Muse

Whoa, is this the new copier? It sure is, Dennis. They installed it this morning. Can't believe corporate actually listened to our request. Yep, I guess Christmas came early this year. This thing rules. It collates, staples pages, no more stapling by hand.

Yeah, Santa should have wrapped it. What? The printer. Santa should have wrapped it when he gave it early. Oh. This is going to make our lives so much easier. I know, this is so much nicer than the old copier. Yeah, I know. And Santa and all his elves must have worked so hard on it, and then they gave it to us early?

It's a very nice printer, Tracy. Just make sure no one copies their rear end, eh?

Oh, that naughty old elf must be one mean bastard to give us this so early.

What?

Did I stutter, Megan? Santa Claus.

Okay, it looks like the printer's gotten everyone a little too excited.

Of course it did. Everyone just go back to work.

TBTL!

That's it! The radio! I'll go on the most popular program of the day. I assume that's still Don McNeil and his breakfast club?

Can I just say I feel like I'm on MTV right now?

They have been posting their stuff out on the internet, and apparently they've been met with virtually nothing but ridicule.

This is about respect. This is about personal space. This is about the violation. Hey, skip to the end.

Got it. Here's the long and short of it. Someone has been touching my karaoke machine. I stand corrected. This is compelling radio.

All right. Hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Tuesday edition of TBTL, the show. It just might be too beautiful to live. Hey, where's the freaking gabagoo? My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. Ziggle Zagat. Let's get back at it. Coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center right here in Portland, Oregon, where, like much of the West, it is going to be spicy today. It's going to be very hot. It's going to be very uncomfortable for everybody. It is going to be in 113, I believe, in parts of California. 90s here in Portland. So everybody, pretty, try to stay cool out there. Try to stay cool out there. You know, we were on tape yesterday. I mean, we were even more on tape than normally yesterday. So it's taking me a minute here on this Tuesday to get back in the flow of what co-hosting a professional podcast should sound like. I think probably by the end of the week, maybe I'll have gotten there. I got out early for my jog today to try to get in front of the warm temperatures. And I'll tell you, on Saturday, I was out for a run and I got I was bitten by some mystery bug. And this is four days. I still have a huge welt, and my leg is itching like crazy.

You know, it's not so much the burning, but the itching. Oh, my God, it's driving me crazy.

I am, uh, I'm actually afraid to Google what this actually means. Because I don't know if I'm going to like the answer. It's going to tell me that I'm, you know, I only have weeks left or something. But anyway, it's very uncomfortable. I'm going to focus, though, on getting through episode 3,776, May Collector Series, which already feels like it's off to a pretty hot start. Let the fun begin. Interesting piece in Slate Magazine. My goodness gracious. The entire, just as I said, hot start. You know, I'm standing at a desk as I do this show, and it's one of those kind of fancy ones that has like a motorized up and down. And I must have just bumped something Because as I was talking to you all The entire operation Including the microphone Just started dropping precipitously And I had to basically limbo my way down With the equipment To keep talking to you Anyway, interesting piece In Slate Magazine About the latest on Wordle

The word that comes to mind is ludicrous

The headline, did the New York Times Kill Wordle by buying it So we will look at that. Also had a great Labor Day weekend, a fun kind of camp, camping hangout in Salem, Oregon with Becca's family, including some professionally operated karaoke that had me realizing that I'm singing.

I'm in a store and I'm singing when I have had a few and I'm singing my little heart out.

it is not sounding to the outside world the way it's feeling to the inside world of my brain and heart. So let me talk about that as well. This guy, though, this guy is always pitch perfect.

Your voice is like a combination of Fergie and Jesus.

He is the longest running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions.

the tall ships he is andrew walsh and he's joining me right now good morning my friend good morning luke i have some well i was gonna say observational humor oh you know what the humor part might be that might be subjective let's just start it also it raises the bar too high here i

have been wondering for longer than i can even remember what the deal is with airline food yeah

i know why don't they make the airline food the black box yeah right i think that's how that joke Sure. No, but I did have an observation today as I was listening to public radio, which, of course, my life has been intertwined with public radio for decades now, although I will admit in the past year or so, I listened to it much less. I would say if you were to go into too much detail, but if you were to draw a chart of my public radio listening, there would be some peaks and valleys. And I will say I have been in a bit of a public radio valley over the past year or so, as I've mostly just kept my radios around the house. Yes, multiple radios around the house on the AM Sports Station. Today, I'm listening to public radio, and I hear a little forward promo by, you know, the local host, who's a dear, sweet man who I like and I will not name here. But I was excited to know and hear that public radio's love of the intersection is alive and well. I heard a promo for, like, it was, I think, on Here and Now, and the promo was coming up. We'll hear about the intersection of archaeology and ethics. That's coming up in just a few minutes. And I heard the interview, and I'll be honest with you, I don't even remember the ethical talk in it. I was sort of half listening, but it definitely was not the most interesting part of the interview. It just is such an easy thing to grab onto. And I'm throwing stones here. I want you to know I am living in the biggest glass house when it comes to these things. I've written so many public radio promos for upcoming segments and shows. I've written show descriptions. And I can't tell you how many times I have leaned on that structure of we will explore. Like, I feel like we need to do one of those Twitter memes, right, where it says public radio and then a handshake symbol. And then it says exploring the intersection because God damn, does public radio love to explore the intersection?

Well, I remember when I was a traffic reporter, like as in one of the people that like when you listen to a radio station, they go, we got the traffic update with so and so. And but I worked for the service that just did that. I didn't even work at the radio stations I was on. And because there are only so many ways to describe bad traffic, they would regularly circulate this list of basically terms they didn't want us to use anymore.

Oh, yeah. The white stuff.

it was just kind of like yeah it was just like instead of this try this instead of like i remember one of them seeming deeply offensive because instead of car fire they literally suggested car bq oh my god i was like huh well you better hope that nobody was in that car bq when it

happened yes i like to think that you were smart enough not to take that advice my god if you use

car bq that's that's all the listeners remembering after that like they're not they're like that's gonna stick in the old brain it's stuck in my old brain and this is from like 20 years ago or something more than but um uh now this is the thing okay so you latched on to something that you feel like is probably overused in the public radio space during the holiday weekend i latched on to something that for some reason and i've done this a million times um because this has just been the standard operating procedure when you are promoting something that is digitally available like this show at the end you always say let's say you're promoting a podcast you say get us wherever you get your podcasts and something inside me just broke this week and i just thought i don't think we need that instruction anymore i and so what i wrote on twitter was that i had heard a promo for a podcast and they had omitted that and now i have literally no idea how to

locate them i do think that i mean in a lot of people's defense i think people have been dropping that more and more or making a joke of it when they get to that part of the promo like even i i don't know why this pops in mind i've been hearing a lot of kenny main promos lately wow yeah it's strange you have a show on lebitards network or something no it's um when i listen to my baseball games on various platforms i'll hear totally different commercials and when i'm listening i believe on the mlb app they block i basically listen to the local baseball broadcast But then they cover up the local commercials with that satellite radio is for me as well. Exactly. And satellite has its own set of commercials and the app has its own. And I think the app has a has a relationship with maybe like a partnership with maybe audacity or some sort of podcast network. Right. And so you hear those sports related things. Anyway, Kenny Maine, I believe, has a podcast called Hey Maine, which is kind of a funny.

I don't even really know who he is. He's a former sports player, right? No. Kenny Main is, he's actually kind of well-known in the Northwest. Well, except for you. But like he, so his deal was, he's from the Northwest. He was, the kind of his origin story goes, he was working, doing the weekends on, I believe it was called KSTW, Channel 11. So Channel 11 was an over-the-air station, not cable. but kind of it was based in tacoma it was always kind of the it struck me as the scrappy station that you could get locally because you know you had cairo como and king those are all based in seattle those were the like you know the prestige stations and then you had this kind of weird thing called kstw that like their logo was like the tacoma dome they had like ranger ronnie in the afternoons which was that like park ranger with a raccoon puppet and there was like a bunch of

kids in the studio like so this is uhf it sounds like those others not uhf oh it wasn't though it was over the air you did not because what you need no uhf was over the air like i know but here you

