Muse

A little BG on me. I do HR. It means human resources. Here at TAC, my name is Eric Rossdale. Some people call me Cool Eric. They called me that once. Some young people, too. Some one young person did that. I love people, to say that another way. I love people. That one's got a little more fun to it, doesn't it? TBTL! i thought i was shame eating in private what is shame eating i don't think we have enough time for that tonight as i tried to explain before you cannot get honey from a hornet's nest i just don't think there's any science to support that buddy there's some very basic science out there

supporting that trust me pal what a fun terrifying joke that's science these are facts in science we call that a hypothesis you find something to back it up and we can talk now if you excuse me i was

watching mama's family this will be blown way out of proportion you have my word on

all right hello good morning and welcome everyone to a wednesday edition of tbtl the show that just might be too beautiful to live be careful though it's spicy my name is luke burbank i am your host yes he does coming to you from the hollywood broadcast center right here in portland oregon where i am not kidding five minutes ago as andrew and i were dialing up getting ready to do the show i looked out and it was beautiful blue skies oh ma pa it's just beautiful and then in the intervening moments as i look out there now it is dark rainy clouds didn't know you like to get wet though so i don't know what is going on weather-wise today i know what's going on as far as episode 3801 in a collector series let the fun begin which is where we arrived today despite the fact that yesterday i think i said it was like episode 3789 or something i made a huge mistake i just apparently completely forgot how counting works yesterday i was looking at a number from the previous show from so two days ago which would have been, I guess, 3,799. Now, a lot of people would look at that and they would say, well, 3,799, what comes after that? A lot of people would say 3,800. But that wasn't where my brain, I've kind of a galaxy brain going. So I'm using new math and I'm working in all kinds of four dimensional directions as far as counting. But it's a bummer because yesterday was 3,800, which is a round number. It's fun to celebrate those. So let's just celebrate episode 3,800 in our heart today here on episode 3801. The NFL says Mike Evans, the receiver for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, was not, in fact, signing autographs for a ref as he ran off the field the other day after a game. But what he was actually doing, apparently. What are you doing here? I don't know if it's a lot better. Doesn't seem like it fully cleared the air, so we will get into that. And also, we got a little bit of a late start on the show today, which was totally my fault because I spent the morning just battling with the realities of life in 2022 in about 10 different directions involving phone calls and emails and trying to just navigate the world where we don't have enough people working in enough places.

This is so boring and forever taking.

It took a while, but here we are, ready to do the show with the help of this young man, the longest-running cobro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships, although these days he's really animated by one thing and one thing only.

Kittens! Inspired by kittens!

He is Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Hello, my friend. Hey, Luke. I was just thinking, as you were talking there, I think I want to get me a sniffing rag.

I don't know if that's really a thing, but it's something that I'm going to come up with, which is a rag that can hold scent that I can smell throughout the show. I don't know if I told you this. I blabbed about it way, way too much on Spotless a couple of weeks ago, but I got myself a little vial of, like, fragrant oil. It's something called Egyptian musk. It's a scent that I used to wear in high school because my arty friend, Henry Cahoo, wore it.

Is that one of Elon's brothers?

I think so, yeah. Yeah, me and Henry. Henry was a cool guy. He was kind of, like, goth adjacent. He was, like, one of my first, like, cool friends who, like, kind of helped pull me out of the grip.

I meant Egyptian musk, not Henry. I know, yeah. In case you thought I was. No, no, I got it. I just was. Because one of those jokes was hilarious and the other one would have made no sense. Right. The lack of reaction from you made me worry that you were, you weren't aware.

of the hilarity of my joke yeah no i was doing that thing where i was trying to complete a thought which is sometimes difficult for me as it is in the best of circumstances yeah uh no but anyway but what i anyway so i had i wanted to you know just chalk it all up to probably midlife crisis or whatever i was thinking about my little egyptian musk that i wore in high school and probably a little bit of college and i've also kind of as an adult realized that oh like scent is really important to me i think it took me a long time to kind of realize that but it can have very calming effects on me. And so on a whim, I bought this stuff online a while back. And it's okay. It smells nice. It doesn't smell exactly like I remembered it smelling in high school. But my point is, for the past few weeks during the show, I'll kind of put a little bit of this on my wrists and kind of rub my wrists together. Yeah, and sort of smell it throughout the show. But the thing is, I'm sitting here. I'm sort of sick of smelling my wrists, Luke. And I thought, would it be weird if I got a little rag? And I was also thinking, like, maybe there are some other scents out there that I should be messing with, you know, mess around. find out as the kids say about scented oils um i'm wondering would it be weird just to get a little rag that i put the oil on so i can just smell the rag during the show and would somebody think that i'm huffing is it getting a little bit too close does this does this rag smell like ether right it doesn't get into some blue velvet territory if before i talk you hear me go

and take a huge huff of a rag it's funny that you would bring this up because i feel like this maybe this really is a middle-aged kind of guy thing because i've been really getting into scents as well like i've worn cologne for kind of a long time now i wear um home by yves saint loren um and that was because i was wearing calvin klein eternity for men for into my 30s at some point carrie was like we can definitely upgrade this we can we can we can improve this situation uh and i'm like really because i've been wearing this since eighth grade did there be any problem with that and she was like yeah you smell like a boy but um and then and then i started to get a lot of compliments about this other scent that uh that somebody else had picked out for me but anyway i have so that's one thing that i've kind of just done pretty much as a go-to but i have been partially because of having this cat now and having a litter box and being really worried about any kind of odors i've been like getting into candles i've noticed that when i go to addie's apartment in seattle she's got these diffusers going that are diffusing some kind of really great but subtle smell becca's got some diffusers and candles and so i'm really getting into this idea and i think what you might need though instead of a instead of a rag a sniffing rag what if you got something that was a diffuser that that basically just kind of pumped a subtle amount of that smell that you like into the room so you could smell it but you wouldn't have to keep you know basically huffing you wouldn't have to huff during the show but then when i go out in

public that's when i pull out my portable huffing rag right and then that's when you get a little

no you get a little vial that's just got a little like this the screw top of the vial has just a kind of a little sort of toothpick like point on it and you dip it in the oil and you put a little In the corner of your nose and then you sniff Like in the olden days Like when they do like a pinch of tobacco I know that sounds like a Cocaine reference I really didn't even mean it to be Like you could just kind of Or you could just take a little on the edge of your Like on the tip of your finger before you go out and just kind of like You know hit the inside of your Nostrils and then you're good to go for the whole day

I do think there's something a little bit Different about a scent that is like kind of On me Or on I'm you know I'm mostly Joking about the sniffing rag I thought it'd just be a funny way To start the show because sniffing rags don't sound very sophisticated but um i also am very interested and i was talking to genevieve and hannah about this on spotless um i am very interested in thinking long and hard about the olfactory profile of this house now that we're a two cat family again and like i'm very paranoid about nose blindness people come in the house i say does it smell like cats are here and everybody's like no no your house smells fine but that's because people lie to be nice and

i'm always i have never ever once now this one you had one well no you had two cats you had theo yeah i've never smelled any even tiny hint of cattiness in your house i do think this new

house which you've only been to a couple of times during a season when the windows were open i do think and we'll find out i do think this new house really sort of traps scent like we have windows that open in most of the rooms but kind of our big main rooms don't have windows that open and And I've noticed like kind of coming home, maybe even a day after cooking a big dinner or something and still having a little bit of a whiff of yesterday's dinner in the house. And this might be honestly, it might be a bit of a classist thing of me that maybe I shouldn't be proud of. But like I kind of just like for me, walking into a house and smelling somebody's dinner from the night before always kind of has kind of turned. me off a little bit like i like walking into spaces like your your house i mean you talk about addy um and becca having nice smelling places i think you always have a nice smelling place too with your diffusers you always have a very open airy you know with a bit of a scent i i like that i don't like coming into a place that sort of smells a little bit too lived in sort of and i'm worried about that with this house with two animals i noticed that even though our new and the I know that our new kitten is a small little guy, but I feel like he, I can notice his smell like more than bananas. And it's not because he's a bigger cat. He's a different cat. And I'm like, oh, that's probably because I'm nose blind to the catty smells of my other cat. So, yeah, between sniffing rags, diffusers, and also staying on Genevieve's good side, because Genevieve does not like too, too perfumed of an experience. I need to kind of carve out a middle way.

