Muse

Hi, this is Langley. I have a joke for you. Have you heard about the new movie called Constipation? You probably didn't, because it never came out. Bye.

TBTL!

All I know is this violates every canon of respectable broadcasting.

Did you hear the one about the guy who couldn't afford a personalized plate, so he went and changed his name to J3L2404?

Yeah, that's a good one.

What'd you say?

I didn't say anything.

Yeah, totally. No, I hear that.

Why are you wearing a tux?

It's after six. What am I, a farmer?

I'd like to say that I'm passionate about walking, and I'm passionate about TBTL, and I think, what a great combo. I love to walk and listen to TBTL at the same time.

Are you out of your mind? You're putting your entire future in the hands of the man who put radio on the internet.

That is something everyone cannot like together. All right. Hello. Good morning and welcome, everyone, to a Wednesday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live.

As soon as we get the kinks worked out here, I'm sure it's going to be a great, great show.

My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host.

Today was the first time in three years my blood pressure's been normal.

Coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center right here in Portland, Oregon, where the rainstorm moved through last night. It's kind of cool. We did have some petrichor happening, that smell of the sidewalk and the streets when it rains, but it's been dry for a long time. We did get a little wet this morning as well. Didn't know you like to get wet, though. But it's kind of nice, actually. The temperature is in a very pleasant range right now on this Wednesday. Had an adventurous morning here in Portland. I took the cat to get her nails trimmed.

A cat is an angel that poops in a box.

And it did not go as expected, and it will be featured as this week's Hey Dummies video for the newsletter. So if you'd like to see more just absolutely gratuitous content of Bubbles the Cat before and after an attempt to get her nails trimmed. And an even more sweaty than normal Luke Burbank after the procedure was attempted. Make sure you subscribe to the newsletter and check it out on Friday. Here you are, subscribing to episode 3746 in a collector series. Let the fun begin. Golly, I am feeling... I'm feeling good on this Wednesday morning, my friend.

I'm so happy of myself.

Because my beloved baseball team, they did something kind of historic last night in winning a baseball game, one run to no runs in the 13th inning. So for the baseball heads out here and out there, that was just a super fun thing. But even if you don't care about baseball, there were some interesting, dazzling details to what happened and also to what it told me about my sports fandom. Oh, and also, I may be becoming best friends with this kid.

The Seattle Mariners.

The actual kid who was so worked up about his Yankees losing to the Mariners has done something quite unexpected, which we'll tell you about coming up. Also, we've got a new, adorable child we're obsessing with.

everyone loves corn kid ever since i and i was told that corn is real it tasted good that is

ever since i was told corn was real it tasted good followed up by the line when i tried it with butter that's when everything changed yes we will play you the tape of corn kid and time permitting but let's be honest probably won't permit uh we can tell you how apparently we've all been charging our cell phones incorrectly i'm trying to use the phone we'll also do some emails and v-mails and we will talk to this young man the longest running cobro of the show maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships you are handsome don't worry he is andrew

and he is joining me right now good morning my friend good morning luke my apologies in advance i'm slightly distracted i'm trying to do the show with one headphone on one ear and one headphone off the other ear because I am living through something that is way too rare in these parts, which is an honest-to-goodness thunderstorm. It's not just drizzling here.

I didn't know you like to get wet, though.

And as you were doing the intro, it got heavier and heavier. Now, obviously, it rains in the Pacific Northwest, but it's always kind of a drizzle and a grayness and a general dampness that is around a lot during the winter.

But, like, this is, like, thunder is cracking in the sky. The rain is pouring down. It'll probably last all of 45 seconds, but it's exciting for me as a boy who grew up in the Midwest and kind of misses the sound of storms rolling through.

Absolutely. That's some real Imagine Dragons territory, lightning and the thunder going on for you.

Oh, is that the name of their most famous song? I don't know the names of their songs, but. I don't either.

I actually don't plan on learning the names of their songs. No, we're good. Yeah, I'm fine. Imagine Dragons and Fall Out Boy are like the official bands for NFL, like televised NFL event, the directors, to choose as a way to express to the TV audience that this is a really big deal. Songs like, this is how legends are made. It's like. Is that Imagine Dragons? or fallout boy i believe that's fallout boy i feel like imagine dragon seems like the and i

think we've said this before i might even be stealing your words here i don't know but seems like imagine dragons to me is the official music of microsoft i don't know why i say do i say macrosoft funny microsoft totally different company yeah microsoft surface commercials it sort of seems like back like i don't know five ten years ago could have completely happened yeah

I mean, listen, again, we're trying to work on not yucking yums. So if somebody's favorite band is Imagine Dragons, that's totally awesome for them. There's just a certain genre of music that has been adapted by, like you said, the TV commercial makers of America and the NFL televisors of America to really tell you that S is getting real. And the thing is, it never makes me think S is getting real. It just makes me roll my eyes. Kind of hard. That's just my take on it. But anyway, you're in a real live thunder and lightning storm right now. Now, are you safe? It's over. You're in a basement, so that's good.

I think it's done. Now it's just pitter-patter of rain again. Yeah, it just rolled through pretty quickly. But, you know, I got to be here for it, so that's important.

There is, honestly, you know, as much as if it's raining kind of in a damp, like, you know, London-esque kind of grayness in the summer, I'm like, no thank you. As that was persisting through May and June, I was like, come on. But when it's been really hot for a good stretch and then you just have a big old rainstorm, thunder, and lightning storm roll through, that is a very – that's just like a really kind of fun part of the summertime. When I lived in Miami, there was a rainstorm every afternoon at 4 p.m. Like you can set your watch by it and it was great because it was humid AF and then this like rainstorm would come through for exactly one hour-ish. Is exactly one hour-ish an oxymoron? That's a show title. Did it have thunder and lightning or just rain? Sometimes. It was heavy rain always and maybe sometimes because the humidity I believe is, you know, that's tied in often with lightning and thunder because that's a static. electrical event right is it so

the light whatever you're going to ask me don't ask me I don't know the answer to it so

I believe I think I remember reading somewhere when I was a kid that lightning is because the static charge builds up between the clouds and the ground and much like if you walk over if you're walking around on carpet in your socks and then you reach for like a metal doorknob you'll get that zap it's because that static charge is trying to jump from your body to a thing that would conduct it i.e. that doorknob so lightning is when the that static charge is basically like the clouds are you walking around on a carpet and the earth is the doorknob and

that's what that is i thought it was about hot and cold fronts bashing into each other i'm not

joking but i mean that could contribute to it but i'm i feel pretty confident which is usually a sign i'm wrong uh i feel pretty confident that it's a static electric um event but then this is the part where i'm where what's the what is the thunder sound i had heard that the thunder sound was the literally the air coming back together where the lightning has actually like evaporated

the oxygen hmm i can't speak to that i'm looking at the causes of lightning here now it's okay That's a great Billy Collins poem book, by the way. It says, when God takes a balloon and rubs it on his hair. Let's see here. I think, you know what? I'm going to go to a different website, I think.

The temperature of the air in the lightning channel may reach. I think I was right, Andrew. This is what makes a thunder sound. The temperature of the air in the lightning channel may reach as high as 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Five times higher. Hotter than the surface of the sun. Didn't we talk about this on the show a while ago, actually? Just how surprisingly hot lightning is? Like, hotter than the surface of the sun. Immediately after the flash, the air cools and contracts quickly. This rapid expansion and contraction creates the sound wave that we hear as thunder. No kidding. You were right.

I was actually...

I'm taking the rest of the show off. I mean, right-ish.

