Muse

Item one, fan base. What fan base? The fan base of the band. Well, you mean Mel? It's not a fan base, it's just a woman. Yeah, but I'm calling it fan base from now on. It's just easier when I call, because, you know, you say, oh, the fan will be there. Just, you know, they can tell there's only one person. I'm trying to make it look bigger. It's a base, put base on the end of it. Okay? That sounds good. Sounds better. I came up with that. TBTL!

i just might have tacos tonight it's in material he cares that's the secret it's in his voice

you know but that's worth to an advertiser we fired a jokes at you like an automatic weapon of comedy we throw a curveball joke at you hit you right in the head you go wow what happened we take you on a little trolley ride down story lane you're having a good time enjoying our little tale think you know what's coming boom left turn you don't know how it happened you don't know where

you are but you like it oh that's hella beautiful oh this is really the happiest place on earth

all right hello good morning and welcome everyone to a wednesday edition of tbtl the show just might

be too beautiful to live my name is luke burbank i am your host oh my god he admitted coming to you

from the hollywood broadcast center right here in portland oregon looking at another lovely summer

day oh ma pa it's just beautiful it's uh coming down from it was in the 90s the last couple of

days which is toasty so now it's down to like 80 it's just perfect a couple of wispy clouds in the sky i always wonder i know i've brought this up before but since matt graining the creator of the simpsons you know of course the iconic beginning of that show i mean i guess a blue sky with white clouds and it kind of is what it is but sometimes when i'm gazing out on that sky in portland i wonder is that the same sky that matt graining was looking at when he thought of the intro to the simpsons and then i realized he probably didn't even invent invent that it was probably somebody else at the show so my theory is falling apart even as i'm saying it out loud uh i think today's show is going to definitely hold together it's episode 3726 in a collector series let the fun begin much to talk about i've got an update on the uh andre the giant or as i called him yesterday uh andre andre the dryant which i would i love the idea that somebody somewhere wanted to wrestle under that name but they didn't want to commit some kind of trademark violation So there was a guy named Andre the Dryant that was wrestling somewhere. I have an update on what's going on with that photo that I got from the bar that I'm trying to get a reproduction of. Also, Twitter is now suing Elon Musk to force him to buy them. There's a waste of time to do that. Very interesting business strategy to force someone to become your boss. It seems like it wouldn't be a great scene if you were successful. But, of course, there's billions of dollars. at stake we'll talk about that there are billions of hours of baseball being played today by the seattle mariners we could be seeing about eight hours of which i like i would like every day to have eight hours of baseball at least when the mariners are winning but you throw the ball you hit the ball you catch the ball they were rained out last night in washington and so the teams are playing two games today uh which has me thinking about this article i saw in defector telling this story I hadn't heard before of the time when Ray Kroc, yes, the founder of McDonald's, commandeered the public address microphone at a San Diego Padres game and started berating the players. Yes, he was also the owner of the San Diego Padres at the time. And this, my friends, is why I could never own a Major League Baseball team.

This is why we can't have nice things.

So we will dig into that story as well. Plus emails and v-mails. And this guy, the longest-running Cobra of the show, may be best known for his depictions of the tall ships. Yes, there is a Seattle Mariners game happening concurrent to the recording of this episode of TBTL, but he promises that only about 70% of his brain will be thinking about baseball.

Come on, brain. Think of things. Come on, brain. He's smart.

He is Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend. Good morning, Luke. I think you know that I take pride in honoring my commitments, right? Yes. When I commit myself to something, I like to follow through. I don't like to be known as wishy-washy. But I do have to say here at the top of the show. A Walshester always pays his debt. That's right. I don't want to be wishy-walshy, which is the nickname I would get if I kept on being wishy-washy. Kids used to say to me, hey, A-

Andrew Walsh, my car. That's the best they could come up with. You see the morons I had to deal with as a kid? That's pretty sad. It was very frustrating to be bullied by idiots. Anyway. I have kids calling me leukoplakia, which is a cancer of the mouth. I know. I had to deal with that. It's pre-cancer, for the record.

Although, those kids can't even claim credit for that because that was from the movie called Lucas. Oh, I didn't know that. A kid named Lucas gets bullied because people in the movie call him leukoplakia.

Yeah. Somebody should make a movie about me as a kid who's being bullied, but I want to punch up all of my bully's jokes. I'll be like, come on, man. Let's sit down. Andrew, wash my car. All right, let's just sit down and talk about that, okay? Yeah. Let's see. Anybody got anything better there? Okay, so yesterday I told you that I was considering a...

Andrew needs to wash his butt more. See, that's better. That is even better, although worse. Yeah, it's worse for you, but I think it's a stronger joke if you're in third grade. It can actually hurt my feelings, actually.

it's really i can't help it that i'm a comic genius remarkably demoralizing i don't know if i could do this show um here's the deal though i am rethinking my decision to get a job as a u.s postal clerk oh okay i just got a text message like i don't know uh like a half hour ago from listener and who says well this is why i caught my attention i don't open every text message as it comes in but the first line was luke is wrong and i was like oh juicy uh yeah you're like let's you have actually a setting on your email that just prioritizes those right yes i have a little special sound that goes off it's you laughing um it says luke is wrong you have been working independently for far too long to put up with the horror show that is the usps management practices it's literally why i quit and i will emphatically tell people that i didn't retire i quit also it's okay-ish money but it's not retire at 45 money well it turns out i'm not retiring at 45 45 and a half now how many months old am i i just start telling people i'm however many months old i am um but yeah no i mean that's the thing about the like we were saying yesterday you know i took a trip to the post office on monday we were talking about it yesterday and there i saw that they're you know hiring and i said you know i'm too old and out of shape to be a mail carrier i think but could i handle the could i handle the stress of being a mail clerk in some way sorting mail that type of thing but traditionally you've always heard this it is a high pressure job i mean back in the 80s of course it was cliche and it's tragic that people were that there was a string of employees postal employees shooting up their workplaces and a lot of people were that shined the light or shone a light on on some of the stress and mismanagement there and it doesn't seem like a according to this listener that it ever really kind of got cleaned up so maybe maybe

i wouldn't be able to handle the usps i think you would be a great mail carrier i mean i don't think you said you're too old and out of shape for it i mean first of all i think it would uh it would you know it would get you in shape i'm kind of jealous when i see mail carriers like particularly on a nice day like today oh those calves those calves yeah they got the shorts you know when that when they're able to break out the shorts when it's that time of year and they're just walking and they i'm again i'm sure there are just all kinds of challenges to that job including dogs and people being annoying and whatnot but uh on a beautiful day walking around and dropping the mail off and saying hi to some people that didn't seem like the worst job yeah maybe you're

right i shouldn't say old because there's plenty of mail carriers who clearly have years on me but i do feel that i'm out of shape maybe it would maybe it would kick my ass maybe it would get me in shape i would hope so i think that you know you can picture two different things that you can picture like a mail carrier in like a nice little residential neighborhood like wallingford or something where i used to live and it's blue skies and they're looking at the clouds wondering if mad graining was inspired by them or whatnot at least then realizing that was an idiotic thing i don't think it was idiotic let's actually move off the mail carrier thing because i want to say the simpsons has been around for a really long time but like that iconic beginning has been around for a long long time i think since the show started as its own show and when the characters were still squiggly and everything and i think that that show was such a brainchild of graining that i would be shocked if he didn't have the have the broad outlines of that open that that didn't come from his mind originally i think you're actually right on that i think you i think you i think you washed it out of your brain it's um w yeah it's a luke w wednesday it's just me talking but i mean doesn't that sort of make sense like you would feel like he would have had a lot

of creative control on probably the earlier in the show the more control that he had presumably yeah i do think over time it's of course it's just become its whole own thing and it's taken not a life of its own and i have to say part of why i started to doubt myself is because and this actually doesn't really make logical sense but i tend to think that the parts that matt graining had the heart the tightest control over are the the elements of the simpsons i like the least like like the tracy ullman interstitial episodes of the simpson Thank you.

right where they would just play little bits of the simpsons as kind of like you know as they would begin and end certain segments on her show which was like a sketch show those i did not get at all those were very weird to me very squiggly very quiet homer voice and even like life in hell yeah i i think life in hell is probably kind of funny i should revisit it but i remember seeing it as a kid in like the stranger or whatever and not getting it like not really thinking it was all that funny like the simpsons feels to me like something that was pretty okay and then a bunch of other really smart funny people just use it as kind of a jumping off point and then turned into something transcendent the conan o'brien's of the world yes precisely by the way it's 558

andrew it is 558 that's how many months old you are oh thank you 500 you're 46 and a half

yeah that's that's 12 times 46 plus 6 is 558 okay great that's good to know yeah boy i'm

actually i'm closer to my next birthday already than than i am to my last i know that's i'm looking at 50 my dude well you're not looking at 50 next well in four years yeah i'm looking i'm looking at 60 man that's just like 15 years from now that's like in when harry met sally i

believe when meg ryan says and i'm gonna be 40 and billy crystal says yeah in seven years right i

haven't seen that movie still all the way through but i know that scene oh my god that movie is so great and it seems to be so up my alley i don't know that's rob reiner right we always that is

i believe rob reiner directed it just i mean just incredible performances by by everyone but like bruno kirby carrie fisher meg ryan of course billy crystal it's just it's just great it has It's probably got, like, five scenes that by themselves are, like, in my top 30 movie scenes. Like, that movie overproduces. Like, the Mariners in 2023 overproducing All-Stars. This is my new thing, Andrews. I feel like, because in 2023, you know, the All-Star game is in Seattle. Oh, I know. And I think we're going to have, like, five All-Stars. That's, like, that's when Harry met Sally as far as iconic movie scenes, in my opinion. Hey, do you want to hear how it's going with my Andre the Dryant photo?