don't you didn't need you didn't need the special uhf antenna because i remember when ktzz channel 22 came in you needed the uhf antenna that was a huge deal you could get kstw with just like the regular tv setup of you know the 1980s and so kenny main was uh by during the week working at a facility that i believe assembled garbage cans and on the weekends he was the sports anchor on kstw and he sent a tape and he would this was right at the beginning of espn kind of having like sports center be the well the way i like to put andrew is the intersection between sports pop culture and funny kind of you know quips um that was it was a kind of a new take on how you could report you know the sports of the day and it very clearly played into kenny main's i think sensibility and i think so he kept trying to get a job with them and sending his tapes in and finally i think that he managed to land some kind of position either fill in or i don't know maybe permanent like hosting a motorsports segment for them and so he did that and I guess he did that effectively enough that he moved up to finally being on SportsCenter and then he was on SportsCenter during what people like me consider just the golden era of it like just like you know Kenny Main I guess to some degree Chris Berman although Chris Berman always felt like he was for the older people than like the Kenny Maynes of the world and the Keith Olbermann's and the people like that that seemed cool and hip. So anyway, but now he's he left ESPN and he's still in Seattle and he just like is basically always raising money for veterans and bopping around and just being kind of a Seattle sports. I don't know, gadfly now. I think his promos are pretty

interesting. I think they're pretty funny. It actually you hear a promo enough times. It really does work. It kind of makes you want to tune in or the next time you're sort of prompted to the the gap um sort of decreases every time i'm gonna we don't have to get into this because it's super not interesting but i'm really confused by what you mean by the the special uhf antenna because growing up we had rabbit ears but we had three network stations and two uhf stations and we just had them coming in over the rabbit ears on the tv i mean i don't know what to tell you

other than you could watch channel 11 in seattle without you did not need a special um that uhf antenna and the reason i know is because but well that's what i'm saying we watched uhf without a

special antenna too so what is the special antenna that you're talking about something that goes on

the roof or something because no it goes on your tv it was a uhf antenna and there were ads for it it was a huge deal because they were like ktzz channel 22 you could probably if you google this right now those promos by the way god bless you andrew for your archival project on 90s seattle television that sonics thing you sent yeah it's like oh my god just i'm just a shot of just a fair like portly era george carl over the rain man in the glove like we should explain what

we're talking about sheffler i was really hesitant to send that to you and the rest of the people on the sports chain because i wasn't sure if it would be triggering i came across i have a box i've talked about it i think in a lot of places i think on the show as well definitely in the newsletter that I came across a box of mostly unlabeled UHF VHS tapes at a garage sale, and I got myself a VCR for $12 at Goodwill, and I got myself a little digitizer cable, and I've been going through these just like, you know, mostly local, well, often local broadcasts of things from Seattle-area TV stations back in the mid-'90s, and I came across a Supersonics promo, Just like, you know, join us on Cairo TV as the Sonics take on the Grizzlies or whatever. And there's a 30 second.

Promo with highlights or what have you to get people pumped. What did they say? Loaded for bear as they go up to Vancouver.

And I had this. I wonder if that's a deep joke because they were the Vancouver Grizzlies.

Well, I think it was. There were a couple of bear. They were loaded for bear and there's another bear related. Anyway, I really wanted to send that to you guys. But I was also like, will this be a bummer to see like a promo for something that is still like kind of a painful loss for.

No, it's better to have loved, loved and lost than to never. I'm glad to hear it. I had nothing but good feelings about that. Now, so here's the thing. Now, I've located, not the ad in question, but something that is on YouTube called KTZZ TV, Channel 22, Seattle. First day of broadcasting, sign on. Okay, so when I was, well, this was, I don't know exactly, this was 1985 when this happened. So I would have been all of nine years old. And what I remember, and this is the reason that I'm not trying to drill down on the antenna thing. but we never had cable right i was very jealous of of anyone who had like more than the standard few channels but they used to run these ads ktzz was that you could go into a local like 7-eleven or anywhere else and you could just get i think it was even free this circle it's almost a full circle antenna that was just like a wire a wire circle and had those two little horseshoe kind of things that you screw down over i don't know what the term for you know i'm talking about yeah you shape exactly it was that thing and on the back of your tv and maybe the tv that you had had it built in or maybe your rabbit ears did it but i just remember these ads playing everywhere you got to go get your uhf antenna that round thing and it had a little kind of like diagram you hook it up to your tv and now you can get ktzz channel 22 free and that was the closest we got to having cable i was like we're adding a channel in the burbank household this is incredible so i that's the only reason that i'm like weirdly keyed in on what antenna was in play for which thing because i just remember thinking like this is this is almost like cable can i just play you i don't know what this will sound like it's just a guy in a suit i think announcing the existence of this channel finally in seattle let's see what he says it starts off with hello i'm dean

woodring vice president and general manager of ktzz tv today we are pleased to bring seattle in the Puget Sound region, the first new commercial TV station in 27 years. We also bring the first commercial UHF independent to the area. For us, it all began on September 12, 1977. That was the day KTZZ-TV first applied to the Federal Communications Commission for the construction permit for Channel 22. Now, almost eight years later, KTZZ-TV joins an impressive group of highly professional Seattle TV broadcasters, which date back to november 25th 1948 on that day television came to the pacific northwest on channel

five krsc tv okay now he's just getting into the history what i'm curious about that's a power in

right there that's the first those are the first moments of that tv the first words spoken on this

television station which i think again and now so so i've i've added whatever small amount of technical awareness i have to this now i have no idea how things work anymore with digital versus you know over the air cable like did who knows all i know is i think there was a period of time because ktzz they didn't have the rights to really anything new or uh you know they weren't creating a lot of original content so it was a lot of like mikhail's navy and just oldies and stuff and then i think they became like one of those like maybe me tv or something like just basically kind of the kick see of television where they're just and they might still be doing their thing although again I'd be surprised to know if UHF was even still a thing I don't know yeah I'm not sure I'm

not sure either and like I guess I did have growing up and again I'm taking this to the boring place picture just like two rabbit ears poking up like straight lines we did have and I guess this was the UHF antenna like something that looked like it wasn't big and it wasn't round but it did kind of attach to the rabbit ears as a separate little antenna I'm remembering it now almost you know what it looked like a bow tie it was like in the shape of a bow tie and so i wonder if that i bet you that was doing the exact same exactly yeah so anyway we had w for whatever it's worth we had w uab 43 uh and channel 19 which was w oio which would eventually become the fox station too so that took over that that thing but like like channel 19 is where you had the big chuck and little john show and all like the weird like holdovers from like 1970 like people dressed oh And W U a B had a superhero with like a big red nose that I think was supposed to indicate that it was like a, it was like a real busted out Superman kind of guy. And he was like out of shape and probably the red nose. I'm trying to think it might've even been.

Sort of a wink and a nod towards alcoholism, although I'm not 100% sure. Was it like a clown nose or did it just paint it red? I think I got to look this up. I think they just painted it red. The whole thing was just like the lowest budget. I mean, it was like out of the movie UHF with like Weird Al Yankovic. It was just like the most low budget, low rent. I got to figure out who would introduce these movies on WAB. But it's like the idea of seeing that now is almost like cable access in its vibe. Exactly.

And that was why, I mean, the movie UHF starring one Weird Al Yankovic and also Michael Richards. Yeah. And his mom was a Stanley Spadowski, right? That movie so inspired me. I mean, that was why Peter Williams and I, I think anyway, probably signed up to take the class so we could get certified at the public access station, which was this low slung cinder block building right off of Aurora Avenue. that was exactly like where you imagine that kind of content would get created just like a completely unassuming kind of you know down market little building full of like old tv equipment and whatever and it was all because uhf the movie so inspired us i really thought we never even did anything like we got our little certification and then we we never got it together to create an hour of content per week but i just was so and it's funny because you know really that's what the internet is now right i mean that's what that's what youtube is and there's various degrees of polish they put on it that's what instagram that's what reels are that's what tiktok is it's all in a way a version of the dream of public access television which is like you don't need to have a television station give you permission to put out whatever kind of content you think

might be interesting to people yeah now we're kind of spy i'm taking this conversation to a weird place are you laughing because i just sent you the image of superhost look at that guy right that's wuab's superhost you can look it up i also i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna roll the dice with copyright infringement and maybe use this as today's show pick so people can enjoy it i think it's a i think it's a promo pick anyway but yeah you got a guy here maybe a middle-aged guy actually sadly this guy's probably much younger than us this is exactly what i wanted to ask you and

looking at this guy so he's he's you know he looks to me still to my eyes like he's a guy who's pushing 60 that's just how it reads but he's a very kind of looks like he could be if he wasn't dressed up to do this he could be a local tv weatherman or be selling used cars and as you described andrew he's got kind of like a homemade superhero outfit on one of his buttons is undone which is probably also intentional and he's got a little kind of red painted almost clown nose or something going on this guy is probably younger than us oh i think that and look at that head of

hair i'm gonna put him actually in his early 30s at the latest he was portrayed by marty sullivan according to the internet here at uh independent television station wab channel 43 in cleveland from 1969 to 1989 he wore a baggy suit cape and a red nose like a clown version of superman it doesn't say busted ass version of superman to host the station's saturday afternoon monster movie so yeah that is something that that is something that the younger generations are missing

and probably for the best well yeah but it does bum me out there isn't really room anymore on local television well it's not that there's not room there's plenty of room they got a lot of time to fill but i guess there's not enough of an appetite for like weird programming um like that like there's just because the problem is if you're going to dedicate resource if you're going to assign a couple producers and a couple of hosts to do something like that then it needs to get enough eyeballs that you can sell the ads for it and if not there's just no interest in doing it anymore because i guess most of those eyeballs are just going to the internet and other places for this they're not going to like i feel like local television is just now it's just hours and hours and hours of of the same news kind of repurposed and repackaged um you know because that's the only kind of locally created content that really actually gets an roi i know it's not

local and i know it's very different from what we're talking about right here but as you were describing that and you said there's not a lot of room for just like weirdness i was thinking like what's the last legitimately kind of weird or loose or in in in my vein of of entertainment like that that i can remember the most recent example that i can think of and again i know it's very different and I'm stretching here a little bit but I feel like Joel McHale's talk soup came close to that like do you remember the format of that like they would just they would leave everything in I'm sure they didn't I'm sure they took a lot out but it really had a pretty sloppy feel to it and like okay I guess we told that joke let's move on like it just like and things coming in and out of the frame and the jankiest way like I really applaud them doing that pretty late into, you know.