And that's the whole thing there because obviously if a house has a kind of a slightly funky odor to it, that can be not great. But then the thing that's also not great is if there's like 11 Glade potpourri things plugged in. It's like the most SC Johnson wax based, you know, just basically it's like smell dominance from some chemical that's probably mined by children in some faraway place. And then it's like you plug it into your light socket and it just never starts pumping out some kind of very synthetic smelling thing. That's also not great. So the key is the subtlety, and that's what I feel like they are dialing in more and more in the scent industry, certainly in the kind of like the more nuanced one. Actually, Addy, speaking of which, is opening – you know where the – we used to call it the Pacific Antique Gallery down there on Lander Street? It's that big building that's got all kinds of different booths in it where people are selling kind of cool furniture.

Is this in Bellingham or –

No, no, this is down in South Seattle, down south of the stadium on Lander.

I don't think I've been to that one, but it sounds like my ideal kind of place. Oh, my gosh. I love places like that.

Half of the furniture in the various places I lived when I lived in Seattle was all stuff that I bought down there. And now I think it's called the Lander Street Market or something like that. It's the same place, but it has a new name and a new owner, but it's still the same kind of idea. And Addie has a booth down there now. She's actually starting in November. She has a little store called Knack. what's she doing she's just gonna have all kinds of she has i know this is my child so like this is typical parent behavior no i'm into this you tend to you know tend to be the number one fan of your kid but like uh she's just always had this really really incredibly good um sense of taste and and uh kind of a great aesthetic like when i go to her house now her apartment i'm jealous i'm like how do i make my apartment look more like this this person's apartment she just has a great eye for objects whether it is a a little thing that you put a candle in or a you know i mean you name it like uh the way that she has her record player set up and the way that she is like just you just look around the house and you're just kind of like man that's exactly that's exactly the plant that's exactly the pot that should have that plant in it you know what i mean just that kind of stuff and so she's gonna have a little a booth there at the the lander

whatever it's called lander street vintage it's called now i'm looking at the lander street vintage

it's called knack so go check it out but um starting in november i don't think it's up yet but um but anyway all i was gonna say is like she's always got like this kind of diffuser that like i said is i started to see it more like i want to say sort of maybe not high end but like if you were getting your hair cut at somewhere pretty designy or if you were gonna get a some kind of a if you're at a spa but like a kind of a nicer spa they've figured out that like a little goes a long way with the smells that's all i'm trying to say you were saying genevieve doesn't really want the whole house to smell like a perfume bomb went off yeah exactly there are a lot of they've figured out some ways to make it so it smells nice but it's not like overwhelming

yeah and and also that you kind of hinted at this as well like more of natural smells i can smell good through diffusers and not artificial um smells or or what have you so i'll be working

on this i'll let you know how it goes i had uh i don't want to over dramatize this because nothing like specifically terrible happened but i just had kind of a run of things this morning that just felt like i said very much an example of kind of how life is a bit different in 2022 than it would have been in you know 2002 or something now you said something to me on the show recently andrew which i'm really it has really been living in my head since you said it which was rudy's Barbershop in Portland just may not be The place for me To get my haircut considering almost every time i do something related to the place i come away with some kind of frustration that i then complain about on this show and yet i continue to go there and the reason is because they have they still have a lot of locations it doesn't take a my schedule is often in flux i i'm not like you i'm not sort of able to um schedule a haircut a month out and then stick to it some of that's just my own disorganization some of that's the nature of the job stuff i'm doing but um this morning well it started off this morning i realized i really need to get a haircut we're having a wedding celebration for my brother sammy i keep saying wedding celebration because he's already married this is just they kind of eloped and so this is a celebration of them being

married yeah i hear what you're saying he's double dipping and you don't appreciate it one well i

just i was thinking because i feel like if i say wedding that's kind of misleading because they're not getting married so i'm saying wedding celebration we're celebrating the fact that

they're married you know what in all seriousness i think in i i never once i mean i guess i i know you and sammy but i never once questioned it and i don't think most listeners would because in this post-pandemic world luke which is also related to what you're talking about i think a lot of people are doing stuff like this they had to have a zoom wedding or they did something very very small in a cornfield or a sun a sunflower field somewhere and now they're you know now that things have opened back up we can share these experiences with more people so that makes

total sense so so we're going up uh to um the sort of bellingham uh mountain vernon area for that this weekend and i was like i got to get a haircut because i'll probably be in some photos or something so i get up this morning and i find that there is an appointment at a certain time at one of the rudy's and so i make the appointment via the uh via the you know the website which of course then also takes my credit card number i've complained about this before because now I'm on the hook for that haircut. Okay, that's fine. But then I realize after I think about it for a few minutes, I'm like, you know what? It would actually be more convenient based on the errands that I have to run later today to do it over at another part of town in what's called the Pearl in Portland, which is a particular neighborhood where I was going to be already for something. So I go back on the website and I find the one that's in the Pearl. And I just think I'll make an appointment in the Pearl if they have an availability, and then I'll call the other store and just ask them to please cancel my appointment so sure enough the pearl they have an appointment at the time that i need so i make an additional reservation now they've got my credit card and my info in two times today at various rudy's um but it's fine because i have a plan i'm just gonna once they because this is before any of these things open this is like 7 30 in the morning i'm doing this and so the i get an email from rudy's that says congratulations your your appointment at the pearl for tomorrow is confirmed and i'm like what and it's like oh technically they're not open today so their software their calendar software had just moved me to tomorrow like when i was looking at what i thought was today on the schedule i was looking at tomorrow and i could have i should have been more attentive i should have noted the exact day but i just it went past me so now i've got an appointment tomorrow that i don't want to use at a rudy's so then it's like nine something now people should be up and at them and working and whatever so now the problem is that location is closed you can't call them i thought i said well yeah you just can get down the horn with them but you can't exactly so then i have to call so i call them and i get the voicemail and they say these are the days that we're open and i'm like i know that meanwhile half the other time when i call ruse i get routed to some 800 number that was the guy last time who was like giving me grief about trying to change my appointment i was like how do i get back to that guy this time there's this by the time they get to this location in the pearl tomorrow and they like open up their computer i'm already going to be within the window where they don't let me cancel right oh that was the other thing it was like do you in the email the confirmation email at the bottom it said do you need to cancel and i was i do click on this link and i click on the link it doesn't take me to a page that says cancel here it takes me to a page that says message us and then i click on message us and then it just takes me to like an faq page like it doesn't doesn't give me their email address it doesn't start a chat with them

it just sends me to a totally like static faq page with like a hundred commonly asked questions none of which are helping me just let them know that i don't want to get my haircut there tomorrow within the window of time that i have before they're going to charge me for it that's frustrating

Yeah, the website, I love Rudy's, but I will say that I do not like their website. I find it very, and any website for a business, by the way, that does that, where they kind of tease you into thinking that you'll be able to actually contact someone, but it's kind of like, oh, click here for ways to contact us, and then frequently asked questions. How to contact us? Well, check this, check, you know, somebody else in the Rudy's community might have already had this issue. Have you checked these FAQs? And it's just like, oh.