Oh, yes, I do. Yeah, I do. What's going on?

Remember yesterday I said I was going to take this photograph that I had borrowed off the wall of a bar here in Portland called Nick's Coney Island. And I was going to take it to a photo lab and see if they could digitize it. And then I could make a larger version and also return, of course, the photo to its original home. Now, one of the things is that this photo, the glass is cracked, and I was trying to upgrade, I thought, the situation by offering to buy a new piece of glass for it, but Nick said, no, I like it cracked. This will come in, this will be relevant to the story coming up in a moment. So the plan as of yesterday at the end of the show is I was going to go to this place called Citizen Photo here in Portland, which turns out is like four blocks from my house. So that's super convenient. But I got there. Well, a couple of things happened. Because this was also the place, Andrew, I said, looking at the website, this feels to me like, forget the post office. This is where Andrews want to work. It's just like, seems like it's just black coffee and jazz music and sort of gray-haired dudes just like, you know, thinking about film and cameras and things like that. It just seems that probably a cat lives there, you know, but like a mellow cat, not like Bubbles, who's trying to claw her way through the door into the studio even as we speak.

Well that all sounds nice until Anne texts me Tomorrow morning and takes that dream away too I used to work at Citizen Photo So

I was I parked the car And I was looking at Waze and Waze was telling me Oh you're at the thing But I was looking and it was just a liquor store And I thought unless it's become a liquor store During the pandemic Or unless it's in the back of a liquor store This is confusing so I parked the car And I'm walking and I And I realized that there is a guy who has gotten out of his car, and he is walking really fast. He's trying to overtake me. And I'm thinking to myself, and we've now passed the entrance to the liquor store. I understand running to the liquor store. We've all done it. But this guy was on a mission, and I started to realize something, Andrew. I was like, I bet you I am near Citizen's photo, and I bet you this guy is trying to get in the door before me. He looked like a photo guy. This is a whole, by the way, this is a whole new.

Let me guess.

Do you have glasses? Glasses. Check. Ponytail. Check. Mask on. Check. Okay. Yeah. Oh, my God. Andrew, I can't believe that I didn't understand that you were carrying your camera around. I ended up going to two photo labs yesterday. I must have seen four people with cameras around their necks. Photo guy is a whole vibe. traditional film photo guy and you're not you're shooting digitally yeah yeah yeah yeah i'm talking legit film camera photo guy is a mood in portland so so this dude is gaining on me and i kind of realize what's going on now i am not in a rush tbtl's done i've handled all my other stuff the mariners are busy getting rained out so i've kind of got time and so there's no reason that i need to like like power walk speed walk a little faster than him to get to the door but i just do because i'm basically a terrible person and so i do i get in there and there's a guy ahead of us photo guy he's got his camera on he's a young dude he's a total hipster actually seemed like a very sweet person but like is just talking pretty much at length with the guy behind the counter who's you know an older guy with gray hair just just discussing film exposure and like kinds of film and contrast and light and they're i mean this is actually nice this is what this place is for right this is your dream by the way no jazz music playing it was a little bigger and kind of more like i don't want to say industrial it was it wasn't exactly what i was picturing wasn't as cozy wasn't as cozy yes thank you i was expecting a high level of coziness kind of like again just almost like someone's you know house that they just also sell you know camera stuff with or something it was a little more like a you know it's a place of business and it was a little how do i put it there was kind of a lot going on in there um but anyway so i'm waiting i'm waiting i'm waiting and i can see the guy so i've gotten in before but the guy behind me did this weird move which i've also done myself where he's not actually standing right behind me in line he's kind of standing at an angle almost like creating a new other line which is i don't know if he's hoping someone else will come up or it just was like it was clear that he really was antsy and so i and i have and i'm holding by the way a cracked photo of andre the giant so i look at him when finally the guy in front of us uh is done um and it was funny because the guy in front of us again he was young super hipster he clearly kind of idolized the dude behind the the counter

the guy who was already there or the fidgety guy was already there the guy that was in the store

when we showed up it was clear that he had a lot of admiration for the older guy who knows everything about film and cameras because he was like the younger guy was like um you getting to see your family this summer and the guy was like huh and he was like family huh he goes are you getting are you going to idaho to see your family and he was like oh yeah yeah we've been out there twice this summer or whatever it was clear that the the young guy buys his film there he really kind of admires this older guy and like wanted to make you know some nice chit chat with him so anyway that guy's done and i look at other dude and i was like you know what if you have a relatively quick thing why don't you just do it because this is kind of involved he's oh hey thanks man because i i was gonna feel bad if i was standing there yeah like because there's so many questions related to what i'm trying to do yeah like this is an involved process uh and so i was trying to be nice and the guy was like oh yeah thanks so then he jumps to the front of the line and let me just tell you he didn't have an uninvolved order he needed like three different kinds of films and then this was the part that i was a little bit like huh about he then goes and can you recommend anything to me like like i'm also going to be doing this do you have any recommendations like he basically asked an open-ended question of a person whose whole life is thinking about traditional film in other words like he asked a question that was going to by its definition probably take about four minutes to answer which i was like i'll allow it but it doesn't it wasn't like i thought he was just like gonna drop something off like literally drop something off and leave but no he had questions and anyway so they got through all of that the irony was andrew i then stepped up to the guy and i go i would like to have this scan and the guy goes we don't have a scanner big enough for that so i had a very short order there because they could not actually scan the photo so he sent me to this other place across town uh where i went and they were super helpful they're going to get me all taken care of but this is the thing i had to take

the thing this is what do you think the thing is well i will only what's in the thing what's in the thing you told me before that um or you mentioned in passing that um the crack is going to come to play in this story and i'm wondering and i'm worrying i'm literally worrying now that you're in a situation whereas if you take the print or the photograph out of this frame you won't be able

to put it all back together in an authentic way that's basically exactly the problem so i was i was thinking that i would just hand them this entire thing and then they would using their expert you know photo lab technology they would take it all apart probably wearing some kind of white gloves yeah and then scan it scan it and then

and put it all back together and then i would just get it back that way and i don't know if there's a charge for that but i charge i'm willing to pay the guy was like no i can't take it apart because if anything happens to the photo then it's on us which i sort of respect i do respect that as a thing and that's a real thing but i also think he just realized this was going to be a pain in the ass i just didn't really because it's like the frame was very involved like it's what i ended up having so he loaned me a screwdriver yeah and i'm like unscrewing it and you basically have to take apart the corners of the back of the frame and then there's these like spacers in there and there's all this stuff going on and the frame just when i unscrew this up the frame literally just disintegrates into like four parts and then a massive amount of hardware that was holding it all together in the corners like there has to be a better this is probably the frame technology the best frame technology of 1981 but they must have improved this over time because what i now have Andrew is it's an envelope I got from the photo place I have an envelope with a picture frame that I will literally never be able to put back together and two deadly shards of glass which have they can't break more like it has one crack like maintaining the integrity of this crack yeah so when I put it all back together it has that same crack is going to be so challenging because the glass is very fragile and it's now just i have these two huge pieces of glass and all this random shit from this frame in a manila envelope in my car i don't think i have any chance of putting it all back together putting humpty humpty the giant back together again properly

this is so stressful i'm serious i can feel this feeling and it's not even because you know the

glass i'm gonna break the glass when i try to put it back together because it it had a certain structural integrity based on the fact that it was in this frame right it was all locked down everything was just everything was kind of in place and there it was now that stasis has been interrupted by me and i i don't think it's going to be possible to recreate the i'm going to bring him i'm going to have to buy a different piece of glass try to break it in the same way and hope