premium premium tv age no i think you're totally right that had strong uh i would say it had strong tbtl vibes but it of course way predated us so maybe tbtl had pretty strong talk soup vibes that was also an interesting show because i mean it went through multiple hosts and they were all kind of good for different reasons it was a guy named hal sparks i believe it was greg kinnear

i remember kinnear i don't know who hal sparks is it might have even been this john henson guy

for a minute and then and then of course Joel McHale and it kind of it changed over the years based on the specific host but it was always that kind of like weird loose we're breaking the fourth wall you can hear like three producers laughing or groaning off camera that's like very I'm with you that is very much my speed for television and actually

now I'm on the Wikipedia is I guess technically Joel McHale never hosted talk soup he only toasted the soup yeah but you are right the The earliest incarnation that I can think of was Talk Soup, hosted by Greg Kinnear, and that goes back to the 90s, the early 90s, 1991, I didn't realize, and then The Soup, and it did have a little bit of a resurgence on Netflix for a little bit, which I think I watched one or two, and it still maintained, even though it was on-demand programming, it still maintained a lot of that weird DNA that I loved.

You know that Andy Cohen show Watch What Happens Live People seem to really like that It's not really for me Because it just focuses on a lot of programming That I just don't have a lot of context for You know real housewives of wherever and stuff But that show When I see a promo for it I was about to say when I'm flipping the channels I can't remember the last time I flipped the channels Andrew Zero channels being flipped in this household But like when I catch a bit of it Through some whatever weird circumstances It has a real looseness to it, like they're drinking or at least pretending to drink. I think they take calls or video chat from viewers, and it has a little bit of a kind of like it could go off the rails feeling, which, again, I'm always into. That is always what I'm looking for. Too many shows these days stay on the rails, which is why I'm so happy that TBTL to this day has never been anywhere near the rails.

We like to explore the intersection of antennas and loose programming. There is a show that, so again, back to my obsession with these box of VHS tapes I've been pouring through. And I have still so many. Like I'm meticulously documenting them as you'd expect and like pulling the commercials. So I've only really gone through three and a half tapes so far. But one of the first ones I watched was from, and there are various ways that you can kind of pinpoint the time of these things. So I know that this broadcast in December of 1995, I can even tell you December 3rd of 1995, Fox debuted a show that was on one of these tapes called What's So Funny? And it is exactly the type of programming we're talking about where it like kind of recaps various funny things in pop culture, sometimes just like on the latest episode of Ellen. And this is the this is the sitcom, not the talk show. Like, you know, Jeremy Piven says something funny and they like play a clip of it. But then they'll say, like, this is what's going on in the world of toys. And like, it's just it's kind of like talk soup only. It kind of covers all genres. And it is hosted by this guy. I'm going to see if I can play the beginning of this for you, if you don't mind. It is not not Dennis Leary. Who's the other Dennis who Dennis Miller? Yes. this guy is the poor man's Dennis Miller and he like stares at the camera and like everything is so he's saying things as you would say Luke kind of in the cadence of a sarcastic joke from the 90s but there's no real joke there and then he just sort of stares at the camera like daring you not to laugh sort of let me see if this pays off as audio probably

hi I'm Art Peterson host of Q13's dialing for dollars movie and joining me for Monday's mystery

movie dialing for dollars Andrew i love this project so much luke this is my identity now okay this is a columbia picture

sorry it's just married with children fans don't go away more laughs coming up on the premiere of what's so funny join host nick bachai for a look at all the incredibly dumb things that happened

on the planet this week nick bachai i think was his name bachai do you know that guy no but i'm looking at a picture of it as this as as i'm listening to it and i think he was yeah he kind of bounced around maybe did some ad campaigns i would have never known that guy's name but he's familiar from that time uh that time in all of our lives because he used to kind of show up and just be very droll in various places and not funny though all droll no no funny maybe that's a

show title and it's just like this aggressive demeanor on like this aggressively passive Demeanor on TV Which I know is a funny way of putting that Before you say anything It's an aggressively passive show title

can I put that I'm writing it down

but like I thought his Dennis Miller vibes were so strong and then I think I looked him up at one point and he was like I guess was he a sidekick on the Dennis Miller show for a while or something I think I stumbled on that so it makes sense that this is sort of his when back in like 1995 late 95 when we just thought that like this was the this will be the vibe forever you know just like kind of sarcasm and it's the

here let's give you a viewer's guide to this week in laughter a compendium of hilarity a heaping sack of funny so whether you missed it the first time or you want to see it again

we'll answer the question what's so funny and then he does a he does a turn to camera there that you can almost hear in the audio they go to there it's a straight on shot of him at a desk and then they take the shoulder shot and he turns to the camera at his shoulder and says oh that's so funny with one eyebrow raised i i had kind of actually admire the commitment to the bit

of like just delivering it so kind of flatly and like without without giving into the urge to try to zhuzh it up at all it reminds me a little bit of the whole bob saget project on uh america's funniest home videos you know where like i just that was mostly i mean i guess he was on full house oh they didn't really watch full house much as a kid but like i we were a big america's funniest home videos family like that would be a big thing on sunday night we could all gather around and watch it and it was like the jokes were so bad cringy even as a kid i was like this is terrible i guess now people are like yeah but saget was kind of in on the joke or something

yeah the the difference i feel here and i don't know if i'm splitting hairs it's kind of hard it's kind of hard to explain by the way this show i think i looked it up it lasted four episodes or something it is it is truly some of the worst programming you can possibly imagine um and i absolutely love it um but like this guy the thing about saget is he was making really really corny jokes whereas you get the impression that this guy thinks he's kind of edgy whereas saget might have been a little bit more edgy in real life but here he is doing this very family friendly thing this guy is dressed uh in a very miller-esque style of like a black shirt button to the top And then a black sport coat over top of it And when he looks at the camera he always raises One eyebrow like he's like He's Mr. Suave he's in on The joke he's real cool And you're watching something with a little edge To it even though the jokes Are terrible it's very Tim Heidecker-y by the way I was watching some of this With Vives and once we realized oh This guy is a Tim Heidecker character Before Tim Heidecker was doing characters

I am still Catching bits of that office hours live thing that that tim heidecker does and i just i'm like i i find it very interesting but i can't really fully understand what the hell is going on like is it just a straightforward is it just a talk show is he doing a character i don't have you watched office hours live i've watched i don't

know if i've watched one all the way through but i mean he's talking he's he's being himself but then they will slip into various things right and it's also a podcast right it's kind of like a watching a live podcasting taping only there's visual elements yeah he's being himself but it's

so it's it's it and i'm i've only been seeing it like by way of tiktok in like three minute chunks so that's part of why i don't really have all of the info either but like it's it's almost kind of like reminds me the way that it's shot is a little bit like tmz it's like he's kind of standing in like kind of a not even fully a broadcast studio but almost just like a command center and then they're like talking like fred armison they do have an amazing recurring bit now what they've done with fred armison and jack black where you know in that uh that joe walsh song life's been good i don't think i know that song there's a line i think if i played it for you you would it was pretty but he's there's a line in it where he sings this is going to be terrible i'm sorry but he sings the line something to the effect of my maserati goes 185 but he sings it really high so it's like my maserati goes 185 oh that and so they play it they play it the way joe walsh does it and then the person has to keep going up an octave and keep trying to sing it higher and higher and like fred armison got so high with it and jack black gets like pretty high with it it's it's like a just a genuinely funny bit but but every time and also this talks about this speaks to sort of physicality like tim heidecker is kind of very fit now all of a sudden he was never excessively unfit but he just kind of like i've never seen him i haven't seen him very much when he's not in a tim and eric mode right so where they purposely make themselves as ugly and out of shape as possible.