just want to send a note right i mean it was literally a thing was like hey do you need to

cancel here's the link and you click on and then it just takes you to something that's totally not helpful to the canceling so finally now it's like 9 40 and i'm like so i call the rudy's that i still have an appointment with today and this poor person who answers the phone they're like rudy's and i'm just like hi i have a two appointments with you but one of them is the pearl but they're not open today but i need to cancel it but isn't there like a person i can call who's like at the central i'd like i just like unload like a two minute manic soliloquy to them while they're

popping their gum like a team yeah they're like well what's your name and i give them my name and

they go oh yeah uh well so you want to cancel the one at the pearl tomorrow and i'm like yeah they're okay it's canceled yeah do you want to keep the one today at hawthorne i go yeah they go okay we'll come by it's like it was fixed in one second yeah i just had i had torqued to myself up into this whole state because of the and because the other thing that i was dealing with this morning was i have a doctor's appointment next week just like a physical with my i tell all my middle-aged guys doctor who by the way i'm really i want to get your thoughts on this i'm really considering trying to switch doctors because i've only had one appointment with this person it was like last year was like a physical just a kind of wellness check and it was it was this is the doctor who then um well first of all he introduced me to like the various medical assistants as being a famous person which i felt was some kind of hipaa violation it's not hipaa

violation but it is not a good it's it should be against code i would say like this you know very

professional i would say maybe like 25 year old like you know pa or medical assistant comes in and he's like do you know who this guy is and i'm like can we not when i'm in our um when i'm wearing a napkin could we lay off with the do you know who this guy is line of conversation i would like to be as anonymous as possible in this scenario where various embarrassing things are happening to be yeah of course i think that's so and then he came to a show i told you this last time when i when this was all kind of unfolding about a year ago he um what was it oh uh he was like yeah we live right by the theater my wife and i live by the theater i said oh you've never been he goes

yeah my wife doesn't care for it oh that's right i thought he didn't care for no no his wife doesn't care for it right i think it was his wife that makes more sense yeah yeah and so i was like oh

Okay. And now in his defense, I do think I said something almost reflexively like, oh, you should come to a show sometime. Like, I think I'm just in the habit of saying that if the topic comes up. This is Livewire related, by the way. But I didn't really he'd already established that his wife wasn't interested. So I was like, OK, fine. And then, like, I get done with a show and he's like standing at the foot of the stage. Like, hey, what's up? I'm your doctor. I was like, I was like, all right. I got these results. Yeah. Here you go. You know what? It is infected. what um so don't worry about the discharge tell me if the smell changes so so anyway um i get an i got a note from his office a while ago saying you know it's been a year you're ready for another checkup i was like okay so i made the appointment and then i didn't realize that it was conflicting with something that i have to do for live wire like this is for next week and i can't move the live wire thing so i just wanted to call the doctor's office and say is it possible for me to move this thing by like a half hour or an hour it is impossible to get a human at this doctor's office i called probably eight times this morning and you get the kind of phone tree first of all they don't even list this guy as a doctor there i'm like does he work there it's like it's like press this button if you want to make an appointment so i press that button and then it sends me to a voicemail and then the voicemail says or it actually puts me on hold and it says if you'd like to leave a message it leaves you on hold in that way that it just keeps recirculating you and no one ever picks up the line so finally after the fourth time when it goes if you'd like to leave a message leave him press this button i did that and then it says um legacy health voicemail is full click like oh so then i i i'm calling back and then there's the like the sixth time it's like if you want to talk to a medical assistant press this button i'm thinking maybe they call the folks at the front desk the medical assistants even though that seems like that would be weird so i press that button just to see if that gets me a human they're like if you if you need to leave a message for the medical assistant for doctor and then they list like three doctors names press this button they go through a the entire alphabet of doctors at no time do they mention my doctor like i'm like does he even work there did he ever work there is this like a a scam did i go in through some false door that took me just to like a bizarre live wire fan oh my god what's even happening

oh my god have you gotten to the bottom of this yet have you googled this guy

oh well he's on he's online he exists but uh you know like it was it's just the strangest thing and i still cannot get human being over there so i was i was toggling between trying to deal with that and trying to deal with this haircut situation this morning and in both cases it just felt like i was i was just calling into the absolute like void of the fact that there just aren't enough folks right now to answer the phones at the various places and i don't blame the people that are that are working at rudy's or at this doctor's office like the people who are actually showing up to do the work are not the problem it's just the larger structural issues that are making it very very difficult at times and what it's really doing like before the show you and i were talking about how you had had an experience of going to a store over the weekend and they had kind of hung a note that said you know we're we're we're out you know the store is closed for a moment or something yeah the unfortunate effect of all of this is that it is and this is i'm not this is not the proper response from me but it is driving me more and more to stupid amazon like i wear this wear this i use this kind of like um hair gunk that's like uh american crew fiber is technically what it's called and i use the smallest amount of this every day like the tiniest bit just to kind of push my bangs back so that they're kind of somewhat under control but you know i go through the stuff takes me about like a year to go through it's like a hockey puck size little like you know container of it it takes me like a year to go through it so about once a year i have to go to like a cvs or a right aid and go to the like hair care department and find some of this and buy it or whatever i went to this i can't remember which one it was could have been a cvs could have been a right aid and it was like it was wild how limited the stock was of anything like i mean the shells The shelves were just bare in every direction. And I'm walking around like, so of course they didn't have that. They didn't have anything close to it. And I realized, I was like, I could also just have this delivered to my stupid mailbox tomorrow. Or I can keep wandering the various pharmacies of Portland trying to find one that has some American crew fiber in it. And that just seems to be happening more and more to me where it's just like easier to just, which is bad. Because we all agree that Amazon is not making the world a better place But from a convenience factor When we have these experiences with retail The way it is right now It just tends to drive me towards my own personal convenience of Amazon

And plus going to a CVS isn't exactly like You know, supporting mom and pop stores either You know, that's a good point Those CVS stores Actually, I should maybe check what I'm about to say

Because it also could have been a Rite Aid or a War Right, but whatever They're all the same hellscape in my mind

But the thing is, you know what? i'm trying to figure out maybe this is more influenced just by where i live now and like if i find myself in one of those stores it's like off of aurora up north in shoreline or up here in north seattle or something and um and maybe these stores are hardest hit but you are right that like i can't remember the last time those stores went from being small but useful little drug stores as we called them back in the day pharmacy and drug stores and they had limited supplies of things but that you could count on them then they kind of got bigger and bigger and you could get your beer there and not groceries but like they started having much bigger aisles and more stuff and they became like mini grocery stores bigger than a mini mart i don't know but still sort of had this sort of a nice suburban feel to them maybe that's because i was going to them in more like suburban areas like at my parents house or something i'm not sure but like now i feel like the past years Anytime I find myself in one of those stores, it's really kind of depressing because they expanded at this rate where they're building these huge footprint stores. They expanded the aisles. But there's always like some toy section that has been like abandoned. And there's somebody left a cart there. They were restocking the seasonal toys, but they left their cart there because there was somebody probably trying to like pinch a 22 ounce of beer or something like that. And then, like, everything just always feels, like, bombed out and sort of half-staffed and just, like, kind of empty and depressing. But, again, I might be going to the hardest-hit ones in my new home.

Yeah, well, I'm not much help because I'm also apparently going to the ones that are also the hardest. It might be because we both just, like, live in cities or something. But, like, I will add to that, and I guess the good news is I'm not really going to – or which one I'm mad at, but like, I think it's Rite Aid now that doesn't, they actually don't, they often do not have a person at a register anymore. They made the decision, also this could be CVS, one of these ones made the decision that they are going to try to drive all traffic to self-checkout. But what that means is they still. need to have a person standing because no one knows how to do the self-checkout so they have to have a person and also they probably don't trust us so they don't have the person at the register they just have the person standing where the line forms for self-checkout to try to walk you through self-checkout i guess their thought is after a couple years of this we'll just all have it figured out and they'll they will they won't have to have as many employees because it'll all be sort of automated so that's kind of annoying one of them i don't know if it's the same store a different one doesn't have hand baskets anymore and i think it's my guess is it's a theft thing like if somebody walked in and they had a hand basket they just fill it up with stuff and then they just walk out it's it's easier than like you can only carry so much stuff but do

they have carts or anything i know carts are a huge theft item in the city grocery stores around here because people want the grocery carts on the street you know um they don't have like this one

