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TBTL!

www.this and www.that. Let's www.explainit.

Well, what are you?

I'm a chicken lady. Can I get you a beer? Would you like to just drink out of the toilet?

A beer.

Okay, sure. Kachap.

Kachap. Kachap. Kachap. Has anyone in this family ever even seen a chicken? Well, there's that fine line between, you know, showing emotion and being a hot dog.

I just wanted people to like me more.

And this, this is your master plan. Huh? Oh, no, no. Now, this is a whole other awesome thing. This is just a goof. Later, Tater.

All right, hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Monday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. Where are you adventuring to? Places I haven't been before. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host.

I just want to get to level 9. What's at level 9? It's one past level 8.

Whoa. Coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center right here in Portland, Oregon, where it is, as will be the case in much of the country, it's going to be hot. I'm flying in hot for that hottie. Getting very close to 100 degrees here in Portland and much warmer in other places. Hope you all are doing okay and able to stay somewhere cool. I'm not going to go full local news tip on you, how to beat the heat. I wrote this on Twitter today, but like find find yourself someone who loves you the way that local news loves giving tips for beating the heat that include the most obvious ways of beating the heat. Like with a straight face, they will get on TV or the radio and tell you to drink water and stay indoors, preferably somewhere that is air conditioned. I'm not going that far, but I'm just wishing everyone well on this Monday and hoping that you're doing all right wherever you are and staying cool. We've got a cool show for you here on episode 3734 in a collector series. Let the fun begin. The coolest new vehicle out there is the Volkswagen. I wrote this down before the show. Don't call it Volkswagen, even though the irony is we are talking about an electric version of a Volkswagen. Okay, the Volkswagen bus, the iconic bus. They have created an electric version. It's called the ID Buzz and Jill Lepore, one of my favorite writers. It's electric and there's no turning back. I wrote a piece in The New Yorker about this and it's just full of dazzling details, including why the price of chicken in the 1950s is still impacting what kind of vehicles Volkswagen sells in the U.S.

These are the best Cajun chicken niblets I've ever had.

And also, we will play you a tape of an ad for the Volkswagen van from the 1960s that played in the U.S. That might be the most sexist television ad that I know about. I mean, and there are a lot probably from that era, but this one is really something. And we've got the tape. We'll play for you coming up. Also, speaking of futuristic technology, there was a chess tournament happening in Russia, and there was a robot arm that was playing chess against, like, multiple people at the same time, and it grabbed a kid's finger and broke it.

Robots may strike at any time, and when they grab you with those metal claws, you can't break free, because they're made of metal, and robots are strong.

So we'll figure out what's going on with the robot revolution coming up. Plus, we'll talk to this guy, the longest-running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ship. He's my pal. He's my homeboy, my rotten soldier. He's my sweet cheese, my good-time boy. He's Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning. Good morning, Luke, from your good-time boy. My sweet cheese. Was that Jermaine Clement? Who was that? No, it's the other guy, though. It's the Arizona guy. Oh, right, of course. That's from what we do in the shadows. Right, right, right. I conflated those two. but they they they sound similar and they they work on similar projects so that's reasonable i don't watch that show yet and i say yet because i fully plan on at some point spending you know hours at a time with what we do in the shadows i've only

heard great things about the tv version i loved the movie but um that guy whose name always escapes me is just kind of to a certain like comedy fan that guy is a really big deal yeah he's always kind of flying beneath my radar or below my radar but he's on uh what we do in the shadows and that

that audio has now taken over tiktok he's my pal he's my homeboy my rotten soldier he's my sweet cheese my good time boy something about how he says boy is so that guy's just brilliant just

genius hey i don't want to get too far away from this breaking news i wanted to share with you today this is a big deal in my life this is an update to a story we've talked about on tvtl before you'll recall that i i didn't even mean to bring this up on the show but i sort of backed my way into admitting something to you the other day, which was I was literally using the toilet because I'm your rotten boy. No, wait, I'm your rotten cheese. Rotten soldier. I'm your rotten soldier.

You're my rotten soldier and my good time boy. Right, so I'm a rotten soldier. He's my homeboy, my rotten soldier. He's my sweet cheese, my good time boy.

And I'm using the toilet and I'm flipping through my phone as some of us do. We should really wash our phones more. Yeah, we should. Steam clean and martinize them, really, if we're being serious. And I was scrolling and, you know, on Instagram, the New Yorker, which we'll be talking about more, Jill Lepore, the New Yorker has, of course, their famous caption contest. And if you follow the New Yorker cartoons, you have an opportunity to play along. So they'll, you know, throw a cartoon in the feed without a caption. And if you want to officially submit back in the day, you'd have to email somebody before that. I think you'd have to send a self-addressed stamped envelope to the New Yorker in order to participate in this contest. But these days, Luke, it's all hashtags. It's all hashtags. And so if you used a special hashtag and left your suggested caption in the comment section, you were officially entering the New Yorker caption contest. Remember this? I was telling you this.

Yes, but I guess I didn't realize that the hashtag also entered you in the contest. I thought it was just people were, you know, workshopping their ideas in the public space.

But I didn't realize it was also entering you. It was my understanding that I was an official entrant. And here was the cartoon. I've never done this before. I've never submitted anything. I've never had an idea for a caption. I don't think I'm necessarily good at it. But the cartoon that caught my eye was two hikers going up a switchback together. um up in the mountain somewhere and they have not backpacks on but one house one standard looking single family home that is strapped to both of their backs so they're sharing the load each has a strap over their shoulder and they have a back a house on their backs right and like what is the caption for this and i told you a lot of people were weighing in with home prices or like jokes About home prices and other obvious things And I Submitted this using the proper Hashtag of course I decided in that Moment without overthinking it I threw in this caption In quote as if one of these People is speaking to the other one and Remember we can only Eat what real snails would eat The joke being That these folks are in Some sort of diet slash Lifestyle not unlike the Paleo diet of old where you could only eat what neanderthals would eat or whatever i don't think that's exactly right but whatever toe shoe joke i think you're kind of close sure so anyway that was my caption did i expect to win no did i expect to even bring it up on tbtl no but it but i did because i have so little going on in my life i got to bring something well i have been waiting for this day there's a website that seems like it's got a a week or two lag behind but it will announce the the winners eventually it's some like it's not an official new yorker thing i've been refreshing that i haven't been satisfied they still haven't published the um finalists for this but listener and can i give credit here listener nicole is a subscriber to the new yorker and has the print edition and apparently in the print edition we now know what the three finalists are the three finalist captions for this okay nicole took a photo of the magazine and posted it on slack i will skip to the chase mine is not on here i didn't expect it to be given the fact that nobody on instagram so much as gave it one heart there was not one like the internet did not like my caption

wait a sec so but you mean not of your instagram so even were your instagram followers i'm sorry that i am so um under informed on the workings of instagram but i just am could your regular followers also see this so you didn't get even one like smash from the people that are following you? Well, keep in mind, I didn't repost it anywhere. This is just, I just let

I left a comment amongst thousands of comments underneath this thing.