It has nothing to do with hot and cold front smashing together. It's not God moving his furniture around. I remember hearing when I was a kid. Oh, is that for the thunder? You mean, oh, that's interesting. God, wow, yeah.

Somebody said, I remember when I was a kid and like somebody was like, oh, thunder. Yeah, that's just God rearranging his furniture. And then some other kid, some, you know, I'm sure this person's probably incarcerated now, said, yeah. And then when it rains, it's because he's peeing. Yeah. And I was like, calm down, butthead.

I always thought it was, I think I'd heard bowling, like God's bowling. Oh, yeah, that's – I love how Midwest that is as an explanation.

Yeah, it is. Not that I grew up in the furniture-moving region of the country. I grew up in the Northwest where everyone's always moving their furniture around, but bowling just feels so Ohio to me. Yeah. And that's actually a better – that's actually a much better myth, if you will, or just whatever kind of joke because – think about it. Do you think when God's moving his furniture, he's just dragging it all over the floor? He's God. I feel like he's got people, right? he's got people he's got powers he's got broad-based appeal right um right but bowling

it's kind of like you're not gonna like you're doing it for fun so like you're not exactly

you're doing it right you're knocking a lot of pins down yeah you're making a lot of that sound like god i assume god always bowls a 300 no actually honestly god mediocre bowler it's in

one of the books of the bible but like i can't i think it's old testament stuff but um yeah it's weird it's one of those things where you'd expect him to be just really really good but the thing is if he's getting a strike every single time it's no fun for him and it turns out god

mediocre at best interesting but he's still knocking down enough pins yeah so that we hear the thunder like to me that is a that's a silly but at least in its own way logical explanation if that makes any sense god rearranging his furniture makes no sense because you know he just looks at a couch and then levitates it and then moves it to the other side of the cloud yeah

And what has he got? He's got an armoire, probably. Like, what kind of furniture does God have? I assume at least one. A couple of futons. A couple of futons. God, you can do better than a futon. Come on. Settle in, man. You're not going to. Come on.

You've been out of college for a while now. Could God buy a futon so big that even he couldn't move it?

Or it's the old thought experiment. Could God create a duvet cover that even he could put on a duvet?

Could God create a fitted sheet that even he couldn't fold? you know have you covered that on spotless i mean that's sort of cleaning adjacent it's in the laundry category but have you have you talked about or dealt with or do you have any useful hacks on re unfolding the fitted sheet when it comes out of the dryer so as not just have to kind of have it as a very sad unsatisfying quasi square you can i mean i don't know if

we've talked about on that show before we've definitely talked about the duvet thing but I've seen some people say I've never had a satisfying answer to this and if there is a satisfying answer I just don't have the dexterity to make it happen and so like I do my best with them and I just kind of fold it up as neatly as I can and kind of tuck those fitted corners in but I think the key and I might have gotten this from Genevieve in fact supposedly the key is you take one of the corners like the actual point of the corner right like you can poke your finger in it when it's not on the bed and then you fold that into its corresponding corner on the other side of the sheet. So you're like tucking the corners into each other. That's supposed to mitigate it a little bit.

See, that's a genius idea because what I've been doing is trying to treat it as a sort of sad square. Yeah, that's what I do. Where I'm trying to fold kind of like the, let's say the northwest and the northeast corners. I'm trying to fold them together down the middle. And it just never get a very good outcome. But you're saying take the northwest corner and the southeast corner.

and it's also that might help yeah and also but like but literally tuck them into each other don't just sort of fold it in inward and then fold it like you would a normal sheet but like fold one kind of into another as if they kind of fit like you're stacking um like you're stacking uh cones like um traffic cones you know what i mean only the cones are the corner of the sheet but the thing is and this is just me here like i think it's one of those things in life where i've just had to realize like this isn't going to be perfect like there's no perfect way of doing this like for the sheet that goes on top like you know like whatever the straight sheet whatever you would call that like that thing you can fold that that's the best thing in the laundry to fold right because you can make it totally

totally crisp and there are no corners on it there are no sleeves you know tucking it just you can make it you can fold it up and it's perfect that's my platonic ideal but not everything is going to be like that and you know what you have a linen closet or you put it under the bed wherever you keep your sheets and you just know that you got this one as good as you could get it and you fluff it you push it down you kind of fluff it down or whatever and then you just forget about it and then the next time you're making the bed you pull that thing out and it smells like laundry soap and a little bit of a linen closet and it's a good feeling and just let it be yeah i think

you're right you have to just pick your battles now as far as the duvet goes the duvet cover

yeah forget it just get a quilt i i'm done with duvets and duvet covers i love it i mean i don't

like dealing with it but here's what i here's what um and this is just sort of by happenstance But I bought a duvet cover, and it has some little strings that are in the upper corners, the northwest and northeast corners of it. And then also by chance, because is the duvet, is the comforter, like the thing that's got the feathers in it, is that a comforter or is that a duvet? I think that's the duvet, and then you're putting a duvet cover on it. cover on it okay right so the duvet that i bought has these little fabric kind of loops at its corners so that i can tie the the little ribbons that are inside the duvet cover around the ends of the duvet and i'd done some other version of this back in bellingham where i had like ironed in these snaps to try to solve for this but this was just like complete serendipity that i this duvet and duvet cover which i think were purchased separately have this system and it just works like a charm i tie it in there and it really reduces the hassle and i don't understand why this isn't just the standard um equipment for for all of these things i've heard of this i think it

is becoming standard now um because i've heard of this how did it take that long a hundred years yeah i don't know but also like growing up and and i kind of pushed for this and we have it on our bed now too it's like we have like i don't know i don't think quilt is the right word but we have some sort of a maybe bedspread is the right word like we have something that has kind of a cool design on it that colors that i like that is our comforter and it's not a duvet it's just like when i'm done with that thing i throw the whole thing in the washing machine and i take it out and we have two of them that are exactly alike so i can always like throw one in the wash and have another clean one uh in the linen closet or under the bed i don't know why i keep on giving people the choice on that one um and then and so i love that like there's no cover to be covered and i like that best although i mean i guess it's probably a matter of quality right like i guess if you get a really nice duvet you and it's down inside like you said feathers then you can't wash that and it's nice but you can wash the cover i guess it's a i guess it's a quality thing but for me the bed spread is so much easier and i'm never like laying in bed thinking like i wish this had more duck feather in it see that's funny because i actually i take a tremendous amount of personal

enjoyment out of what's mostly a saturday and sunday morning ritual for me in bubbles but it is because i don't let her sleep in the bedroom with me um because she's just too active at night and whatever and so on a saturday morning i will like open the door to the bedroom and then i have this i have a pretty huge bed considering it's generally just me sleeping in there and it's like i have a duvet and a duvet cover and it's a i think it's a pretty nice duvet cover it's just white but i'm pretty regular about washing it so it's nice and crisp and then bubbles jumps up onto that and it's this big ocean of like kind of crisp clean whiteness and then i take this her favorite toy which is one of becca's earplugs that has long since been seeded to bubbles and somebody said on twitter that earplugs are not good for a cat to play with i'm listen none of us are perfect pet owners we're just doing the best we can because she loves this earplug so much and i do this game where i throw it up in the air it lands somewhere in the middle of this ocean of bedding and then she jumps and does all these like attacks and jumps at different angles and rolls around and grabs it and runs runs out of the bedroom and then comes back and jumps up and then drops it like we play fetch that is that gives me so much joy for some reason that it's worth all the hassle associated with the duvet something about that that kind of hangout with