They're always like taking off their shirts And pushing their bellies out as far as possible

And this is him like definitely You know having kind of lost weight He's very trim now And his hair doesn't look ridiculous I mean he's actually a nice looking dude And he's kind of standing there And he's kind of like And he's got this whole you know Cast of characters that are Different producers and people associated with the show And it's kind of cutting between different shots of them and him And he's interviewing real people But he's almost so cocksure and like kind of like doing a character like i can't tell if that's really what tim tim heidecker is just like forget it i'm just i'm making music that's genuine and i'm just hosting this kind of like tmz style interview show with a bunch of people chiming in and this is if that's really his because it just it's like a level of confidence and i don't know i can't i don't have the word for But there's something from a personality standpoint that he's doing that I assumed was a bit because it's so outside of anything else he's ever done. But maybe that's just the real him. I need to just watch an entire episode and then see if I can figure out what I think the bit is, if there is one, or if it's like you're saying, just, you know, just hosting the show. And I've just never seen him not making fun of himself actively. Yeah, right. So I don't really know how to, like, process all of the information. All right. We've been talking a lot today already about broadcasting and just sort of the highs and lows of trying to entertain people. Something happened during a San Francisco Giants game recently. I want to play you the audio, Andrew. It's Wordle related. And it really feels to me like if they let you and me call a Major League Baseball game, this is what it would sound like. the tbtlization of major league baseball broadcast this project is just beginning and it starts with this tape from the san francisco giants that i want to play when we come back from this quick break here on tbtl all right let's thank some daily donors who are keeping tbtl going here on episode 3765 in A Collectors. I'm mildly proud of myself that I got that right, Andrew, because usually when we go into any kind of special programming like recording a Labor Day episode on a Friday, forget it. The chances are slim and none that we're going to come back to the right episode number. But I did my due diligence and went to the internet and checked out what yesterday's show was numbered.

So you got 3765 for today. Is that what you said? Yes. If you went to the internet, I've got to ask you, and this is a real, like, me begging for an attaboy, but I've got to say, I sat down yesterday, Monday, to post the show. Of course, we'd recorded it three days prior, so I had vague memories of things we had talked about, but I had not written down any viable show title, and I didn't know what to call it, and I came up with... This is a very good show title. I came up with, because we were opening up mail from the P.O. box, I called it Alpha Mail, M-A-I-L. And I got to say, I was like, I sat down at the desk, I'm like, I don't know, man, I don't know. And then my brain landed there somehow, and I, you know, Luke, sometimes it just speaks through you. Sometimes TBTL just flows through me. I was, I won't lie, I was very proud of that.

That's a very, very, very solid title. And that's the kind of content That Michelle and Larry Little Of Port Angeles, Washington Are helping to support with their donation Thank you Michelle and Larry Also thanks to Sheila Reeks In Ithaca, New York Sheila, great to see your name on the list All these many years That Sheila has been a part of the TBTL universe She's one of the rare, I believe, overlaps Of the Dave Ross universe And the TBTL universe

Oh, did Sheila come to Cairo Radio during one of those holiday extravaganzas where it was like a, they turned Cairo into almost like a public radio pledge drive central and people raised money for some sort of charities? Oh, yeah. Holiday magic. Yeah.

I don't know. Did Sheila travel in from Ithaca for that? Oh, I don't know.

You had mentioned that it was an intersection of the Ross.

Well, she grew up with Dave Ross.

Oh, I see. Okay. I believe. I see. Unless it's a different Sheila in Ithaca.

Because, you know, we're a pretty popular show, Andrew. Amongst Sheila's. Because William Weinberger is in Paonia, Colorado. I don't know if I've seen Paonia before.

I like to take Paonia and just wander around the desert. I thought you were going to go with a Paola joke, but you went with a peyote joke.

I did, yes. Thanks, William. Also, thanks to Terry Hanberg in Meridian, Idaho. And then look who we have next. The one, the only, Kat Solin. Wow. in los angeles california what up cat friend of the show was on the show

recently yeah that was a very fun conversation i think as long as we keep our guests to people

that listen to tbtl every day we usually nail it yes or at least let's say three times a week

are you just gonna stick with every day we have no success with people who are unfamiliar with the show see our jeff garland chat of many years ago but people who are actually already listeners well then you know we can say all we can say you gotta eat that microphone then they laugh and then it feels like we're doing good hosting uh caitlin woodleaf is in eagle idaho we've got meridian idaho and eagle idaho checking in um thank you caitlin and thanks to all of our donors uh for today for making the show possible we absolutely would not be here without you hello and welcome to top story saw this article in a slate that heather schwedell Wrote did the New York Times kill Wordle by buying it and this was the Part that kind of jumped out at me is This writer cites this piece Of tape that's been going around It's the Television host if you Will it's the play-by-play folks for The San Francisco Giants TV it's Dave Fleming And then John Miller now I got to tell You I am a John Miller head from the Day like to me some of the Greatest baseball announcers would be Of course Vin Scully and then John Miller Maybe he still does, but he used to call, I think, like the Sunday night baseball game on, I think it might have been ESPN. And he just has a, I'm going to use a word that I don't think I actually know the full definition of, but is it like sonorous voice? Sonorous?

Like, sonorous? I don't even, you know, I don't even know if I'm right about that. But I know the word you're talking about, and I've always pronounced it in my head as sonorous. And does that just mean kind of like a very, well, let's listen to this one.

Sonorous. Oh, you were right. Imposingly deep and full. So I think that this, once you hear John Miller, I've just always, John Miller just has that voice that like, when I heard it, it meant, oh, it's a Sunday. I'm watching baseball. Life is good. My Maserati does 185.

And he's the guy, I've heard this tape now. I listened to it this morning. It's great. So he is going to be the guy who is having Wordle explained to him, right?

Because John Miller's not young. John Miller's got to be, you know, he's been around since, like, I feel like my childhood. Like, he was sort of, he may have even, it's possible he took over some responsibility on This Week in Baseball after Mel Allen maybe didn't do it anymore. I just, John Miller's been around a long time. And I will say this, this isn't probably his best broadcasting because it's kind of just like, you know. It's John Miller yells at Cloud. John Miller is suspicious of Wordle as a thing. But he does have, God, just a beautiful, beautiful radio voice. So this is these two guys talking about Wordle for almost an entire inning.

Brandon's a big, he loves the Wordle. Wordle, well, I've looked it up on my app here. You started off, you pick any five-letter word and then hit enter and it tells you which letters you got right. Oh, I see. You have to make the first move. So any five-letter word. Yeah. There's a lot of them. So you can just pick one to start. And you go across or you go up and down? You go across. And you have to hit enter? Yeah, then you hit enter, and it'll tell you, oh, you got two letters correct, but not in the exact spot where they appear in the word. If the letter comes up green, here's Tommy. I should actually call the game. Here's a fastball inside to La Stella. Ball one.

so a question i have for you andrew is when announcers go into this mode like be it the mariners announcers or anywhere else as a because you're a baseball fan you listen to a lot of games on the radio are you here for this kind of broadcasting versus just letting us know what's

happening with the pitches it it depends on several things it depends on who it is how entertaining it is and what's going on with the game and you know what i mean like if but usually i mean these broadcasters are smart of the ninth Castillo is pitching with the bases loaded let's lay off right exactly and you know these broadcasters in most cases know you know they're doing this during the slower parts of a game or a you know a not edge of your seat time of the game and so I you know I trust them and you know we um talk about our favorite broadcasters you know like some it really depends on what it is sometimes like Rick Riz and Dave Sims like the two old heads if they're broadcasting together they'll go down some roads that are just like they just sound so out of touch like literally talking about um the lone ranger tv broadcasts and i was kind of like they start talking about uhf television we need to send a cease and desist because that is our lane yeah and i don't know there was just something so antiquated about that and also so... kind of i i guess lacking of a modern worldview in in the celebration of that uh that i was kind of like oh this is a little cringy but then i've told you before if they just go down memory lane if they're in philly and the ballpark reminds them of some like 1978 team that i know nothing about and they just start listing names of old ball players i don't even i don't even care that i can't follow it i love listening to that you know or when the younger guys get into stats or start goofing around like i i i will i am there for it when it's done right i guess is the answer

i definitely if it's we're talking about the mariners guys i definitely am more intrigued when the we'll call them the younger crew which would be aaron goldsmith and gary hill jr when when gary goes off and gets like a weird stat and comes back and then they're kind of joking more in like dead spin style of kind of sabermetrics and pop culture and like there's although the funny part is i'm probably 10 15 years older than both of them so it's like i'm identifying with the sort of younger guys but i'm more probably in the demo of riz and sims at this point uh-huh