But nobody, when scrolling through the comments, saw your smoker that you whizzed and said smash the like button.

I like this one. Now, chances are, if you're scrolling through the comments, you're probably just somebody who wants to leave your own submission anyway. You know, we aren't there to support each other. It's a dog-eat-dog world. It's a caption-eat-caption world. You know what I mean? So, okay, but whatever. But the fact that there wasn't one person. Every person for themselves. Yes, right. More or less. Yeah. So anyway, I will also say, though, while I was not necessarily proud of the caption I submitted, I do think with as much humility as I can muster here, I do think my caption was better than these finalists, at least as I read them Friday after a few beers. So I'm going to read this And now I actually have not re-read these I'm actually going to scroll The first caption The first finalist is One of these people saying to the other person Did we forget anything?

What?

I mean Medium Okay But it's not very I feel like mine's more clever I just feel like mine's more clever I feel like mine I think yours is more clever

But I think yours needs I think yours is more clever But more narrow I think in terms of like which is the kind of comedy that I like right don't get me wrong but as far as I think yes and that is the stuff that makes me laugh more I do think that people you know who who nominate who upvoted that or whatever happens uh or if just David Remnick personally selects all like the top three whatever I can see choosing that one for a finalist because everyone can relate to you know you think you've brought everything you need for something and then you still forgotten something so what if you brought the entire house this is the part of the show where i explain obvious humor and sure what if you brought the entire house and you still managed

to forget something are you saying and i'm like i don't want to be defensive about this but are you saying that you don't think america is ready for an andrew caption no i don't wow i'm not saying

that just i think wow i think that probably in this case the broadness of that joke the joke that was making it to the finals was it probably served it better than your I think probably

funnier but slightly more specific joke how about this okay from Alexander Artagia in Houston Texas okay the caption is this one person saying to the other thanks for helping me move I mean it's broad I mean it's understandable city America's ready for that did we forget anything thanks for helping me move maybe this is you know you're you know you're getting your dream luke of accessible comedy here like you always beg for hope all hope middle america is keeping up with

these that one is really bad i mean that's terrible that thanks for helping me move that's just i can't believe that got in the top three the uh did we forget anything or whatever the first one was i can kind of see that one but thanks for helping me move thanks for helping me moving okay here we go from i don't even think that i don't even what's the the premise of that

joke is i don't even like they're moving to the top of a mountain where there's other hikers on

the trail i feel like it's adjacent to a joke about not you know helping your friend to move kind of sucks like you get to an age where it's like hopefully if you have the resources and the time etc you can stop asking your friends to help you move or maybe drive you to the airport because those are two of the things in life that are part of friendship but also like people kind of dread but i feel like it's not even really making that joke it's just guess what they're moving the house up the hill thanks for helping me move major vibes well should we check in with the final one

from john f davis of yonkers new york submitting your middle stain dripping from your voice hey i need to submit something to the new yorker caption contest i'm going to need to use my middle initial john f davis if you nasty in yonkers wow you're coming in hot on this one day i love it here's what john's got here's what john's got okay why don't you ever leave the house wow actually you know what wordplay second i am you know i think i kind of missed the wordplay when i first read that so in other words you didn't leave the house behind okay right actually you know what my apologies john f davis maybe yours is the best of those three but can i make

an argument for john f davis real quickly not from a comedy standpoint but from a using the f the name john davis there have to be there must be i don't know a million john davises in america maybe the f is just because you're trying to establish that you're you know like my granddad Was named Jack Kelly But there were Sorry he was John Kelly He was John Kelly But there were so many I'm going to do it.

john kelly's in the philadelphia phone book that he went by wait for it jack kelly jack f kelly right so as to be so as to be somewhat unique so maybe john f davis has just been trying to clarify which john davis he is i will give him i will give him that too actually now that you

said that because guns and roses did the same exact thing remember they started going by g and f and r and same deal they because there are so many g and r's out there that they started using their middle initial f so anyway i honestly this is a real asshole thing to say but like i didn't feel that strong about mine until i read these and now i'm like mine has nuance and i'm sorry i'm not somebody who comes on this show usually and argues earnestly that i am funny or clever or smart or have anything to offer society but this is the one time i am going to defend myself and say reading these three make me like mine a lot more like they're hiking up a mountain like it the context makes more sense that these would be some sort of ultra at you know people who are trying out some sort of lifestyle exercise thing like it makes sense given the fact that they are walking up a switchback with other hikers in sight you know did we forget anything i guess acknowledges that reality but thanks for helping me move certainly does not yeah completely that

completely elides the overall context of the cartoon which is that they're in the mountains now they're standing on a street yeah like just a mayberry usa random residential street and they're carrying the house it's still not a funny joke but it's not missing one of the largest

context pieces which is that they're on a mountain i will say this to the artist who drew it whose um suits i can't picture i can't remember john g davis john this is why we use the middle initial i will say that whoever drew this silly little cartoon did add an element that i like which is there is a little bit of smoke coming out of the chimney of the house so i like i like the idea it makes me smile to think that there's a fire going inside this uh house's hearth but anyway there there you go i had nicole honestly thank you for posting that because i was on some jank website like that that's refreshing every we could we were having trouble like last week getting to

figure out what was going to be in the finals so although i wonder if andrew this is interesting i wonder if this new yorker that i'm holding in my hot little hands here i wonder if after all of that if this thing you just read flip to the back yeah literally i'm looking at it's the it's the penultimate page of this new yorker i'm just physically holding it here and i'm looking at what won the uh previous week which just because we're going to lean hard into this this new bit on the show where we just read these highly visual things um so uh the the contest that has been there's a winner has been declared in is two scientists right and they're staring at a oh i saw this one a mouse it's a typical like a rat maze but instead of being a maze made of wood or metal it's made of corn so it's like a corn maze that's small that's it's it's you know um it's it's the size of the rat or it's it's what is the word i'm in proportional to the rat proportionate i don't really know the difference between proportional and proportionate is

proportionate a word of course i said that's proportionate so that's maybe that's part of

the problem for me is that one of these is not even wait are you part of the problem or part of the solution is that a show title maybe they're staring at what we think of as a rat's maze that you would use in a research setting except it's made out of corn and a one scientist with the Clipboard is looking at the other scientist and saying the hardest part was teaching him to use the hedge trimmers. Oh, God. Jesus. I'm starting to really. And you know what? I'll tell you what.

