Muse

I am a good person, and sometimes good people don't get no respect. Rodney Dangerfield. Hey, I don't get no respect. No respect at all. When I was in the sandbox as a kid, I got no respect. Ah, you know what don't get no respect? Airplane food. Why don't they just make the plane out of the airline food? My wife don't get no respect. So take her, please, for example If you don't get no respect, you might be a redneck Respect is nice What's the deal with grape nuts? No grapes, no nuts I don't get no respect

TBTL my mom told me if i wait for things like good things will happen to me dude and i waited for some things and i got some banana bread at work today dude hell yeah listen up ladies i get it

it is very hard not to get seduced by these two and yeah i'm gonna say it these two super good

looking super hot guys oh that naughty old elf must be one mean bastard to give us this so early Oh, won't somebody please think of the children?

All right. Hello. Good morning and welcome, everyone, to a Monday edition of TVTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. Here we go again. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host.

I don't know who that is, and I don't care to find out.

Coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center right here in Portland, Oregon. Once again, inside what is a sort of improvised kitten infirmary.

Kittens! Inspired by kittens!

The cat Bubbles is still, I guess, recovering from her being spayed surgery last week. And so I've been trying to keep her mellow. But I think today is the day that the levy breaks. She's figured out how to take her soft cone off and is kind of just getting back up to her old trick. So I do have it set up in here, hopefully, for maximum healing for her. But anyway, we'll see how that goes. And also we'll see how this goes. It's episode 3,809 in a collector's series.

Let the fun begin.

There's a clip of Billy Corrigan, of the Smashing Pumpkins, going around, of him during a concert. And as the drum solo kicks in, casually saunters to the sort of back part of the stage and begins eating chips and dip, just during a Smashing Pumpkins song.

Of course, you can't go wrong with some sour cream and onions so long as you bring ridged chips.

I think I've watched the clip probably 20 or 30 times. There is an element of it that is quite fascinating to me. And, well, we'll talk about it. uh speaking of eating things it was a tough weekend in philly the phillies uh did not prevail in the world series and also philadelphia's mls team lost in the mls championship in when it went to penalty kicks and so it's a city that needs something to sort of root for something to get their mojo back and it is coming in the form of a guy who's been eating an entire rotisserie chicken every day for 40 straight days try to look a chicken in the eye with great intensity uh so we will talk about what's going on out there in the uh the 215 and also i made i made a big mess up on the national radio last week i made a huge mistake which i only realized like two days ago i got a fact loud wrong as some might say you know what i've found over the years is that the facts are your friends so i will um i will formally apologize this isn't even the show where i made that particular mistake i make mistakes left and right on this show but you're all used to that that's what this show is about baby this was on the fancy other radio show that i host that i'm not supposed to be making factual errors left and right on um so anyway we'll get into it with this young man the longest running cobro of the show may be best known for his depictions of the tall ships he is an activist and house party enthusiast

there's a hidden rally ranch party in my mouth he's andrew walsh and he is joining me right now

good morning my friend good morning luke i um i only have one little story i could tell you today at the beginning and honestly i don't know if i want to tell it yet i've been struggling with since I woke up. It's usually the mark of a decent story. I know, that's the truth. If everything inside you

is saying, don't bring this up on the air, that usually means it'll be interesting. It really is true.

But while I continue to think about whether or not I want to talk about this, how about we start with your Julia Roberts

thing because i did i woke up this morning or when you sent to the um when you sent the show sheet out this morning i looked down at it and i saw the julia roberts thing i'm like i vaguely remember you thinking that julia roberts was in a movie we were talking about and it turned out to be somebody else but that doesn't seem like something that would call for the embarrassed emoji which uh which suffixed your sometimes i include emojis on the show sheet just so andrew gets the tone yeah the tone of this one is uh times big toothy uncomfortable smile like

what's your massive mess up well this i'm going to try to explain this in a fairly clear way because it's a little complicated but it starts with the other show that i do live wire we do a segment at the beginning of the show each week it's called the best news we heard this week and we talk about some kind of cool news story that we saw something that's a little positive life affirming, et cetera. And we have a great research intern named Tunvi, who is just incredible. You ever just work with someone who just right away you realize, oh, this

person over delivers on everything. No, I've never worked with anybody like that in my

life. And it's really, I wasn't referring to this partnership. That's clear. But this This research intern of ours, Tunvi, is just incredible. Anyway, so Tunvi puts together this list every week of, like, possible best news stories. And Elena and I look through that list. And anyway, a couple weeks ago, I saw there was a story on that list, which I had actually observed in the Washington Post when it came out, which was the very curious quirk of history, which is that Julia Roberts' birth was actually paid for by Dr. Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King.

Right. We did talk about that on the show, and that was based on a Washington Post article.

So that we talked about on this one as well. Yeah, we did. OK, because, you know, there are these days where it's like I am doing so many different productions from inside this room that I know for a fact we did it on on live where I didn't remember if we had talked about it on TV. OK, so I'm sure I actually, Andrew, made the mistake on both programs.

We had a huge mistake.

because it was the thing that was most interesting to me about the story which believe it or not wasn't the fact that this great civil rights hero and his wife uh paid for the birth of one of america's most treasured hollywood stars like that's pretty fascinating but there was something else that i just thought was wild like about i don't know maybe two-thirds of the way through the piece there was a sentence about julia roberts that i found utterly fascinating and It was kind of offered without much buildup or reflection afterwards. And I just thought, boy, this is a dazzling deet if ever there was one. And it was that there was a line in the piece that said she by her. She has she has logged in something like seventeen hundred and fifty Wikipedia entries for people who have been more or less forgotten by history, often women, often people of color.

Right. Yes. I do remember that dazzling detail. Yes.