yeah maybe yeah and even those guys like sometimes you know there's a four and a half hour rain delay I know during the ball game on Sunday and like I watched I listened to the beginning of the game in the morning then went to like my friend's Labor Day party and then kind of the rain delay happened mostly during during that party but then the game ends up resuming then it goes into extra innings but anyway during this rain delay I would check in every now and then and like even Goldsmith like they were just they were trying to create fun content like hey how many ice cream bars you think we'll be eating out of the craft services cooler or whatever and sometimes like that stuff really works a peek behind the curtain but you when it's clear that they have nothing and they're just trying desperately to wring some cute content out of it it can really fall flat i got much love to those guys they had a hell of a challenge keeping the needles moving during that thing

i would have figured at some point they'll just you know the radio station will just switch back over to whatever national sports programming they're playing they do oh yeah though they

didn't just keep it go they didn't just do tbtl for four hours no they go back to programming but then they'll come back at like maybe after like a 15 minute break or whatever and you'll hear the music that was one thing sorry we're really far afield here i've had a lot of coffee but that was one thing that i did appreciate goldsmith saying was like you hear the music come on and you're like oh the mariners game is back on and then it's just like goldsmith and gary hill saying like uh sorry the game is actually not back on we're just here to give you a check-in we don't really have much information it's still raining here uh how many ice cream bars have you eaten so far you know and like on its face it was good but it was just like they were really running on steam

yeah i i um was kind of i was at this this weekend camp out with becca's family but i you know was checking my phone just kind of seeing where they were at with things and i was excited because we were winning and then we went into rain delay and then i was like i guess that there there's no way that they are going to be able to not finish this game because otherwise either we had to fly to cleveland or cleveland would have to i mean i guess we would have to fly to cleveland to play one game and considering all the playoff implications and how close things can be at the end of the season it just was one of those things where if they had to play that thing at four in the morning they were going to play it at four in the morning because the logistics of trying to get that game in at a different point in the season would have just been like completely

impossible yeah and i may have this wrong but like seattle only had like one free day opportunity and it would have really made like it would have it would have been a a tough thing to do and then it would have kind of ruined another road trip like whatever they didn't want to i know that the mariners didn't want to spend their like one off day traveling back to cleveland to replay this

game what about that thing ichiro said about cleveland did that oh yeah on some level because i know that you're like you're from cleveland and you know all of the the the upsides and downsides of cleveland but that was a remarkable quote that in any way kind of grind your gears oh no that thing has been around forever that's not a new quote that's from when he was a mariner that

that's like right yeah i didn't see that when it happened originally it's surprisingly blunt it would say yeah i don't know i don't know i don't think i've seen it you know when it originally was said basically each road dunking on cleveland saying no i'm not excited to go to cleveland

he says to tell the truth i'm not excited to go to cleveland but we have to each euro said if i ever saw myself saying i'm excited to go to cleveland i'd punch myself in the face because i'm

lying it's such a weird missing words i know it's such a weird thing because like i wonder when that was in his career that he said that because like it's such a it seems like you know as americans we all agree certain cities suck right and it's just like you jump on cleveland now are there reasons that cleveland maybe has some things going against it but it's also just kind of I think Cleveland sucks. No, no, me too. That's what I'm saying. I just think that... Cleveland has definitely Shot itself in the foot in many ways We don't have to get into that now But there's also some good things about Cleveland But my point is That feels like Dunking on Cleveland almost seems sort of hacky Sort of, and here you have this guy from Japan And is he saying that because he knows That's the cultural joke here in the States That everybody just jumps on Cleveland It's like an obvious punchline Or did Ichiro just really In his travels start to really hate going to Cleveland.

Right, because I have to say, I've only been to Cleveland a couple of times, but the last time I was there, which was actually for a few days, and I was staying in downtown Cleveland, I was quite taken with the place. I know that it's described derisively as like the mistake by the lake, but despite that, it didn't occur to me that it actually has this huge stretch of really beautiful shoreline, yeah which as you're driving into town or at least coming from where i was it was sort of off to the right and i was like holy holy smokes this is really beautiful you can say then you can say the bad word the downtown i i enjoyed it i had a couple of nice meals like you know or satisfying meals at the least like i i'm with you that it it seems like one of those things that i feel like uh you know in the words of i think it's sarah koenig be nice to cleveland please don't be mean to Cleveland. I feel like Cleveland's, you know, as a city, I, if I hadn't heard, if I hadn't known that it was a punchline to kind of be a little bit disparaging about Cleveland and you just had me visit that city, it would feel like so many other cities in America that just, you know, and again, I was in the, the downtown core. I was staying in kind of probably a pretty decent hotel. So I was, I was seeing probably the, the, the, the primo version of Cleveland, if you will, at least of the city itself but yeah i was i was actually i liked it way more than i thought i was

going did you check out the um northfield park hard rock rock sino hotline or whatever remember

have you met me andrew yes there was a casino within walking distance of my hotel and i rocked that sino wait did you really go to the rock sino i think probably whichever one was near my there was one that was like three blocks from my hotel and you were in downtown yeah in like a in like an off not an office building but like a you know it was a downtown building as opposed to like a casino that's in the suburbs and has like you know miles of parkings ringing it this was like a this was a building that like could have been a bank you know a long time ago or an office building i guess like but kind of a maybe turn of the century office building that now you just go in the lobby level They check your ID Then you take escalators up to the casino level I don't know if that was the Rocksino

I've never been in there before When I was growing up I don't think that gambling was legal in downtown And I think And I know we have listeners who will text me Listeners slash friends who will text me on this But I think they passed something in the past 20 years or so That allowed this thing to be built And I've never been there But I just remember listening to That Nutso Cleveland football broadcast, and they'd always call the... And they had to keep saying it was the Rocksino line. The Hard Rock Northfield Park Rocksino hotline, I think, yeah. Anyway, we're in the middle of some great tape here. Yes, we are.

We're pausing the great tape to create some less great tape. Yes. Mostly by me. Okay, so I got

two green ones, right? No, you got two yellow ones. The yellow means letter is correct, but not in the correct spot. And the other ones mean they're not in? They are not a part of today's work. So should I get rid of those? Well, your next guess, you won't include those letters. Is that a good start getting two of the letters? That's a good start, yeah. Many times you get none. For a rookie. A lot of days I get zero. Is there a time limit on it? Nope, no time limit. DC corrects me. Technically 24 hours because the new one comes the next day. If you haven't completed it by the start of the next day, you didn't complete it. Oh, so now it's late in the day. I might only have four hours. Yeah, you're running out of time.

Isn't the guy who... Now, listen, again, I'm here for this kind of chat, this kind of meandering, whatnot, and I've already said I'm a big John Miller fan. But we've heard nothing about what's happening on the field, right? I mean, there must have been a couple of pitches. I know at one point the Fleming guy says, I should probably call the game, and then he lists a pitch.

that's happened oh this is a montage though this is edited together oh yeah because i was watching the twitter video this is like from different parts throughout the inning there okay thank you

because i was like wow this is i mean i'm enjoying it but it really represents dereliction of duty like if you go okay okay okay okay this makes thank you that makes a lot more sense yeah

His name is, if it's not Wordle, it's something very close to that. So he invented a game based on his own name.

This is where it starts to get TBTL-ish to me, especially so, because they're half remembering. He's half remembering a thing about something and then trying to kind of wing it. Like, it's either the guy's name or it's, like, close to his name. And then later on he says that he sold it for, like, I think maybe he gives the number of, like, $10 million when actually they said low seven figures was what the reports were. So, like, that's kind of off. Like, they're really shooting from the hip, re-colon, Wordle right here, which reminds me of everything that we're doing on this show.

Must have been a really interesting guy to know.

Here's the one-off pitch.

By the way, that's powerful Alex Trebek losers, in other words, vibe. Yeah, could you go back a little bit? Like, can you get to the beginning of him talking about, and of course, we know the guy's name is Wardle, right? That was Andrew Wardle, I think, actually. Josh Wardle? Oh, was it Josh? Oh, okay. I believe maybe his middle name was Andrew no I don't know why I thought it was Andrew um but you know you mentioned this is like TBT like this is one of those moments where you're kind of like yelling at your phone a little bit like I'm listening to this thinking it's Wardle his name is Wardle like I know this story right and then him just drolly saying huh sounds like an interesting guy to know I guess sarcastically I have to be honest with you he does sound like

an interesting guy to know he fucking wrote this yeah thing right made a million dollars off it wrote it to entertain i believe his wife yeah and uh i mean and and did a clever thing with his last name i mean these are all things that i would like to talk to this guy at a party like that feels again like probably just generational you know john miller's generation also just and you and i know this very well sometimes you just say something on one of these shows because it's It's your turn to make a sound with your mouth.