I'm starting to feel better about my submissions I haven't sent in. I said, you know what? I think I submitted one for that, too. And it was. And remember, we can only eat what real snails eat. And I understand not winning that one. I've been using the same caption for years. You have a style, and I respect that.

No, that's not great. Not great at all. I feel like there's a better corn maze joke.

Yeah.

Because, okay, also, you don't trim a corn maze with hedge trimmers. Yeah, it doesn't make sense. To me, the funny part of this, I just love, this is how we're starting off the week. To me, the thing that's notable about this is that it's a corn maze. Right. Do something with that. It's not like the hedge that you and Veeves have. It's the specificity of the little corn on the cobs that's there. That, to me, is where you need to go with the comedy.

I'm not saying that this is a good idea. Probably it's not. But for young humorists out there who would like to play around with this one, maybe consider that maize is another word for corn. Oh, my gosh. Maybe there's something there. I don't know. Thank you. That might be too, I don't know, on the nose.

I bet you, we should, we...

we must know this we notice um but because we talked about like back in the radio days we were obsessed with this new york caption contest as well so i've now forgotten what the process by which these get created like because you know the new yorker is getting cartoon submissions all the time and they have people they work with do they get one that's fully formed and then they just take they take out the caption or do they have someone draw one that never had a caption because looking at this you're exactly right i feel like if this was something that was fully realized at some point as in to say it had the cartoon and the caption the fact that this is a corn maze

that had to be the joke yeah no i'm pretty sure that these are made without captions i think i mean the artists might have some secret idea in their head but i think they are commissioned to write these without captions i don't think these lived somewhere and the captions was were stripped off it i think you've been doing this for years and years though and maybe now

one of the listeners will go back and find as they were narrowing this down i wonder if some of the you know finalists did figure that out but that to me there's i'm with you there is a joke there that the fact that maize is the spanish word for corn and this is a corn maze etc anyway can i tell

you um something here so again i'm on this weird website i can't even it's just a bunch of letters and numbers but for some reason they are keeping track of the new yorker cartoon caption contest this is a data set and it's a very um unglamorous website but they um i'm looking at the submission for this corn maze one and the rat is just entering into it they show not just the new yorkers winner on this website but also the top rated caption now i am assuming and i could be totally wrong here that top rated might be rated on instagram because i don't know otherwise how they would have that information but um the one that was the top rated caption so not the hardest part was teaching him to use the hedge trimmers which again you don't use hedge trimmers to cut corn right the one before that luke or the one that was top rated whatever that means was we use the males as a control group they never ask for directions i can barely say it it makes me cry what's going on what is the deal with airline food what is going on right now why don't

they make this plane of the food why don't they make the food out of the black box what how is this how are we well you know what actually sorry actually actually andrew i if it's the top rated meaning it was the majority of people who are looking at a website presumably the new yorkers are they going to pick the funniest thing or are they going to pick again this is back to this is why you should feel good that your snail reference didn't make it into the finals because unfortunately when you ask a million average americans what is funny they will say the emoji movie because one of the emojis looks like number two right like they are never going to say something that's they're never going to say this guy saying a good time boy he's my homeboy my rotten soldier he's my sweet cheese my good time boy they're never going to say good time boy because most people if you if you average it out the average american has bad taste i'm sorry we just like the more people you get involved in something usually the more the flatter things have to be for a lot of people to engage with it so the idea that the top rated one was playing on this trope that one of the tiredest comedic premises which is that men don't like to ask for directions just kind of reinforces the point that people generally have bad taste yeah what

now the only thing that i take issue with with what you said is um regarding the um emoticon movie the fact that i call it the emoticon movie means i'm not oh my god that would be such a

different film if it was like a semicolon i would see that one that's the art film version yeah well that would just be so dope if it was just uh somebody explained what that particular kind of art is called and i forget now where you create things out of the actual ascii art yes you shall receive you was one of my favorite not what you can do for your emoticon but what your emoticon can do for you um but yeah like that would just be an amazing movie if it was ascii

That would be like the Sony Pictures classic version, right? Criterion Collection.

Ben Mankiewicz introducing the... But you were going to say.

Oh, I was just going to say...

You take issue with the emoticon movie reference.

Yeah, exactly. The Emoji movie actually was really good. It was probably my second favorite movie after Boss Baby 2. So that's the only thing. I would just be careful. If you haven't seen these movies, don't mock them.

No spoilers. Okay. It turns out they're all emojis.

Let's take a quick break here.

I do want to update everyone on one small victory that I had over the weekend, which is how I differed from the Seattle Mariners baseball team and that I enjoyed one small victory over the weekend. But we'll talk about that and we'll get to this Volkswagen van story. A lot of New Yorker talk on today's show coming up in a moment here on TV TL.

Thank you, baby.

Hey, let's thank some donors of the day. They're making this episode possible, and really more broadly, TBTL possible, because of their generous donations each month. And it's the only way we can do this, with the Hanks and the Thanks of Jamie Nettles of Columbus, Mississippi. That name is familiar.

I've been in Jamie's home. Jamie's home, Luke. I don't mean to blow you away, but this is the truth of the matter, yes.

Jamie is a wonderful member of the TBTL10s community, has supported the show in ways both large and larger, including hosting us at her house and driving around, I think it was Columbus, Mississippi. I don't know if she was fully broadcasting from the top of her car, but I do believe she went into a restaurant at some point and made the people in the diner listen to some TBTL so she could collect them up as people who had been exposed to the program.

I want to say a local diner. I believe that happened.

Anyway, Jamie's the best. Thanks, Jamie. We really appreciate you. Megan Tuomi is no slouch there in Horseheads, New York. What up, Megan? Hey. Thank you so much. Nice to see you on the list there. Eric Ryden is in Seattle, Washington. Thanks, Eric. Stephanie Salmon is in Issaquah, Washington. Thank you, Stephanie Danny Crawford I believe one of our Danny One of our FBI Yeah Cast members Out there in New York City Thank you, Danny What if I just What if that sentence ended One of our FBI most wanted Yeah As in We need to always With Mike Frizzell gone R.I.P. We need to always have one listener Who the FBI is looking for Yeah, you heard It's funny

on this show that that was my that was my kick in the hacky sack back to you luke just thinking about mike and going oh like because i was like oh so if anybody is actually being pursued by the

fbi let us know we will not blow up your spot unless you did something that seems really genuinely bad but we just need to always have one listener who's on the lam just set up a cool cool factor exactly we have teams of lawyers named danny that can help yes we do not this danny this is part of our acting troupe named danny but we also have a legal team named danny and then brian kirstie is in west hills california brian thank you as well for your donation we really do appreciate it thanks to all of our donors of the day for making tbtl happen hello and welcome to top story uh just a quick update andrew on my andre the giant photograph that i borrowed from nick's coney island here in portland yes now i want to tell