that nick doesn't notice it no don't do that so yeah shoot this is even worse than i thought i had a feeling when you said the crack i'm like oh it's going to be like one of those things once you take it out of the glass then putting it back it's not going to be just a simple like kind of kind of a little crack i'm not a little crack but a big crack but that gave it character it's so ironic now luke that your offer was hey i'll even replace the glass and i was so impressed yesterday that the guy's answer was nope i kind of like the crack it's kind of the vibe here and i was like i get that that's so cool and now here you are really trying to do the right thing and even like jumping on this and doing it right away so you don't like you know have it off of their bar wall for too long like you're you're trying to do all the right things here but they want the crack okay what about this this is really i'm almost like panicking here i'm not even joking i hate this feeling what about um so it sounds like the the thing that i didn't realize is that this is an old frame that comes apart so like literally all four sides of this frame are apart now there's no there's no like um structure to it it's just a bunch of parts it's four it's yeah it's four

metal pieces that were the frame yeah which i have to fit back together fit these little like you know angle shaped uh you know hardware back into the corners and then somehow screw it all back together lock it all back down but it's like a it's like a three or four step process

it's not uncomplicated yeah no no i believe it let me ask you this is there any chance he likes the crack i don't know how much he knows about the frame itself is there a chance that you can replace the frame with a frame that's the exact same dimensions but you can reuse the

broken glass that's a really good idea that's probably what i should do because there's no way and also the frame is gross in a way that's not like cute like not like oh we've had it forever it's it's just scuffed up and banged up but again i was had a lot of time looking at this frame yesterday as i was waiting in various lines at photo mats and i was noticing that it's like it's pretty crappy actually like it would be kind of nice to have it in something a little bit a little nicer so that is probably what i should do is just buy a black frame that's the same size and that's way easier to work with and then just put the glass back in and i don't other than the fact that we're talking about it on the show i don't think it would be noticeable or i mean and

i would even be i mean well of course that's the difference between us i i would i would be so afraid of of getting caught and trying to pull something over not that it's a big deal that what you're pulling over i would just be honest with him be like hey the frame itself we couldn't

put humpty dumpty back together again how reflexively you said well that's how we're different because your assumption is that i would be lying to him i thought you're not wrong i thought

You just said that you would. maybe never I guess I did describe basically lying yeah I mean I assume you meant he wouldn't be able to tell not the patrons but maybe but yeah no I would definitely be like hey here's the story of this we couldn't put Humpty Dumpty back together again but um same glass new frame here are the parts of the old frame if you want and also here's the new glass if you want it if not I'll take it out of here I'm not trying to give you garbage but that that's what happened and sorry if that's not ideal for you like it would just be a real bummer if you thought it was kind of like one of those things where you went on vacation and you told him to take care of your goldfish and you come home your goldfish is a little bit different you know what i mean

like you don't want to be that person right your goldfish is oh goldfish darling a beta fish exactly so anyway the good news is the the the photo is now being scanned and the guy gave me options he was like do you want and i don't know if you can tell this from the photo of the photo Andrew but it had really kind of yellowed over time which or not even yellowed it had kind of taken on an orangish hue and I kind of I liked it because it just to me it was like that's what the photo looks like to me now but the guy was like you know we can color correct that and we can actually make it more like the photo looked when it was original and I was perplexed or I was I was I was conflicted is the word I'm looking for because I it's like am I trying to honor the original intent of the person who snapped the picture in 1981 in portland or am i honoring the fact that this photo has lived in a bar for the last 40 years yeah do you know how much how

much is it like can you do both it's yeah i'm doing it's 15 bucks and i'm having them do both oh god yeah oh shit so i'm looking at options gonna be way more expensive oh yeah do them both that'll be fun yeah cool yeah so uh that's the plan so far um well while you're doing that i'm over here trying to figure out what a bruno kirby film festival might look like you brought up bruno wow well spinal tap when harry met sally oh i didn't even see spinal tap on the top 20 it's funny that doesn't even make like the top uh what am i looking at the top 10 he's a limo driver and

it's a very short scene but he's a limo driver in spinal tap okay who is overly talkative with with the band and then they eventually just start rolling up that window

just like yes that move yes i wonder boy i'll bet you i've seen almost all of the scenes in that movie just out of order you know because i know i've never sat down to watch it but like that that rings a bell to me that seems i know right up my alley um city slickers is the first thing that pops to mind for me i think that was my first kirby experience right there um he was also in donnie brasco which i think i saw is that good i don't think it's that good right

donnie bra i remember it is it got a lot of attention at the time um and of course you know it had like johnny depp in it it had uh uh what jack nicholson right or is that the departed i always mix up donnie brasco and the departed by the way they're they're from a certain era of like mafia movie probably set in boston with a lot of people wearing you know um like leather jackets from whatever the era was that the movie was set in so it is it is johnny depp you're right about

that but it's al pacino and then michael madsen it looks like and of course bruno kirby so um

yeah i don't know i might mention i i'm wondering if so when i tried to google spine uh bruno kirby spinal tap the only link that i get is spinal tap uncut and and it says tommy and frank and i'm wondering if maybe the bruno kirby scene didn't make it in like the regular version of spinal tap but if it's in some extended one that i might have rented on dvd because you have to think with and that would also explain why you wouldn't necessarily remember it there were like a movie like that must have just had so many outtakes or just so much stuff that ends up on the cutting room floor because you're improvising you're trying things you know i'm such an idiot

i was picturing the limousine scene you you've done nothing wrong here i've done everything wrong for some reason while i was looking at these bruno kirby movies and you're talking and i'm like kind of like using my brain is bifurcated right now and i for some reason i was i thought that that limousine scene was from when harry met sally which is why i said that rings a bell but i've never seen all the way through yes of course i've seen spinal tap all the way through i don't remember that scene specifically i you just you said those words and it felt right to me so anyway

sorry i'm wondering though if maybe if it is actually from some because i was big the you know kind of when dvds became a thing i as an aspiring filmmaker which well that didn't go that far although we do make hey dummies videos so yeah it's all content i consider myself a filmmaker they're just three minute long films i make every other week starring my cat but um uh i was really Into the director's commentary Component of DVDs I was just obsessed with that Like I

I thought I was going to USC film school by just watching every director's commentary and every little kind of extra thing. Sometimes it would be like a mini documentary. I mean, that was what I just thought was the real leap forward for DVD technology was all the extras, all the other stuff that you could do. I never did it, but there was a rumor that you could actually reorganize mementos so that it happened in a linear sense.

Oh, interesting.

By the chapters or whatever. Like anyway, and so I was also obsessed with any kind of any DVD that promised to have new features or extended cut or director's cut or whatever. I was like going right for that. So it's conceivable that I had some Spinal Tap extra long one where they leave in a bunch of stuff that got cut out of the other version. And maybe that Bruno Kirby scene is part of that.

Although I'm on the same YouTube video you're on now. So just on regular IMDb, he is credited as being in that movie. and this spinal tap limousine scene that I'm looking on on YouTube is 10 minutes long so there's a chance that I was afraid to bring the audio up on that because I thought that's just going to sound terrible but my guess is part of this scene does exist in the one that was released and then this is the extended version of that scene as you might see it in the uncut version of the DVD

this isn't fair but if you had to Pick maybe your favorite scene in Spinal Tap.

What would it be? You know, I'm not. I mean, I appreciate Spinal Tap in all its glory, but I'm not like a huge Spinal Tap head. So, like, I can only think of, like, the very, very iconic scenes. I mean, them getting miffed about the one inch versus one foot after the concert sort of sticks in my head a little bit. You mean of Stonehenge? Of Stonehenge. Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to I'm trying to think that's kind of a tough question for me.

why do you have an answer yourself well i mean i it's hard for me to i am obsessed with that movie or was and there are i mean that one yes stonehenge that one is really funny um the when they're at elvis's grave and they start singing since my baby left me and they're trying to harmonize and it's just so terrible but i have played this i think on the show before but this is fred willard this is probably my favorite scene it's when they as their as their tour is descending into just complete madness they end up playing like an officer's formal at an air base i think it's maybe even listed as being in like tacoma washington or something and fred willard is the liaison so just imagine the guys from spinal tap and then fred willard in full like military uniform greeting them this scene is so great visit to a military facility

fine may i start by saying how thrilled we are to have you here we are such fans of your music and all of your records i'm not speaking of yours personally but the whole genre of the rock and roll and so many of the exciting things that are happening music today and let me explain a bit about what's going on this is our monthly at ease weekend gives us a chance to kind of let down our hair although i see you all have a head start these haircuts wouldn't pass military muster believe me although i shouldn't talk my hair's getting a little shaggy too better not get too close to you they'll think i'm part of the band i'm joking of course shall we go in and i'll show you around walk this way please uh right through here did you ever run into a musical group works out of kansas city calls themselves for jackson and jill they've been at a ramada in there for about 18 months if you're ever in kansas city and you want to hear some good music you might want to

drop by uh have you ever heard of an outfit out of kansas city called jackson and jill

I think we used that as intro tape when Fred Willard passed away last year.

