ahead And we'll just we'll just assume it's the world's smallest park, which now this isn't the thing.

Now, this is going to take it to a dark place because I know that some cities were doing some some, you know, a little bit of B.S. with the parks because they were trying to keep sex offenders from like there are a lot of laws that say people who have been convicted of a sex offense but is but are no longer serving their term cannot live within a certain radius of parks. Did you hear do you remember this this is years ago I mean this would have been I think this was kind of a story when you and I were both working at the radio station together like and so some cities were building these tiny things calling them parks as a way of just pushing offenders further and further out doesn't sound like that's the case here.

No, I don't think that I don't think I would be shocked if that were playing a role in any of this. I mean, I just think it's probably one of those things that think about it. It's easy to do because you're talking about the world's tiniest versus the world's largest. So like I could make the world.

tiniest park in this hotel room in port townsend you know i don't know what the rules of what is a park is but i think it's more like a gimmick to try to get some attention than uh anything having to do with uh you know yeah certainly the one that's in portland is it's in an area where there are lots and lots of people many of them who are uh you know dealing with a variety of issues and i would imagine some of them have a potentially criminal background you know what i mean and no one's chasing them out of this area of portland because of this park so yeah i think this was all just but the thing that was the reason i thought it was weird was so two weeks ago i had no idea this was a thing and then becca and i drive by this park and then we are out in the willamette valley with her brother and his wife and he says hey did you hear that salem just opened the world's smallest city park and and then i was like what is going on with this park situation and then like a day later i hear talent oregon has now opened what they're saying is the world's tiniest park and it just was like a weird triptych of places trying to establish this what i would think of

as a pretty obscure record so anyway do i hear a cbs piece in fact i was just googling around here i see your buddy robert smith did an npr piece about what was then the world's smallest park in philadelphia which was like what hold on let me see if i can get back to it by the way i was googling around that theory that i or that that memory i had of stories about cities building parks for the reason i mentioned there was a piece in the new york times with that headline uh in 2013 which is about the time that i i had a feeling that we had been talking about that um but here's something a brief history the smallest national park site sorry this is the smallest national park site this is 2008 all things considered robert smith it's in philadelphia Yeah.

The place in Salem is called Waldo Park. It is one of the smallest city parks in the world, measuring 12 by 20 feet. Are you kidding me? That's like, that's massive compared to what's going on in Talent, Oregon. Those big city people. That's freaking, I know. God, that's like Central Park, Salem. Get it together. Okay. Let's talk tunes, Andrew. That should have been the name of this segment. TBTL, talking tunes on Friday. What tune would you like to talk about

You know this was a tough one for me this week I realize I haven't been listening to much music I was listening to a lot of music earlier in the summer And then I don't know what happened in the past couple of weeks Maybe just I've been listening to a lot of podcasts again So I'm going through my list of songs That I had sort of been putting aside Over the spring and summer And I guess I'm going to play this one But this one I struggle with So here you know the singer Skeeter Davis The old country pop singers From like the 60's that name ring the bell doesn't actually okay anyway um so she was like a you know kind of a country singer back in the day um from that era that i kind of like right the kind of kicksy right in fact that's kind of the story behind this i was you asked me sometimes if i've had any like kind of iconic little kicksy moments in the summertime and i did i was out there i think it was one of the first times this spring where i was grilling we've been doing a lot of grilling it's just been really idyllic around here i've been enjoying our summer and uh i brought out the kicksy radio i brought out the radio and i turned on kicksy radio and um and this song came on almost immediately and it was like the perfect vibe and i was like oh i love this so much then i started listening to the lyrics i'm like oh these lyrics are just atrocious this is one of those country songs um you mentioned these types of songs a while back and and this made me think of that um where the woman is basically just saying no matter what i'll be here waiting for you like you can do anything you can step out on me whatever so i hate that message and i just want to like you know i hear this song and i love the song but i also weep for skeeter davis and where she was emotionally but why don't you take a listen to this song by skeeter davis called i can't stay mad at you

I can't stay mad at you You can run around You can tell me lies But there's nothing I can do I'll never say goodbye Cause I can't stay mad at you I can't stay mad at you I got mad at you last night When you were holding another girl