you that you sent me a picture this weekend that intrigued me and i had a lot of follow-ups but i saved them for today i'm not joking nice yes that's the reason i only texted you back i texted you one word back but it wasn't out of disinterest it was out of a it was out of too much interest

so a little a little uh kind of i guess refresher on what happened so i went into this bar restaurant i was sitting at the bar and i looked over and there was this i thought very arresting photo of the actor andre actor i guess he's an actor but really more known as a wrestler andre the giant that is true i would as this funny thing is i don't know if i would have even questioned that but yeah this mini bike enthusiast andre the giant that was also a photo i i saw this photo of andre the giant walking on the streets of what i later found out was portland and then i immediately started googling like weird andre the giant photo because i wanted to figure out where this was from so I could get a digital version of it. And in that there are a lot of pictures of Andrew the Giant on a motorcycle with this one family somewhere, which was I was surprised to see. What I didn't ever find was another any other copy of this photo and that's because it appears that this was just that rarest of things. A photo that someone took that then they enlarged a little bit and then framed and then put on a wall of a bar. That was it. It was not doesn't live online yeah shepherd fairy hasn't like turned it into some kind of a you know meme it's just like this was just the thing so i um asked eventually i got up the gumption to ask nick the owner of nick's coney island if i could take this photo he was super nice so i took the photo to this place where they were going to scan it the problem was the photo was in a frame and the glass in the frame was broken it was just kind of cracked right down the middle diagonally going from let's just say the northeast corner to the southwest corner and i what i was going to do is buy some new glass because i thought nick would like that i'd upgrade his photo and he said no actually i think the crack is kind of part of what's cool about this to which I thought duh of course that is what's cool about this so when I take the photo to the photo mat to have them you know scan it they're like you need to take it out of the frame because we can't really if we harm the photo or even if we get harmed by this very sharp glass that's going to be a bad situation so I then had to unscrew this frame which was very complicated it had i'm not exaggerating eight metal hinges or like little l kind of pieces that fit into different parts of the frame and had screws in them that would then expand them to create tension there was a support wire in the back there were also those like little metal kind of um i don't know what you'd call them but they're like little um Sort of slightly curved pieces of metal That you put in a frame so that it Forces the photograph up against the glass Spacers There was like ten spacers In there and as I'm unscrewing this Thing in the photo mat It's just like it's Disintegrating in my hands like Pieces and screws are coming Out from every aspect of this metal Frame and spacers And it's got this broken glass and I'm just like

No one is putting Humpty Dumpty no one named Luke is putting Humpty Dumpty back together again successfully so then uh I they've scanned the photo and I realized on Saturday because I'm going to uh Bismarck North Dakota today Andrew and I'm going to be there until late on Thursday night I realized I needed to get Nick his photo back and there was no reason for me not to because the photo mat was done they're ready to give it back to me and if I don't if I didn't take it back on Saturday then it was going to be a an additional week and i just felt like that was kind of rude of me considering he was nice enough to let me borrow the photo so i drive over to the photo place i get the photo i i get the all of the sort of pieces of this frame and uh i'm sitting there uh on this kind of table work table i have here in portland and i start trying to put it together again it is just so complicated because i'm trying to account for this broken glass and i'm trying to not re-break it another thing that happened was bubbles jumps up immediately jumps onto the tv where the tv is and then jumps onto this higher table and i'm not kidding you andrew like of all the things she could go towards on this table she goes over to this giant shard of glass that's kind of sitting precariously on something and starts sniffing it like she wants to unalive herself in some way and it's like get down i had to lock her actually here in the studio yeah i was gonna say you you can't then

there are two things you can't do with that cat in the room one is fix this frame the other is

cocaine like you just can't do that exactly i learned that second one the hard way she didn't come down for weeks she does have a lot of energy yeah she sure does um so so whatever the the way this story ends is that after some trial and error and a couple of nervous moments I was able to after about an hour again through just being very unusually delicate with this Andrew because I am the kind of person who when I get a piece of furniture like from Ikea and then I take it out of the box and then something's not fitting my brain doesn't say well you're probably putting this in wrong or you have this thing reversed I'm thinking it just needs a little more torque Just needs a little more PSI, right? I didn't do that with this because I knew that if I broke the glass more or in a different way, I would be really screwed. And I just very carefully and meticulously through trial and error fit it back together, start to tighten it up, realize something was off, go back through, stand it up on a different side, gingerly hold the glass. Anyway, Andrew, at the end of the day, I put it back together perfectly. I was so proud of myself and I even put the spacers in like I was actually going to just like leave the spacers out because I was like if I can just get this thing to where it's like in there and the glass seems fine I'm just bringing it back as is it's just going to sit on a wall doesn't need spacers I was like I don't want to mess with that and then but then I got it back together so solidly and I thought well maybe let me just try and then I got all the spacers back in and then it was just like perfectly imperfect as it had been before I

i got it and i drove it over and nick was outside smoking a dart and i walked up and i said recognize this and he said what took you so long did he really didn't man yeah he did and then i went back in and then i just like it's like a packed bar it's a saturday i just walk in i hang this andre the giant photo back up on the wall and then i just walk out oh i thought for sure you'd

stick around i guess it's middle of the afternoon yeah i had uh you just describing hanging on the wall made me nervous because i thought that and then i stepped back and it fell and crashed to the floor like that's how my story would end i gotta say i want to jump in here i got a lot to say about this because first of all i would like to apologize because i did not think that you had done it yourself and that was my first question when you texted me a photo of the of the um completed frame and you said i don't think you said i did it you might have but i i thought you left it somewhat vague so i still didn't know if you had taken this to a frame shop and said would you mind putting on some protective gloves and putting this back together for me as one listener had suggested you do and i especially thought that you had done that because and this is where just one more thing i turn i turn into colombo um in the hay dummies video of yesteryear in the hay dummies video of friday that just posted yes you recorded that on wednesday i want to say yeah those like a couple of days in advance so they can get turned around um and in that video you're sitting in your car and at some point you hold up a manila envelope and you say this is the frame in here and i think i think you could hear things rattle around although i could be wrong

about that feels like dan akroyd with bag of glass it was a little bit like that snl yeah i don't know

why you picked it up but you did just very briefly and you're like hey this is the frame and you shook it and it sounded like they're a bunch of pieces and now i'm like okay he's got the frame in a bunch of pieces he's in his car right now he is on his way to a frame shop or multiple frame shops until he finds one that will put this back together for him that was not the case why was that in pieces in your car if you were just taking it back upstairs to your studio to fix it I just