doesn't have carts either so i mean the one i'm thinking of is speaking of the neighborhood called the pearl this one's also in the pearl and it's like i don't think they had carts i just remember a couple of times going in one of these places and being like hey where's the basket because i'm just getting a few items and they're like yeah we don't have those anymore and i'm like how do you who i they're like yeah i don't know they just got rid of them for some reason my theory is that they were a convenient way for a person to have a number of items and then leave the store so their their their solution no more baskets so now i'm just like i'm walking around with like a you know a can of shaving cream and like a revlon cover-up for my pimples and like four other loose items that i'm just trying to like cradle in my arms as i stumble towards the self-checkout it's not a great experience self-checkout doesn't bother me i always opt in

for that too unless i have a really unless i'm at a grocery store and i have like a lot of groceries And I feel like it's unfair to the people in line. But like the places that I go are they're they're expanding more and more of the self checkout. And I don't know what that I don't know what the proper argument is from like a labor perspective, like pre pandemic, pre huge, huge labor shortage. I don't know if, you know, good jobs or even just like kind of starting level jobs were disappearing because we were, you know, giving more responsibility to the robots. But from a business perspective, it certainly makes sense. I don't see people you know I don't know what's going on with the people in the stores that you're going to but like they seem pretty straightforward you have to you know definitely have somebody check your ID if you're buying beer or wine or something so that can take a second but I mean it definitely seems more efficient to have like I just went back to my old grocery store don't tell my new grocery store but I just went back to my old grocery store and they just opened up three more self checkouts there and there's still one guy a friendly guy who I kind of you've gotten to know because i go to grocery stores too much but um you know and he can he'll just zip around and check your id and boop boop boop it out and people are just kind of coming and going and obviously like one person can kind of if they're on their toes handle like kind of eight people checking out all at once i mean it makes sense to me and i don't see a lot of people like kind of struggling you know depending on where you are and who you're dealing with but it doesn't seem to be a huge problem of people not knowing how to use them i had a moment of just pure

fury on sunday not because of any specific incident but just because of this feeling so i was at i was grabbing my um grilled cheese fixings before my big sunday football cheese off and i was in this fred meyer by my place and i was in the self-checkout line and i was looking and i was realizing that the reason that most of us i believe i mean i'm kind of speculating here but we were the most of us were in the self-checkout line because the lines that had an actual human checker were like prohibitively long and i realized the reason is because they only have it's a sunday it's a football sunday at a massive fred meyer i mean this one is like sprawling they've got everything right they had two i think it was two human checkers maybe three max like it was like out of the like 12 lanes of you could be having a human checker it was like maximum of three of them were actually being staffed so what happens then those lines become insanely long so what do you do you then do your own work of checking yourself out and the fact there was something about just standing in the line and feeling like i was being socially engineered in a way that was like they know what's going on like they're you know they're not they're not idiots social engineering what is it exactly man how does it work like the fact that i felt like i was a rat in a maze of social engineering from fred meyer corporate which was they were like if we if we make it so if we're only going to hire three people on this day to do the checking because we know that that will make that line long which will drive more people to the checkout self-checkout which means they'll be

You

more comfortable with it and over time that will be their default setting there i will to the day i die feel like it's not my job to scan my groceries and wait for some person to come over and check my id and and bag my own groceries and then self-report how many bags i used it's just with inflation being what it is and you know the thought that i had and i'm not even saying i'm right about any of this i'm i'm admitting to my own just kind of like rageful ways my thought was i'm just ordering groceries online from now on like not necessarily from amazon but from some service because i was like i don't want to be standing in this fred meyer right now waiting to check out my own stuff and if this is their solution then i'm going to find a counter solution which is going to be i'm just going to like pay the service charge to get my stuff delivered so that i don't

have to be part of this ecosystem anymore you know it's interesting i mean we you and i just have i think fundamentally different perspectives on this because like i'm thinking about the fred meyer that i often go to now that that's the one that you know and a lot of listeners have said they know as well it's in in the greenwood neighborhood of seattle washington it's a big one it's kind of an og one but you mentioned that they've changed a lot over the years by expanding their their mission and more into groceries right when i think you said when

you were a kid yeah it was not groceries when i was a kid at all yeah but now it's like a huge

grocery store and then a whole downstairs section that i never even go to that has all kinds of homewares and whatever it's a huge fred meyer and when you go to check out i'm gonna guess they have at least 15 but i want to say more than that like more like probably 25 self-checkout kiosks and then maybe three lines or two lines with um human beings if they went back to an older school model and just replaced all of those kiosks with you wouldn't be able to get 15 more lines there you'd get like I don't know three or four I would be super bummed to go back to a model where we were all wait I've waited in grocery store lines much less in the automated version of doing things than I used to when you were totally reliant on the humans in front of you both the checkout people in front of you and the grocers in front of you who might have coupons or this or that like I find self-checkout to be so streamlined and good now like people are just like I never wait more than probably 60 seconds in Fred Meyer to get to one of those kiosks now.

I'm not saying you're wrong, by the way. You're probably totally right. But part of this might be like, you might be smart enough to not go to your local Fred Meyer at 1230 on Sunday, the day of a game, to try to get your foodstuffs for the game. So I might be really picking some bad times. I'm also often shopping. Sorry. Do a little cat removal here. Not permanent, just temporary. just uh just a light sedation um uh so maybe part of it is i'm timing these things poorly i'm also often there at like five o'clock in the afternoon like i really pick the worst times um to be in these places but i i guess i would also say that in the olden days it just seemed like they had a lot of there were a ton of staff because that was just like they knew it was important to make sure the lines weren't weren't ridiculous and so my experience of grocery shopping let's say 10 years ago was it was not i don't remember there being terrible lines all the time and now i feel like there are terrible lines all the time but again some of it could just be when i'm like i'm sure that if i went there right now i could be in and out i mean i could i could talk to a human checker in no time i could go through the self-checkout in no time some of it is i'm picking bad times but um i guess the other thing is and this is not really the it's not specifically the grocery store's fault but it's like prices aren't going down no no prices are certainly so it's like the idea that we it's like the idea that like okay we're gonna we're gonna like maximize our profit as the grocery store and we're gonna like create all this efficiency which is also going to mean more work for you the the person who's just there to get your stuff but we're gonna pass the savings onto you i could kind of get in for that model but it's like everything being more expensive which i understand is a global phenomenon this is not fred meyer related but the experience of everything being more expensive and everything being more of a hassle that's the part that i'm

kind of not into you know what i want to see i want to see lion joe and nancy pelosi i want to see them checking me out at the grocery stores and see how they like it i don't know what i'm talking

about did you see the new prime minister of england his little um uh gaffe that like that everybody was giving him crap over no this is the presumptive the new presumptive prime minister or has he been voted in already oh okay yeah yeah rishi sunak he is a very wealthy he's worth a reported 800 million dollars he um uh was raised in the uk but then he went to stanford and then he made a ton of money and i think like you know venture capital or one of those things i believe his wife is also the heir to a incredibly uh valuable family empire of some kind so it's a real bootstrap story you know classic well you know i will say this you know his parents i believe his parents immigrated to the uk from india so probably it is actually that probably is yeah maybe his parents are one i mean i think he probably grew up fairly comfortably because his parents worked really hard but like that's still closer that's closer to a bootstrap story than most of the ones that we get in this country um but all that is to say he is very very wealthy and um there have been you know some kind of questions of like is he you know can he sort of empathize with with at the average person and so in one of these very staged events they were like with camera crews rolling and him miked up he went to like a like a mini mart to buy something and the person was picking up you know the like the the little kind of gun thing that you scan the upc code for the price of the item yeah i love it when they have

the gun at like a home depot or something yeah so this was just like i'm gonna i don't think it was

a gas station but let's just say it was like a mini mart i think he was buying like a soda or something so they hold up they pick up the gun to scan his item to scan his soda and he doesn't apparently know what that thing is so he's like holding up his debit card and he's like holding it against the plastic like the protective plastic sheeting to be like go ahead and scan my card with this which is not what that right right right it's supposed to scan the the product supposed to scan the item yeah yeah yeah it was a real george bush senior i was about to say this is exactly the

barcode grocery store situation of george bush yeah it was a real it's one banana michael yeah right exactly wow hasn't paid for anything in a long time i will give it up though to our uh to

our friends on the uh other side of the pond as they say like the fact that boris johnson was run out over some like illegal parties that he was throwing and that liz truss was kind of drummed out because of like a bad policy that was clearly kind of hurting um the economy in england like i feel like and the fact that this guy's getting grief over his card i feel like they still have some sense of like what is the word i'm even looking for like there are still some political repercussions for politicians just totally messing up over there not that i think that this debit card thing was the biggest mess up but we just live in a place where i often say It feels like there's no there's no gravity and also there are no political repercussions ever for anyone. You're Herschel Walker. You're, you know, Dr. Oz. You want to stop you. You want to stop a woman's right to control her body. But you're also paying women and pressuring them to have abortions. And yet it does no political harm to you with your voters. It's like it's just so wild that because we live in an era of such strong identity politics that particularly on the right, There's nothing you can do as a as a right wing candidate to alienate your voters, because they will always think that you're better than Joe Brandon and Nancy Pelosi at Al. And it's like so at least in England, if you do something dumb, there's a five percent chance there might be some repercussions.