and i was like wow that could have i mean again the the birth story is pretty amazing but like if julia roberts is out here just logging in editing adding things to wikipedia that is such an interesting detail about her life that's just the last thing i expected from julia roberts how cool in fact that was that was literally the thing that made that tipped it for me that we should talk about this on livewire and then here on tbtl i remember i remember i said like i'm just

so surprised that i mean i just find the the language of wikipedia like the the language of wikipedia editors and the ability to go in and and adjust things it's a very it's a very complicated process and one that is very locked down as well like you can't just have anybody going in there and messing up the facts um and so i was just impressed with it from a technical standpoint because i i couldn't do that and i like to think i know my way around a web page and the thing is

julia roberts has like dialogue to memorize for her upcoming movie like she's got a family she's julia roberts is a busy person i just i was so tickled by the idea of her like you said understanding the sort of mechanics of how to actually get into a wikipedia page she's also got to research who are the people who are people who are were very important historically but have been passed over um and she finds those people and then finds out they're not on wikipedia it just was a great i i really felt like it was almost the best detail from the story so this weekend i get up it's like i think it's uh it would have been saturday morning and like you andrew i i get a number of kind of news aggregation emails um that will just pull together uh interesting stories from kind of across the web. and i i get one called pocket and i think it was pocket yeah i look at it and you know it's kind of doing that morning you're just kind of starting to get rolling you're making your coffee you're kind of scrolling on your phone a little bit and one of the stories in pocket is she has logged nearly 1750 wikipedia articles for people who are passed over by history oh i see that line and i look at a photo of the person and it is not julia roberts andrew not julia roberts at all and i realize what has happened and now this is where it gets

incredibly or slightly complicated can i can i take a guess with one word or one hyphen word does it involve print friendly dot it sure does my friend it surely does i saw this coming as

soon as you said oh shit i was like ah i what i did was so when when i uh print stories out you know i'm i'm uh i'm always bragging about my love of printing pieces of paper for this show even though it could really be all digital if i wanted it to be when i print out a story uh like i did from the washington post i will use this thing called print friendly which just makes the story more printable and also allows you the option of like erasing a lot of superfluous ads and click bait and photos because it takes up a lot of ink and it takes up a lot of page space and all i really want is the text so i have a very at this point kind of just a habit and a routine that i go to it's like get the link put it in print friendly it converts then i go through and i just get rid of all of the photos but you know what doesn't get deleted andrew when you delete

the photo the caption yep because they'll insert these little promos for other stories right in the middle of the story but when you take away all the formatting and the all the context yeah and all the context then it's just you you will sometimes just get the stray line of something and that is weird now i can't imagine you reading the story just like this fact just like i assume if it's a caption it's like one sentence just thrown in the middle and it didn't say for

the record it also didn't have parenthetically the name of the person who had taken the photo didn't say yeah something something getty which is a which would be a dead giveaway there was it was a it was a grammatically correct and full sentence that was not out of place in this article other than that it was about julia roberts supposedly doing this crazy thing on wikipedia but other than that it just happened to fall perfectly into the piece it also was in between two paragraphs because you know what they do they'll have a paragraph and then like a photo to the other story and a caption or a headline and then you're supposed to like you said you're supposed to click on that and get to you know they're just trying to keep you constantly in the world of washingtonpost.com but when you took the photo out as i did mindlessly that sentence because it was between two paragraphs it also made sense to a degree in the flow of things it wasn't like a complete non sequitur or it wasn't like leading into a sentence that would make it make no sense somehow everything in the universe lined up for me to completely misdescribe the

actions of Julia Roberts so okay let's talk about the the consequences of this obviously the consequences for TBTL is great we have a lead story I don't have to talk about the shit I didn't want to talk about um it's just more content for us but we're not like the responsible side of public radio that would be more your live wire stuff how did you find out about this mistake and uh

and are people upset with you i found out of the mistake because i saw the real story in the news aggregator yeah you just and the number of wikipedia entries 1750 was so specific I was like, so either someone else entered the same number of Wikipedia bios as Julia Roberts did.

That would be another interesting detail. They're competing.

So I would like to point out, the physicist who has actually done this is someone named Jess Wade, who is a British physicist who spends her time writing Wikipedia biographies for women and minority scientists.

Yeah, but she's no Julia Roberts.

I want to credit Jess Wade. Jess, I am very sorry for not giving you your due and for misattributing your due to someone who's already gotten plenty of their due. And to answer your other question, Andrew, I don't know if people listen to LiveWare very closely. I haven't heard any blowback.

That's amazing. What I – I was going to say what I love, but maybe that's the wrong verb. but what I find fascinating is that there are people who probably heard that on the radio and just thought, huh, that's interesting and they're now going around telling other people that exactly what i was thinking andrew i mean it helps that it's julia roberts i feel like we'd believe just about anything she seems almost larger than life because of all of her success in the world and how beloved she is so like if it was elon musk i think heads would heads would cock and eyes would roll right people be huh like there are people that it would be like there's just no way elon musk is doing that it's just not in his personality um by the way It's been a really entertaining weekend over there in the Twitter space.

Yeah, sounds like it.

I mean, it's just hilarious because, you know, this guy who, you know, positions himself as sort of radically in favor of free speech is just getting roasted at every turn on this platform that he overpaid for. And so he's just furiously trying to whack a mole down the various things. like for a while everybody was changing their name to elon musk and their photo to his photo so you'd have to look very carefully at the person's actual thing you know or you'd think it was elon musk and then he comes out with this tweet from now on no one's allowed to impersonate anyone unless it's clearly a parody account and as i wrote on twitter the noted free speech advocate has logged on the funny part is most of the people who care about this story and most people who are roasting elon musk or doing it via twitter yeah like it's the that's because if you're not on twitter you don't really care that there's not a big story to you it doesn't really matter so it's all it's bizarre because it's all unfolding in the ecosystem that this guy it's like he bought a high school and now he's being bullied by the student body of the high school that he owns well

it's you know i was kind of come up with kind of a bullying kind of situation it's almost like he was the kid at school who was kind of being made fun of or whatever so he's like fine i'll just like you say maybe buy this i'll become the principal and then he becomes the principal and he's like trying to like yeah he's kind of turning into the opposite he's like fine no more lunch fine no more recess he's just like trying to like yeah take everybody's fun away and it kind of and it's i get to pick all the teams for kickball yeah right and it sort of feels i'm taking shack again um i uh it sort of feels like in the people who are doing this like the good parody accounts of you know making fun of elon musk or turning themselves like into fake elon musks they're people who already earned a blue check mark in some way or another a lot of them are comedians or some people of note and you also just get the impression and i'm not following this as closely as you are i'm just sort of getting like the third ripple of it as it hits my as it hits my feed but it sort of feels like people are like well screw it like this whole thing is going down let's just all just like dance let's like i just picture all these comedians as little like goofy little devils who are just like dancing around poking elon musk in the butt before the