because I'm lazy and it had been in my car ever since I left the photo mat initially okay so I think I will part of it was I was kind of afraid to move it yep because it was it seemed very precarious so it had just been sitting on the pat like the back passenger seat of my car it just happened to be in the car when i shot that video it was not because of anything like intentional and but also i just because i didn't have the photo back yet that just seemed like there was

no real point in moving it so that's why okay and so okay well my apologies for not expecting you to have done that yourself i didn't think i could i am proud of you um also how tell me about all of the feelings i was gonna say how awesome did it feel but maybe it didn't feel awesome maybe it felt awkward how did you feel walking into that bar and hanging that thing up yourself and did anybody observe you doing it were there any like regulars who were kind of like what's this what's this guy doing did you feel like fonzie how'd you feel i was hoping to get a stronger

reaction from this kind of cool guy move i was doing there was one guy who was sitting i think literally in the bar stool that i had been in when i initially peeped andre and he was looking at me as i walked away like huh i wonder what that was all about i was hoping there'd be like a table of like hot chicks who would just be like hot chicks as we often talk about on this show

right i was hoping that rollerblade like kind of rollerblade bikini ladies from the 80s is that

what you were picturing i was hoping for six or seven bachelorette parties yeah right that were in nicks coney island at one on a saturday they would all just be like oh la la look at that guy

and i didn't they're french or swedish i'm confused i just hold on i want to enjoy this moment was that the first time in the history of tv tale that the phrase hot chicks has been offered

and the last okay i i agree with that yes um but but i was i was very i'm very relieved now though because this thing is handled right like it's it's back together i will tell you this other thing really quickly and then we should move on to the vw story but um as i was putting it back together and as i was figuring out actually the mechanics of this it was i know that like it sounds like i'm making way big bigger of a deal out of this than there should be of this frame because many of our listeners are very crafty and talented and they would they're all thinking it's not that hard you just reassemble the picture frame this is a thing people do all the time it's not that big of a deal but you have a broken pane of glass in there and i'm also the kind of person who i think when i am daunted by certain things i just kind of either check out there's a reason why i have a large orange truck that's still at an auto place in burnside there are certain things that when i feel intimidated by them for whatever reason and it's weird what does and does not intimidate me, right? It's not like anything that I'm intimidated by I shut down over.

but there are specific things and this is not something mechanical like mechanical things fitting things together being careful with stuff sharp glass these are not the areas of expertise for me and so I was really kind of tempted to just like basically let this go on for months to where poor Nick is missing his photo you know for an extended period of time I felt like that would be really disrespectful to him and so as i'm kind of like figuring out oh okay this fits in here and here's why there are these this is why these two metal l's sit together like this because then when i tighten the screw on one of them it makes them it creates space between them which then locks down this angle of the frame right and i'm just kind of analyzing it and starting to figure out just from a simple mechanic standpoint how it all works and what the kind of how it fits together and why everything is the way it is and as this is happening i'm also monitoring the mariners just shitting the bed and as i am having success in my personal life and the mariners are having very limited success on the baseball diamond it actually kind of was a balm on the bad feeling i had about the mariners because this was a tough weekend as a mariners fan we had so much um excitement going into this series and it just kind of couldn't have gone a lot worse and so at least on that saturday as i was putting this thing together and as it was finally like i screwed it all in everything fit and the crack was going in the right direction because that was the other thing i was like when i got it back together i was like if i have reversed the direction of this crack it's just going back like this and i'm just going to see if anybody notices you know what i mean oh because right if you actually because i could have flipped it over it could have instead of going from one corner to the other it could have been going totally the wrong way but i was like that's just going to be what going on with this photo if i get this thing back together right right right turns out i actually got it right

you know that's great chance also i'm surprised i wonder if you had googled like how to reassemble old-fashioned frame i don't think your first hit would have gotten you there but you might have started to find places where you find out what this kind of frame is called or something there

might have even been some online help i bet you there was and i was about to do that but but as i was starting to piece it together i could just kind of i could sense that i was on the i was sort of on the right track with it but i just there was it was the kind of thing where again this is so boring but so many pieces had to fit into so many other well there's four corners on a frame and if any you had to do this thing where all these interlocking pieces were all kind of partially put together but then when you click it all in like you couldn't click half of it in because then the other wouldn't be enough play in it for the other half to fit if that makes any sense yeah I think it just was very interdependent on itself. My point in all this is to say I was this is such a small thing, but I genuinely felt like this is a good life lesson for me that I can sometimes do things that do not naturally land in my comfort zone. I don't have to drive around with this broken frame in my car for three months because I don't want to address the situation.

So you're going to go take a look at that car today?

You know, if I weren't flying to Bismarck, Andrew, that's right.

You have a busy day. Yeah.

But, but, um, but I, I, well, Hey, more on that, Andrew, can we talk about this Volkswagen ID buzzes van? Yeah. So there's this great, uh, Joe Lepore piece in the New Yorker. I, this, I had two victories this weekend, Andrew. One was the frame. And the other was that I actually managed to sit down with a physical copy of the New Yorker yesterday and read an article. I know hold your applause everyone I had seen I love the writer I love Joe Lepore's work and I've actually personally been very interested in this ID Buzz thing which is the the new electric Volkswagen van or bus depending on how you want to describe it and so when I saw that Joe Lepore was writing about it I was very excited and I was like I am going to on Sunday at some point sit on my balcony and drink a beer and read this article and i did and it was very rewarding it was as nice as i hoped it would be there's all kinds of dazzling details in this um basically one of the things that well here is the first dazzling detail to me so jillaport goes she's a fan of these of these um buses because she has had a couple of ones with her family and they've had great vacations and stuff so she's kind of old school kind or the new election okay yeah you can't even get your hands on the new uh electric one yet in the u.s which more on that in a moment but she kind of uh does a little bit of a deep dive on the history of electric vehicles in the u.s and i had no idea that you know at the beat when cars were first being invented the majority of them were electric in the u.s by the turn of the century one of every three motor cars in the u.s was electric I'll be right back. Wow. She goes back and she talks about this like original New York auto show that happened, I don't know, a hundred plus years ago. And that it was kind of neck and neck between like there were steam cars there. There were electric cars. And when we say cars, we mean like a horse carriage, you know, with big wheels on it that like had something powering it to the tune of half of a horsepower or something. but in the such in as much as these were cars it was equally distributed between electric steam and combustion and in fact a lot of people at the time really thought that combustion was not even in the top three of or not even you know it was the third of three of ways to power a vehicle because of the smoke and the hassle and the fact that the engines were unreliable the problem was battery life you just couldn't in those days get enough capacity in a battery for an electric vehicle to really have any sort of range although they did have a um at this new york show at the turn of the century they did have a battery charging hydrant they called it um where you could for i think it was like 25 cents or something you could charge your electric vehicle this again