I'm so into Spinal Tap that the other day, for some crazy reason, Andrew, I was watching those three guys. So Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, and Michael McKeon in the characters of Spinal Tap in, like, I don't know. It would have been maybe, like, 1992 or something. They reformed to go on an actual tour. And they were being interviewed by Charlie Gibson On Good Morning America But they were in character And he's like well what have you been up to Since it was really genius too Their whole idea was that the movie had misrepresented them And made them look foolish Oh that's a smart premise yeah And so and they were like what have you been doing And Christopher Guest I'm sorry for my terrible Accent but Christopher Guest was like I've been inventing things And they're like what have you been inventing He goes foldable wine glass like you you go on a picnic and you you want to bring out wine glass but if you put it in your pocket it shatters so foldable it has hinges all along the only problem it leaks through the hinges like and i there's this through line of christopher guest wanting to invent things that don't work in his different characters because remember at the end of waiting for guffman it's not that they're inventions that don't work they're just bad ideas like the my dinner lunch Thank you.

With Andre action figures. Action figure, yeah. And what is the lunchbox he's selling?

Remains of the Day lunchbox.

Right, yes, of course.

And like, there is something that Christopher Guest must love about the idea of just kind of like coming up with ideas that are terrible for his characters. It's so great.

Well, anyway, fine. We can put a Spinal Tap in the Bruno Kirby Film Festival that we're going to be putting on next summer. That's what I was getting at this whole time. I guess, what are we doing? We're counter-programming the All-Star Game. Is that what the plan is? We'll put together the film festival for next summer?

then okay good yeah gives us a year let's we'll rent out the columbia city theater and would you go would you try to go to that all-star game when it's in seattle oh you know what i would actually

i don't know if this sounds bananas i would actually rather go to the home run derby um my friend who's a baseball fan and her family loves baseball was visiting me last summer and she's from cleveland where they had the all-star game what was that three years ago no it was like right before the pandemic i think um and i remember watching i remember watching the home run derby here in seattle while you know on a tv from cleveland and just like loving seeing the skyline as the as the balls went out of the park so um she was telling me that actually the more fun ticket is the uh is the home run derby i just think it's going to be really like i don't know how they're handling this i know that they're giving priority of course to the season ticket holders um so i've kind of for this year so i don't know can i get my hands on a ticket to the home run derby that's the question i would go to any of it but the home run derby i think would be the thing that i'd want to go to first i've made this joke on twitter before um so i just

want to recognize that if somebody saw this i'm not trying to recycle material um but well i am trying to recycle material but i'm being transparent you're real jonah layer i find i find plagiarizing myself with this observation i find the home run derby to be fascinating for this reason hey it's really fun just to watch these people on freaking load also i always feel

stressed out for the person pitching to them yeah it's like the third base coach yeah it's always

the third base coach and it's just like some little some little old dude who's just like standing behind a protective like netting and then just like whizzing these balls in it what's supposed to be the sort of ideal but i feel like it's as much on the person pitching as it is on the hitter because if that person throwing it just gets the moment gets to them yeah or if if they're just having an off day then it obviously affects the person who's doing the hitting yeah no but the other thing is it's been a tradition for years now to like let little kids run around in the outfield and try to catch the balls that aren't home runs and i find it amazing that we live in a society where like i was at a hotel pool not that long ago and there was a kid who had on so much life protection i kind of couldn't believe it it was like the full suit so that no sun hits their body which you know obviously i probably that's a smarter idea you know like i'm talking like long sleeve swimsuits now that's a thing but then a very robust life jacket and this kid also was surrounded by like three adults and was in the shallow end of the pool and i just thought this you know we're taking very good care of this kid and yet we also live in a society where we have eight-year-olds trying to field a frozen rope from juan soto like how is that safe how do we have children in the outfield during the home run derby it just seems like a because yeah some of them are home runs but the ones that aren't widow makers well yeah the ones that aren't are pop

flies though they're i mean they're not line drive i mean they're they're tossing these things over the plate they're just like just softly tossing i think the batter is mostly accidentally get on

top of it a little bit more than you thought i mean there's a reason they have the picture standing behind a protective thing yeah like it's it's not super likely but i actually like it i mean because i mean you could hear a little disdain in my voice about the what i think of sometimes the over protectiveness of our current age this is bordering on under protective yeah

i'm here for it i always like the the um yeah like the the ball boys and ball girls on the side you know like along the baselines um or sidelines as i like to call them who like every now and then they'll just make a fantastic play like a nice catch of a foul ball like everybody in the booth

is so excited for him oh my gosh that would have i mean i i'm for being as kind of precocious as i was as a kid and kind of not taking no for an answer i don't know how i never figured out what i had to do to weasel my way into some kind of ball boy type of situation i mean you definitely had to know someone for that but to have been like 11 years old and just made some lucky snare and then you end up on like sports center even just on the local broadcast i mean that would

have made my entire life yeah i'm just i'm so nervous just thinking about somebody saying i have to do that at any age from age 6 to 46 i don't think i'd be in the right room until

the other day this this memory came back to me do you remember this were you working on the show when Dave ross and i caught fly balls in center field during a game i were you were you on the show yet it

might have been oh yeah was that before i mean we i definitely was there for a ross and burbank day at the park and a lot of tens showed up for that too that probably would have been the same thing did they yeah was it the thing where they gave you like the funny props it's the game they play before the game like you had to catch in a cowboy hat or something i i i remember that they shot the

ball out of like uh you know like a pitching kind of jug yeah or something so it wasn't like a person hitting it it was just being you know shot out of that thing with the look rotating tires and i i there might have been a gimmick i just remember because i can't ever do anything normal somehow i caught the ball or tried to catch the ball and then ended up tumbling into a full-on somersault in center field um and i probably because i was like i need to make this funnier than it is right now it's just kind of lame i'm just running around trying to catch a ball um and i think i feel like also they were spongy but they weren't real baseballs they were like spongy because they

don't want you to get hurt right i think yeah i think they maybe give you a because this is a game that they'll play before um you know before the actual game as you know as as the crowd is filtering in anyway so i've seen it a bunch so my my mind might be combining different memories but i think it is the one where maybe you start with a regular glove and then like the moose comes out and it's like, uh-oh, he takes away your glove and gives you, like, something goofy, and I think you did do that. Boy, I'm now remembering, I forgot, that day began with us doing a three-hour broadcast, or you guys, I was there as a producer. Do you remember who the special guest was? Was it baseball-related? Yes, I think, unless, again, was it Rick Riz? No, well, I wonder if Rick stopped by, that's not outside the realm of possibility, but I'm pretty sure it was the bartender, Tom Wilhelmsen. Remember him? Oh! a pitcher for the mariners at the time right and he had a great story he had left baseball and went back to bartending and then came back to baseball and wasn't bad and i think he was a i think he was even he might have been a reliever i can't remember if he was a starting pitcher or a reliever but yeah the bartender and we loved him like we fell in love with him he was he was very charming yes

i think you're right god it's amazing how many things my brain has now forgotten things that should be memorable like that's you know that doesn't happen every day to even if you're doing radio like that should have really imprinted itself on me and that's like now it's all coming back to me that that's what happened but anyway it's fun all right let's do this take a quick break and then when we come back we've got some top stories to talk about and we will do that coming up in a moment here on tbtl All right, let's thank some donors of the day. They are making today's episode possible with their generous support, which we are so appreciative of. Kathleen Munns is in Bloomington, Minnesota. Anything else notable about Bloomington, Minnesota that you can think of, Andrew?

According to my notes here, which I believe were probably typed by one Jonathan Sklaroff in American Public Media, Yeah, our pal and fundraiser producer, it says it is home of the Mall of America with an exclamation point. So that is worth celebrating. Absolutely. Becca used to work at the Nordstrom at the Mall of America. Really? I forgot that she has some Minnesota roots. You know, the more I talk to anybody, I realize we're all connected to Minnesota in ways we don't realize.