The trust thing is a little confusing, though, because I thought trust kind of got drummed out by her own party because she backed off of policies that they liked. I thought it was her. Oh, really? Maybe. No, I think I'm probably wrong. But I just kept on. I'm just very confused about British politics. And of course, we have listeners who are very, very plugged into it. So I probably shouldn't even raise this. But I thought it was like she had promised huge tax breaks, but then but then rolled them back when she saw that they would be detrimental. And I think that even one of her ministers said no. like there's just more it does seem like there's more of a check uh checks on power there because i think some i think like her own hand-picked minister said no these tax breaks aren't going through or something uh and anyway the whole thing was a disaster but i don't know if it was people saying hey listen your your tax breaks will be hard for the society i think i also she was drummed out by people of her own party that were mad at her for not living up to the campaign promises of tax breaks but very i've gone too far i'm way out over my skis right now so let's well i anything

that i say here would be kind of guesswork on my part i i didn't read into the super details of it either my sense was she you know came in and basically proposed or was about to implement all of these kind of sweeping tax breaks and then the bond markets just basically were looked at it And we're like, yeah, no, that's going to absolutely pwn the economy. And so then all of a sudden there were these other sort of like market-based financial reactions to it, economic reactions. And then it got everything.

Everybody else scared. And now maybe see that the last part you're talking about, I don't know about if if it was if she was going to back off those or not. And that was why, like, her her own party was mad at her for not having to stick to itiveness or if they just felt like I mean, the way I understand it in England, though, if you're in the ruling party, the only way you can get ousted is from your own party. Right. But even that's a thing, because, like, I mean, imagine there's nothing that Donald Trump could do to cause the Republicans to oust him. Mm hmm. That's the thing in England, at least at least, you know, the party in power, if they if the person who's in charge, whether it's Boris Johnson or Liz Truss, at least there still seems to be some mechanism where that party can oust them or put pressure on them to leave in a meaningful way. The Republican Party is such a cult at this point around Donald Trump that when he was in power and if heaven forbid he ever gets back into power, there's just – I mean this is the thing I think of all the time. The reason that Richard Nixon resigned was because the Republicans were literally walking from Capitol Hill to the White House to say we're going to remove you if you don't resign. It was his own party that just said enough is enough, and that's just what's missing now in the Republican Party. There is no enough that is enough for them to get away from the cult of Donald Trump or whoever it is who's in power. If they think that person has the, you know, sort of has enough power, like they'll just do anything. And that is like a very scary thing.

Yeah, it is. I'm I'm I think like a lot of people, I'm bracing for the near future here. Well, I mean, honestly, like even no.

So November 8th is the midterms and like November 9th. I'm just like, what am I doing? what is the self-care that i can be doing on november 9th to deal with whatever this political

landscape looks like we'll just do the podcast from under our respective desks that day it just

might feel good that's a this is a sit stand desk so i can actually make this thing go way up so i could sit you can stand underneath it almost i could definitely have like a chair and a smaller desk under it kind of like a bunk bed situation so when professor bananas our older cat is stressed

out by the new kitten who's running around and what she does is she goes under the table and she sits on one of the chairs underneath the table so that there's just a little bit of headroom and somehow that's that's always her safe space right to feel like protected nothing can come down on top of her and i'm thinking about myself on november 9th and i feel like that makes a lot of sense like i don't know what i'm protecting myself thing yeah because holly holly will

totally do that when i bring bubbles over to becca's like she and holly bubbles and holly have a very weird relationship in that they they tussle all the time and holly kind of pretends she hates it but she also kind of sticks around like if she really hated it she would just go hide but she kind of hangs out for it but then she likes to get on a dining room chair under the table yeah

i think that the cats just like to the more freaked out they are the more they want to protect every side of them you know what i mean nothing from above nothing from either side like when bananas is really upset she'll go under a dresser right and then in the corner of a room and then nothing can get at her without her noticing so i think i think you can sort of tell she's also been um and i'll wrap up cat talk here i guess this is my third mention of the day although i'm talking more about bananas i'm talking more about bananas than the kitten here so i don't know how that plays into the kitten talk contract of 2022 but um i will say that i don't remember what i was going to say but bananas also likes to um when she's feeling more comfortable she just tries to get the higher ground that's what i like i when because she's still like you know we just kind of let this house be an open door upstairs downstairs the cats can just sort of figure out their own stuff after 10 10 days of living in this house together we're not separating them anymore um and when bananas is really freaked out by by the kitten harassing her um she'll go into a corner you know and kind of shut off but she doesn't want to do that she wants to be a social cat so as she like reluctantly kind of joins the rest of us in the house she just always have to has to have a little bit of higher ground like whether it's the top of the couch instead of the cushions of the couch you know or my nightstand she was sitting so uncomfortably so uncomfortably on my nightstand yesterday with her back to bingo the kitten who was just like luxuriating on the bed because it gave her like like three inches of higher ground like that's that's the only way

she can be comfortable so everyone's doing well it sounds like no we're a wreck we're awful all right let's take a quick break and then we come back uh we'll talk about this mike evans situation in the nfl plus some emails and v-mails coming up here on tbtl

Thank you, baby

Alright, let's thank some of our donors for today These are the wonderful people making this episode 3,801, if I'm counting correctly, possible with their

financial support folks like kaylin murray in clinton washington i feel like clinton

is that over on whidbey island i feel like it's surrounded by water but i don't know i think

clinton washington uh i think there was a brief moment of time when i was like maybe i could move to clinton i'm not kidding i mean i think no no i know you're not kidding when i was gonna be departing bellingham and i was like what's my next move where could i live could i be a person because it's i if i remember right the sort of little downtown area of clinton washington is about as adorable as it gets yeah speaking of adorable folks thanks kaylin we really appreciate you also we appreciate mckenzie sergeant oh wow seattle washington nice i believe mckenzie

i think i have the right mckenzie here that's the mckenzie who saved my bacon for the thing festival in port townsend when we had to do a show there but we didn't have lodging and mckenzie had some extra lodging to oh i remember that along to us yeah thanks mckenzie thank you supported the

show in so many ways so many ways as has melissa may ing in toronto ontario toronto i wonder we can be friends again the baseball season i was gonna say i i i bet you that melissa uh signed up or continued her donation during the fawn thankfully well before the seattle mariners and toronto blue jays faced off in the playoffs because i could imagine a moment on a saturday not that long ago where melissa would have been withdrawing any and all financial support from

this program i should check my email to make sure that that that was not a request too late no give

backs no take backs melissa no thank you melissa we really do appreciate you um and we can all agree That we just hate Houston now Not the people of Houston Not our listeners in Houston Who we love Who we absolutely love But the baseball team We're not big fans of right now Thanks Melissa Also thanks to Michael Plastina In Morgantown, West Virginia Home of the Mountaineers