is in like 1901 you could charge your electric vehicle uh and then drive it like 25 miles or something so they had basically like a tesla hub at the turn of the century which i just didn't even realize that was part of the conversation they probably got all the plum parking spots at the grocery store too exactly so um skipping forward to the 1950s now this is what jill writes in this piece um uh for all the cult of counterculture talking about kind of the way that the v-dub bus has become a hippie thing the fate of the v-dub bus starting in the 1960s mainly had to do with the price of chicken here's where i need to explain about the chicken war so what i'll paraphrase here but basically what happened was in the 1950s the united states got really good at producing huge amounts of cheap chicken and we were pumping these chickens full of chemicals growing them real fast killing them freezing them and selling them to europe and it was undercutting the price of chicken in europe and the european countries particularly the chicken farmers there the poultry farmers were pissed and they were like going and like uh expropriating um like the u.s uh anything that like these uh german chicken farmers get their hands on that had anything to do with the united states they were like taking it over and protesting and barricading things they were very not happy about all this cheap chicken that was flooding europe and so um europe's uh commission market excuse me common market raised tariffs on imported chicken so basically the u.s was always for a period of a few years trying to figure out and negotiate with europe over chicken prices because europe kept creating these tariffs and then it was u.s farmers were mad because you know their chicken wasn't selling as well in europe so what ended up happening was in december of 1963 lyndon johnson is trying to get the support of the united auto workers he's running for re-election and he realizes that the way that he can get their support or one way is to create a 25 tax on imported light trucks this was aimed specifically at volkswagen as a way of getting germany back over the chicken tariffs so what that meant was that volkswagen could not sell their buses in the u.s as any kind of truck not as a pickup not as a panel van not as any vehicle that could be construed as commercial and that rule persists to this day that tariff so in a lot of other parts of the country like what we think of as a v-dub van they have v-dub pickup trucks they have all kinds of working they're working vehicles or fire trucks

in places their ambulances in other parts of the world you mean not the parts of the country sorry yeah yeah okay i just want to make sure i follow okay i see but that's why we never see a

volkswagen pickup truck that's right they can't you cannot volkswagen cannot sell or they can i guess but there's a huge tariff on it so it's not it doesn't make any sense so that's why if you go other places in the world and i've noticed this particularly europe you will see all kinds of working vdub vans they can be all kinds of things in the u.s they can only be a passenger van they cannot be anything that looks like it has any kind of commercial use to it that is interesting in

In fact, I think I've seen some and I don't know if they're maybe maybe they're not German. There are these little trucks that I see around town. In fact, a fellow I used to volunteer with had one for a while. It's like a it's like a very small pickup truck. I'm not talking about an El Camino here. I'm talking about a little like weird looking foreign little truck that the steering wheel was on what we would call the wrong side. And I wonder if that was like some sort of old used like German truck. Like I'm wondering if that was even a Volkswagen. and it's over here just because, you know, it's an old used truck now and it wasn't something that was actually sold on the mark. it i know a guy over in port townsend named peter gerloffs who's awesome dude who has a v-dub like it's like a v-dub flatbed but he got it from like south america or something it is the coolest vehicle i've ever seen in my life and coincidentally he was talking to me years ago about maybe electrifying it because of course the whole issue with v-dub buses is that they have like they're very gutless they have a hard time getting over any kind of mountain pass and you know they're they're sort of cool cars or cool vehicles for what they are but they they were sort of historically and and well known to be very underpowered um so this is the thing this is jillapour's point is because they were not allowed to sell these things as anything other than a passenger vehicle they basically invented the minivan like what they wanted to do was sell a bunch of like pickup trucks to the and buses you know commercial buses to the u.s but because of this tariff they had to come over as passenger vehicles only and that is why there were so many of them and why they became part of the like road trip culture the hippie culture the civil rights movement they talk about how um the uh the national museum of african-american history has a the back of a 1966 v-dub van and painted on it is love is progress because there were people taking these v-dub vans to civil rights marches and protests like it just became this whole cultural thing kind of by accident because that was the only thing we would let into the country as here's

what i there's a lot of amazing things here one of the most amazing things from my perspective is the fact that when i was pulling intro tape today i was using an old montage made years ago and there were two very specific chicken related drops in that intro and i thought that's weird what a chicken lady skit from kids in the hall which is a strange thing to put in an intro anyway And then also followed by Arrested Development, the family going around doing terrible imitations of chickens. And I was listening to that today. I'm like, well, I guess I'll use this. But it seems weird to me, all the chicken content. Now, here we are back into chicken content. And I'm looking for chicken related tape that I haven't already used to end the show with. That's the amazing thing from my perspective. You don't believe in God.

Does Jill mention any of that in her piece? no but what she does mention which i tweeted about yesterday because i was so sort of just stopped in my tracks by this advertising campaign she's talking about when the kind of culture shift around a vdub van started to happen in the u.s and again basically largely related to the fact that they couldn't just send these things over as working vehicles and it was this tv ad from 1963 which she prints the text of but actually found it on youtube and it's this is the beginning of vdub she says trying to kind of appeal to a certain kind of person about a certain kind of outdoor living type situation or camping kind of like this is this represents a lifestyle right but take a listen to this ad it is wild if your tv

set broke down right now could your wife find something to talk about is she the kind of wife that can bake her own bread? Does she worry about the arms race? Do the neighbor's kids wish they had her for a mother? Will your wife say yes to a camping trip after 50 straight weeks of cooking? Will she let your daughter keep a pet snake in the backyard? Can you show up very late for dinner without calling first, with two old friends? Will your wife let the kids eat frankfurters for breakfast? Would she name a cat Rover? Would she let you give up your job with a smile and mean it? Congratulations. You have the right kind of wife for the Volkswagen station wagon.

Which is what they were originally calling V-Dub vans, by the way. It's not a different vehicle. It's what we think of as a V-Dub van. So it's like, wow.

It took me a long time to figure out. It's so much to unpack because I didn't know where it was going at first. And wow, that is. So in other words, it's kind of saying you have a cool, chill, progressive wife, but it's still based on the idea of she will have dinner waiting, even if you are super late and you show up with your drunk friends. The drug being applied.

It's like I think what I take from it is they were trying to appeal to. Here's what I actually found. OK, first of all, obviously, that's extremely gendered and misogynistic and like a really bad way to frame any kind of purchase is, is your wife hella cool? But I did find it optimistic in one way, which was that they were assuming that there were many American men who perceived their wife to be hella cool, because I would think most people at that time, the answer to that question would be no on a lot of fronts. Like, is your wife fine with you coming home hours late for dinner? Like you said, probably drunkenly with two random friends.