whole thing burns down exactly and i mean the thing is there's no there was no actual confusion as to who was really elon musk because all you had to do was look at the at elon musk or if you looked at the other one was like at kathy uh griff i did a tv story and i still can't remember if it's griffin or griffith um who apparently got her account suspended or shut down because of doing this um like it was not a real identity i saw there's just like just you know terrible predictable right-wing trolls there's this one guy i won't even mention his name because he's i feel like he had a moment a few years ago it's not like tucker or something like it's like a kind of a lower level guy but he sort of had a moment where he was getting written up in the times because he was kind of one of the early real just trolly people that was getting attention I feel like he's died down or at least he's been sort of sent back into the liminal state of medium influential right wing trolls means I don't hear about him because no one's writing think pieces on the dude. But like the first comment under like Elon's tweet or one of the first ones was from this guy going, thank you. Identity theft is a serious problem and it's like this ain't identity theft. somebody making uh their banner or their picture look like elon musk something that's clearly um sort of you can very clearly understand who is actually who if you take two seconds to look and then writing what are obviously sarcastic kind of satire comments that is not identity theft at all and that is not like they were trying some and again i i really maybe i just don't hang out right-wing twitter i feel like this is probably very much influenced by the twitter accounts i follow but it doesn't feel i don't feel like there's a lot of pro elon musk people on twitter right now i mean there are the like tesla heads and the incels who like for some reason venerate elon musk as some kind of demigod but i don't feel like i see very much from most of those people mostly what i'm seeing and again it's probably just because of my algorithm and who i follow is people on the site just really roasting this foolio i don't know if i was fooled by the internet

or this is something else pretending to be him or not but i just scroll right now you're siding with him no no i'm gonna say somebody else i'm i'm bringing into the conversation here but i think i saw somebody kind of like retweeting and then slamming on dane cook remember dane cook apparently i think dane cook might have tweeted out are we allowed to be funny on this website again yet or something like that oh that's pretty good that was the first well i don't know was he taking down i i saw that as an earnest kind of like he's a he's happy that musk took over because he can be funny without being super politically correct and getting flagged by twitter now well i guess it would

matter what the timing of that was but i think it's possible that that was actually a burn of elon musk because one of the first things that elon musk tweeted when he finally closed the deal one was the bird is free yeah and the other was comedy is allowed again on twitter i remember that So I think a lot of people have been pointing out, like, you know, life comes at you fast. It'll be the comedy is allowed to get on Twitter tweet, and it's side by side with the going forward. No one is allowed to have a fake name on their account unless it's clearly a parody. So I don't I don't know when Dane Cook tweeted that. And I have to say, like, I don't Dane Cook's comedy doesn't really work for me. I do find his life story sort of fascinating. Do you know his actual brother stole all his money? No, I didn't. And he prosecuted him and his actual brother went to jail. his actual brother was his like business manager slash accountant and embezzled all of dane cook's money um dane cook made it back with many shows and is wealthy again so i we don't don't cry for him argentina i i find his life story kind of interesting i don't find his comedy to really be for me um he is he got a lot of grief on the internet recently because he announced his engagement to a woman who if the math adds up they were together when she was not of age she is now of age but if they've been they were like celebrating an anniversary of time together and if people are doing the math on how many years that was and how old this person is and realize that something's got to be off either they haven't been together that many years or they started dating before it would have been permissible but anyway that's what's going on with the dane cook currently so i don't know maybe if he was pro elon or not but it could have been a joke at elon's

i think it might have been and i think somebody might have misinterpreted it because the only reason i saw it was because people were dunking on him saying like if you thought you couldn't be funny here before it's because you know blah blah blah blah like your type of humor isn't really humor or whatever um but you're right i'm actually seeing other things that looks like he like a way back in mid-october he tweeted or late october he tweeted something like twitter just feels different so you're i think dane cook is i i'm really glad that we had this conversation because i think i just saw something in this and this is why things like twitter or the internet And just, like, me not being a careful consumer, but I don't think that, like, I'm unusual in this way. Just, like, I've never really thought much about Dane Cook. I mostly know that people who like the kind of things I like don't like Dane Cook. I saw a quick tweet that said, are we allowed to be funny again? And I just assumed that was, like, kind of him echoing Musk as a way of kind of support. I kind of didn't even give it enough thought, but it left a bad taste in my mouth for Dane Cook that is not fair if he was actually being sardonic. So I'm actually glad we had this conversation. And you know what? Honestly, I'm not even joking, even though this sounds corny. Like, I'm going to try to remember this moment as I can do as people continue to change their change their names to get kicked off this platform. And sarcasm goes deeper and deeper and deeper.

you know it's that is actually a good thing to remember because i spend a fair amount of time thinking about this kind of stuff in that i am so troubled by the you know here we are the day before the election by the way i really i did not schedule my travel very wisely i am flying basically tomorrow afternoon 2 30 west coast time i'm getting on an airplane i'm flying to new york And then I'm going to land at like, I don't know, midnight in New York. And then I guess I'll just land and my phone will start lighting up and I will know if we if it's looking good or bad for a democracy, you know, like I didn't I my original plan was to like watch. i mean i'm a i'm even in years when it's not like literally the future of this country feels like it depends on even in regular midterms i you know i really like to watch the whole night of election coverage and kind of you know fix up some food it's sort of a thing for me and i'm not gonna be able to do that i'm gonna be on an airplane and then i'm gonna be almost a little like you were talking about january 6th how you and vives were in arizona yeah and we're like huh okay you get you go up in a helicopter and you land and then it's like you're seeing january 6th on cnn and you're like okay uh maybe our country is done and also we're not even home right now and we're in arizona i'm gonna be in manhattan i mean forget it where am i gonna i'm behind enemy lines my guy no the thing i was gonna say though is uh to your comment about all of us

kind of just like taking two seconds to like find out one more thing about whether it's me completely stealing the valor from physicist jess wade or um or somebody maybe misinterpreting what dane cook was saying i i think about how troubled i am by the way that people on the political right react to everything and i feel like it's so incredibly myopic and it's so it doesn't like the herschel walker stuff comes to mind it's like you have all these people who are allegedly pro-life and would would you know would say abortion is murder and all this stuff and then they have a candidate who's very clearly advocated for multiple abortions i don't think it's a bad thing to advocate for multiple abortions but i think you got to pick a lane on this one you got to pick one or the other if you're one of these supporters and it's just no one is phased by it And I try to identify in my own self, where am I being that version of a liberal, you know? Like, how are the ways in which—and this is, by the way, why I think the whole war is asymmetric. One, because literally they have the weapons. So that's not good. And two, I don't think a lot of people on the right are asking, what are my blind spots? Like, it's screwed up when there is a philosophy that is built around trying to figure out what your blind spots are. And then a philosophy that's built around just might makes right. but I do I'm trying to think of that because I'm with you like I don't have any particular love for Dane Cook's comedy act and if some person that I love was dunking on Dane Cook I would you know I would be right there with them and I would probably not really take the time to figure out what really happened because it fits into my pre-existing worldview which is Dane Cook seems

kind of douchey to me yeah yeah exactly lot to lot to bite off there I will just say this you know, I kind of said we were in Arizona, which was maybe not a nice thing for our Arizona listeners to hear when these and I were when we were there, you know, in January, we were driving around on a road trip from Seattle to visit the Grand Canyon and make some stops in between. And I just think that, like, while I know that there's a lot of different people with a lot of different viewpoints living in Arizona, like what we were exposed to and what struck us as we kind of drove around Arizona was like, like just a lot of Trump stuff, a lot of MAGA stuff MAGA MAGA do I say MAGA funny I mean literally I think I mentioned this on the show like we were shocked like clutching our pearls because there was a you know a pickup truck in front of us that had a white power symbol as it's like hitch you know on the back of the truck like I was just like just outwardly just like a white power symbol so I know that doesn't represent everybody in Arizona and I sort of feel bad for for kind of saying that the way I did a moment ago but in in this moment when Genevieve and I were there in January 6th like And, you know, in the days leading up to it, it just felt very foreign to us from being, you know, in our in our Seattle bubble.