There's already a million things I want to cut out of today's show that I'm too lazy to do.

This is the lead up to that. I might only have four hours.

Yeah, you're running out of time. Isn't the guy who invented it, his name is, if it's not Wordle, it's something very close to that. So he invented a game based on his own name. Must have been a really interesting guy to know.

Here's the one on pitch. And it's a fastball over the outside, one and one. I've been getting text messages now From friends saying Well don't mention what the word is I haven't done mine yet for today

It's true Okay so this is also Just programmatically really interesting to me So John Miller has his cell phone Sitting there next to him As they're calling the game And as he's trying to play Wordle On his phone And he's getting People who are his friends Who are listening to the game Or watching the game in real time Are also worried that he's going to give away that day's word it's the instantaneous nature of the communication loop is interesting

to me on this i love you question it or you just find it interesting i find it interesting because

john miller is so old school i mean i guess i should know he's on his cell phone because he's been playing wordle so okay i guess it's given or his ipad or whatever he's using so i guess that that shouldn't come as a surprise but there's something i'm just thinking about like this guy john miller is you know from the era of the dave knee houses of the world and the uh you know i I already mentioned like Vin Scully and some of the real just kind of classic beloved play by play guys, Bob Euchre. And to imagine one of these folks getting text messages while they're broadcasting saying, don't don't don't ruin it. Yeah, it's just so twenty twenty two and so kind of quick. It's just yeah. Yeah, I guess I give him credit for being that plugged in. Right. Yeah, I love it. Don't want to be a spoiler.

Josh Wardle is the inventor. Here's a curve in the dirt, W-A-R-D-L-E. And the New York Times paid him like 10 million bucks, and he sold it to him.

So, it was about the money for him. I see.

He's sitting on a beach somewhere, thinking, suckers. It's a weird way to end it.

Very sinister take on Wardle.

It really is. I think he doesn't really know what he's talking about, so he's just trying to riff, and he's turned this guy into just kind of a money grubber.

I think it's a good reminder for us, you and I, Andrew, that when in doubt, you don't have to go negative. And I do think it's a tendency, and I'm sure it's a tendency, that I've acted on on this show thousands and thousands of times, right? But it's like just because we don't understand something. If I learned anything from my infamous TV commentary about Twitch many years ago where I just kind of crapped all over it because it wasn't for me, um it's like when in doubt you don't have to go negative you don't have to be suspicious of something that you don't understand whether it's a fandom of a particular style of animation or uh people that like a kind of a video game or a word game or what have you um so that was just the audio that i thought was interesting but like can

actually just segue here though because i know you're gonna get into this article that that like i like this article because it introduced me to this tape that i didn't know about and i should also give you credit because your show sheet introduced me to this article which i appreciate but talk about going negative i did not appreciate the tone of writer heather schwettle in in writing this for slate i don't know if it's just coming from that like everything with slate has to be sort of like cocky or my joke is always the headline on slate was cancer is good for you right exactly and it's just like it's always got to be kind of either like hey you thought this but it's actually the opposite this isn't quite that but it really starts from the premise that like nobody's playing wordle anymore and obviously i'm probably a little bit defensive because i still have a group of seven friends and we play wordle every day and it keeps us all in touch It's one of my favorite things. I, you know, I, I rarely miss playing Wordle. Now I'm not saying that I'm just because I have that relationship with the game doesn't mean that I can tell you that, yeah, the game is alive and well, but it really sort of felt like this writer is really dunking on it. Like, boy, the Times sort of starting with a premise that the Times might have made a mistake by buying this or ruining it because nobody's talking about it the way they were before. And it's like, well, yeah, nothing's going to keep that kind of social media energy forever. Nobody's talking about angry birds as much as they were at one point either. Like, yeah, obviously it hit a total peak that wasn't going to last forever. But that doesn't mean that it's bad or dumb or that nobody cares about it anymore. But again, do you think I'm just being overly sensitive?

I think this is a very clear example of lived experience informing how somebody takes in information, because I know that you and Veves and some of our friend group have a Wordle group, and I understand it to be something that you all still do on the regular. I don't play it that regularly. Becca still plays it every day. And so when I read this graph, it didn't hit me the way it hit your ears. But if I think about it from your experience, totally a line like the online word game, if never quite hip, like, first of all, that's like a that's kind of a sort of a value judgment. Right. Of like, was it hip or not? Well, never quite hip. Yeah. It was excitingly hip. Like that's what a weird what a weird judgment of a word game. It was excitingly everywhere earlier this year. Now, though, it was possible we had just witnessed the actual sole remaining person in the world. She's referring to John Miller learning about Wordle, who didn't know about Wordle being told what it was. It was a little sad how the mighty have fallen, question mark. Now, listen, I will, in defense of the writing of this piece, I will say that much like me going overly hard on Twitch, some of this is generated because good writing or at least intriguing writing often has to stake out a position, one that may or may not be defensible. but like the the idea of this is obviously to raise the question is wordle over and like the best way to do that is probably by citing examples that set up the idea that maybe wordle is over you know what i mean like if it was like if this headline first of all i clicked on it because of this headline which i don't even know if the writer wrote that that's usually a different person's job but did the new york times kill wordle by buying it made me click whereas an update on the on how wordle is doing with the person in charge at the new york times i don't click on it you know so i guess tip of the cap for this having the desired effect which was

getting me to pay attention to it but it's also misleading like yeah that is a if you don't have great writing chops it's easier to take on an an extreme position that isn't really based on anything other than your gut feeling and then when faced with evidence that might you know belie your premise just sticking with it anyway because you're cheeky like we know good writers who can write things that keep you on the edge of your seat without being bullshit and i sort of

feel like this is a little it's bullshit i mean maybe i think the thing that i think the the the thing that the only way because i don't think the new york times is super public with their data on how many people are actually participating in wordle every day so the way that this writer is getting some kind of temperature check on it is basically how many people are online like sharing their wordle results and that of course is i think on the specific day they cite it was something in the neighborhood of 30 000 and like at its very height of virility it was 300 000 so but then the question is does that indicate how many people are actually playing or just how many people are sharing yeah because i don't we don't know i don't google it

anymore that used to be the way that you would get there and they do address this in the answer in the I think it's one of the first questions and answers but like trying to figure out trying to figure out how many people play by googling it is no longer applicable because those of us who play every day play through the app which it's finally getting folded into the new york times like crossword puzzle app and here's the deal obviously the numbers i'm not making the argument here nor do i want to make the argument here that yes the same number of people are playing wordle as they were whatever five months ago when you couldn't open up twitter without seeing people tweet about it no of course not as many people are playing it but like nowhere in this article is it really addressed or backed up they have the headline did the new york times kill wordle by buying it where is any evidence in this at all that that is not just like clickbait like the yes a smaller group of people are still playing it but like the new york times has a bundle of of other word games including the crossword puzzle online the digital version the spelling bee thing that people are obsessed with and like i'm not saying everybody's obsessed with it but there are hardcore people like genevieve who play the spelling bee every day and other people i i'm not smart enough for it i don't enjoy it but like i know a lot of people who get a kick out of posting their results every day when they get to be queen bee and it's like where is the new york times killing anything here it just didn't maintain the same viral the viral levels that it did a while ago well obviously nothing is going to it again i'm probably defensive because i enjoy the game but it just sort of seemed like this person came into this with some like kind of half-baked notions just in her gut and didn't really change the lead graph or the the the headline when confronted with the truth well the truth as

jonathan knight who's the head of the games for the new york times put it although he came off as extremely level-headed in this basically saying all the stuff you're saying he was like yeah we are we knew going in that this was going to be something that was going to kind of hit a sort of a peak because of it being a viral thing and that that was not going to be sustainable. But he said, we're still very happy with the amount of traffic we're getting in the participation. And again, I assume that they absolutely kind of knew what they were doing and planned for that because they're probably not dummies. If you run the New York Times game section, you're probably much more on the ball than I am. And there was a couple other things that were addressed that I wouldn't have known, which is that they're still basically working through this question of, did it get harder when the New York Times acquired it? And he said that they're still working through Josh Wardell's list of words that he had, like, designed, like, years' worth of, would you call it answers, clues, whatever the game is. They're still working through, basically, the original list. So, in fact, he said they actually eliminated some words I thought were too boutique, like, agora. um because i thought that was too although i'll always think of agora because of the great great film um uh not plan nine ed wood because ed wood's character is just in love with agora and he's always trying to get sarah jessica parker's character to wear agora in their various oh

like agora sweater you know it's so funny i couldn't quite i didn't know what that meant because i knew it as a club in cleveland the agora um but yeah like an agora sweater the material I think.