the cat on a Saturday morning well you know that does that does raise a difference between us as well like you will spend more time kind of lounging in bed than me now I'm not setting this up like oh you're a Mr. Lazy layabout and I'm out there getting a bunch of shit done in the world I just mean for my recreational time like I'm not drawn to sit on the bed with my laptop like I don't I never want to look at my laptop in in that position it's uncomfortable for me i'd rather just be sitting behind a a desk or a table i don't um you know i go into the bedroom to sleep and like it's just not it's not a yeah it's it's just not a huge deal for me to have like maybe more of a basic comforter as opposed to a you know a really nice place where i'm going to be spending a lot of time yeah i think that sentence i think if you were to diagram that sentence it did not it was it was not finished i think that was the beginning of one sentence and the end of another sentence and i just jammed them together but you can probably figure out what i'm talking

about right you you basically and you've been on the record on this show as saying you really like being in bed but you like the sleeping part of it i love sleeping in you hate getting out of you hate getting out of bed because you'd like to be in bed sleeping but what you're not doing is you're not in bed but awake for like substantial periods of time and that's more kind of my move um certainly i made an entire cbs commentary about it right which is which is really not that wasn't an exaggeration like i do sometimes like to just get in my bed and get comfy and then work with my laptop um but yeah like um as just back to the duvet thing there's just something about particularly when it's particularly when it's clean like just been washed when all the sheets are crisp and clean and the duvet cover is really just like starch isn't really the right word because i don't use starch but it's some kind of a thread count where it's it's a little almost i don't know it feels like it's almost a little starched and that like is one of my favorite sensory experiences it's like getting under that or or even you know like playing with the cat running around on it or just i don't know that's that's something that because i grew up with like the world's worst blanket situation because all the blankets that we had when i was growing up were like those extremely itchy like wool blankets that nobody likes oh almost like an army blanket yeah kind of but now there was a kind when i was growing up that was pretty thin now i don't want to make it sound too dickensian it wasn't like i did not have enough blanket for warmth or whatever

andy haynes cue up the golden ticket joke exactly everything was fine i was safe i had i was warm

everything was okay but my mom would buy these blankets at garage sales and rummage sales that were like very thin but very kind of dense wool like machined right not like some grandma knitted it and then it would have like a border on the top that would be like satin sateen so like the top like four and so it wasn't just kind of like you know what i mean i don't even know what that kind of blanket is called but our house was full of those kind of blankets and if you opened like the linen closet or wherever we kept that stuff there'd be like 10 of them why because people were always selling that shit at garage sales because they were like these suck my mom was always like more wool blankets for my family so or she was always picking up my mom also really did love duvets but never a duvet cover that worked so we just had like this random amalgamation of different kinds of blankets and no one had like a there was no there was no such thing as like a set of sheets in my family growing up like you went to the store and you bought like the fitted sheet that matched the top sheet that matched the pillowcases like my mom was also obsessed with flannel she loved flannel sheets another thing that was on offer at every rummage sale because people were like these kind of suck you start sweating the second these touch your body so we would just it's like totally random flannel sheets that nothing ever matched so i think there was something about me asserting my adulthood and my adult choices to be like i'm buying all these from the same place or getting some free ones from bowl and branch which i still use oh yeah me too

those are nice yeah yeah you know what i guess yeah i guess it's not totally lost on me because you're right as you were describing like the really nice experience of having um a nice laundered duvet like that i think of like staying in a nicer hotel and that is a nicer experience when you like crawl under like a really a really nice uh comforter or duvet or whatever i guess that's not totally lost on me i will say that you know right now we don't have a bunch of really nice sheets um actually we had a couple of brook linen remember we did bowl and branch and brook linen so we have like two sets oh maybe i'm thinking of brook linen i think you probably have one of each as do we but um you know as adults like genevieve and i each individually before we lived together probably collected weird or like kind of random um you know like sheet sets and then you have this pillowcase left over from from some sheet set that doesn't exist anymore whatever and when we moved it was a little maybe maybe it was a few months before we moved but we knew we might be moving i went through all of the sheets in the house and like figured out what are actual matches what are you know like i'm a full set two pillowcases the top sheet Thank you. and the fitted sheet and what how many actual sets can I make let's get rid of anything that doesn't fit in the set and let's only keep like three or four sets that we actually like because we had a pair of like uh or a set of um flannels that were really nice when I lived in New Hampshire and it was super cold but like you know that was years ago and it wasn't very nice and they weren't very nice anymore and like just knowing that and then we took all the extra stuff and then we moved with it we used it as like moving sheets or stuff to wrap up you know pictures or what have you and then i was able to get rid of them all at the end of the move and we now just have like three or four sets that all have all the components and that just mentally for me is a big deal like not looking at one pillowcase and being like oh do you have do you have a family pillowcase or can i get rid

of you where are the other star wars pillowcases that go with this like spider man i think that I mean, and then we can wrap this up because we need to go to the break and then also we need to just take a moment to really bask in the glow of last night's Mariners game. But I think for and again, this is like a total privilege thing. Like I've been lucky in my life that I've been able to like, you know, sort of acquire these things that have meant a lot to me in terms of my day to day comfort. but growing up in a complete growing up in chaos ball andrew um it's it was like something like i didn't buy my first mattress like a new mattress for myself until i was like in almost 30 when i was living in new york and uh because i had my first ex-wife and i had been sleeping on a mattress that i just got from bill radke and it was so like you could feel the springs in your back you know and stuff like that and like there are just things like that that in my you know as i've moved into older life i've just realized like if you have if you have the ability to buy like a mattress that works really well for you that is comfortable and to get some bedding that uh is you know matches and is comfortable for you like those are that's some of the best money i've ever spent you know like those kind of creature comfort because i just grew up nothing on any level of my life as a child ever matched or was coordinated nothing was part of a set again ever anywhere i'd like i never slept in a new sleeping bag till i bought a sleeping bag when i was like 31 like it was just like a sleeping bag that had like hunting dogs inside of it for some reason do you remember that era when every sleeping bag for some reason had a had imagery of dogs hunting on the inside no i don't know this at all this was also the flannel sleeping bag era i'm telling you dude my life i was swaddled in flannel growing up so we had these old musty green sleeping bags again that were picked up secondhand and the inside of them would always have like a very elaborate artwork and it would be of dogs hunting for some reason and just anyway all of that is to say that's what they're doing when they're not playing poker that's a really good point they play hard andrew

but they also work hard. I came here to do two things.

Hunt ducks and play some poker. Yeah, and bluff on the river. Wait, does that apply to duck hunting or cards? I don't even know. All right, let's do this. Let's take a quick break, and then when we come back, we still have so much to get to here on this Wednesday edition of TBTL. Stay with us. All right, let's thank some donors of the day. These daily donors, I should say, are helping keep TBTL going with their generous financial support. Folks like Bob Love in Richmond, Virginia. Owns all of the Love truck stops, by the way. Yes, exactly. And based on that, Bob, I'm just saying you could probably, you know, pick a couple extra bucks in now and then I mean appreciate your support but I mean my goodness that's a thriving enterprise that's where I go to buy all of my news radio DVDs and dream catchers and antiquated like knockoff

corded earbuds you know what they didn't have that I was shocked about I don't know if you know this Luke but when I rented a car to drive it to Denver I rented something called a Mirage which was a tiny idea of a car and it didn't it looked like a car but when you got up to it yes it turned out that it wasn't it was just an optical illusion yes and you were still lost in the desert um but uh the car did not talk to my smartphone so i would put on my mapping software on my phone and plug it in but it didn't appear uh on the little dashboard console thing uh console i should say not console um but uh anyway so i needed to do something i hadn't had to do in a long time which is find a little hole

for my phone so I could prop it up, like either suction cup to the windshield or, you know, one of those things that will snap into the air conditioner vent or whatever so you can look at your phone while you're driving and follow the map. I figured if they don't have that at a Love's truck stop, they won't have that anywhere. And I am here to tell you, Luke, they don't have them anywhere because me and a customer service representative spent 10 minutes. He was very diligent. I feel bad for the other customers. He was very diligent about finding this for me, and both of us were gobsmacked that they were not sold at love.