Well, I also feel like you probably had an acute like an accumulative effect because you're driving from Washington. You're going to the Grand Canyon. It's going to take you through a lot of rural America in the West, rural Washington, Oregon, Nevada. i don't know if you hit idaho or utah but like and the thing is like we've been talking about this like you're in a city like seattle or portland or los angeles or whatever and you know those are sort of liberal bastions generally but then when you get a few miles out from that when you when you're in one of these states that maybe the state is reliably blue like washington oregon and california are reliably blue states right but that's just because there's a lot of people living in the city so if you live in the rural area of one of those states you are feeling probably like you are speaking of behind enemy lines like you're just going so hard with the like outward expression of like all that bullshit which is why i do think i saw less of it in tennessee because tennessee is a red state i just don't think you're under the pressure to constantly feel like you're pushing back so and and i know arizona goes back and forth i guess it's sort of purple i mean it went for biden last time but i can just see a world in which the two of you are leaving seattle and then just everywhere you go you're like really this is this is america in the words of donald glover this is america and then january 6th happened and it must probably have just felt like really

disorient yeah it was just like i remember being very sad as i was driving through rural parts of the country because that's why i do love going on a road trip to see that and see like these very small towns that are just like basically like swells in the road that little communities are built up around and it kind of makes sense and it's like you can almost see the um you almost see the evolution of a community like in the middle of of nowhere like well this place exists because people needed gas at some point you know what i mean and right then and that became a tiny microeconomy but it might be a just a place where you know a hundred people live or something and a couple of businesses and that always fascinated me in kind of a in a kind of pollyanna-ish um who am i thinking of little pink houses uh john cougar melancamp Cougar Mellencamp and I say the cougar um you know it matters yeah and uh and then to go through those same areas like as an adult with you know maybe a different perspective on the world but then to see these little tiny like let's call them hamlets and there's what I consider to be all these flags that are celebrating hate and I mean I'm sorry but like well I guess I'm not sorry but like I see a Trump flag and that Trump's platform was based on hating people who didn't fit into what him and his followers want to see America being like that's a hate flag to me and so to go through and just see all these MAGA things and like basically you know things that threaten the democratic governor's life yet presumably from people who would vote for a quote-unquote pro-life platform or something like you know just like seeing like and and maybe maybe maybe I'm exaggerating things but yeah to see these little towns that at one point would have seemed like really romantic to me seemed like little bastions of hate where I just wanted to get through them as fast as possible like you know that that was a real bummer and that really did color the kind of the the rest of the trip or you know like i say and that was then then january 6 happens while we're you know like the the heart of the the height of that started while we were up in a in a uh in a helicopter for 40 minutes and then we came back down and it was like that felt like

the world had changed i guess it did i i mean i'm not old enough to to say sort of definitively what the vibe has been throughout other sort of presidential campaigns and just periods of of this country's history like i don't know what it was like you know when when nixon was running or i mean i my conscious memory starts around the time of like reagan's second election but i don't think in 1984 you would have almost every one of those little kind of like you know gas station like small towns there's a a you know a convenience store whatever all those little like you said they were now by the way i believe the politics were probably still the same i'm you know rural america is always huge conservative i don't think you saw reagan bush signs flying everywhere the same way because it wasn't i mean listen there's a lot of problems with ronald reagan and but i don't think the mentality was the same i don't think and how about bush senior like or even bush jr like and i'm none of this is a defense of any of the policies of these people but you just can you imagine if every small town you went through had like george w bush flags flying everywhere like it would have been totally bizarre like that wasn't a cult of personality yeah it wasn't a way of identifying yourself in the world to that degree now you might say and you know i'm a republican i come from a long family of republicans or i'm a conservative or i you know i'm a christian you might you might say and think these things but the the outward expression of it and then now the other part of it which is the aggressive let's go brandon f joe biden that stuff that feels different than anything in my lifetime that i can remember

yeah you know we're you and i were talking i think it was maybe exactly a week ago on this show kind of talking about like just feeling like the democracy is falling apart around us and like whether or not these are truly unprecedented times i mean i think they are unprecedented

I call them unreasonable.

I think they're unprecedented in the way that they are unfolding now. But I was also arguing that, like, you know, America has always been kind of a scary place for some people or what have you. And one thing that I've been thinking about that conversation. And again, this doesn't go to the very the very specific heart of what you're talking about. Like, well, the act of January 6th has no precedent unless you go back to the actual splitting of the union. But like I do I am still just obsessed with this question of like you and I weren't around when but a lot of our listeners were when they shot the president quote unquote they but you know what I mean like political assassinations from from Martin Luther King to the president to RFK people were just being politicians were just being shot you know and like then you put that in the context of the attack on Pelosi's house in San Francisco and Paul Pelosi and you know like that's seems like an assassination attempt or something um and so i'm not i'm not even trying to really make a an argument here other than like where my brain has been as i try to grapple with where we are in 2022 or where we were in 2016 and just how terrible everything felt and it feels unprecedented but then also like we didn't live through the vietnam war where because of because of um decisions being made at the highest levels of power in this country there's like thousands of people were just thousands of young people just coming back dead like you know like that is something that i can't can't put my head around and not that i'm trying to be any kind of uh what do you call it when you try to compare moral injustices um you know what i'm talking about yeah i do moral relativism moral relativism yeah and i'm you know i'm not trying to be a moral relativist i'm just trying to wrap my head around it like it just and you know these examples i was giving were you know the 1960s we're not going back to the 1860s on that one and it's just like man i don't i don't know how to put this stuff in context i just sort of feel like the older we get the more we have context for these things yeah i mean i wasn't there for that stuff