This is going to be an interesting comparison, but I don't think since Ghostface Killah's first record Have I enjoyed the sound of music, but hated it.

lyrics so much as i do with this song i i mean that is the alt that like that is my favorite sound as far as music is concerned but those lyrics make me so mad uh that song i have to

say is so catchy i've never heard it before in my life but it is again lyrically not great but i don't know i mean people have the right you can run out you can lie to me but i'll just always take it i know but people do have the right to spell out their feelings if they're even however it is that those feelings manifest i don't know yeah like i want to come up with a reason why i can listen to that song more andrew well i mean i i have it on my playlist i listen to it but i'm always like oh come on man um i want to play uh something that's kind of an oldie as well it's a george harrison tune it's i want to play that if you can find andrew the demo version of a song called run of the mill which is off of all things must pass i am i have to say slightly embarrassed because i have only recently gotten into the george harrison album all things must pass and it is rocking my world have you spent much time with that album i had the cassette growing

up i think it's a double album right and i had the cassette growing up and it's one of those things where i don't know if i was too young for it or whatever like there were some songs that i absolutely loved but it's jam-packed with songs and there are a lot that kind of just washed over me as well i'm actually interested in hearing this demo i saw this on the show sheet because i think i remember the original song i think it's kind of i do think it has some horns and stuff in there so maybe the demo version is kind of a strip yeah this is much this is a much more stripped

down than the versions on the album i also didn't realize that uh phil specter um somebody who history has not judged kindly but boy was certainly a genius of production phil specter helped produce

this album did you know that you know i didn't but that makes sense because the beatles they re-released that let it be thing where they stripped away all of phil specter's um production do you remember that they released like i don't know 15 20 years ago something called uh let it be naked because the beatles never really liked the phil specterization of what he did to a bunch of songs so they they stripped out that production and re-released it does that ring a bell to you

no i didn't know about that but i i when i so i heard this song and i was like okay i should just go back and check out like what this album really sounds like and i started listening to it and i was like this is so surprising to me how big it is and like yeah the horns and like a lot of the songs just really do kind of come in sort of wall of soundy but you know the george harrison version And then they'll kind of like just get into just like a great rhythm. And I mean, it's it's just obviously most people know My Sweet Lord and stuff like that kind of big hits off of it. But I just think this album is so, so good. And I can't believe I mean, really, what I knew about George Harrison was like, I got my mind set on you when I was a kid. That song I loved. And then I knew he was in the Beatles and I knew he, you know, wrote some of the songs that were catchy. But this album is interesting because this was he wrote this after they broke up. And I guess, you know, I guess I just feel like maybe the cool people have always known how cool George Harrison was, but I guess I just haven't given him a lot of thought in my life. And the idea that this guy was also in the Beatles and was probably considered, you probably know more of the dynamics. I mean, I did watch Get Back, so you think I would have more of a memory of this. But the idea that basically you had a band that involved Paul McCartney and John Lennon and then like the third banana is this good at writing music and really was like, if I understood it right, he wasn't writing a ton of the Beatles stuff and he was coming into his own as a songwriter, which was kind of part of the friction in the band because he just kind of felt like they didn't really see him as an equal in terms of the songwriting stuff. And then he goes off and he writes this album All Things Must Pass And it's just so effing good

Yeah I'm trying to There was a George Harrison record that I liked A little bit more than this one I think you're right like this is the one that I mean This is like this is a huge record And for whatever reason again Even though I had it It just never really I never really bonded with this record that much Again aside from the actual song All Things Must Pass and My Sweet Lord I think on this one And I wanted to recommend to you the one I think maybe Dark Horse came out a couple of years later That might be another one to check out Although you will have your hands full With All Things Must Pass for a while Because there's no dearth of songs on it