I feel like, you know, I think, why am I trying to do this off the top of my head? And I feel like, you know, Homo erectus, is that what we are? Homo sapiens, I guess, is what we are. You know, I think Homo sapiens started, the cradle of life was Africa, right? And then sort of spread out from there. But as far as the cradle of public radio, it all started in Minnesota, and it just spread out somehow. And now we're all, everything somehow ties back into Minnesota. I was wondering where that was going. i i only like figured out andrew like three weeks ago that neanderthals aka neanderthals and homo sapiens were not related we're not like just i think i thought neanderthal was just a stage of human evolution i i did and i do are we not no neanderthals were i learned there was a radio lab where latif nasser was talking about his um crones and how there was a theory that the reason that we have certain autoimmune diseases where like our body is attacking itself are because there was a period of time where neanderthals and homo sapiens were mating and that the the basically neanderthal influence in our genetics is what causes some things like that. So there is some

in our genetics then yes yes so that proves though to be um in later on in the piece they talk about how that's actually scientifically maybe not totally a slam dunk okay i but i see what you

mean the difference between just straight revolution versus i guess like cross population

i just thought that neanderthals were like there was a period of time where we were neanderthals i just thought it meant like caveman and then like we kept evolving and our brains kept getting bigger and then we started having crops and whatever no neanderthals were just human-like but they were just different they were the pepsi to our coke and then we basically killed them off or circumstances killed them off so that there were no more neanderthals and they were the ones that went up to like europe and did a lot of the you know stuff up there but like they were just a separate you know other than the times when we were cross pollinating if you will they were just a separate group of folks doing their thing and then somehow we the homo sapiens we just won out and it ended up just being all us except for some remnant dna that's giving us crones so in a new

yorker cartoon when we're sitting when we see you know a family sitting around a cave and they're just watching cave paintings and somebody makes a comment about there are there are too many channels these days or something along those lines are though is that us or not wait which one are we are we i was just trying to i was trying to come up with like the the corniest like

classic that is definitely a new yorker it's a new yorker cartoon it's black and white and it's

like a family sitting around and they're all in a cave and they're all like you know cave people and the caption is like a quote and it's like the dad is holding the remote control or something he says like there's too many options these days or something like that and they're all just staring

at cave paintings that's my right or we've already seen this one yeah yes that's good we've already

yeah or but i yeah but also maybe something that ties it to hey can you keep on doing this um you keep doing the donors because i want to look something up i did something related to the new yorker cartoon caption contest i've i never take part in that but i really thought i had a good one

the other day so i actually took part but i gotta find out what it is i'm also dying to thank noriko ikuda of vancouver washington hey i practically live in vancouver now noriko thank you so much for supporting the program aaron nelson is in renton washington thanks aaron julia morse is in bozarts washington aka bozarts village one of my very favorite places over there on the east side and then christopher shade is in barrington illinois and then sarah burke is in portland oregon thank you so much to all of our donors for making the show possible today we really genuinely would not be here talking to these microphones without you hello and welcome to top story all right what is this new yorker cartoon situation

i don't know i'm trying to figure something out here but i'm also wondering if my account was hacked this is i'm i'm in a strange place right now so i'm going back through my old my old comment because so you know like I follow the New Yorker and various New Yorker cartoons on Instagram I'm reading and talking at the same time my apologies in advance for when I say something the opposite of what I mean but I'm looking I'm looking at my old activity on Instagram and I see at one point me 14 weeks ago commented on a New Yorker cartoon and I just wrote Ian sucks and it looks like this is a cartoon by and i'm trying to figure out it won't show me what the actual cartoon is but that doesn't sound like something that i would i would write does it give you a time stamp on when it says 15 weeks ago but i mean this weird thing instagram is so dang unuser-friendly sometimes like i can see all of the comments but i can't get to the actual cartoon itself but that's not i'm hoping that that was just me being funny and in my usual charm and

i'm talking about i just ian sucks doesn't seem like a thing you would put on the internet it

must have been me um okay i found what i wanted to find here but god damn so i don't know what that was i'm assuming that i was commenting on something that was happening in the cartoon that i wasn't being a total jerk about it okay but um so we'll just give me um we'll give me credit on that one i am really mad at this interface right now because i entered i actually like when you you can comment on the new yorker cartoon caption contest on instagram you can officially submit your um your funniest caption right by using some sort of hashtag now look i don't know if you know me very well i feel like you do i feel like you know me better than most people i am not into formally submitting something where i'm trying to be funny by using a hashtag right like that is not me I don't want people

to tell me i'm not funny i don't like hashtags beg the listeners to do that very same thing right exactly well chateau san michelle did um okay here i think i found okay i think i found the cartoon so yes okay i found the okay here it is here it is here it is everybody calm down cartoon caption contest all right you can enter this week's contest right here on instagram by submitting your caption in the comments below and use the hashtag my new yorker caption and here is the drawing okay it's a it's a black and white drawing as you'd imagine it's a new yorker cartoon and you see two hikers on a on a like in a switchback trail kind of like going up a mountain somewhere right you see some other hikers on the trail like way way up and in the background but our heroes it looks like are i'm gonna say it's two characters i'm gonna say two fellas maybe and they're hiking next to each other but they both have an entire house strapped to their backs collectively can you picture that it's like one house two hikers one house two hikers don't click on that that is you will not recover um i do like the videos of grandmas reacting to two hikers one house um all right so anyway i'm so if you can picture that like it's like they're sharing the burden the the house is strapped to both of their backs right um oh this isn't funny okay and my caption was i remember being proud of it at the time because like everybody's going for like house

prices and like trying to make it like doesn't have sure so you're able to see i mean you've already explained this but i guess i'm only finally wrapping my brain around it this is kind of like instead of submit everyone submitting their ideas in secrecy this is a kind of an open world of you can see what everybody else is yeah throwing in as their suggestion because you're just commenting

right and so everybody's trying to make it like um very topical right like hey this is the way we keep housing out of the hands of uh millennials and so it's a lot of like it's a lot of jokes about um how hot the market is it's a lot of jokes about over packing like oh just the essentials huh um and stuff like that and my caption was okay okay two people carrying a house on their back as their camp as their hiking i just wrote quote dot dot dot and remember we can only eat the stuff that real snails would eat that's pretty good are you just saying that i mean it's not as good as i remember it being but i remember better than uh housing prices i remember this joke sitting on the toilet in the morning seeing this come across looking at the other looking at the other comments and just thinking okay this is literally the only time i've ever done this in my life i've never submitted a caption but i was like we can do better than like housing prices are going up the mountain so um this was more of a this was more of a caveman diet joke that would have been topical seven or ten years ago snail cosplay basically you could do that but you know remember it's like everybody was wearing the toe shoes and they were on the paleo diet and the thing was you can only eat what cavemen eat yes yeah so that was the joke now is this formally

submitted it was formally submitted do we know do we have the answer can we see what the three

finalists were let me um i'm gonna move to my regular computer now and start seeing if uh if the if the new yorker has a place where they um collect the winners so let me we have talked i

mean this is a topic that's come up on the show many times because even back in the radio days jennifer and i were obsessed with trying to get you know in the finals of this oh really so i've said yeah and i've said this before i think that i'm a reasonably funny person i do not have the synapses oriented in the right order to ever have a funny idea related to like my brain does not work in the way that i can ever come up with a good caption like i think i do okay on wait wait when i write the fake news stories and you and i have some fun japes and jokes here and maybe on live wire every once in a while i'll get off an okay kind of uh observation but i will stare and stare and stare and stare at those at the the cartoon that doesn't have a caption yet and then i'll look at the ones from the previous weeks and where they've listed you know the three finalists and i'm always like god those are all better ideas than i would have had and also how did i not think of them like i could stare at a captionless new yorker cartoon for a one day straight and i would never have a good idea about funny captions well maybe that's why i decided to weigh in because i

think i'm generally like you as well um i don't usually have ideas for these things and this one it just you know just came to me i have not received a an envelope in the mail certified mail that says i've won and i assume that that is how the new yorker would tell you that you won It's actually David Remnick. Sorry, I just dropped one of my many clocks I'm surrounded by. David Remnick brings you an oversized check. David Remnick brings you an oversized tote bag. An oversized New Yorker cartoon. Shakes your hand. That would be, see, that would be a fun. That could be, you know, that could be a New Yorker cartoon, Andrew. Oh, there you go. Because we're so baseball. So you never found out, by the way, what the finalists were. It's probably not listed.

No, this is driving me bananas. I'm going to keep trying. Because the New Yorker has to somewhere publish it, unless it's only in the magazine. And, you know, I don't think we have a subscription right now. Do you have a subscription to the New Yorker? And if so, can you send me your login? I can probably guess it.

I do have a subscription to the New Yorker. I do also get the physical New Yorker mailed to me, which is hilarious because I haven't opened a physical New Yorker in probably a year and a half, maybe on a plane for a minute. But there is something is important in my life that I'm an adult person who has the New Yorker physically delivered into their life. I feel it yeah I don't know why it's it means something it's about it's my identity is very tied up in it but I am I mean I have at this point it seems like hundreds of of New Yorkers that I have yet to even done do it the other thing that's kind of honestly cannibalized some of my New Yorker reading is that the New Yorker radio hours a really good show yeah you mentioned that covers the same stuff not all of it but you know there have been many times where I'll start to read something in the New Yorker either online or in the magazine and I'll realize oh I actually heard this on the radio show and it's funny because they have i feel like these sort of increasingly desperate promos from david remnick i don't think the new yorker is hurting for subscribers but he'll be like we're glad you like the radio show but please also subscribe to our

magazine um i'm a little bit that way with my harper's i was excited i don't know has it been half a year now since i resubscribed i guess i never subscribed to harper's magazine before but in my in my uh young manness when i was in like in my 20s i love my favorite thing would be to like grab a New Yorker off of like a literal newsstand or like newspaper stand in Boston or Davis Square or something like that. And then like go somewhere and like drink a Bloody Mary and like and read Harper's. I remember taking Harper's to the beach one time and thinking this is the worst beach reading ever. But aside from that, I love it. But now I subscribe to it because I thought it was pretty affordable and they're coming in and like I'm enjoying when I finally crack one open, I totally enjoy it. But then I get this feeling of guilt for not like consuming every page of it. And just the other day I was, like, reading it and enjoying it and thinking, like, just give yourself a break. Like, you're supporting a magazine that you love and you want to be around for a long time, so that's good. You don't have to read every page. You don't have to beat yourself up. Like, and someday you may get these and maybe not. But, like, I'm still generally enjoying it. I didn't want the feeling of, like, taking something I enjoy and then turning it into something that makes me feel bad, like it's a task or something. You know what I mean?