too so i i'm totally just speculating and yeah we've had an actual civil war in this country which you know would that's worse than what's happening now because what what's happening now feels like it could be the lead up to it but i mean it actually happened obviously uh we had slavery in this country and uh we still have all kinds of institutional racism there's the patriarchy there's i mean all the things that i could kind of footnote and caveat here we also had those assassinations i mean i'm not a conspiracy theorist so i don't think that like the i don't think those were politically um those i don't think those were part of a a movement like the difference is to me the people that are trying to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan are people who got their marching orders from the standing president of the United States in one way or another and you didn't have who I don't know who the highest ranking Republican was when JFK was president but as far as I know that person wasn't on television advocating for violence against JFK and then someone shoots him yeah and that to me is the issue is that the leader of this one of the major american the you know one of the two major american political parties regularly calls for violence and nobody from his side of it does anything and that to me again other than the civil war i don't know if that's something that's happened a lot historically um and even the the paul pelosi stuff i was just googling this is the worst way for me to try to say something informed on it i was literally just googling what was the republican reaction to jfk's assassination which like i was going to get some kind of exhaustive useful information in those four seconds and then repeat it back to you i don't know what it was my guess would be that it was more respectful oh yeah then the treatment of the attempt to assassinate or physically harm gravely the speaker of the house you know yeah no absolutely and the reaction to these things and

certainly the way we've been taught them and the way they're depicted in movies is like you know like the the nation's yeah i mean it would still happen today and i it's such a dark topic i don't want to keep talking about it but like um you know the nation mourned jfk you know that did not seem to be a partisan thing and i do think the reaction to an assassination these days no matter who it was um if they were political the reaction would be very different very quickly and so you're you're right about that i'm just saying that like and again that's where i can't i can't compare apples to apples on any of these things because history isn't repeating itself along um along clean lines or maybe it's not repeating itself at all i don't know i'm just trying to figure out for myself not to not to argue a point but just for myself like is this it feels i mean i think the answer is yes i mean it's things are really really bad right now i'm just trying to figure out like are they quote-unquote worse or are they just is the badness manifesting itself in a different way you know that's that's my question i think that might be the question of my life honestly i mean

i'm hoping to be honest with you i hope that it's not the worst it's ever been and i hope it just feels like that because i haven't lived through a version of this before because that gives me some comfort you know like i'm actually rooting for i find some bizarre kind of comfort in someone being like oh no it's always sucked in this country and here are five examples of other things like this that i mentioned this when this came up the other day i've been listening to that rachel maddow ultra podcast and it's you know there was a pretty significant contingent of nazi sympathizers in the u.s congress like that's pretty bad that seems like a bad thing like we have this idea that like you know we all just rallied around and we went over there and we you know beat the pants off of hitler but it was like there was a lot of people who were very much sympathizing with with the nazis and hitler and etc so i am i mean i'm hoping that that that things turn out okay and that we uh that this is not as unprecedented as it feels to me that's the thing i just think the thing that really worries me and why i hope everybody goes and votes uh is because if you have one of the parties that has already indicated that it doesn't really care about free and fair elections it doesn't care about the outcome of an election like i mean you had a guy running for i think it's governor of wisconsin who said if you elect me uh republics will never lose another race in wisconsin and i believe wisconsin is an example of gerrymandering gone. Wisconsin is like a 50-50 state, pretty close, 50-50 Republican-Democrat. But they've now drawn up the districts. The Republicans have...

gerrymandered it so effectively that it's now it's basically republican for life and that also means that if you have a popular vote and let's say wisconsin was going to go blue for the president those people that are in power at the state level can do a lot to try to thwart that outcome that's the stuff that really really makes me nervous that's why the stuff in pennsylvania luckily right now it looks like this maniac who's trying to become uh governor is not going to prevail um uh but like it's just these certain states where i guess it's just this this idea that one of the parties is working these systems so that they don't have to ever turn power over again that just feels like i mean the civil war at least it was right out there like we're battling this is so much more upsetting to me and sinister well it's not more upsetting than the civil war which was just the movie gone with the wind traumatized me as a kid and that wasn't even like being just the scene in little house on the prairie where um uh one of the people in the town their son comes back from the civil war and he's hooked on i think it's like daladen and he's played by the way by um an actor who uh went on to do a lot of stuff and i really loved him and i forget his name off the top of my head but he basically was like on on some kind of painkiller they got addicted to during the civil war and then he was having all these crazy like um uh hallucinations and stuff just that alone traumatized me so i'm not trying to say that i'm not trying to rank these things either i guess what i'm trying to say i am just um you know i'm like all of us i'm pretty i'm pretty i'm pretty nervous and i'm i'm pretty

pretty worried about where things are heading okay i think i found it 1976 is called soldier's return it's season two episode 21 it was directed by william f claxton just so you know here's and Is it like Doc Baker's son or is it like I don't know that here's the synopsis coming home after 12 years of performing with a busy Philadelphia orchestra Mrs. Whipple's troubled son Granville hopes that the peace of Walnut Grove will help him shake the nightmare of the morphine addiction that resulted from an incident during the Civil War Battle of Shiloh. So that's a little bit more complicated. I'm looking for Michael Landon. Nope, those are just, you got Melissa Gilbert in there. That's good. It doesn't, I'm on the page, but I don't know which one of these people is the one you're looking for.

It's like Martin, is it Martin something?

This is terrible. I apologize. I thought I was going to be a, Margo Martindale is also listed on the page down below with somebody who might be of interest to me. Let's see here. Granville is what I need to, I need to find out who played Granville here. Okay, we're getting closer. We're getting closer. I'm going to edit all this out. Richard Mulligan. Richard Mulligan. It was Richard Mulligan. I was thinking Martin Mull, but I knew it wasn't him. Yes, yes, right. Because Richard Mulligan, I know him from Empty Nest. Empty Nest. Now, let me ask you this. The character in Empty Nest of the horny pilot next door, was that just a thing in the 70s and 80s? Did everybody have a horny pilot next door? Yes. why do i feel like that's more than just this thing was that david leisure um i don't know his name and i feel like i should not be responding i feel like i did not treat imdb responsibly the last time you asked me somebody's name so i'm gonna avoid that uh i feel like there

was always in that in that sort of era yeah there was always some sort of um neighbor who would pop in for even more comic relief and get up to all sorts of hijinks uh just to you know i mean spice up the occasional which is kind of interesting because you know kramer was i guess really that for seinfeld even though seinfeld felt at the time like this is a very new way of you know to show about nothing and it starts you know the interstitials are jerry seinfeld doing comedy on stage and and yet kramer busting through the door and having a situation is sort of like it's got echoes of three's company of mork and mindy of laverne and shirley of of endless number of sitcoms like you said at that time where there was always a neighbor dealing with something and

they're always popping in although there was a sec there was a sexuality of like kramer didn't come off as overly sexual or over sexed in the way that like some of the i feel like three's company kind of had those vibes although maybe not necessarily through by way of the neighbor but you also and of course you had the empty nest now you also have family guy which has a i think is like a parody of it that they also have some horny you know the giggity giggity guy next door who also is probably a pilot so maybe i'm just sort of like maybe i'm exaggerating that exact trope i don't know it was david leisure by the way yeah i saw that yeah played the skirt chasing neighbor charlie deets chasing um oh i wanted to say something here this is a totally unrelated to what we're talking about but well i'll tell you the listeners are good with that i'll tell you why i was thinking about it because i was like oh god it's gonna be another one of those days where like, I like talking this stuff out with you, but sometimes I wish we weren't in front of microphones, not the empty nest stuff.