There is a place where you expect that to be found. Exactly. That and Best of the Judds CD, except not with their top three songs, because it's actually not.

It's their second greatest hit collection. Right.

It's basically, this company did not have the rights to most of the popular songs by the Judds, but they do have, you know, some of them. Thanks, Bob Love. We appreciate you. Also, Kathleen Halloran is in Norman, Oklahoma. Wow. Boomer Sooner, my friend. Boomer Sooner. Or later. That, of course, is the, what would you call it, the chant, the exaltation of the Oklahoma Sooners football nation.

Boomer, like just like the sound boom, like it's just a good, scary sound.

I don't know why they, I mean, Sooner, because Oklahoma, you know, they're the Sooners. But Boomer, I don't exactly know the origin of that. I just know that the one time I went to an Oklahoma game against the UW, everybody was saying Boomer Sooner. and um i've told this story many times but that was the game where the huskies who were really terrible at the time so not a lot has changed uh and oklahoma was one like a top five team in the nation the huskies scored an improbable first touchdown and i thought that this portended maybe the upset of a generation and i proceeded to yell that to everyone in the stadium in norman oklahoma

And it worked out well, and it did go down in history for the Oklahoma Sooners who went

on to score about 50 unanswered points.

Was Baker Mayfield playing, do you think? No, but before that.

Baker Mayfield was probably not even a twinkle. I mean, he literally may not have been born at this point. No, that's not true. What is he, 25? Baker Mayfield would have been probably like six years old or something when this was happening. I'm going to find out what his birthday is. Anyway, thanks, Kathleen. Also, Scott Hartley is in Oxford, Ohio. Oxford, Ohio.

Baker Mayfield was born when I was graduating high school in 1995. I mean, the events were unrelated, I believe.

So he would have been probably 11 or 12 when this happened, because I still worked for NPR at the time. So it was pre-TBTL. And TBTL started in 2008. And then, of course, Schubert Dip. So counting backwards. Sharon Sprout is in Chilliwack, British Columbia Thank you, Sharon Thanks for being from such a cool-sounding town Chilliwack

Yeah, it is Just like, hey, that's both chill and whack I mean, it is It's right there

I mean, the thing is Two things can be true, Andrew Exactly He's whack, but he's pretty chill Tim Mackey is in Tacoma, Washington Thank you, Tim, so much And then Robin Brecker is in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania One of my favorite places in the world. So thank you so much to all of our donors of the day for making the show possible. Couldn't be here without you. Hello and welcome to Top Story. All right, Angie, let's talk a little bit about this baseball game that happened last night. I did have a listener on Twitter saying, I hope that we get at least 10 minutes of conversation on this before the river.

Well, you're welcome. We're past the river, though, right? Well, no, I think – well, wait.

Isn't the river – hold on a second.

The river is the first break, right? Like if we don't get to the first break before the Stewbot would have crossed the river on his commute from St. Cloud into St. Paul. But we're already past the first break now.

So the break itself is called the river because I thought it was – so I guess that makes sense logically. For some reason, I've never thought about the break as the river. I've thought about the river that Stu was crossing as the river, and if we went too long, we were over the river. Right. That's accurate. We have a lot of birds flying by, which means we also have a wild bangle cat who consistently jumps up onto this desk and almost knocks our entire operation. And I spray her with the water, Andrew, and it only makes her stronger.

Yeah, and also now you're spraying water around radio equipment, so that's not good. No, it's terrible The whole system is It's terrible

absolutely terrible yes there's been something going on with the i don't know the magnetic energy of my apartment building which is also by the way soon to change names which never seems great that feels like the equivalent of like a sitcom adding a cute baby well were they purchased was the i don't think so i think they just think maybe part of their problems is that they don't like their current name and so they want to have a new name and so they just handed this like flyer They put this flyer under everybody's door saying, guess what? You live in a new, your apartment has a new name now. I was like, all right, cool.

I will say Bummer Town Towers was a bad name for an apartment complex.

Yeah. I mean, I think there's a certain logic to changing it. Anyway, there's something magnetic going on because last night I was noticing, and it's happening again today, birds, just like a lot of birds flying very close to my windows. And I have some pretty large windows, and that really gets Bubbles' attention. That and these wasps that are building a network of nests outside the windows. These are not windows I ever opened, so I don't really care. But she will – it's so interesting to watch her brain try to figure out how can I get to the top of an 11-foot window where I see a wasp building something. And it's like, Bish, you're not getting up there. But she will just like – she's like, can I walk on top of the television and then bounce off the corner of the wall? She spends all day plotting to try to get to these wasps. So apologies for the slightly chaotic nature of the broadcast today. But we are talking about Chaos Ball, Andrew. We are talking about last night's game where the Seattle Mariners beat the New York Yankees 1-0 in 13 innings. I will tell you, every one of my sports bets lost, and I did not care.

I did not have it going to extra innings.

I did not have every single—there was a moment I had a parlay going. I know this is probably as boring as talking about fantasy baseball so I'll keep it short I had a parlay going that said Castillo needed to get more than six strikeouts which he did and the Mariners needed to score more than two and a half runs and then also Mitch Hanegar needed to get at least two bases so a double or two singles or a home run and he had a single in the in the you know beginning of the game and there was a point where Mitch Hanegar came up or There was a possibility that Mitch Hanegar was going to come up in the bottom of the ninth inning with two runners on and have the chance to hit a three run home run, thus satisfying all of the conditions of my of my parlay. And I was just like, there's no way this is going to happen. And I was right. There was no way that it happened. Regardless, it was an incredible game. One of the things that's so interesting to me is that there's all this talk about baseball is boring because not enough runs are being scored. But that was one of the most nail biting regular season Mariners games I've ever observed in my life.

and I've been watching for a long time yeah it was amazing and I mean there's all this backstory too and I don't know how much we want to get into it but you know the the pitcher Castillo who is on the mound for us is a is a brand new Mariner we brought him over from the Reds a few weeks ago and it was a huge acquisition for us and this is this was the first time he was pitching at the at T-Mobile Park here in Seattle so the crowd was out for that I mean you have the dynamics of yankees fans you know them being the the evil empire of baseball of course there's yankees fans all over the country so when you go to see a yankees mariners game at t-mobile park you're going to have almost a home a homestand effect for the yankees this is what i angrily tweeted

to uh our text chain uh on during the first game i was looking i was watching the game on tv and i was doing a scan of the crowd and i was doing a scan of the people in yankees gear and based on age and other things i find it extremely unlikely that you have 10 000 new york expats who've relocated to seattle even though a lot of them look to be about 22 years oh yeah no and are like they're just like rooting they grew up in the bronx and now they're just they just want to go root on their team it's just like there's a certain kind of person who's just like hey you know who i want to root for the team that hasn't had a losing season in 30 years and i say that again andrew the last time the yankees had a losing season was 1992 1992 but they always have

but there are they but i come by no no i'm not a front runner i come by it naturally my step brother's uncle yeah exactly like was a yankees fan like it's just like it's like such a weird

It's such a weird thing because it's the kind of team that's so iconic that it just draws people who are, like, not even, like, fans of a band, but they're fans of music.