Do you know why it's called Morgantown? I don't Because back in the day That's where they made all the Morgans It was like 90 I think it was like 95% Something astounding All of the Morgans were manufactured

right there in morgantown yeah morgantown makes the world takes that was there that we drove into the town right there was just a factory creating all of those morgans and a couple michaels including our friend michael who's living there and supporting us thanks michael nancy cook is in burien washington one of my favorite things when i'm landing at sea tack if we're coming from the south is to look down at burie in washington and note how many swimming pools there are i don't know why this is my obsession i just have a running count i think it's like 40 right now but i'm analyzing all of the landscaping and yard choices of most of the residents of burie and possibly including nancy as we land uh kristin reicher is in austin texas and is supporting the show from down there in um what do they call it the the blueberry in the bowl of red punch or something i don't know what that makes kind of a name for austin's politics being you know sort of a bit different than a lot of the rest of texas now do you think that people in austin

root for the astros or the rangers or how do how would that work like who gosh i don't know i gotta

i would have to think of the i would have to try to picture the geography of texas which i'm pretty bad at as far as what is also is there a team in marfa texas because that's who i would be for yeah that would be a real it's like five hours away but i mean marfa high what's the marfa high

baseball team yeah that would be we gotta get you a marfa high baseball cap that seems like you

would love it i took this photo i don't know if i've showed this to you before i when i was driving through marfa not the time you and i were there but it was a subsequent time there was one of those speaking of the local high school there was like one of those car wash fundraisers and so they had the like cheerleading squad out kind of doing cheers on kind of like um you know like a median in the roadway just to draw attention to where the cars were being washed and there was something about it that was so americana that was so perfect because it was just like it was just right out of i don't even know it just it just was so perfectly american to me these these cheerleaders and this car wash and we're in west texas and whatever so i asked would it be okay if i took a picture and they said sure and they were just kind of doing their thing and i love this picture so much from a photography standpoint but i feel like i can never i can't do anything with it because it's high school cheerleaders it feels like a creeper picture even though that's so far from what it was but i just feel like it could it be a show pick i mean you and i were not i'll send it to You tell me what you think. I mean, with that context, I think it's fine if it's just a cool picture.

You know me. I'm a fan of kind of taking a picture or finding a picture, as with our Andre the Giant journey that we all took together. I'm going to send you this picture right now. Yeah, email it to me. Email it to you. I mean, I don't, you know. I'll let you know what I do. What I would like to do is blow this picture up or something or kind of use it somehow displayed in my home. But I do not want to seem like I'm being weird in some way, which, again, it was the furthest possible thing from, you know, what my intention.

Well, that's what. Yeah. I mean, maybe in your home, I could sort of see a first impression. Somebody being like her. But certainly maybe for a show pick, I'll take a look at it. I do want to share one thing with you that I just learned that you might already know. but the the marfa sports teams the marfa high sports teams like marfa um baseball or football or whatever they're the short horns and god i love that so much like you not know we're not the longhorns like you keep going down the road for the longhorns we're the short horns and we're fine

with that i love it that's gotta be a some kind of what steer or something there must be a short horn yeah that is for there's some competitive advantage to not having those longhorns um or something that's great that's a great dazzling deet I need to get back down there at some point I wish that that what's so great about Marfa is that it is so in the middle of nowhere but that's also the challenge because it's like you're never I'm never in the neighborhood and I'm going to pop on over it's like you know you pretty much have to dedicate like two days of travel in either direction to get there but anyway Kristen thank you for your support thanks to all of our donors today for making TBTL possible hello and welcome to top story all right uh nfl officials say that these um referees after the tampa bay carolina panthers game on sunday the referees that were seen walking uh into the tunnel with mike evans who is a receiver for the bucks uh mike evans was seen there was a photograph that was taken by uh actually it was the beat writer for the panthers a person named sheena quick filmed the two officials in the tunnel appearing to hand evans a pen and paper evans momentarily stopped and scribbled something down so that was what folks saw and then everyone was like really the the the refs are getting an autograph from a player well that doesn't seem like it's unbiased that doesn't you'd hope that the refs would be just calling things completely new in a completely neutral fashion but if they're getting an autograph from mike evans there's already a lot of conversation around feeling like the league goes way out of its way to protect tom brady and aaron rogers like some of these marquee quarterbacks that seems like there are a lot of calls about roughing and things that are just kind of like head scratchers so there's already like a little bit of that aura around the tampa bay bucks and uh so people were kind of like what's going on with that well the nfl has said no it was not an autograph but what's funny is they will not explain what was really going on so a writer for nfl.com tom palisaro uh supposedly has the inside scoop which is that this um this referee a guy named jeff lamberth was actually getting mike evans phone number so that he could put mike evans the receiver in touch with a golf coach that he likes because apparently they're talking about golf so he was getting mike evans digits so that he could then put him in touch with a golf coach yeah did you watch the video of this i think i've seen stills

of it i haven't seen the the video yeah and i think it's interesting because before this new detail about the the trading phone numbers came out like it was really hard to imagine what else would be going on here because it's just like if i recall it was a very short video less than 15 seconds um but you see them you see both of these referees sort of chasing down evans right like he's like they're they're leaving the field and going through the tunnel and the camera is from the perspective of like the everybody's kind of walking towards the camera sort of and then you see these two you know these two referees like kind of kind of kind of jogging up from behind and maybe even calling his name although i don't think there was sound on the video i watched And one of them is holding a piece of paper And they sort of frantically get something from him And I'm like well what else What else could it be that seems really weird It's not like they pulled out like an official clipboard And they're just kind of like you know they're investigating Something it just seemed odd

Can you sign here here and here Yeah right yeah Mike Evans is trying to get a HELOC, and this is just the easiest place for them to get him to do the DocuSign.

But, yeah, and so it did seem majorly suspicious. And then the next day I hear, oh, they just, oh, they'd say it wasn't an autograph, but the league would give no other information. And then, like you said, now it's come out that apparently the referee and the football player, Mike Evans, I think share an alma mater or went to the same school or something. I don't know why that's relevant, but that was a detail that was in the report. and apparently like the referee said oh i can hook you up with some professional golfer for golf lessons i don't know why he knows that mike evans the football player wants professional golf lessons or what it was but you know my reaction to this was the same as yours i was like is that better like is that like buddying up and especially like it's this idea of like sort of chasing this guy down to like make this interaction it sort of seems like oh yeah like he's the star in these puny little i don't mean like physically but i just mean sort of in in social stature sort of these the puny refs are like hey hey hey all-star football player like um hey you know come on i'm gonna hook you up with my friend like it still seems like pretty bad i don't know what i expect from referees to just be like you know the humorless judges at all times who like never talked to the players and about anything but you know the the profession i mean i don't know if that's realistic or not but like this still seemed like sort of like i don't know like would you trust these refs on the field with him if there's like a if there's a very contentious call about pass interference or whether or not a toe was just over the white line of the sideline

yeah it's you you don't and mike evans i don't have the statement right in front of me actually i probably do in this printout but like mike evans even said something like oh he's a you know talking about this referee he was like he's a you know he's a nice guy or whatever like uh here's here's what he says i wasn't signing my autograph i can tell you that i talked to a lot of officials we are all human beings he's a nice guy that's all we were just talking about

golf which i mean here's the more i talk about this though the more i just feel like i am so out of touch with the relationship between referees and players and umpires and players as well i know that there i can't think of their names not angel but there was a famous umpire who was suspended for a long time a while back for i believe not just getting autographed balls from players but he was caught selling them or something and that's not a good look oh you mean in baseball that's in baseball yeah and and like you often hear about the relationship between players and umps and how it's this dance and like you know the umps can make a bad call but the players kind of have to just eat it otherwise they're going to be in a bad relationship with this ump who they're going to see you know dozens more times in the season if not more than that and that there are conversations had and sometimes you do see them talking and sometimes they'll say okay was that out of the zone the early in the game because uh uh you know a player is trying to figure out like well what is the strike zone that we're working with today and like all of these conversations i just can't imagine them i literally like i hear people talk about them i try to follow them and now I've kind of moved this to baseball but it's the same thing on the football field like you'll see um you'll see players arguing their cases sometimes they're yelling at the refs that's probably not good but you can also see that there are relationships between players and refs because they are human beings who have different jobs but in the same building you know what I mean it's like our interactions with our colleagues on another talk show or something if we're all working in a radio station together so i mean i don't know what our expectations should be between refs and players or umpires and players because obviously there's some there is conversation and there is professionalism there and we have to expect them to communicate about not just the the ones and

zeros of what was in and what was out i think a lot of what this comes down to is the difference in how we experience sports as fans and how the players experience sports as the players because one of the things that will be wild to me is there will be an incredibly tense football game that will come down to the last play and i am just like and let's say it doesn't go the seahawks way i'm just like i'm bereft i'm broken i'm just like sitting there in stunned silence and then you see the player for the seahawks who was just like stopped at the one yard line just like hugging it out at midfield with somebody on the other team and maybe trading jerseys or like i mean this can just be after absolutely devastating losses and i and i'm thinking like how is it that they're okay with this and i'm not yeah right yeah because they're it's a job and they're obviously hyper competitive and they want to win but there is it's i use this analogy all the time but it's a little bit like that old cartoon that was like the sheepdog and the and the coyote or whatever and they they