But it also doesn't mean that you have to stop subscribing to it, even if you're not consuming every single word. Just like you don't have to stop subscribing to TBTL, even though you don't listen to every single episode. Exactly. I also recently started subscribing to Harpy's magazine, which just basically covers half human, half bird personification of storm winds.

Oh, OK. I thought Harpy was somebody who kind of harps on you all the time.

Maybe that's what it's evolved into. but the official definition as you could tell i had to look this up uh-huh uh a foul malign creature in greek mythology that is part woman and part bird also a predatory person a leech so yeah that's what i'm and um i read every page of that though oh yeah good good i'm a little bit

frustrated here this may be luke actually i'm i'm onto something here buddy i'm onto something here this one i don't think the winner of this one has maybe been announced yet potentially there may be A bit of a backlog here I'm going to keep an eye on this And I'm going to give you updates There's a chance that I still won

That would be an incredible plot point For the show

That really would be God I can't wait to get that tote back Okay I relinquished the show back to you Sorry

Thank you We are so baseball obsessed today That we're going to skip the Elon Musk thing Because first of all I know that you have a kind of A limited tolerance for that story Just because you feel like I think you feel like We're just giving him the attention he wants In a way Which I sort of agree actually And that's I think why I've low-keyed it I do find it I find it kind of interesting, though, this idea that they're they went from trying to basically make it impossible for him to buy the company with this poison pill thing to making now suing him to buy the company. It's kind of an odd. And and and what I now I'm just doing the story. But what I found kind of interesting, I was reading a piece in The Times by Kate Conger and Lauren Hirsch. What's what's interesting is it's they have Twitter is having a really, really lousy year. like they're i mean i don't think that they've ever been profitable but their revenue is somehow down or they're like they've they're they're like down 35 percent i don't know what that means if maybe it's how they're being traded or something um but uh

And Twitter seems to be in kind of a bad spot. And this Elon Musk thing went from being like, we don't want him to take over Twitter to being like, whoa, you're going to give us $44 billion and we can all get away from this money loser. Now we're going to sue you to try to make you actually live up to the bargain, which is an odd turnabout.

I haven't read the details of this. What is the end game? Is it really probably they just want either to settle or because they don't really want him running the place, but they want they want some sort of remuneration. Did I put the M and the N in the right place? Remuneration. You did.

Well, there's a couple of what they've been through. Well, they basically feel like he has actually hurt their brand. He has hurt Twitter by tweeting, ironically, about how much Twitter sucks and how many how much Twitter is mostly bots now and et cetera, et cetera. So this lawsuit is in Delaware It's like pretty much The filing is just a bunch of his tweets That they're just saying He's trashed the company He said he was going to buy the company He signed a contract that said he would And now he's trashing us publicly Which he also signed something that said he would not publicly Criticize Twitter And they're just going like here's all the evidence And this has actually really damaged our product And now he doesn't want to buy it He's driven down the value of our product and doesn't want to buy it What a POS um but it's yeah but it's like i mean i guess now the real thing that jumped out to me was like is twitter not long for this world like i wonder and then also why is there not something that is similar to twitter that has come along that we're all using more for like the kind of speech that happens on twitter like for instance you know myspace and then you had friendster but then you had facebook like you as these platforms kind of became irrelevant there something that was becoming more relevant what's the more relevant version of twitter that's what

i don't understand well first of all friendster then myspace i wondered if i got that i actually was thinking i think i did those out of order um and also it's funny because this irritates me so much yet i'm not some big fan of twitter either like i was even saying i don't care if twitter goes away i really don't but i also i here's what i don't like and we saw this with peter teal and what happened with gawker i mean that's the problem you have these billionaires who are coming in and just destroying something because they don't like it and that's what the problem is not that there weren't issues with what gawker did uh as far as journalism is concerned i actually don't i don't stand by the things that got them in trouble with covering that hulk hogan story that ended up you know befelling them but i don't like and this is the broader point whatever you think of these um sites that are either journalism sites or you know a site where people can you know post their opinions on things but then some billionaire can come in and say i don't like what people are posting and therefore i can just come and mess everything up because i have bottomless resources and throw screlly in there like what it's just like it's that is the part

of this that is really sickening uh the three outcomes are possible outcomes with are he's forced to buy the company because he has signed a contract or he's forced to pay a billion dollar breakup fee which that would only kick in if he can't get his money like if he can't get his financing so that the it's not a given that he could even like if he had access to the money um he could be held on he'd be on the hook for buying the whole thing because that billion dollar breakup fee only kicks in if he can't secure funding for buying the company um or another option is this could be negotiating from musk to try to get the price down because this is the the uh the stock twitter stock has fallen more than 35 below the 54 and 20 cent per share offer that musk is on the hook for so he his offer that he put in was 54 a share and now the stock is

down 35 because of him also partially because of him well right yeah because of him jesus christ so

now he doesn't want to buy him but what some people think is he's just doing this because he wants twitter to lower the the sale price and so maybe they will just maybe they'll you know maybe they'll lower the price and then he'll end up buying it i mean i said this before if he buys it certainly if he buys it and he lets trump back on there i think i might just be done with twitter i mean i already don't think twitter is making i mean there are certainly nice things on there and i like you know chatting with tens and things like that but like it is a pretty dark place a lot of times and i often start my day with it which i don't think puts me off on the right trajectory necessarily um and the idea that this this kind of horrible person would have acquired the company and then let an also horrible person back on so they can make more trouble it just it doesn't seem like a place i want to spend a bunch of time but then that raises the the question i've already sort of posed which is like what's the what's the alternative right now like i do like being able to put my stupid quasi jokes or observations like the other day i was on my jog and i saw a woman walking three corgis and as i wrote on twitter you never see some walking one corgi it's is it like a costco thing do you get them in bulk like whenever you see someone walking a corgi it's a minimum of two corgis in my experience it's luke's tweet of the

week oh yeah don't forget about the oh yeah um i you know i don't have an answer to that i will say things are changing like instagram is changing quite a bit you hear people talking about this and in many cases complaining about it that did i say twitter i'm sorry i meant i'm talking too fast again you said instagram oh i'm sorry instagram that you know instagram was a photo site and now they're you know there's i mean i think some people are kind of somewhat paranoid about this but like pushing different algorithms and definitely like pushing this is true definitely pushing video content more than the photo grid and like there is you're seeing like especially instagram stories the temporary things that you just flip through like that's where a lot of people are putting their thoughts out there you know sometimes people are just grabbing their own tweets and kind of retweeting them in instagram stories or they're just talking and giving their opinions there or they're writing out stories that don't even have any kind of visual component because they want to because they're upset about something or they want to talk about something or whatever so i mean i do wonder if if instagram is taking on some of that stuff which of course is a facebook property um there's of course parlor which i assume is doing pretty well um i tried to log into that but i used the wrong spelling of parlor and found myself in some sort of a uh a porniverse if you'll recall i did that on the show i don't know if you remember that um so i don't know what's going on over there who can forget so yeah i i think that you're you're right there isn't like a complete hey this is the new version of twitter but you'll just sort of see it seep into the other things and i'm sure tiktok as well i'm sure tiktok will continue to evolve like um in ways and you know like when when i don't know you you shut down one of these things and the the opinions just go somewhere else sure yeah i guess you're right about that i just