Don't you think the majority of American husbands in 1963 would probably, if they were being honest, answer no and like reasonably so? Like, no, I don't think that would be something that would be cool with the person I'm married to to just come home late, drunk with people hanging. You know what I mean? Like they thought that there was a statistically significant number of American males who were married who thought whose wife checked all those boxes in their mind.

I don't know. i think it's a stretch to make that a positive because it's still based on i mean that whole thing is based on the woman being subservient and i agree but i'm just saying like i i guess

maybe you're right i just think it's a weird to me it's such a weird approach beyond just all the obvious misogyny because it's like i just wouldn't think that if you listed those things off to any married man i think most of them i guess i wasn't married in 1963 but i've been married in the more modern era i just think they're listing a variety of things that almost anyone would be a hard no to would your wife let your daughter have a snake some of them are so random would would she let you name a cat rover like it's it's really all over the place and you know it's again it's it's extremely sexist but it's also extremely weird it is extremely weird beyond just the blatant sexism it's just like what i wish it would have not been so sexist because on some level it's kind of an interesting ad approach i wonder if this was remember i don't know the name of the

company and i and i should because um it's it's famous and i have a podcast about advertising but yeah i do wonder if this is the same um if this is the same creative company that uh came up with think small and all those like really groundbreaking vw ads which were those were mostly in print i think but i don't know if that same team moved to broadcast i think um it was called doyle dane

bernbach agency that's what the internet is telling me and uh so i think that was maybe that was the i'll look at that up while you can doyle dane burn or ddb okay i so funny i've seen ddb a million times i never knew what the d d and b were for but yeah they were the ones i think at least according to wikipedia who did the think small ad oh they're the ones who did think small you don't

know if they're the ones who did this particular thing no okay no this one i don't know but you

know it's kind of interesting because after i got done watching this 1963 commercial the next thing that just auto came up on youtube and i was just like not even trying to watch i was like editing the tape and putting it in it was this ad created by volkswagen that started with audio of news clips about them lying about their emissions remember this whole thing i do the reason we

if we were able to afford a new car in 2018 was because of volks we bought a volkswagen and volkswagen was still reeling from that so what we wanted was affordable yeah so it's their own ad

where they're actually playing audio of news coverage or maybe they've reenacted it but it sounds very convincing of news coverage describing them lying and cheating and it's just this guy who's like supposed to be a designer for volkswagen or something sitting in the dark and just all this audio is playing of all their misdeeds and then it's like um from the darkness comes light and then just the front of this new bus the id buzz just like pulls into the darkness and you just see the face of it illuminated and i mean again i have to give them credit in that ad for a very I don't know if I can think of another time that a company would almost embrace something

they did that was illegal in that way yeah I mean the fact that they're Hitler's car and they brought it over and they've been successful here I mean to me that'll always be the biggest you because I mean that'll be the biggest PR coup exactly the fact that they were able to overcome the fake diesel crisis not the fake diesel but the fake emissions uh tampering with the emissions readings crisis is that is impressive but also the fact that it was because i mean and again i don't think i'm exaggerating that right that it was the people's car right it was built by the state under hitler right they were able to survive that pr disaster they can do anything well you know what

else is in this piece and again i highly recommend everyone just read jill's excellent writing on the topic but like when we bombed or when the allies or the u.s when we bombed germany they specifically didn't bomb the factory i think maybe in wolfsburg they didn't bomb wherever exactly was in germany the factory that was making v-dubs because they knew that germany was going to need to be able to continue to make cars so like it's interesting i mean that probably also they had a guy from hitler had had a guy whose last name was porsche design the v-dub and that i mean i don't know if It's the same guy or.

or the brother of the person whose name is on what we think of as Porsches. But like, so that was one thing I didn't know. And then the other was that we actively tried to not destroy the places that they were making these V-Dubs back during the war for some reason. I didn't know that either. Anyway, a very interesting story that I highly recommend everyone check out from the very excellent Jill Lepore.

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, an email or V-mail before we skedaddle?

Yeah, I got a couple here that I can burn through pretty quickly. This I thought was interesting, Luke, and this was one of those things I should probably talk to you about off-air, but I figure why not let the listeners in on this as well. It would appear that, this is from listener Bill, we have a bit of an opportunity here, a financial opportunity, if I understand it correctly. Nice.

Hello, my name is Bill Miller. You've been pre-qualified for $26,000 in cash per W-2 employee because of the pandemic. This cash program is part of the American Rescue Plan for business owners. It's possible we can help you get this money immediately.

Can I call him directly?

Please call me back at my personal desk at 866-621.

I can call him at his personal desk. So that's exciting. Should I look into this? Wow, $26,000?

Right? That could get us out of a... That's halfway to a V-Dub ID Buzz. Right. starts starts at 45 grand so like that's in fact that's more than so that's pretty yeah so i'm

excited about that um also uh we were mentioning listener jamie uh earlier in the show she was a daily donor today um our friend um and longtime listener um and now jamie i don't know if you know this luke i think you do but jamie handcrafted some tbtl 10 stickers like a while back now i'm thinking this is going back like at least five years or something because we didn't have any tbtl sticker stickers to give out and people like representing tbtl on their cars so jamie did that and i don't know if she was giving them away or selling them at cost or whatever uh and this uh voicemail is from a listener who has one of those on her car and was approached by a stranger

hello dum-dum i just wanted to let you guys know that i was in line at uh burger king by the way

i'm not trying to be a jerk here to this listener who's calling in but i have noticed that we're getting and maybe it's because we're playing more voicemails which is good and people are just calling in the moment but the like i'm driving using bluetooth like i had to reject like about 10 voicemails today because i mean this one just this sit over the line but yes people don't realize how terrible that sound is and it just picks up all kinds of extraneous so like if you're somebody who is driving and you're not sure why you didn't hear your voicemail on tbtl it's almost always unusable this one is just on the line a little bit i want to say really quickly thank you andrew for

bringing this to light as it relates to the tbtl voicemail line and as it just relates to living in a society people are under the impression that when they turn on the you know when they let the brain of their car run their phone that it's like it sounds the same as if they're talking to their phone it doesn't i have never my car has that i have literally never used it that's not true i probably used it for four seconds until the person i was talking to was like huh i was like hold on let me switch over those things those are not they should not have rolled those out before they were actually a decent sort of substitute for just being on your phone or at least being on the speakerphone of your phone you know what i mean like those things promise more than they can deliver those in-car microphone hey you can just talk on your phone and the person

can hear you they can never hear you some i will give okay here's the deal i think that you and i are both a little bit old and a little bit obsessed with phone sound and so we have strong feelings on this um it's hard to separate separate those out i will tell you that i've had some conversations with people in the car especially if it's a quick one while they're in the car i should say and if i'm just if i just have earbuds in myself like what you know all of the technology is pretty chintzy and so we can communicate fine but i just want to specifically say and i'm not even saying this to drag people but just to say like if you if you left us a voicemail and you're kind of wondering why it hasn't been played if you did it in that manner chances are it sounded too bad for even broadcast quality, even for whatever you call what we're doing, which I guess is not technically broadcast. Having said all of that, getting that out of the way, let's go back to this listener, back to the beginning.