I just love music. It's like Rob Lowe wearing the NFL hat. Thank you. What game was that? I can't remember what game it was. I've got that saved.

I'm so ready to deploy that to our text chain come football.

season there is a picture of the actor rob lowe at a football game the hat he's wearing is not for a team it literally says nfl it's just might as well say football i kind of like it though like i just enjoy the sports right anyway uh it was such a it was such a riveting game i'm sorry i

actually interrupted what you were no that's okay i mean i could go on forever and i'll just start talking faster and less coherently but i mean there's just a lot of backstory here these two pitchers facing each other two of the best pitchers in baseball the fact that we are now in this in this playoff run things are getting really really tight in the wild card like we I don't know if you're following that I'm sure you were but you know we were holding the second wild card slot for quite uh quite some time now but now like there are a lot of teams we're just like I think half a game ahead of maybe Cleveland or something no actually Minnesota now but anyway it doesn't matter I told you I was gonna ramble but there's just like a lot going on here and this idea that it was kind of like it's starting to feel like kind of like playoff baseball sort of or you know late season baseball and the mariners are still in it and we have this acquisition and it's exciting and i will say and this will be the last thing i i say before i tell you my prediction for tonight's game by the way um which is something i want to do um it uh even though you do get a lot of yankees fans at a game like this from I was watching this uh on my computer and it seemed like you know the Mariners fans were into it they did not let the Yankees take over they held their own they held their own happen and kept their seats until the end of a 13 inning four hour game with only one run that ended the game and like the Mariners fans stayed there they did not try to beat traffic And I got to give him credit for that. Absolutely.

I mean, this game featured one of the most incredible defensive plays that I've ever seen in my life. And it was when our pitcher, Matt Brash. Oh, yes. And the thing, too, I don't want to get too in the weeds on this, but for people that don't follow baseball super closely. so it used to be the case that when the the game went to extra innings when it was tied at the end of nine innings and you start playing extra innings it was not impossible to have an 18 20 inning game because like the hitters are getting tired and like the you know just somehow it's just like you settle into this rhythm i'm i remember being a kid and watching 17 inning games and by the way loving it like just thinking it was or more to the likelihood i was probably listening on the radio but i love a super long baseball game personally but now they've done this thing where when you start to get into extra innings they just put they start the inning with somebody on second base i still hate it really forces the issue it's so it's so you pretty much almost you have a fairly decent chance of scoring immediately and this is a way of just sort of like i don't know the um you know video game terminology andrew but this is just like setting it on like easy mode or something like it's just trying to make it so we don't have 17 inning games anymore but what was incredible was that neither team was able to score even with this kind of thing with the person starting at second and for three innings in a row the mariners somehow got that person at second base out including this play where a guy hit a screaming ground ball which our pitcher matt brash just reached his arm behind his back without any sense of where the ball was like it was a weird reflex it was the kind of thing you do reflexively but with no real chance of it working out and he perfectly snares this ground ball that he cannot even see where it is and then turns around and gets the guy in a pickle uh who was coming from second that guy's out then the other dude for some reason decides to try to get cute and the other yankee he gets thrown out second that was really one of the most unbelievable plays i think i've witnessed in terms of defense since i've been watching baseball there were three pickles in that game two that happened

in the same play i love pickles you know it's my heritage i love a pickle i love a pickle too john and why don't i have my stacy from bismarck pickle tape but i need it i think it's i think it's uh sasha was her name um but uh yeah no that was an incredible game now here's the deal here's what i I've been thinking about this, and I swear I was thinking about this before I saw on the show sheet today that you wanted to just give in to our demons and talk about last night's game.

We had a listener request, Andrew. This is super serving. We had to do it.

Exactly. But here's the deal, and here is Andrew's picks to click, okay? So I told you a couple of days ago when the Yankees were coming to town, even though we had taken the last series from them, I felt like, you know, that was awesome, but kind of a fluke. And I said, I just have a bad feeling that the Yankees are going to come here and either sweep us.

or or take the series but i had sort of a a sweep feeling like they're going to embarrass us at home and and i said you know i'm not trying to be negative but i just have this gut feeling that that's going to happen when they come here that was before the first game in the first game they did embarrass us offensively they got nine runs and that was a mess and ended up being nine to four but like our runs were kind of a couple of them were kind of garbage timing or at least one of them was anyway so they did kind of embarrass us on that first night and i said to you yesterday Luke after that first embarrassing game I said you know what I think it's good that the Mariners got smoked in the first game I no longer think this is going to be a sweep I think we got the embarrassment out of the way in the first game all of this is science by the way it's all backed up by science I was in my laboratory working on these hot takes so I said I no longer think we're going to get swept I think it's actually good that we got really spanked in the first game watch this space so then yesterday i don't think anybody could have predicted the the what we saw yesterday even with these two amazing pitchers i don't think anybody could have predicted you know 13 innings of baseball with no runs um here is my prediction for today's game which begins shortly by the way which begins within the hour and um i'm going to go into great detail of how i think this game is going to go and then we're going to check in tomorrow to see how right or wrong I was okay are you ready for this Andrew's picks to click did you get the promo package uh no we'll just do this dry okay we are we the Mariners are going to lose the lead early we're gonna lose the lead early um by like the leader like we're gonna have the lead and then lose it I'm sorry not lose the lead I should have said that we're gonna fall behind early in the first couple of innings I see like I'm thinking sort of like the second inning who's

pitching the Yankees George Brett who's the pitchers in this game who's who's the pitcher

in this game in fact i don't know it wouldn't be it might be kirby you why don't you look that up i'm thinking it could be oh god i just think it's bold that you're making your picks to click and you haven't even looked at who the it's all it's all from it's all from the gut here's what's going to happen here's what's going to happen we're going to um we're going to give up the lead kind of early in the game probably in the second you mean we're going to fall behind we're going to fall behind it's going to be like it's going to be like let me just start over okay okay it's going to be about three to nothing in the second inning okay okay and then the mariners are going to tighten that up a little bit in like the fourth or fifth inning and it's going to be like three to two and we're going to have some hope but then the yankees are going to expand their lead again in like the sixth inning and it's going to look less hopeful for us it's going to be like five to one maybe five to two but then in the seventh inning i refuse to click this but then in the seventh inning the mariners are going to come back through some stupid bullshit it's going to be like it's going to be by them by the yankees it's going to be well all all told it's going to be weird stupid bullshit it's going to be an error by the yankees it's going to be a wild pitch and then one of our like bottom of the order players is going to do something like that they shouldn't do but it will be successful like get some dumb blooper that's a double or something and then we're going to end up taking the lead in the eighth inning and holding it and winning the game that is my ultimately you think the mariners will win but let me try to recap this yes for

people that may have lost the thread how could you have lost the thread on that i could not have made you're gonna go by the way it's robby ray against nester right of course which you'd think Robbie Ray, of course, won the Cy Young last year. That's the best award you can win as a pitcher in Major League Baseball. He has not pitched like it. And also is anti-vax, which has really not done him any reputational help as far as I'm concerned. But you'd think Robbie Ray would have a shot, although he does have a 3.96 ERA, meaning he's giving up almost four runs every time he pitches, which is not great. Anyway, so I just want to make sure I'm understanding. The Mariners are going to fall behind early. But then they are going to close the gap a bit, but then they're going to fall even further behind. But then through some fluky luck, through some miscues by the Yankees and possibly at the hands of a Mariner, we don't expect it like a, you know, a Luis Terenz or.

Yeah, who, of course, is the hero last night or even a even something, maybe even maybe even Frazier steps up or something, something unlikely.