I mean, that's the only place that I've seen A-G-O-R-A. Wait, that's Angora. That's Angora. Oh, right. So was that the word that they eliminated? It's listed in this article here anyway. Point is, they took out— No, that's too many letters. So my point is, they took out Agora, A-G-O-R-A, which, you're right, is not the sweater. It's a public open space used for assemblies and markets. And I think this supports their decision to take it out because I did not know what that word was.

I've learned some words.

I'm Angoraphobic, though. They're very afraid of that sweater. Anyway, so his point was like, we're not making it harder. We're just actually trying to make it easier or at least trying to take out things that feel like no one's going to get them. And then the other thing I thought was interesting was, and I didn't see this when it happened. And you as a daily user might have, but I guess around the time of the leak over what the Supreme Court was going to decide regarding Dobbs and ultimately Roe v. Wade, the word was fetus.

Yeah, well, this was interesting because my word that day was not fetus. And this is what was kind of, well, from my perspective, kind of interesting about this.

It feels like a very APM situation, doesn't it? Kind of. Sorry, APM. What do you mean? well in that there are a million systems and often very very complex and sometimes we'll be like well can we do this and they're like you'd think and in this case it was like well can we just make it a different word and it's like yes but not for everyone yes exactly

isn't that strange so here was my experience with it like i i'm on this chain and i think like we started to realize amongst the eight of us who are on this thread or seven of us or whatever it is um that something was funky and we weren't all

doing the same word and we had to do this thing was is everybody's answers and we need to talk about this what was your word i think it was our friend toon who like it was it was very clear that her word was not the same one that i had answered and this had only happened for what it's worth i guess i really am a wordle nurdle um as far as i know this has only happened twice in the existence of wordle first when the new york times took it over there was a um there was some sort of kind of malfunction in them kind of folding wordle into their system where one day there were two different answers and it had to do with the way people were not clearing their caches on their iPhones or something um uh and so there there were two words that day and then this other day fetus comes out and so people who played the game early got fetus they realized oh that's no good so they changed it and then those of us who played later in the day had a totally different word and I was so confused and then I found a little press release from the New York Times or something or a little explanation saying hey we changed the word we try not to make words be connected to the news this is supposed to be an escape from the news and that's a new story that's upsetting a lot of people right now we didn't do that on purpose yeah I didn't even I didn't

even know that it happened because I'd probably already sort of gotten off the train although you know the thing is on the occasion that I dip back in I always find it very enjoyable You know what I mean? It's not like it's weird. I think I probably just represent somebody who is not kind of a word game type of person generally. And so I got in on this because it was so ubiquitous. But like I didn't have the core. It's sort of like a bandwagon sports fan. Like maybe you don't care that much about a particular sport or team, but then they're in the championship and your city is going crazy. So you kind of dip into it for a while. But like when it's the offseason, you're probably not listening to the hot stove league like that's probably my relationship with it. And there must be other people that are probably in that category. Yeah. But they also asked the guy from the Times if if Wordle was going to go behind a paywall. And he said, well, I can't predict the future. But as of right now, it's it's free. And and so, again, they're the New York Times. And I feel like this games thing. And I'm look, we have listeners that are like hardcore deep into the world of like word games and logic puzzles and things like this. So they know much more about it than I do. But my sense is this is a very successful platform, you know, and a very well designed one that really brings people in and keeps them there. And so my guess is paying a million low seven figures. I don't know what a low seven figure is. Does that just mean it's one million, two million? Between one and nine, I guess.

Oh, I guess low, yeah, so between one and four.

So low would be below five?

Yeah, maybe. What's the cutoff of low seven figures? Because you'd think that five would be mid, right? Five or six would be mid, seven would be high.

Well, no, I think mid seven figures. Oh, well, let's see. Okay, seven figures is a million dollars, right? Yeah. So mid seven figures. Would you assume that that's like five, right?

Yeah, like five mil maybe.

Because you get a new figure when you get up to 10, yeah. So low would probably like two maybe. does two seem like i would say anywhere between we should be that i think one thing we've proved

proven here is we should be baseball announcers i would um guess that it would be between one

and four it's just a like rounding error for something the size of the new york times to acquire something that has still probably to this day so clickable for people and you get people into the other games you've got like my guess is that that's what i'm ultimately supporting your point here andrew which is like i don't think they killed it and i'm sure i'm sure that it's doing just fine for them and even if it isn't that low seven figures is a very modest sum of money for a company like the new york times at this point yeah i think that that is the brilliance

of it because you mentioned um in this conversation has come up like their other their other word games and like i'm not really interested in those like wordle got me playing that spelling b game a little bit because wordle kind of created this need and then when i was done with it for the day i wanted to play more kind of related games now i didn't stick with that one but the fact that i was even giving it a shot as a guy who i really dislike crossword puzzles they make me almost i have a lot of problems but they make me almost physically uncomfortable i've told you this before like doing a crossword puzzle on an airplane makes me feel claustrophobic because i'm already in a tight space in that seat and then i feel like i'm i feel like i can't escape this puzzle that i'm trying to do because you know back in the early 2000s before we had smartphones to entertain us it was very common for viz and i to take the in-flight magazine and go to the back and you know we'd each have our magazine we try to do the crossword puzzle together and it would i would want to crawl out of my skin after like You

two minutes of trying to play it so I don't know like getting me to like download the app and now I have the app on my phone and I see the other things and they this article glancingly hits on this idea of the wordle bot which I find fascinating like when you're done with your puzzle now you can go to the wordle bot and I do think that's behind the paywall for what it's worth because only certain people on our chain have access to it but it'll break down like all the okay you started with this word that means you had these many possibilities means there's 15,000 more words in my database that you might get on your next try. And it'll just take you turn by turn, breaking down each turn you took and then comparing it to what everybody else in the world did and then comparing it to what the computer would have done and ranking you in a whole bunch of different ways. Like, there's so much data packed into it that it's really interesting.

Yeah, somebody, did I read right, that somebody else built that, and I don't know if the Times acquired it or if they're just recommending it, Is that also part of the Times games page?

It's part of the Times, and one thing that was in this article that I found fascinating, I'm looking for it now, it looks like it was developed by some folks at the Times who were actually more like, potentially even maybe from the investigative journalism department or something that crunches numbers for news stories. Not investigative journalism.

Yeah, it came from a really, this is the quote, came from a really clever team inside the newsroom called The Upshot. Okay, that's why. I saw the upshot, and it made me think, oh, the upshot is some other thing, but yeah, you're totally right. They kind of, in parallel and independently from the game itself and the work that my team was doing, took this really interesting scientific journalistic approach to Wordle, and once we made it part of the New York Times, they were able to, at least for New York Times users with New York Times accounts, start to see what their scores were and what their words were and kind of develop it. So, yeah, you're right. That comes from the call is coming from inside the Times. This is amazing.

So I wonder if there's now a war going on between the New York Times and Slate, because this article in Slate mentions that the Wordlebot often suggested using Slate, that five-letter word, as a starting word. And that's brought up in this article, because, of course, it's in Slate magazine, as I still call it. And now when you go to The Upshot, their main New York Times dot com slash The Upshot, the headline is Wordlebot's word switch. Slate is out. Crane is back in. They're no longer recommending using slate as the first word.

Yeah, I could see them being a little a little miffed. I mean, again, it's like, do a hammer and a nail have a huge rivalry? Probably not like the New York Times is going to be fine. whatever gets written in slate but you know uh you make the head of the whole division available for this q a which i feel like the q a was handled appropriately yeah but like just the kind of setup of the piece of like did the times take a big number doo-doo on wordle like what you know they

must not have been like loving that headline although i don't think that this was actually i'm looking at this story in the new york times and it's just like more wordle bot number crunching And again, it says here, the latest update, Slate is out, Crane is now the bot's preferred opening guess in regular mode, and Least is still preferred in hard mode. I play hard mode, of course. Also, they don't reference that. I don't think anybody calls it a number doo-doo.

I really mixed my whatever's there. I followed.

I followed.

Here I go once again with the email. Every week, I hope that it's from a female. Oh, man, it's not from a female.

All right. Do you have a quick-ish email or V-mail? I am, after this, off to interview the writer Isaac Fitzgerald for Livewire. He has a very interesting memoir out called Dirtbag Massachusetts. You might actually find this book interesting. First of all, it's well-written, and it also is largely, well, a lot of it is set in Massachusetts, maybe even in Boston and some places that you've been around to.

That writer's name doesn't ring a bell to me. This is somebody who's established, a well-known writer that I should have heard of, and now I'm just embarrassing myself.