That's fine. But like the only way that we actually will set aside an hour to talk each day.

Obviously, I feel very out of my depth talking about things, political things, historical and political. I don't know. Like, I'm I'm doing my best here. But like, I don't know, publishing these conversations always causes me a bit of agita because throughout the day, I just think of all the stupid things that I said during them. And I think I was thinking about that and thinking about how probably we have some listeners who don't like us talking politics, some who do, some who don't like us talking about sports, some who do. And that led me to some people like us talking about cats and some people don't. And I wanted to say that we gave we we teased very hard a listener last Friday who sent in a very stern note asking us no longer to talk about the cats so much. I want everybody to know that while I'm not revealing that person, it's a longtime listener who really rolled with it and sent me a funny note kind of re-editing their original email saying, okay, okay, okay. So I want to say sometimes I read something like that on the air and I feel bad because we did – I kind of really put that person on blast. So I really appreciate them kind of just being able to roll with it and wrote to me later on on Friday just saying, okay, here's an amended version of the email. You can talk about it as much as you want. So thanks for being cool.

Okay, well, good tip of the cap to that listener for rolling with it. Thank you. More than I did, yes, certainly. And now we will not talk about cats all week because the listener outmaneuvered us. Now by responding with grace, now we have no— See, it was fun on Friday to get to just, like, lean into the cat talk as a way of sort of pushing back on the listener. But now the listener has responded in the way they have. Now we have to not talk about cats.

Bingo. I'm just playing bingo over here. that and that was not cat related i just got a bingo all right well 47 minutes in probably time to take a break i'm gonna don't say that because i'm editing out everything i just said that's what happens when we start talking julia roberts hold on 15 minutes in can you say 15 minutes in

luke we're gonna go to the break two and i'll give you a variety of times golly hey we're actually hitting the break on time it's amazing okay let's do that let's take a quick break all right we're a little late for this break but uh i don't know half hour that's not the worst for us uh so um we'll do that and then we'll be back i'm trying to cover every

i think we got it i think we got it just do one more a little bit more purple sure

well i don't the line has gone down i'm not sure what's going on with andrew so we're going to take a break and figure that out and then we'll be back with more tbch in a moment possibly with a new co-host all right for real though for real for real let's take a break and we'll be back in a moment all right let's thank some of our daily donors these are the people making today's episode possible with their financial support uh folks like danny koontz in little rock what up danny danny a long time supporter of the program fan knower of all things southern uh often hits me up on twitter and other places to to just like add some uh some intel on what's going on south of the mason dixon thank you danny also summer martinez is in puyallup washington summer hits me up a lot to let me know what's going on with the washington state fair how it is with the how the hot tub uh display is if they're still if they're selling out of trampolines how the cutco

knives are working i'm really mad at myself that i did not every year i watch it come and go and i always say oh next year next year i'll go and i didn't i went like three years ago i guess i went maybe the a year or two before the pandemic um and then i haven't been since now i'm sure it was shut down for at least one of those years but man it's not that hard to take a day and go to

the fair i should really do it it brings me joy i know i missed it this year too becca was talking about it because it's in salem her hometown and uh we were gonna go and then it just didn't work out and that's a bummer because i do it's it's definitely like i'm not one of those people some people will go like multiple times in a year that's probably more than i need but one one visit is nice yeah i just got so uh terrified by the cat because i forgot that she was in the room because she was like sleeping in the corner and as i'm standing here and yes i'm in shorts andrew get your mind right i'm going on a jog after this and um so i have like bare legs and all of a sudden i just feel like a shark it's like i was treading water and a shark just brushed my leg except in this case it was oh she didn't try to she's not doing that thing that um bingo will still sometimes do to me which is crawl up my leg instead of no she doesn't really

do that now thankfully plus they trimmed her nails while she was under general good anesthetic so her nails aren't too bad right now but um no she just recovering well too by the way i think so i mean that's i said at the beginning of the show today is probably the last day that i'm going to try to keep her on any kind of which they said 10 days this is i think this is like day five or six or something what i haven't i you know usually she and i spend a ton of time playing fetch like hours a day where i'm just like watching tv or working on my computer and just throwing like an earplug or a bottle cap or whatever i have for her to go get i haven't done that at all obviously because i don't want to get her running um and i've tried to keep her in here a lot where there's fewer things to jump on but the incision looks fine she seems fine um so i think i'm still not gonna like go crazy but i'm gonna i think i'm gonna let her roam the house a little bit more starting today great glad to hear she also pulled off her cone she's now figured out how to get her the only way for me to keep the cone on is to put it so tight that it's garrotting her which i don't think is nice so no but the funny part is the cone is now her favorite toy Yeah, batting it around the room. It's gone from being her tormentor to, you know, history is written by the victors, Andrew, and she has vanquished this cone, and now she's just parading it. She's carrying it around the room like, you know, putting your enemy's head on a pike outside the city after you've defeated it. Anyway, none of that gets us any closer to thanking Annette Melton, who's in Burien, Washington. But we do appreciate it. Thank you, Annette. Also, thanks to Diadli Patusik in Hamden, Connecticut. I feel like Diadli zoomed in on one of those things.

I think it was a show and tell, although I don't remember.

Maybe like right after having a baby or maybe the baby was, did the baby even make an appearance? I feel like I'm associating these things together, but I could be wrong about that. I don't know.

If one has a baby simply for show-or-tell purposes of their favorite podcast, that is commitment. That is amazing. And we appreciate that. Yes.

I've said this before. All we ask as this show is that you spend all your time listening to it and you donate money. That's it. And also potentially have children to delight us when we're doing the Zoom get-togethers.

And write quizzes for the TBTL Winter Games, which are coming up. Don't forget that.