So basically, like, through some flukes and an unlikely hero for the Mariners, the Mariners will actually pull ahead late in the game and then will manage to hold on to that lead, ultimately leading to a Mariners victory. Yes, and which we will probably win by one run. Okay. I sure hope you're right. I mean, again, you'd think when you have a defending Cy Young pitch, Cy Young winner pitching you would think that you have a pretty good shot but Robbie Ray has been very mediocre this season I would actually disagree with that I would say he's either been

really good or really bad which then well leads you to be mediocre across the season but like he's got he either has I feel like in maybe not every single one but I feel like he either has really good games with like one bad inning but really but mostly really good games or just total collapses like we saw with like two out of his three last starts he's eight and eight so that

would actually argue your point so eight times he's been good enough to win but eight times he's been crappy enough to lose so that's kind of to your point this is the this is the the takeaway for me from last night's game i'm getting old andrew because as the game sort of grew longer and longer and i just said i love nothing more than a long baseball game but i started to become more and more anxious that the mariners were going to lose and i would have invested four hours of my life into something that was ultimately going to leave me bitterly disappointed and so i started to bargain and do some sorts of like tactics to try to lower my emotional stake in the game so after the like i don't know probably 11th because it's it's you know most of these games now just get decided in the 10th if you are the team like let's say that you're the home team like the mariners were and you deny the yankees in the top of the 10th you can almost pencil in the w at that point because all you do is all you do is have somebody bunt the guy over to third then you hit a fly ball and he scores it's like game over so when that kept not happening at some point i was like i just need to go to bed and wake up tomorrow it was like the 2020 election i was like i don't like where this is trending i need to just go to bed and wake up tomorrow and hope that they said biden has taken the lead in michigan like so i did i just like turned off the tv which I have never in my life done like the game was undecided. And at about 11 or whatever it was, I just turned the game off. I'm like, I can't handle this anymore because I know what's going to happen. Aaron Judge is going to hit a bomb on us and I'm going to just be like, so I'm just going to be bereft. So I go in the bathroom, I'm brushing my teeth, I'm flossing, I'm getting all ready for bed. Then I get in bed. And speaking of laptops in bed, it occurs to me, Andrew, I could watch it on my laptop in my bed because you know i have xfinity so it's like as long as i'm on my home wi-fi it's like i can do anything on my laptop that's happening on the tv and so eventually i did re-engage with the game and uh and at just the right time to see that louise terrens hit but i was like it's just weird to get to the age where i was like i can't i was like if i have to stay up till midnight to see how this ends and then they don't like either way midnight is too late for me to be awake anymore at my advanced age but if it's stay up till midnight and they lose i will be so bummed that this will have like i i really had to sort of like just make peace with them not winning and then go to bed like an old man although i did again re-engage from that i mean we find ways

to protect ourselves right like i mean this is something that you and i talk about you know with when i was rooting for the browns and they just would always find new ways to disappoint and surprising ways to disappoint and so I would always gear up and you know I'd have a you know usually a pretty pessimistic or maybe accurately pessimistic attitude towards a lot of Browns games because it's a way of protecting yourself and being prepared for the inevitable or being prepared for the worst maybe and so yesterday like as I'm watching this game like I can't tell you that I was thinking like sometimes I just get these weird notions like I have for today's game But like we weren't like halfway through this game and I had a feeling of how it was going to end. But I was prepared for the Mariners to lose and I was prepared for it to be pretty disappointing. But like I don't think I could have turned I don't think I could have turned it off, especially last night's game. It was just like it was adrenalizing like I was. Well, what I mean, not that you care, but like what I was doing was so I set up a little laptop on a chair near the dartboard, not in the way of the dart. So even if I did have a wild dart pitch, it wouldn't go into the laptop. But I had my little laptop out in my little dart gallery. And Veeves and I played some darts. I was practicing darts by myself. Been playing a lot of darts lately. Want to get good. Then I want to pretend I'm bad. Then I want to play some bets. And then I want to get rich. Love it. Yeah. But anyway. He's banned from the Eagles. He's been hustling people at darts again. I'm going to show up with like a pool cue case. I'm going to open it up. And there's going to be a bunch of darts in there. But, you know, like I get very, I get very kinetic sort of. And it's also one of the reasons I can't watch like TV and movies now too. I must have some sort of ADHD situation going on. Like I can't just sit there and watch. I got to be doing something, which is probably why I listen to a lot of games on the radio because I'm puttering around, I'm cooking, I'm doing this. But yesterday I was like playing darts and taking out my energy on that. And then at one point, you know. As this thing stretches into, like, you know, the third hour or the fourth hour, maybe I should say, like, finally, I'm like, OK, I got to sit down. I'm getting kind of tired, but I did not want to move the laptop. In fact, Genevieve came down and she's like, can I watch with you? I'm like, yeah, but you got to pull up a chair, too. So I have the laptop just sitting on one chair. But then I've pulled my desk chairs out from my office to sit on in this weird area of the house that is not a place that you would set up to watch a baseball game. Sure. But Genevieve even said, can you move the can you move the laptop? And I said, no, there's like there's there's cosmic forces working here. I can't remember exactly what I said, but she's like, can you flip it around? I'm like, I'm sorry. No. Like, can you go grab a chair? I'm almost kind of just remembering that interaction now. And Genevieve didn't even question it. God, I love her. She just grabbed the chair and sat down next to me and watched as we kind of like hunched over my laptop at this awkward angle for the last probably two innings or something. But, yeah, like, I don't think I could have disengaged at that point.

I had to, I guess, if I have a point, is that I don't think I could have just turned it off. If we were losing by just, you know, huge numbers, I might just finally just turn it off. But in this case, like, there was just no way. My blood was up.

Well, so this, to me, was maybe the biggest development. Remember the other day on the show we played this audio of an angry Yankees fan after the Mariners beat the Yankees in New York, to everyone's surprise. And this guy, this kid, the Seattle Mariners, the Seattle. Hold on. This is an abbreviated clip. Let me try to find the original one. This is a kid, by the way, named Nicky Scarlatta, I've now learned, who, you know, went viral, as it were, complaining about. Let me see. Oh, boy. He's really got a lot. There's the problem is now the only video that I can find of him complaining about the Yankees is the edited version where he's just saying Seattle Mariners over and over again. But anyway, this kid was very upset about the Mariners beating the Yankees. And we played the tape on the show last week because it was very – it was fun. And also kind of there was a certain amount of – would you say schadenfreude kind of at play? Like just seeing a very brash Yankees fan who's probably – again, in this kid's lifetime, he's probably – I told you the Yankees haven't had a losing season in 30 years. In this kid's lifetime, he's probably never seen the Yankees have a losing season. And they lose one game, and he's like super irate. Well, last night I screen capped him from his video where he's written on the screen. Are you kidding me? And I just retweeted it with the hashtag Mariners. And then I noticed that somebody had named Nikki Scarlatta had retweeted it. The kid from the video had retweeted it, which then led me down this rabbit hole. Everyone is trying to orchestrate a situation wherein he comes and throws the first pitch at a Mariners game, which is he's super into that idea. And all he's doing now is retweeting people from Seattle, putting up memes of him. He's retweeting things about the Sonics. Like, it's all positive. Like, he has totally, like, you know in wrestling they call it a heel turn? When somebody who's supposed to be good then becomes bad? He's done a reverse heel turn. He is totally in on the joke and is apparently loving, well, loving the attention, but also has now become somehow very pro-Seattle sports and pro-Mariners.

I think he's just pro people talking about him. That doesn't seem super respectable. I mean, that's fine. I don't have a problem with it. But like, yeah, he went viral. And so he's trying to milk it for all it's worth. And it doesn't really matter. He's like, oh, the Mariners people like me now because I went viral. Good. I'll be I'll do this. I'll milk this. It seems kind of sad to me.