I don't know if you should have heard of him. He wrote a previous children's book called How to Be a Pirate. He was the book's editor for BuzzFeed. But, yeah, this is, I think, his first memoir like this, and it's really well done. But anyway, now I've taken up even more time from our email and V-mail segment explaining that we need to keep it relatively tight.

Well, I've had a lot of coffee, so I'm sure I will read this in the machine gun rate that I've been spitting out my stumbles all day today. Anyway, this is going back to our conversation about the pizza that I accidentally ordered from Red Robin. Oh, Donato's. Yeah, I was just using my app. I found Donato's pizza. I ordered it. when it came it came in a box that said uh it gave an actual little history of the company and it said you know we were part

We're now partnering with Red Robin, but we were a pizza company that started in Ohio, and I'm pretty sure that this email that we got is coming from Ohio. This is from listener Winchy, who says, as a former Columbus resident, I have so much to say about Donato's pizza. Andrew, I don't think that you were Pasquale. That is the term you gave it when you for a while there, people were ordering pizza from a place called Pasquale, and it turns out it was just Chuck E. Cheese pizza that was rebranded in the pandemic for delivery. I didn't know that Red Robin has Donato's now, but it's a real pizza chain in Ohio that's known for its St. Louis-style pizza. I've also heard it called bar pie, but it's a round pizza on a thin cracker-style crust that's always cut into squares. That was a big draw for me, Luke, the fact that this pizza was cut into little squares. Other people have written in, by the way, to call that a party cut or a tavern cut, for whatever that's worth. I don't know if they still do it but for a while Donato's had a bake at home sitch you could pick up the pizza at the stores and later on you could then take it home and cook it I'm a little surprised you didn't have them in Cleveland anyway that's the background I'm just sort of cutting to the end here because you're in a hurry says the Donato's talk brought back so many high school and college memories for me and now I really want Donato's the crust is so thin it really is the perfect pizza to eat by yourself. I agree with that. That's one of the reasons I love this so much. Small little pieces you can eat throughout the night. I don't know if I'm allowed to admit that since I now live in New York City. Spoken like the Salsa Cowboys. Thanks. Power out Wenchie. Wenchie, sorry.

See, this is this raises a really interesting point that I kind of, I'd been a little dismissive because of the Pasquale situation. I think I'd been really dismissive of the Donato's idea because it's like, well, if Red Robin is just cooking you a pizza, but it's like, think about it how difficult is a pizza to really cook if you've got the right ingredients um and you got a big oven at red robin presumably like there isn't any reason they couldn't make a an edible pizza you know what i mean it's not like it's not like chevron or like you know it's like yeah right you know like you're buying getting a pizza and you realize it's actually from ace hardware like it's not an unrelated industry it's a place where they put cheese on things that are breaded and melt them like already in some form or fashion right like this is this is within their ability to do and also the way that the you describe the donados and the way that listener describes the donados makes me think that it's definitely like you know they were keeping with whatever those like like it isn't just like they rented the name donados it's like that party cut you're talking about the thin crust it all seems to check out with being very much in the style of this kind of pizza that people really like so it's like yeah they cooked it at a red robin kitchen instead of cooking it at a different kitchen that said donato's on it on the building like it's probably a pretty minor difference and i bet that pizza could be quite quite satisfying yeah and i think

you said that you've had it before i remember you saying like yeah it's kind of good as and i hope you don't regret saying this because it sort of echoes in my brain sometimes when i'm thinking about getting a donato's pizza which i don't know if i've gone back to get another one yeah but i i will but you were like yeah it's kind of it's like kind of garbage pizza which that sounds really rude but i mean i put that in i would put like dominoes in that category too right and i would say that this is better than dominoes pizza hut like yeah just like fast food chain pizza it's not as good as like the independent places i get but like we eat those

we're not too good for that oh and there are times when i prefer it you know what you mean like i i will sometimes drive to this pizza hut that's like two neighborhoods over to pick up yeah because they won't deliver it i'm in a pizza hut desert here and i'm i'm not in a desert for like there's a place called ken's artisanal which is so good by the way like is very very delicious you know wood fire pizza so no no slight on them but it's like i don't always feel like something artisanal i don't sometimes i don't want i was i got a pizza the other day and i won't name the place i don't want to seem mean but i went in and they just had these like it was wood fire and basically the only thing that didn't have meat on it was the margarita right oh yeah which is fine but the margarita can be a little bit not bland is the wrong word but i you know i wouldn't i wouldn't mind a little topping on there and so i asked could i get um olives added and they didn't have any olives which i thought kind of strange basically what it was is they had olives that had pits in them that were for some salad yeah but i nobody wanted to de-pit the olives that's reasonable i mean that's kind of asking a lot so i was like well do you it was i was like sitting at the bar like do you have martini olives she was like yeah can i get a side of martini olives sure so i get my margarita pizza and i just like cut they gave me a little knife i just like cut these martini

all these green olives in half and put them on it was it was delicious but it was involved yeah that really bums me out because i know you have to go but like um first of all here's my hot take to close the show you can totally miss me with wood-fired pizza like i i've had it i know it's better i know that i have no class or taste but like i i don't really care for it that much give me just a real pizza um but also like you would think that any pizza place in portland would realize like pizza is a great option for people who don't eat meat like what a strange it was

this place was more promoted as a mediterranean restaurant and they happen to have pizza okay so they had pasta mediterranean is a very was very broad yeah they had pasta they had pizza it wasn't a pizza place per se okay but i zeroed in on the pizza as being my best option for stuff that didn't have meat in it and i was a little surprised because and i'm just such a nudge anyway like i'm just like the king of like asking for a little extra help on everything you know like and i unfortunately maybe you could say usually get my way you know what i mean it's pretty rare that i run up against kind of a hard no like really this whole restaurant olives on the pizza not possible i mean i didn't say it that way because you know it just is what it is but as i was there cutting up my martini olives and putting them on and again actually tasted totally fine so like it was cool But yeah, I was like, well, what I wouldn't give for a little stuffed crust pizza from old Pizza Hut. I'll tell you who's not out pizzaing the hut. This place I'm at. Ken's.

Yes. Or no, not Ken's.

It wasn't Ken's. That was a different place. In defense of Ken's. Actually, and the ambiance of that place I really like as well. So that was, I promise you I was not at Ken's. I'll tell you later where I was. Okay.

Why would you have sliced olives at a Mediterranean restaurant is what I want to know.

Well, I mean, yes, of course. all right that's gonna do it for today's episode thank you everyone for listening uh we are gonna be back here tomorrow oh tomorrow's a big day for me andrew a crew of people is showing up at the house that i'm working on to pour a new cement floor in what is going to become the tbtl studio so that's gonna be happening just steps from where i'm doing the show i'll be doing the show from up there tomorrow and it's going to be all i can do to not leave during every break and go out there and like just stare at it because they have a big hose and cement's coming out and they're floating it it's like very exciting gotta carve your

initials in some place to screen really really quickly i'm going to step on your ending here and just say um a little dazzling detail that i heard today was you had mentioned um having i think some moles or mice in the area and one listener said that they were watching your hey dummies video in the newsletter on friday where you were out in this uh garage that you're renovating and somebody said they saw a mouse run by behind you which bubbles was there i don't know how bubbles wouldn't have been on top of that situation but i don't know i may have to go back

and watch the footage yeah that would be the brooder that would be really shocking to me and right yeah where's the cat hey bubbles dude i mean get with it like this should be your whole thing

Yeah, we got to double check that anyway.

All right. Okay. Well, we'll check on that. We'll have a full report tomorrow. And God bless that mouse. But if he is in there, he's getting covered with about three inches of concrete tomorrow.

Concrete shoes. See, he's going to sleep with the fishes.

All right. We'll see you tomorrow. Until then, have a great Tuesday. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

Hello, Luke and Andrew. I was told that I can read my favorite Too Beautiful to Live for you guys. When Andrew learned he'd be driving from Seattle to Denver, he knew he needed a very moist vehicle, so he headed to the rental car lot and told the agent that he needed the moldiest car they had in stock. The agent offered him a Honda, but Andrew thought it was too sludgy. Then they offered him a Chevy, but he thought that one was too purple. What about a Ford earwig, they asked. No way, Andrew yelled slimely. Those cars are too gummy. I want that one. He pointed to a delicious car in the corner of the garage that was so small you could fit it inside of a tow. Okay, they said. So Andrew drove the tiny Mitsubishi through the mountains towards Denver, and the car gnawed and shredded the whole way. Andrew thought it might break down any moment. When he finally arrived to Denver, his friend Luke just shook his head ragefully and said, you're never allowed to pick your own car again. Andrew agreed. Power out.