And by the way, that's coming up. if you've got thoughts if you've got a winter games quiz something tbtl related could be audio

could be visual or just could be yeah like something if you see some like what as i put in the newsletter this week like which disgraced royal are you from your favorite magazine or whatever you can just send us a link too and we can anything yeah it could be involved or not

involved but yeah we're taking ideas we've got 10 of those episodes to record here so that we can take a little time off uh in the winter so please do send us your winter game ideas uh thanks also to joseph sullivan in seattle washington appreciate you i'm gonna be in seattle next week we're doing a live wire at town hall in seattle and it's it's wild this is not typical for us but it is sold out like super sold out so that they wouldn't even give me this shows you how much addy like how similar addy's brain to my brain is addy was like hey can i um you know bring a friend to the livewire thing and i was like well i put you on the list but i'm not uh their own they're not giving they're only giving me like x number of spots because it's it's really sold out she goes don't they know it's your hometown and i was like yes that's literally what i told them i said i'm gonna need x number of tickets because dot dot it's my hometown that's what i said to them and they were like that doesn't matter there are only so many seats And this is how many tickets you're getting. This is Town Hall? Town Hall, yeah. Although we're not in the – there's multiple spaces in Town Hall now. There's like the big one where I was with John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats some months ago. And for whatever reason, maybe because it's our first time doing it there or something, they didn't put us in that room. And I think that turns out a mistake. I'm always complaining about us being booked into a big theater and then just really having to work to get the word out and get people there. And then, of course, they put us in the more medium-sized theater, and then it sells out weeks in advance. And then I'm like, hmm, well, that was a mistake. So there's no winning with me is really what it comes down to. So there's no point in promoting that one? There isn't, other than I might see Joseph Sullivan there. I mean, Joseph's in Seattle. The show's in Seattle. I'm just trying to tell Joseph I can't put him on the list. Normally I would.

Joseph, you're on the list plus one. I'm just I'm just making your plus one is Mafio Appia. who's coming out from vienna virginia another donor for the show yeah thank you mafio for supporting the show thank you to all of our donors uh today for making tbtl possible we

would not be here without you hello and welcome to top story all right i uh have been watching

this clip of billy corrigan from smashing pumpkins a lot since it hit my radar a few days ago it is uh during a uh smashing pumpkins show i guess it says it's in milwaukee that's the youtube clip that i'm looking at it says milwaukee 2022 i was sort of under the impression initially that maybe it was this was an old piece of like archival footage that's just been bouncing around and it just kind of bounced up to my awareness which sort of happens a lot these days but i actually you clarified uh that it looks like this is probably actually pretty

recent i think i want to be very careful with this and we should get to the the point of it i don't i don't want to bog us down with the details of the potential timeline or whether or not i'm getting fooled by the internet but i'm pretty sure so first of all these things started popping up this video started popping up on various platforms about a week ago. And so I'm pretty sure this is from the current tour. They are on tour right now, and they are playing Midwestern Dates right now.

Well, that would all check out then.

And what, I'll mention this after you explain what we're talking about here, but the phenomenon that we see Billy Corgan doing here, apparently he's doing it other stops along this tour.

So it's not particularly great audio. I mean, I'll play it, I guess, because just to kind of set the sonic scene. But, you know, it's Billy Corgan. The drums are to his left. There's a huge video screen behind him that's just, you know, sort of whirring away with all kinds of rock star kinds of, you know, visuals. And let's see here. I'll unmute it. And then just Billy Corgan casually. He's got like a paper cup that has what looks like potato chips in it. Now, here's one thing I've noticed. People keep saying chips and dip. I think they're assuming that there's dip in the cup, maybe?

It looked like he was dipping it in something. I got a chips and salsa vibe from him, but I could be wrong about that.

No, I think you're right. No, I think you're right. I'm watching it again. It's hard to tell because the chips are also in the cup. So it's unclear, but he takes the chip, he dips them, he eats a couple of them. This is all during the drum solo.

he is wiping his hands off with some kind of a towel can we also mention he's got doesn't he have like i'm not watching the video right now but he's got really he's really gothed out right he's got shaved head doesn't he have white like paint all over his face with some black markings

he has been i um he has been shaved head for a pretty good amount of time and yeah he's kind of wearing like what they would call in um princess bride a holocaust cloak uh-huh he's like kind of is he's really leaning into his uncle fester kind of years i think but doesn't he is

he not i think he's got these black i think and now i'm looking at i think it's a little bit eye makeup on and stuff yeah and you there's other photos when he's under blue lights you can see that those are very prominent like kind of like you know dark lord looking like uh you know makeup features on his face and on his forehead and so to see this devil boy eating these chips so this middle-aged devil boy eating these you know is also part of the vibe i feel like he's got a real

varus yeah vibe going these days with the shaved head and with you know his whole look and kind of a frock on or whatever now this is interesting to me for a few reasons uh this video one i would think that if i were in the midst of playing a rock show to some in front of some huge crowd the last thing that i would want to do would be eat anything like the last thing that would come to my mind no matter how hungry i was right before the show like as we're taking the stage the adrenaline you'd think would be coursing through your body would shut down everything that's not the performance and then like you get off stage and all of a sudden you're like oh my god i'm famished yeah like it just it's that's just i know for me personally if i'm doing anything performative and i've never done anything on the level of trying to you know uh saying despite all my rage i'm still just a rat in a cage by the way that's really coming back to a bite old billy on this one because you know there's a proud tradition of memeifying billy corrigan yeah like when he was on that like very small roller coaster and somebody wrote despite all my rage

i'm still on a train that's low gauge and i think was that the stew bot's joke or did he just retweet it what's that was that the stew bot's joke or did he just retweet it i can't remember

I think he might have retweeted it. I don't know if that was a Stubat original.

If it was, tip of the cap. I think there's, you know, many going around, including, despite all my rage, I am still eating chips on stage. Things like that. But the part of it that really got me is the move that he does after he eats the chips.

Have you ever seen this before? Did you see what he did? I just remember, I watched it this morning. I remember he kind of wipes his hands off and grabs his guitar. What are you talking about?

There's a critical moment in between. I advise you to go back to the tape.

I'm looking at it now. Yeah. He wipes his mouth, wipes his face.

He waggles his Adam's apple with his fingers to send the chips down.

Oh, before he wipes himself? I'm looking for this here. He's very casually eating. It's like the least rock star-y thing you can possibly imagine. That's kind of the...