Hello, dum-dums.

Also, did we authorize dum-dums? I like dum-dums.

You like dum-dums.

Yeah, it's a fun and flirty way of saying dummies, I think. I might even like it more. It makes me think of a lollipop.

Hello, dum-dums. I just wanted to let you guys know that I was in line at a Burger King drive-thru and a guy got out of his car behind me and started walking up to my window and I was a little freaked out that's never a good feeling yeah as i would be you're trapped like you can't go forward or back i always think about that on the rare occasion i'm in a drive-thru line which i do a little bit more these days because genevieve likes chick-fil-a so sometimes i'll volunteer to go pick her up a sandwich for lunch or something and you find yourself in this area where you're like if something bad happens i literally can't get out of here i'm not a paranoid person i do think about that on elevators sometimes like you know what would it be like if this actually I think about it almost every time I'm in an elevator, but I don't think that I my brain turns towards catastrophe very often. But elevators, underground parking garages, as if an above ground parking garage is safer if something bad were to happen. And but then being in line, like once you get so far into a drive through area where you literally could not get out of something bad were to happen, I think about it. Then you start to see somebody get out of their car and approach your window. Oh, yeah. No. No. Thank you. Yeah, not a good feeling, yeah.

And a guy got out of his car behind me and started walking up to my window, and I was a little freaked out. And he asked me if my TBTL sticker stood for Too Bad Trump Lost. So I laughed very hard. And it's the sticker Jamie Nettles made for everybody that wanted them. So I just want to give her a little shout out. and I thought you guys would appreciate that

alright well sounds like Jamie was giving him away but that I'm unclear if this person was joking so the listener says that she laughed really but I can't tell if she was laughing in his face or if this guy was making a joke or if he was being earnest was he a Trump supporter what a weird thing what a weird thing to not understand a bumper sticker and then to get out of your car and knock and not even say what does that bumper sticker mean but take a weird guess like that is that trending is hashtag tbtl trending like a too bad trump lost i am so mystified at so many

elements of this story yeah why let's just say you saw a bumper sticker and you didn't know what the backstory was god it'd have to really be something for me to get out of my car and walk up and knock on the window of a person to clarify then yeah you wonder if it's if the person was a democrat who thought that was kind of clever and or i should say sorry i guess if it was too bad trump lost that would make our listener pro trump so i don't know if the person behind them was a conservative a trump supporter and they were like that's a cool way to um express disappointment that trump didn't win or if they were a democrat who wanted to roast our listener And I mean, it's just like it's very confusing, the whole thing.

Yeah, I'm trying to figure out if this is something that is like if too bad Trump lost is like a phrase. I mean, I'm finding it come up here in certain articles, but I can't tell. It doesn't look like it's a it's a rallying cry or a hashtag or anything. So that's a really strange leap for the person behind our listener to make.

But it's funny that we have been doing this show, TBTL, with those letters for all these years. And, of course, we were as traumatized and affected by the election of that guy as anyone, although I guess I will footnote, as straight white male, we were less under threat from him than many other people. But anyway, it made us real sad, and yet at no time have we ever thought of the fact that those letters could also stand for too bad that that guy lost.

Well, of course. I mean, it doesn't even have both of his initials. I mean, that is such a stretch. By the way, one thing that is maybe kind of interesting here is I do – you can follow hashtags on Instagram as well. So at one point before we had our – actually, you know, we do have a TBTL Instagram account now. I think I've posted a total of three things to it in Denver. I need to post more things to our – but before we had that, people would sometimes just use the hashtag TBTL. So I started following the hashtag TBTL on Instagram. and every now and then one of our listeners will use that hashtag but also so will other like organizations and people like every now and then somebody will use TBTL that means nothing that I can discern or it might be in another language there's tattoos by Tommy Lee so I often will be getting a lot of like close-ups of tattoos because there's somebody some you know studio that goes by no I don't believe so drummer from Motley Crue I think it's just some other is a tattoo artist that goes tattoo by Tommy Lee And so I get a lot of those. And then on Twitter. Now, this one's interesting. On Twitter, there is an organization that sometimes misuses TBTL because they think TBTL stands for their organization, the theater by the lake or theater by the lake. And so every now and then there will be somebody who will be like, hey, I.

really enjoyed the show thank you at tbtl for putting it on and obviously they're not talking about our show we never get that kind of feedback no and it's clear to me that they're talking about some production that the theater by the lake has done but recently theater by the lake identified themselves in a tweet as at tbtl when they're tweeting from an account that is not at we'll take it i know and we were getting so much praise like they tweeted something out and all these people were just saying how wonderful tbtl was and i did eventually jump in and just say thank you so much but i don't know that we deserve all of this praise and i think why why did you because

i wanted to keep it honest we could trick the daily into thinking their hashtag and their handle is tbtl i mean god think about all the compliments the daily hashtag

td all right um that's where we will leave this segment today but i have some more voicemails to play for you tomorrow including the story of uh what a pain it is what a pain it is to try to

throw a surprise party for someone ah good thank you follow up to my story about driving to steward anderson's black angus and having a watching two adults have a huge fight because there was a surprise party that was being planned right from my childhood so all right uh we will get into that and i'm sure much much more tomorrow i will be uh lord willing and all the flights uh occur as scheduled. I'll be in North Dakota tomorrow, so see y'all from there then. Until then, have a great Monday. Take care. Do the Mariners play today? The Mariners do. They play the Rangers.

I think it's a two-game series. We should be able to take this. Listen, the Mariners

have won 14 of their last 17. What I'd like to point out.

I don't think it's going to be a huge slump. I also expected the All-Star break to totally kill the momentum. I just think it's

hard to play what I think is the best team in the American League. Sorry, Yankees fans. They just swept the Yankees in a doubleheader the day before they came and killed us it's hard to beat the best team in baseball when your two best hitters arguably are not in the game in in J-Rod and Hanager so what are you gonna do all right we snuck that in Andrew that's good we got that in at the end we'll see you tomorrow until then have a great Monday try to stay cool go Mariners and please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all

The enormity of their flat brain, the enormity of their stupidity is just overwhelming. You have to do yourself a favor when you're out in the countryside and you see chicken. Try to look a chicken in the eye with great intensity and the intensity of stupidity that is looking back at you is just amazing. Power out.