Well, you're just mad because you're not getting the Nikki Scarlatta retweets.

I mean, it's obvious what's going on here. Yeah.

No, I mean, it doesn't seem that it doesn't seem that laudable to me. I have a different perspective. I used to live in New York. I've been to a handful of games at Yankee Stadium, particularly when the Mariners were in town. I know New York sports fans. And the typical New York sports fan is so dug in on a lot of things. One, that New York is the greatest place in America, and the world, rather. And not everybody can make it there. And that New York sports teams are the greatest ever, except for when they're mad at them. But even then, they're still better than your team. I could have totally seen this kid going in a completely different direction where he's just like digging in and trying to troll Mariners fans or just recording clapback videos. That's the New York sports fan that I knew from my time there and that I see when they come to the games in Seattle. Like it's rare that somebody let's imagine this kid is at the is at T-Mobile and he's yelling for the Yankees. And then you the Mariners win, Andrew, and you turn around and you like say, you know, some kind of a funny comment. for his response to be like give you five and be like yeah man you got me like

That would be so unusual. You expect from that guy would just be to like flip you off or do some kind of just double down on their kind of Yankees. So I guess to me, even if you're right, even if it's just thirst, the idea that he is not just doubling down on being a kind of aggressive Yankees fan, but is like kind of now in on the joke and rolling with it and stuff. That to me seems like a win.

Yeah, I mean, listen, I'm not mad at this kid. I'm not mad at the developments of this all told. I just don't find it, I guess, as shocking that somebody is getting is getting a lot of attention online and therefore is leaning into the attention that they're getting online. But you're right. I mean, there are people who I follow who are just like, you know, who's that? Well, I don't know his name. I don't need to give him more attention anyway. But there's some like super angry Astros fan who is also hosts a radio show down there. And he's just always trolling.

And, you know, I don't even know why you subject your eyeballs to that. Pardon me? like as in you said you follow them i'm surprised no no i don't i don't i don't follow them there i

mean they they're they're often popping up because i follow a million mariners people and they're right and everybody's kind of trolling back and forth at this point but like you know so you're right like that's less pleasant i suppose and yeah if this kid is is kind of fun and you know your example of being like oh you got me yeah that that's good i'm just excited because to me

and it just was it was happenstance but this one screen cap that i that i like kind of took uh or screen shot probably not screen cap well what do you call that these days i call them i use those interchangeably okay good i um this one picture that i took of his video now is for me going to be totemic in a way like it is going to represent chaos ball and him just being kind of he's and it's caught he's sort of mid word so he's kind of like almost derping a little bit and he's got like are you kidding me spelled with just a you that is what i'm going to put up every time for the rest of the season the mariners do some kind of chaos ball shit that works out like i feel like i have a visual of a shorthand sort of thing i can just throw up on the internet or send to you all that just means like it's working somehow like i feel like i now have another tool in my toolbox

yeah and i don't think you're alone on that like i saw that that's one of the reasons i think you're finding it hard to find the full original audio of that kid too is because after yesterday's win everybody like the mariners just took over that video and now it's like it is now the rallying cry of mariners fans is this is this diswrought a yankee fan yes exactly i love it 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. We did not get to corn kid or phone charging, but that's fine. We can talk about that stuff tomorrow on the program. In the meantime, any emails or emails jumping out at you?

Yes. I have a little bit of a stem winder here from listener Rob about his experience recently at not the Home Depot, but Lowe's.

Hey, guys. This is Rob from Denver. I'm calling with a story about a trip to Lowe's this week. Actually, I just finished it a few minutes ago. So the deal is I bought a vanity top from Lowe's to replace a vanity in a bathroom. And I brought it home. I unpacked it from the box. I had it all ready to set on top. And I discovered that the vanity top sink didn't fit my vanity. It was a red measurement, but the sink was screwing everything up. so I needed to take it back. In the process of doing this, my lovely 11, wonderful woman, accidentally dropped the backsplash of the vanity top. So it put a little chip in the backsplash. We're talking less than half a dime. And she felt so terrible, she superglued it back onto the backsplash. uh and and i found out about all this after i had discovered i needed to take the vanity top back so uh when it comes to retail and returning things and lying and such i'm more of an andrew

meaning a hero i want to back up here for a quick second and just say um so this is an interesting dynamic if i'm understanding this correctly his wife dropped like part of this created a small little nick in it, super glued it back together, but didn't tell him. It sounds like maybe she decided to come clean about this once he said, hey, I got to return this thing to the store. Is that how you're picking this up as well?

I think she has what we call Luke energy or cool guy energy, which she knows we don't have to get into everything. Sometimes we can just let shit lie. Sometimes we break things, then we glue them back together, and we just figure it's going to be fine. And it sounds very small, and I don't know if I'm right about this or not,

But for some reason, I'm picturing this being one of those kind of like.

marbled look and so if you have a tiny little chip on something like that and then you and then you glue it back in it would probably be imperceptible so i'm like going i'm going with that as a visual for this you know as opposed to if it was just like plain like black slate black or something and if you a chip came out and you glued it back in it would be very obvious i'm guessing this has some sort of some sort of textured look so that you couldn't even see this thing so i will continue with rob's story here uh so i i was wringing my hands for like

a week about this thing like rehearsing my lie about not knowing about the backsplash chip which you know was again the size of like maybe half a dime tell him your voicemail was full yeah and it was super glued back on so barely noticeable and so i'm rehearsing this live for about a week And I'm like, dreading taking this thing back to Lowe's. And so I'm on the drive over. I'm sweating it. I'm doing the thing, you know, that Andrew talked about where they call the police and, you know, they come, they arrest me and take me away for trying to return a vanity top with a backslash that has a chip less than the size of half a dime.

real county of monte cristo vibes like when they take you to an eye a prison island where you have to then uh stitch yourself into the funereal uh robes of another dead guy so they throw you in

the ocean i did not realize that that is something that i have expressed before this idea of being thrown in the clink for um for something like this although yeah it matches my energy i suppose um but uh yeah i don't uh remember what i was gonna say so i'll give it back to uh i'll give

it back to rob here so i load it onto a flatbed cart and i roll it up to customer service the return counter and uh yeah you i'll just let you guys guess what happened you can pause and guess

right now so rob is telling us to pause and guess what happened now i've heard this voicemail so i

won't guess what do you think his interaction was like my guess was that they literally didn't even open whatever large cardboard box the vanity came in and uh it was a a complete non-issue that's gonna be my guess although it would be a more interesting story if rob is calling us from prison did you cut off the part where it said you are receiving a collect call from uh where was rob again denver from colorado state prison yes okay rob for all the marbles was luke wright