Both clock in for work and then they just basically try to kill each other for the whole day. And then right when one of them has the other one kind of like almost in like the, you know, in sort of a vulnerable position, then the whistle blows and then they just like stop and then they go clock out and they go home for the day. Like these players, I think they're in a lot of ways better at handling the losses than we are as the people who have nothing to do with it. Sometimes.

And it really kind of depends. there are so many so many environmental you know factors there right as far as like what kind of a

loss it is etc well like if you watch though like the way that the coaches interact with the sideline judge so there's like a a referee who's like standing kind of near where like pete carroll is generally and when the when that referee blows a call or when a call is blown and that and pete carroll is like yelling at that referee the feeling that goes through my mind when i'm watching a seahawk game and it's tense and there's a terrible call and it involves like the line judge or something my mind goes to i would literally never speak to that person again in my life that person would be so dead to me now by the way this is over a game where grown men run around chasing a piece of a pig's bladder it's so dumb how how outsized my reaction is but it's like i just think like if i'm in pete carroll's shoes and this person who's standing four feet away from me just blew a call that's costing my team the game i'm like i'm not talking to that person or maybe i am just going up to them going like you're a you i'm thinking of the meanest thing i can say to them that's unrelated to football just like i'm going to dark places but what you see on the field is pete carroll's mad he's hollering and then like 10 minutes later he's just talking to him like it's almost like i just take this stuff so much more seriously because it's not my workplace i don't have to exist i don't think you can exist at the level of freak doubtedness that i am as a fan if you're pete carroll because you still have to work with this person you see the person before the game and you're not mad at them then so like it just kind of you have a rapport with them that i don't maybe that's really what it is i don't have a rapport with any of these referees because i've never met them i will never meet them so i just see them as the people who have the potential to ruin my day yeah and the players too i mean we

sort of see the players that way in a certain way as well i mean less so because we kind of get to know them but and you know the the referees don't have press conferences but kind of similarly you know like we can just we put so much like of our of our happiness on a sunday or in the baseball context any day you know uh on the backs of these players and suddenly you can just hate somebody that you absolutely loved before and at bat but um i do love the idea of one referee saying to another hey did did coach burbank just say you bleed for me what is that what does that mean

apparently i'm looking at the website footballzebras.com which would appear to be an entire website dedicated to what up with the refs in 1995 headlinesman jerry bergman senior who by the way i remember i could picture jerry bergman in my mind was reprimanded for seeking autographs from packer quarterback brett farve and bucks linebacker hardy nickerson prior to a game at the time there was no autograph provision in the collective bargaining agreement according to a former official who was in the nfl at the time um uh they found that bergman was fined two thousand dollars for that incident now here's the thing as long as the ref is asking for an autograph from brett farve and also a guy on the bucks hardy nickerson who was tasked with trying to tackle brett farve i don't see a conflict of interest there i mean the problem is though i mean maybe

i'm making too much of this too but it's also like we don't live in a day and age where a lot of people are getting autographs just so that they can you know put it on their shelf or give it to their scrapbooks like you know what i mean like there's so much value actually is that even true it's just a straight up signature of a football player on a slip of paper valuable

i don't think so but i'm really not very up to speed on memorabilia i mean probably what you want is like either a physical item like you know aaron judge's 60 second home run or there's this whole you know sports card memorabilia thing where there's like a piece of their jersey is in the card now like it's so it's like a it's some kind of special like you know one of a kind card that's got part of their jersey from that game and then it's signed like that's a thing i don't think just a signature by itself is probably worth that much yeah so i guess

that would be kind of funny to like kind of trace somebody down or chase somebody down be like hey could you sign the the back of this dry cleaning slip for me because i'm such a big fan of yours i don't know but best practices say just let's not let's not like trade information immediately after uh after a game yeah it's not a great look it's not a great look for this did you see what

ken walker the third what his new profile pick is

no our running back for the seahawks running back no uh what is it it's him after scoring that crazy

like 76 yard touchdown he did being just double bird flipped off by oh yes chargers fan yes yes

yes yes yes it's really good i didn't know he made his profile but i had seen that picture going around there's also a short video going around i think this is from a thursday night football game Actually, it might have been last Thursday's game And I can't remember even who the teams are Let alone the players I want to say it was Dallas

Probably Broncos against the Broncos And somehow they're still lost The NFL has taken the unusual step Of making the game all Russell Wilson It will be the Broncos offense against the Broncos defense

Yeah, but anyway Actually, this is a stupid thing for me to bring up Because it's just highly, highly visual But I do think it's kind of credit to some of the new camera angles that are being brought to Thursday Night Football thanks to the new Amazon Prime deal. I do think that they're shooting it slightly differently. And there's this amazing shot. It's only a few seconds. But whatever the quarterback for one of the teams who are wearing white uniforms, they look like cowboys. Who knows? They're all wearing little cowboy hats. You know what? This was a Western I was watching. Had John Wayne in it. No, anyway. They were in a corral. there was some sort of a pick six situation one of the teams is wearing white one of the teams is wearing black for our purposes here and there's this amazing slow motion shot of you don't even see the interception you just see the reaction in the foreground of the quarterback looking bummed that he just threw an interception while in the background with like a little bit of a little bit of like um blurry depth of field but like beautiful and artistic you see the player that intercepted the ball, launching himself, like flying like an angel into the end zone. It is art. I need to find this thing and share it with you. I don't know what the rest of the audience is going to do.

Yeah, that sounds awesome. I want to see that.

Here I go once again with the email. Every week, I hope that it's from a female. No, man, it's not from a female.

All right, emails and v-mails. Yeah, you know, I have a couple of short things I want to share here that I want to read. But in the meantime, you know, I started to do this earlier. You promised we're going to hear from an email from somebody whose kid peed into one of the display toilets. I don't have that in front of me right now. So while I read these things, if you could maybe get that queued up here. I'm dialing it up right now.

I'm hacking into the mainframe.

This is a lot of fun. I heard from listener Trina, who just recently moved to one of our favorite cities, Denver. All teasing about the Broncos aside, you and I were just in Denver. I love Denver, and we got to meet so many cool Denverites there, or Tenverites there. And Trina just moved, so she is now joining the legions of tens who are living in Denver. And she liked to meet up with some folks, and so she's hosting this meetup to celebrate Denver, November 5th at 6 p.m. Might be a potluck, maybe not, but you can find Trina on Slack, or you can find listener Renee Leon on Facebook, and they'll get the details out to everybody. So I don't have I don't have a place here, but I guess we have a time November 5th at 6 p.m. And I guess check out the social media is if you want to know where to go. All right. All right. So there's that. And then one other thing. I got a text message from listener Tracy last night. I was telling the story about how my I guess we call my step grandfather, my stepmom's father, back in the 90s when I was in high school was giving me a little like he was a pilot and he wanted to take me up on one of his small planes. And at the time, I couldn't remember when I was telling the story if it was one of his two-seater planes or four-seater planes. And I think that's going to come in handy in a second after I read Tracy's note. But if you'll recall, Bob, that's his name, Bob told me that I couldn't bring my, you know, 1980s-style VHS camcorder on the plane for the ride. That was a big reason I wanted to do it was because I wanted to kind of tape, you know, tape Lake Erie and Cleveland from above. And he's like, no, no, no, that that's going to weigh too much. Just you. I'll give you a ride, not you and your camera. And I remember just thinking like, well, I mean, first of all, I'm doing this so that I can film it. And secondly, if it's just like, what is this thing? Weigh 10 pounds. No, it couldn't even be 10 pounds. It's like six pounds. You put on your on your shoulder. Right. Like, how could this be the difference between life or death up here? And Tracy says, I'm a student pilot. I fly a Cessna 150 from the 1970s. The useful load of old Cessnas, like the ones I fly, is about 500 pounds. That means the pilot, co-pilot, luggage, and gas can't be more than 500 pounds. Now, it holds 26 gallons of gas, which that's 156 pounds right there. So you subtract that.