Yeah oh by the way Also another thing is I feel like Everybody ripped George Harrison off Like there are like at least four different Riffs on this Album that I'm like oh that's Oh I recognize that and this is like predates It like the song What is Life Yeah I like that one a lot totally that one i'm forgetting the song that it come that completely apes it but there is another song that's like from the 80s where i'm like wow how did they not get sued it must have been before that time but anyway way i have just been really digging on this record and i just wanted to um see if uh listeners would dig on it as well so can you play a little bit of this run-of-the-mill demo version yeah let me um

so you don't have a link in here so i'm i'm sure there are various demos floating around so for the record i'm i found run-of-the-mill demo version off of something called early takes volume one so if this isn't the one you can stop yeah that might be that might be what i was looking for

let's take a listen and you can tell me it's called run-of-the-mill this one take one Everyone has choice When to and not to raise their voices Sure that decides Which way you will turn By feeling that our love's not your concern Should I decide No one around you Will carry the blame for you No one around you Will love you today And throw it all away tomorrow When you rise Another day for you to realize me Or send me down again As the days stand up on end You got me wondering how I lost your friendship But I see it in your eyes Though I'm beside you, I can't carry the lane for you I may decide to get out with your blessing Well, I'll carry on guessing I will you leap Will you make it up for you?

Oh, my God, that is so much better than the album version. That is so good. Like, the album version, like, I just, I don't know. You know what? I don't, I don't, I like Phil Spector with the girl group stuff, but I just don't think he was good with this Beatles stuff. This is, just him and a guitar, this is so much better. This is really good. I'd never, like, really pay. First of all, is he singing this to the Beatles?

well i think there is some wikipedia there's some speculation that this yeah this basically is him kind of clapping back to use to use a more modern term at um at the beatles over kind of sleeping on his uh songwriting oh wow but you know you're right as far as like this particular track goes

this is the this is the version that is so yeah i'd never heard that before in fact i i know that But that because once I started hearing, I'm like, oh, yeah, I remember these lyrics sort of here and there. But like that was one of those songs that ending it, if I were to go back and listen today, maybe I'd feel different. Maybe I was just a kid. But like there's just like a lot of songs on that one that just kind of, I don't know, passed over me. All things must pass over my head. But but like if it had been that version, I feel like it would have stood out to me so much more. So raw.

The funny part is I was debating between that song and an MF Doom song.

for suggesting my music for your weekend i'm trying to figure i was looking at a song today that i almost played that i was like who is this person it's in a list some i don't know where i heard this but it's somebody but who goes by king gedora and i was going to play that and i looked it up and it was that's mf doom performing under a different name i almost played an mf song today too i don't even know anything by mf doom i for a second i thought you were making a joke about something we had talked about off air but we never talked about that holy shit what if you and i had both come to the table with mf with an mf doom i don't even know mf doom that would have been

amazing holy shit and you don't believe in a god anyway uh all right uh let's uh play our listener suggestion it comes from listener john in des moines uh john says it's probably the hydrocodone talking i like it already septoplasty oh but i'd like to suggest mf doom no um i had to look up i had to look up septoplasty it's got to be something to do with the septum right uh it yes you're exactly right it's um has to do with repairing uh some kind of septum Injury or something going on With the person's septum that was not ideal So they're fixing it And I guess they give you some hydrocodone After your septoplasty John says it might be the hydrocodone From the septoplasty but this song Really resonated with me It seemed to fill that same part of my ear Once reserved for Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeros Oh man I gotta listen to that Edward Sharp album As I'm driving home You know I'm very ritualistic with my music Andrew, that's why I listened to Sigur Rós on my jog today, because that's what I used to listen to a lot of when I would run around. here and like that edward sharp uh and the magnetic zeros album i forget the actual name of it but boy i used to listen to that a lot when i lived out here so like i put that on and then i drive through the valley and like i then i feel okay for a few minutes anyway john says um hopefully this is good without hydrocodone hydrocodone too it's by a band called the arcs and the song is put a flower in your pocket. So that's what we're going to hear. Got it. And that will bring us to the end of our broadcast week. Thank you so much for hanging out with us and being part of TBTL. We really appreciate you. We're going to be back here on Monday with more Imaginary Radio. Until then, have a great weekend. Stay safe. Go Mariners. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

The city street is hot. The heat is escalating. Every corner in the town, there's a paycheck waiting. Put a flower in your pocket. If you see them, boy, you drop it and you run. Run. They pretend they like you But man's best friend will bite you Just for fun Just for fun If they're going for you, boy You're only one

do you think we should get a boat and a subscription to a boat magazine power out