Okay, so what happened is the customer service agent looked at me and said, Return? And I said, Yes. And she said, Anything wrong with it? And I said, No. And I had a much more elaborate lie planned out. Anyway, she returned it, and my money was promptly returned to my bank account. I had a much more elaborate lie. I don't know what I thought, that the customer service agent was going to pull the vanity top out and do a 20-point inspection when I returned it, I guess, was what I thought. I don't know. Absolutely ridiculous future tripping that I did there. Anyway, all is well. Also, customer service return people at large, giant retailers like Home Depot and Lowe's, those customer service and return people, there's a special place in heaven for them. because they deal with some shite uh anyway that's all power out um hard agree on all of that by the

way rob i agree on most of it and now here's where i'm going to be a little bit of a bummer because i've been thinking about this i will say that assuming this goes back on the shelf like i understand that feeling of like oh it's lowe's or home depot they're a huge corporation they can they can handle this they can they can um this chip is not gonna fell the company but i will say they're probably gonna put that back on the shelf right and then somebody at some point is going to install a vanity and possibly even after it's installed realize that oh there's a chip out of this that somebody's super glued in and i gotta say i kind of feel bad for that person uh that's

an interesting point um i hadn't thought of that i guess maybe the best thing to do there for rob would be to uh say which would just be the lie further but lie differently which is part of my new ted talk lie further lie differently lie successfully the luke burbank approach which is you could say yeah there was a chip out of it or this looks kind of funny so you're flagging it but you're not taking responsibility for it. And so then it's... But here's my guess, though. As soon as that box is open, that thing is not going back on the shelf as is. It goes... somewhere else and this is we were talking about this the other day like i don't understand the business model i took back this like attachment for a riding lawnmower that catches the grass and every single piece was in there but it was not the way it was when i got it the way it was all specially packed and with the this that and the other and you know like uh that thing was gonna have to go to some processing facility somewhere and get kind of repackaged double checked and then sent back out like i feel like they have a system for this so i my guess is that this thing will not go directly back onto the floor or onto the shelf because or it might even end up in a scratch and dent section which would then be i think everybody wins yeah that would

yeah if somebody i was thinking about that too like if somebody goes through this and it's kind of like okay you know it's like down the line so it's rob's not going to be held accountable for it but somebody's like oh you know what this has a little what was it about half the size of a dime But I'd like to see a photo of this, Rob, because also if you super glued it back in, is it even noticeable? It's probably not, but it could be one of those things.

And then you glued the chip in. Doesn't that mean it's basically fine?

I mean, that's the argument, certainly, that Rob is making. I mean, I could certainly see, though, a scenario where, you know, like a bathroom sink, you've had it. It could even be there. It could be installed for a few years or months or whatever. And all of a sudden you kind of like, I don't know, you're brushing your teeth one day and you kind of look down and you're like, huh, what's that? That smudge. And then you you try to clean it with your thumb and you're like, wait a second, this is a little uneven here. You can sort of feel the thing. You're like, oh, and then it just lives in your head as the new owner forever. I'm probably not. I'm not saying all of this to make Rob feel bad. Everything is going to be fine.

It's working whether you're trying to or not.

You don't know Rob's feelings. Rob's already been on this journey probably anyway. He's already probably losing sleep over this. But anyway, I hope you're right that somebody sort of flags it that it doesn't come back to Rob and it won't at this point. There's no way it would. But somebody is like, oh, you know what? There's a small defect in this. So now somebody can get it for cheap. Because if you if you bought it, it's the type of thing where if you bought it, knowing that that was a concession you were making, it wouldn't be a big deal. But it might be a big deal if you already have it installed. And then you realize there's a blemish. Does that hold up your thing? Absolutely.

That's what I'm saying. like i think anyone would be happy to pay a discounted rate i'm sure that it's so minimal so as to be almost not noticeable but if you could get that if that was out like you're looking for vanity and that's out on the kind of like as is section or the scratch and dent and then you get you get it for 50 bucks cheaper then you but you know that there's this little imperfection then you're just like score yeah you know like it's so funny how it's just about managing your expectations. I wanted to say one quick thing about Rob said he was future tripping, I think, and feeling anxious. I read something the other day that has really been kind of living in my head about anxiety and about when you start to spiral and get really worried about a thing that might happen. Somebody once said, and I'm paraphrasing here, but if the thing that you're worried about happens the version of yourself that is able to deal with it to deal with that situation you're worried about if it does go the way you're thinking the version of yourself who's capable of dealing with that will be born into existence at that moment in other words you'll deal with it you'll deal with it and like part of like what when i feel anxious it's because well i don't know what they're going to say when i bring this thing back or i don't know what just you're you're very i find myself to be very sometimes anxious about not knowing what's going to happen or how i'm going to handle the thing if it goes in the worst possible case or worst possible direction or scenario but if i just stop and go you know what the version of me who works that out or deals with it is going to be born into existence at that moment then i'm like i don't have to worry about it right now that version of luke will figure it out when it if it does in fact go that badly the thing that's making me nervous and so i don't know there's something about this idea of like the version of me who can deal with it spontaneously emerging when if and when necessary so that this version of me and right now doesn't have to spend so much mental and emotional energy worrying about it that's been kind of liberating for me for the last couple of weeks you know that may wear off but i've been because i'm dealing with a lot of stuff with this house that i'm remodeling and disputes with my contractor and permitting and people from the city and i have to have a trench dug it's like a whole thing and each one of those interactions my neighbor calling me telling me i have tansy growing in my yard which is a illegal ragweed you know all this stuff and all of it makes me feel anxious because i feel like what's going to happen if like my neighbor calls the county on me or what's going to happen if you know they can't dig a trench because it's too whatever there's not enough room for them to bring in the heavy equipment like every single thing represents anxiety for me or it's chance to feel anxious but i'm just trying to tell myself okay luke will figure that out if he has to

figure it out when when the time is right i wonder if i wonder if it's almost like some anxiety is almost like a phobia because i think about like what are what are my anxiety as well they're too many to list but like you know if you think about my social anxiety which i think it's getting more acute like the idea of going out like there's nothing cute about it andrew as one of your friends um i uh you know like oh well if we're going to this nice restaurant or if we're going to this thing where i i don't know all the people or i know too many of the people i i don't know like it doesn't make sense like what is it that is giving me the anxiety about any of this and and you're right like well when i'm in the moment i'll just you know maybe either i mean nothing really bad has happened to me in a social situation in a long time you know like what am i worried about and it's almost like well it's almost like my fear of heights like if i'm standing somewhere and uh if i'm on the top of the space needle like in the not the top of it but you know in the in the uh viewing area as a tourist in the space needle and i my heart is racing and i'm just absolutely petrified to be up there which i was like by the time by the time we got down from the space needle when i took my family up there years and years ago um i was i really needed to get down from there um and it's like well nothing bad was going to happen i wasn't out in the wind i was always in an enclosure like the space needle isn't going to tip over and suddenly crash to the ground but like there was no rationale for my fear of heights when i'm up there and in a certain way there's no rationale for my fear of or for my anxiety of social situations um but it's just like yeah nothing bad is really going to happen but it's but i don't have to explain it it's just

it's just anxiety you know but it may be if you can tell you remind yourself that you have dealt with things before and that you will be capable of dealing with it like let's just say that the food is not something you would eat you'll figure it out like have faith in your future self to figure it out and again something about this idea of that person being spontaneously born as if they just come somehow fully formed and able to actually deal with it is also almost like this is some weird like superhero person that that exists in the future who's going to show up and be like okay well i'm just going to say oh i don't eat uh i thanks but i'm actually you know i don't eat stuff with melted cheese on or whatever it is you know what i mean like for me somehow this idea that this future version of me is going to be capable is making me much less nervous about the what could possibly happen and you know for whatever that's worth just that i would throw that out to the listeners um i'm still scared shitless about this mariners game though i And I am also suing you, by the way. Get in line, buddy. I'm representing myself in all of these various legal entanglements, too. I assume that I'll spontaneously emerge as a lawyer.

Yeah, I think that's how it works.

I think that's how all the Danis became lawyers in our audience. That's right. All right. That's going to do it for today's program. Thank you so much for listening, everyone. we will be back here tomorrow I think that's how this works with more imaginary radio for you so please do join us for that until then have a great Wednesday take care of yourselves stay safe go Mariners and please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all i'm a lawyer why don't are you get in my in my way i'm a lawyer power out