And you've only got about three hundred and forty pounds left for all of the passengers and luggage and everything else. I'm sure your pilot was being conservative and you would have been fine with the camcorder. But a conservative pilot is always the best kind of pilot. You were in good hands that day. I think that's a really good point. I got this text message last night and I was thinking a lot about it. I think, though, and I could be wrong about this. I think I was peeved about this because it was a four seater plane. and i remember thinking like well then can't we put the camcorder in one of the seats in the back you know what i mean like i think i i and i could be wrong but i'm pretty sure i was like this can't be right because there's room for two more people in this plane and you're telling me i can't bring a camcorder having said that tracy's point is is well taken actually very interesting as well like i didn't realize that the that the margins are that small and you're right erring on the side

of caution is very much a walshian trait but it also brings us back to the statement that we both made yesterday which is like oh i don't know if i want to go up in a plane where the where the margin for error is actually that yeah kind of razor thin like yes probably the camera would have been fine but if it's even close that's just not a lot of a lot of margin for error yeah yeah

exactly and you had to know that like 500 pounds for i'm assuming a two-seater there that's that's amazing did you find that other email from there speaking of errors yeah this is what listener kim

has to say kim says hey dummies i can confidently say that andrew is right hey in thinking that young children might use the display toilets at home improvement stores we were talking about this the other day because as you noted andrew the toilets are all kind of elevated there and And that's different than the vanities and all of the other things you can buy in that section of the Lowe's or Home Depot. They're the only ones that are kind of up off the ground at an odd angle. And you said probably so kids don't pee in them. And I was like, no, it's probably so teens don't prank in them. Sounds like you were right. This happened to me when my kid was potty training, Kim writes. He's 15 now, so this was probably about two years ago. No, I'm kidding. This is probably about 13 years ago. We were at the Lowe's on Aurora Avenue in North Seattle. Andrew, I believe that would be your Lowe's. It's a good Lowe's. Distracted by everything there is to be distracted by in one of those stores, my son very proudly turned to my husband and announced, Look, Daddy, I'm going potty. Side note, in my experience, two-year-olds are generally not ashamed to pull out their pants in public. That comes later. my husband looked over in horror and had no idea what to do as any parent will attest this is a time in development when you are always praising your child for using the bathroom on their own and it was clear that my son had no idea that these toilets were off limits I can't remember exactly what happened next possibly my husband said oh and then looked at my son's sweet little face and decided that maybe this was a lesson for another time I do remember him picking up my son and the two of us wandering through the store looking for an employee so we so we could explain what had happened it seemed like there are always two or three employees nearby whenever i'm at lowe's but on this particular day we didn't see a single person in a red vest as we made our way past the washing machines and the dishwashers and the display kitchens probably we weren't looking as hard as we could have about 50 feet from the door we stopped made one last feeble look around then turned to each other and wordlessly exited the store it was not my finest moment and i still feel terrible for the poor soul who had to clean up our mess at least it wasn't poop yeah still embarrassed 13 years later listener kim in seattle i wonder where that even goes because if you're

peeing into a toilet that's liquid but the toilet's not hooked up to anything but the hole um is still there so it's still drain it's just draining out into the floor i would imagine right

yeah i mean i have some thoughts on this i i feel like first of all is probably not a huge volume of urine yeah because we're talking about a two-year-old they just physically aren't that big also they're less gross than adults like they're not like it's not part jameson part vape pen a little couple of spicy nugs thrown in there like i feel like like if i was gonna have to if i

I definitely need that doctor's checkup, by the way. Do not reschedule that.

If I was going to be having to deal with a bathroom accident or bathroom incident, I would rather it was a two-year-old kid than a 20-year-old person or a 40-year-old person. I just feel like they're less gross. And I bet you that this was not the worst thing that they've had to deal with. Probably not the worst thing that they had to deal with, but probably not the best part of their day. Not the best thing. I mean, what I would have probably done. if i were listener kim is maybe go over to the like you know where they sell like paper towels or something buy a roll and just like walk back there unfurl a bunch of them and just stuff them down in there so at least there's some absorption happening before the poor lows work i mean it's

also possible andrew that no one ever noticed that it's just like dried up yeah just dried up

It just dried up. Maybe it wasn't particularly pungent. Maybe there wasn't a ton of it. And, like, it just dried up, and then it just, you know, it was never noted. No one ever knew it happened. That toilet as a display toilet maybe was never even sold, or maybe it was at a discount. And the world just keeps spinning without anybody realizing except Kim and her family that her child had done such a thing.

Best case scenario. I'll tell you what I'm going to do just for the show. that Lowe's is near me I'm gonna drive there in a little bit I'm gonna go pee in one of the toilets let you know what happens just for the do that for art for journalism not art journalism sorry

no do it and also that's just to stand in solidarity with Kim's kid yeah absolutely yeah isn't that what is I forget what the movie is is it Billy Madison I feel like it's one of those Adam Sandler movies where somebody a student pees their pants and they're embarrassed and so then like I think the Adam Sandler character pees his pants intentionally just to kind of be like we're all peeing our pants that's what's cool oh that's what we're doing yeah so then so that way it's like this kid doesn't feel ostracized i think you need to go do that lowe's toilet yeah kim's kid doesn't feel ostracized yeah also wasn't it steve martin who

said just like peeing your pants is a good way to not get mugged was that right or do you say throw up on your money either way he had he had a lot of advice in the 70s uh-huh throw up on your

money oh right because then they don't want to touch it or something yeah i guess um on that note hey i guess we're gonna wrap things up we're out but um the good news is we're gonna be right

oh and wait today was supposed to be one of the good shows uh-oh no i think it was okay we got to a top story you know we shared um we shared some personal stories got a little bit of cat

talk just me complaining about calling my doctor's office we may need to do this show over again i

can just beat that out um and then maybe tomorrow or friday we got to listen to this country song by listener joey you read your right i'll drive my truck yeah let's do that tomorrow yeah um so

that it sounds like the listeners are really into this thing so that our colleagues when they hear this show is so good that their listeners are writing songs about it that's good and i listened to the first half of the song it's so in fact you know tomorrow's blurs day so we could kick off the

show with that song let's do that potentially okay yeah let's do that let's like that in for

like a top unless i have more consumer related complaints tomorrow all right sounds good all All right. Also, I'm trying to figure out if my – maybe we can talk about this tomorrow. There is a neighbor that I – as I'm doing the show with you each morning, I watch this neighbor bring his kid out and put his kid in the car seat in the car, and then they drive off presumably like daycare or something. I can't figure out if this guy is either the most flamboyant dresser ever or if it's been multiple dress-up days at work for him because of Halloween. So maybe we could get – we can try to puzzle through that tomorrow as well.

This guy is actually a pirate from the high seas in the 1960s.

Dude, literally dressed like a sailor today. But not like he's going to his station at the Coast Guard or something. Anyway, we'll talk about that, too, tomorrow, if I remember. So please do join us for that. Until then, have a great Wednesday. Take care of yourselves. And please remember, no mountain too tall.

And good luck to all.

I'd be on the bathroom pee-peeing, and he'd be standing right there pee-peeing. It was hilarious, and we were both pee-peeing at the same time. It's fun. Power out.