i have such a love-hate relationship with the platform because you know when you get off a good tweet and lots of people are like retweeting it and liking it that very is a very kind of you know serotonin releasing event um and yet it's also it doesn't make me feel closer to a lot of people and it just seems like there's a lot of negativity on there and if it were to go away i don't know if i would be over on i certainly wouldn't be on tiktok or maybe on instagram posting things maybe i would just do it less and you know what maybe that wouldn't be the worst thing for me okay i saw this story on defector speaking of the uh ashes of the gawker media empire of course you had deadspin and then the this uh what was it um some kind of um venture capital group bought them up and started setting a bunch of rules up for them and so they all quit and they started a new thing called defector and defector defector is actually doing something really great this week um they're just everything they write is about is about rays either the tampa bay rays or people named ray oh that's great they did this last summer they did a whole week on the senators i think this might be so they can take some time off i think it's not unlike their summer games maybe where they basically do a thematic week so it's it's much less about the daily drumbeat of sports and more about just a gimmick so last week or last year was all of anything about senators either the team the senators or people who are u.s senators great so this week is raise week so they're writing about like i said the tampa bay devil rays and this is an intentionally weird thing to write about but then anything else that has to do with the name ray or a you know a anything a ray of light it could just be anything that's ray related so this was the the headline today uh ray crock once got on the pa and called his san diego padres stupid in front of everyone now i wish i could just go to defector for some reason when i print these stories out at um it gets rid of the byline which i want to make sure this was patrick redford writing over there at defector um telling the story of basically how ray crock this is the this is the sort of point of this story to me andrew ray crock owned the san diego padres in exactly the fashion that i would own the seattle mariners if i were somehow rich which is when they played badly he would get so mad that he would want to like fire players on the spot first of all he didn't even actually want to he wanted to own the chicago cubs he was a uh i think an illinois guy and so he'd always dreamed of owning the cubs that wasn't possible he was turned down by the The family that owned the Cubs at the time But he I know he also had a place in San Diego The reason is because Joan Kroc His widow donated A shitload of money to NPR And also to the Public radio station in San Diego So they must have lived in San Diego at the end of their life

so he hears that the san diego padres are up for sale and he buys them but then he was never really a padres fan he was always kind of a cubs fan who just happened to own the padres in 1974 um crock was at a preseason game sitting with the general manager buzzy bevese this is the padres were playing the giants in san francisco uh three-time all-star nate colbert dropped a fly ball crock told Bovesi get rid of him I want you to get rid of him immediately Kroc dropped his demand after

Colbert won the game with a home run no that sounds like me that sounds like me being too loud in the stands and just saying what a bum somebody is before they before they hit the walk

off if I were the owner if I were the owner of a team though a baseball team and someone just did an incredibly dumb thing it would be hard for me to not want to fire them just because of my rage Like, is there a rule against that? I mean, if you own the team, I think you're – are you allowed to just – I mean, you might have to pay out their contract, but could you just be like, sorry, you're fired, Sean Figgins?

That's the name of Sean Figgins' autobiography. I – well, I don't know all the rules and everything, but I mean, obviously, that's where you get into some tension sometimes between, like, managers and the front office. I mean, that's what – that Moneyball dealt with a lot of that as well. But I want to make an argument here But you haven't gotten to the heart of the story yet So I'm going to let you kind of finish So he ends up yelling at the team

So basically they have their home opener on April 9th This is back in like 1974 I think So it's the home opener And they're losing 9-5 And Ray Kroc, again, McDonald's founder Is just sitting there stewing Because at one point One of the players on the Padres Forgot the number of outs and one time they blew a chance score at the bases loaded with the Astros holding a 9-2 lead in the ninth, Kroc was finally set off after a pinch runner who just entered the game was picked off at first he stormed from the owner's box to the PA booth, grabbed the microphone and addressed Padres fans as their team's owner for the first time during the game fans, during the game he commandeered the public address system fans, I suffer with you i've never seen such stupid ball playing in my life he said this is the greatest part of the story though andrew in the middle of this statement a streaker gets on the field this is the 70s right it's all happening every game had a streaker after a streaker briefly interrupted him crock screamed into the mic for the man to be thrown in jail this is like this feels like ray crock should have been played by ted knight in caddy shack you know judge judge schmales yeah

he's wearing a white sport coat yes like just like it's just all happening his team is playing

like morons there's a streaker so he yells at the streaker to be thrown in jail and then he goes back to roasting the team he says i have good news and bad news the good news is the dodgers drew 31 000 for their opener and we've drawn 39 000 for ours the bad news is that this is the most

stupid baseball playing i've ever seen like he just keeps calling it stupid and dumb that's my favorite thing that just like um here's what i want to say about this okay obviously this is not professional right behavior and you don't want this and this is borderline abusive but hear me out there's something as a baseball fan that appeals to me about this as opposed to some unknown ownership group that isn't really invested in the team other than leveraging how much a fireworks night can bring in financially or television rights television rights can we you know leverage this thing for root sports and like has absolutely it's all just business to them i kind of love the idea of ted knight slash croc what's croc's first name again i should ray ray croc that's the whole point ray croc um just like grabbing the microphone and just feeling passion for the game like you shouldn't treat people that way and that's that could be very embarrassing and you get in some real uh balmer territory there as well but um like at

least he cares or cared right no you're absolutely right i mean i don't want to just restate what you said but you know a lot of because it's so much money at stake now you know there are these almost like a consortium that might own a team like you know and just have this kind of somewhat detached experience whereas uh this was not detached at all for rake not at all absolutely losing his mind and again it's literally what i would do if i owned the mariners

was at t-mobile and somebody did something and i was just getting really i mean we've talked about this on the show a lot and i've thought about it actually a lot why does baseball make me uniquely furious at the players like i don't get as mad in football at individual players i mean i'm disappointed sometimes i don't in basketball it's like if someone misses a free throw it's can be inopportune but i don't i don't hate them with the fire of a thousand suns the way i do when someone just goes up and strikes out on three pitches when you have two runners in scoring position like i don't know why the way baseball works is it makes me uniquely upset at the at

the human beings who are doing their best i mean in your defense you've also hated on some but like i'm gonna say i'm gonna say a word tell me how you feel jamal adams that's true i think that and we've talked about this before i was gonna throw out an argument well maybe it's the helmets maybe it's literally that you don't see their faces as much because you can sometimes really hate a player's face like i i got to a point with and i'm sorry for folks i can't i can't contextualize all of this stuff but we'll try to get off this quickly but like jared kelnick when he was at the plate this year and just striking out and striking out and striking out and just like there was something about the look on his face and listen he was a baseball player who was struggling it shouldn't make me hate him right but i found his face to be so hateable by the by the time they sent him down to to tacoma um and that's not right but there is something about that like i don't see i mean actually i guess with football every now and then like i love seeing aaron rogers like roll his eyes and be like a drama queen out there after like he doesn't connect with a with a receiver like i actually do kind of like that those close-ups but for a lot of the players on the on the team especially if they have the face shields you don't you don't see that human uh moment as much but it also must have to do with the sport as you said before it is like this man is at the plate again and if and he's gonna keep coming up to the plate like if he's in the rotation like you like a quarterback can just choose not to throw to a receiver who keeps dropping the ball maybe but either way like three to five times a game this person is going to be at the plate and if they are and if they're just terrible like there's no getting around that so maybe you can hang more of your frustrations on the people i think it's also

kind of like a slow speed car crash like it's it's much more solitary like the being a hitter in major league baseball is a very solitary experience you're standing up there everyone's paying attention to you doing this thing in football it's a bang bang play you know they throw it over the middle and it hits off the guy's fingertips and you know becomes an incompletion or you know maybe the quarterback misses the receiver or the running back gets three yards and falls down it's just kind of it kind of goes by pretty quickly the baseball thing is so like eviscerating for me because it's like when you watch abraham toro get although you know he's had a couple moments this season but when you watch somebody who or actually it doesn't even matter if they're good or bad so if they're really good like last year i would get really mad sometimes at like kyle seager like even though he had a really good season i guess but it's like people there's something about just like this person standing up there and then watching in over the course of two minutes this thing unfold that just it makes me but you're right i can't it's not like i'm exactly blissed out when i'm watching the seahawks i am so excited by the way to have Those Russell Wilson photos To just meme-ify the shit out of them The pictures of me and Russell Wilson You mean when Sundays roll around When football comes back Particularly that first game Between the Broncos and Seahawks No matter what happens I'm just going to be peppering you guys With those photos I'm going to be writing captions for them Possibly New Yorker style captions I don't know But I'm just going to be said to you I saw Oh my god I saw on Twitter this morning it suggested i don't follow russell wilson or anything but it must know that he still looms large in my mind because it was just a russell wilson hype video that he had made of him doing a bunch of you know like football drills and of course the caption was like um i'm used to this what was it was like i'm used to the doubts and i'm used to the hard work and then there's just this one thing nobody doubted you dude he's running in a circle and he's like catching a tennis ball and it honestly looks like a thing i could do now i couldn't russell wilson is a superior athlete he's he's incredible i don't think i'm as good as russell wilson but i was like don't lead your hype video with running on in a circle and grabbing a tennis ball right yeah it just didn't it didn't look as spectacular i'm sure it was really hard probably the person throwing it didn't tell him where he was throwing it i'm sure it's a fast twitch muscle eye hand coordination i mean there's all kinds of you know sports science behind it but it just kind of looked like he was just a golden retriever grabbing a tennis ball yeah i was like you got to start with something that looks more impossible than that one right it just looked like unlimited

diarrhea it was some limited here i go

Once again, with the email, every week, I hope that it's from a female. No, man, it's not from a female.

All right. Email or V-mail before we... What's going on?

What's going on over here? Are you turning yourself down? I'm not trying to, but why... Is that turning me down? You turned down yourself a little bit at some point.

I wasn't trying to. I was moving down the fader that controls the music, but it made my voice go down as well.

Yeah, I'm turning you up on this end. I'm also playing this.

That was very strange, though. All I was doing was turning down the email sounder, and then suddenly my voice also went down in my ears.

I don't know. It sounds like maybe you're a beggar. I guess I've made up for it on my end. But, okay, so here's what we're going to do here. We are going to take a journey. We got this voicemail from listener Kirk, friend of the show, yesterday. He'll set it up. I don't need to set this up too much, but this is in relation to conversations we've been having lately about finding lost cats or what appear to be stray pets or that type of thing. And then what what ensues afterwards? So take a listen to this.

Andrew, just listening to today's episode, I heard Rachel's story about, you know, rescuing a cat or finding a stray cat, returning it to its owner. And it reminds me of the dumbest thing I've ever done in my life. so this is kirk by the way and i moved into this house for the i just bought my very first house this was about 20 years ago and it's a humble little house in lake city and i just moved in and i hear this little meow outside and i go and i find that there's this really emaciated weak very sickly cat underneath my car and i love cats so i'm like immersing it back to health There's no collar. And I'm like, okay, I've got to save this cat. I've got to, you know, like really do right here. I'm a savior. I'm going to save this cat. So I call animal control, and they're like, well, bring it to the shelter. So I go to that shelter in Inner Bay, bring the cat down there. And I go home. At first, before I leave, I say, do not euthanize this cat because this cat, if it comes to that, I will take the cat. Do not euthanize. And it was very clear, do not. And so I go home, and the next day I'm meeting my neighbors for the first time right next door, right next to my driveway, next to my car, by the way. And they say, you know, we're chatting, and they're like, hey, have you seen a cat? Because, you know, one of our cats would sometimes roam in your yard. And the feeling that I had, I can still feel it today, that sinking feeling of shame and I'm an idiot and what did I do? did i kill their cat you know like what have i stole their cat and i i lied i just straight up

lied to their face i just can we pause this really quick yes we can we can just end it there actually

we don't need to hear i want to mention no i would have mentioned for those that know kirk is a therapist like a licensed trained therapist who this makes me feel less bad about my lying is what

i'm really oh okay um actually have we gotten to the part yet or is he about to say it that he considers this a lie under panic or something like that oh uh no he maybe he's about to say yeah so that that kind of uh it's nice to have that kind of vocabulary when you're a liar no

just joking take a listen what have i stole their cat and i i lied i just straight up lied to their face i just said no i i i haven't seen your cat i consider this kind of like a panic lie i run aside i it's still a bad lie it's awful but anyway i get my key and i my keys i get my car i drive to the shelter and i'm like give me the cat and they say we can't find the cat we don't know where the cat is and i'm like what do you mean you can't find the cat aren't you a shelter you used to nice the cat you lied to me i you know i'm not i don't know i'm exaggerating a little bit but i wasn't pleasant which i regret and it was shameful i'm sitting in my car and i'm like i've got to go home and i've got to tell my neighbors what i did so i go home and i you know hat in hand so to speak and i tell them the whole story and i'm thinking well that's it i you know after buying my very first house and moving in i have to sell it because i can't live next to these people that are going to hate me i mean i i'm a terrible human being i so i tell them and i'm i'm terribly ashamed and i i think they're going to hate me and they should hate me because i'm a terrible human being i'm stupid why did i do that i was so dumb well they don't get upset at me in fact they're they say oh yeah we understand it's fine and they're being honest they're totally cool about it and they and they tell me that they're a foster home for dogs and cats and so they have a lot of dogs and a lot of cats and The cat in question, they just acquired recently and knew that it was about to die and had been, you know, on its last days for a week or so. And so they said it's not a big deal. They went attached to the cat, and they say, in fact, you know what, if the cat still is alive, we're just going to call the shelter and say go ahead and euthanize it.

Oh, man.

Twist. so i was i guess off the hook in that way um i ended up becoming really good friends with him got to know all their dogs all their cats so i guess all is well that ends well except for the cat but when i'm staring into the darkness at night about to fall asleep this is one of the stories that runs through my head and i just think of how in colossally stupid i was the cat was in in under my car but my car was literally 10 feet from their house why did it not occur to me that this was the universe cat it's just i mean it's mind-boggling power out oh my god yeah

i was hoping wow i was hoping for a happier ending obviously i was really thinking like okay so this is going to end and and and and now kirk still has that little kitten and it's healthy now And so, I mean, it sounds like this cat, they tried to do everything they could before Kirk found it to save it, and I guess they couldn't, and I guess that's the reality of life. But, like, I was hoping for a happier ending.

Well, I'm also a little – at the beginning, I was envisioning a young cat, but then at the end, I was envisioning a cat that was, you know, older and sort of towards the end of life. Because I think Kirk uses the term kitty. I thought, yeah, I was picturing a sickly little kitten, too. But I think at the end, I got the sense that, no, maybe this cat was not like a kitten, but was like maybe an older cat that was not doing well. But yeah, I mean, not a great story. But either way, it wasn't doing well. Either way, it definitely was a sick cat. Not a great story for the cat. But also, I think this ultimately proves that Kirk should have just stuck with his original lie.

Hmm. No, I don't think it proves that. I think that would be harder.

I think because, no, because these people were completely, they were, you know, sounds like they were pretty unperturbed about the whole situation. They would have just been like, I guess the cat wandered off and passed away somewhere. Kirk, what Kirk had to ultimately do is admit to them that he lied because when he comes back the second time and he's like, guess what? You know how you asked earlier if I'd seen your cat? I actually did. And I, in fact, took the cat to a shelter. Like, then he's, I mean, obviously they got past it. they became friends but that must have been that must have been a tough moment for kirk yeah but

would kirk's life be better now if he had just stuck with the lie i would argue that like listen the way this turned out as far as his life is concerned is he became friends with them he got to interact with them he got to meet their cat cats and pets and everything like saving the lie only saves that one awkward moment but i would say you know as he's going to bed at night and this still haunts him i think it haunts him doubly if not more if he had if he was still sitting on the lie and maybe that's also i hate sitting on lies no i think you're right and also

he may have never found out that they were not as upset as he thought in other words if he continues with the lie exactly they have you seen our cat and he says what cat and then he hiccups and then a feather comes out of his mouth wait he ate a bird this makes no sense i might follow somehow i followed because i feel like there's a version of that in every cartoon but if he if they go where's my cat and he goes what cat then they don't get to the part of the story where later they would tell him yeah the cat was really old and or the cat was really unwell and not going to probably live a long time and this is probably the humane end for this cat etc he doesn't get any of that information exactly here we are 20 years later and kirk still to this day thinks that he basically euthanized the kid and then it's like once he's done that then i mean what kind of person is he and then what does he continue to do and get into what kind of a life of depravity does dr kirk honda start working exactly exactly because of this one because once he feels like i'm just broken i'm an evil person i i i put someone's cat down then do you just lean into

that you just become yeah thanos exactly dr kirk thanos right and he's a doctor so he's kind of got a laboratory and he starts messing around with genetics and mutation i don't like i don't like movies is that deranged doctors it always ends well yeah right exactly but the thing we really need to celebrate here is even bottom of the ninth with two outs the mariners can still give up three runs to make it a 6-4 game if i were watching the game and have to burn paul seawald's arm oh right of course during a a double header fan where freaking tastic where you know the next Game is a bullpen outing by the way Of course it is yeah because it's

a double yeah great okay so like so so the whole idea was flexing goes seven and then they just really light duty for the bullpen since we're going to need them in two hours to pitch the next game but no instead uh we managed to give up to soto it's only their best hitter um why would you why would you try to pitch around soto in any way yeah anyway well i'm just i mean that is the

type of thing that would upset me if i were watching the game which i'm not and so that's

good let me get on the let me get on the pa system this is this is the stupidest baseball i've ever seen i need to get a megaphone like howard stern has yes although that would be really ripping off his bit then if i start doing impressions of my parents through the megaphone that'd be a really direct your mom and then asking her really inappropriate questions yeah um these are the days i'm glad marsupial gurgles yeah shut down you just said doing your mom oh i thought you're

going to say um i thought i was picturing um isolating you doing the megaphone this is the

stupidest thing i've ever seen oh no i was picturing you saying you're doing your mom yeah i've also been watching a lot of beavis and butthead on tiktok so i think my overall maturity has really regressed in the last month okay uh that's gonna do it for today's show we will be back here tomorrow though with more imaginary radio for you by the way ems win ems win so Paul Seewald threw one pitch

so we can still use him right

I don't know how that works does it have to do with warm ups I guess we'll find out

I mean yeah I think you can still use him one pitch yeah

anyway we'll see you tomorrow until then have a great Wednesday take care of yourselves go Mariners and please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all

Thank you.