Well, that's the thing, too. It's like, it's not like, you know, sometimes somebody will take a drink of, you know, Jack Daniels on stage, and then it's like, they'll spit it out into the crowd or something. There's like rock star moves involving food and drink. this is very unrockstar this is like i just got to get some calories in me while the drum solo is happening now i'm wondering by the way oh there it is i just

saw it yeah he just waggles it for a split second he's still chewing though he didn't

but it's like is he helping the food go down is he warming up his vocal cords for the next thing i've never seen i've never seen an adam's apple waggle like that and i've now started doing it involuntarily andrew because i like when i watch you ever do this it's very monkey see monkey do you'll just like watch something and you'll realize that you're echoing it like visually without even meaning to because you're just you're taking in the information and when i first watch it i kind of like was okay what's he doing he's he's like uh he's like waggling his adam's apple to like what get the food it's like a it's like a pelican kind of like when they do that thing where they shake yeah extend their like gullet so that the stuff falls now i'm like is he is he just making sure that the the chips go down is he is that to keep his voice limber i of course also had a much more low profile but no less embarrassing event for myself involving singing and eating potato chips or i should say french fries backstage when i was in the mall in the night visitors and i was very hungry because i hadn't eaten all day and it was before the show and someone had dick's drive-in food backstage and i horfed down a bunch of french fries and then ran out on stage to start the show and then the first notes that i sang i felt the french fries who that were only partially chewed coming back up so it's billy corrigan been through that does he know better and that's why he's kind of like helping uh his peristaltic whatever kind of move the food down his uh his his his esophagus what's going on with that yeah i'm not sure and i want to go back to something

that i mentioned earlier and again it's all of this is a little bit tough because nobody's written anything definitive about this it's just a bunch of comment sections and people making jokes like cherub guac which i think is a good one um but like some people are saying we i saw i saw him do this in detroit too and again like the three things that i saw were all midwestern shows um and another person had it it looked very very similar but it was a different angle on the situation saying i think this is from detroit or this is from chicago i can't remember which one And, of course, it looks very similar because when these tours go out, like, the set is the same, right? And he's dressed the same. He's wearing the same makeup. Right, sure, sure. So I can't really tell if it's the same show and somebody taped it at a different angle and people are just sort of kind of look at me-ing on the internet to get attention or if he really is. I mean, wouldn't this be even more fascinating if this wasn't just an unguarded moment during a Jimmy Chamberlain drum solo? but in fact this is built in it's built into the show is that he needs chips because he's gonna like kind of he is going to snack during the drum solo on every show like that's an interesting I mean talk about like very I guess like self-confident like I wouldn't be confident enough to do that just seems so un-rock star he's just like you know he's just eating I can't explain to you how uncool this moment is he's just like you know he's just like eating a chip and then spending some time just trying to get it done you know like doing all those motions one would do when you don't think somebody's watching you eat rubbing your tongue around your mouth trying to get all the chips down before you have to then start singing zero again or whatever the hell

song this is i used to eat some little fries um i i would i i know i'm obsessing on this point but what i would like to see if this is happening in multiple shows is if he always waggles his adam's apple yeah to get like if that's part of his process like if that's if that's like me hitting the cough button at wait wait before i ever speak so i can kind of like if that's just he knows okay i've got these because again he knew the he knew those chips were going to be there he obviously either put them there himself or had someone put them there knew the time in the show when he was going to have time to go eat them. Like it would be conceivable that this is something he's doing at every show this tour, because this, this didn't seem like happenstance. It seemed like something that was fairly thought out.

I'm looking now. I'm trying to find this other video that I saw and I can't find it right now. But, um, I mean this little finger waggle, this throat waggle, whatever we're calling it. It's so brief. It almost feels like it's more of a, um, I don't know if I feel like it's as deliberate as you're maybe thinking it is.

Have you ever done that, though, in your life, even momentarily?

I'm sorry. I was coughing.

You're waggling your Adam's apple?

I should have waggled my Adam's apple before the show did it.

See, we did all learn from Billy Corrigan.

I don't know if you could tell, but I was trying to get out of my last sentence as fast as possible. If I were a better co-worker, I would have sensed that was happening. I'm sorry. I mean, I'm glad that I pulled it off, but then not when you tossed a hacky sack right back to me. I mashed my mute button as fast as possible so I could just... You know how when you suppress a cough sometimes, it makes the cough so much worse than it would have been? I just had to cough a little bit, but then I'm pushing out my words. It's getting worse and worse, and then I... In fact, Luke, I woke up coughing last night really uncomfortably because in my dream, I was trying to suppress the cough. It's very rare. I had a little bit of a bug this weekend. I'm trying to figure out. I mean, it was so minor, like definitely was, you know, we didn't have any kind of COVID scare or anything. It was like a couple of nights last week, I stayed up way too late, didn't take care of myself and like kind of felt a little raw the next day and felt like I think I have a little something. But then yesterday during the football game, it felt more like allergies, like my right eye just kept like leaking. I don't know if I've ever had anything like that. Like half of my face was basically congested and it was just awful. I'm feeling so much better today, but I think maybe I had a little bit of a cough in my sleep, but in my dream, I was around a bunch of people in a place where I couldn't cough. I can't remember if it was like on a stage somewhere or just out of politeness, but then suddenly I woke up coughing, and the cough was so much worse because I was trying to suppress it, I believe.

Yes. The last time I had something similar to that was when I was on an airplane and I was flying. it was when you know we were still very much at the height of the covid stuff and it was the kind of thing where and i had a mask on obviously but it's like if you're coughing on an airplane at all it's really really not going to go over well and i was sitting there and i happened to be kind of near the front of the plane and it had only just begun boarding and i'm just sitting there like trying my eyes are watering and i'm trying everything in my power to not cough and And it's like the cough is then just going back into my body and then redistributing itself through various weird, bad physical manifestations.

Stigmata, et cetera.

Stigmata. I have light anal leakage. Oh, God. My swelling of the feet. It's like if you can't just let the cough out, it's going to get, it's like force multiplies in some way. And it was like so much worse trying to hold that thing in. Yeah, then it comes out and then it's a really scary thing. i think i may have successfully because the thing is once the plane is actually in the air or once the plane is taking off there's a lot of engine noise you can get away with a little bit sure but it was the fact that we were just sitting waiting i think i i may have even gone to the restroom and just like coughed like crazy but that was i don't think i've ever tried because i'm not i'm not embarrassed about that kind of stuff particularly i mean i do try to mute the button here if i'm gonna cough or whatever but it's it's not the kind of thing in normal life where i'm like oh i would never cough you know i would cough into the crook of my arm i would try to be respectful about it but i don't know i can't think of other times i've really tried to i've made it my in my mind like if i don't hold this coffin there's gonna they're gonna kick me off the flight right right like i haven't noted the stakes to be that high before but i was like that's what it felt

like so anyway 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.

We didn't get to talk about the Philly chicken guy, but I'll just say, actually also the kind of story that I think might have 5% rankled you, Andrew, because it's definitely not your kind of a deal to post signs that say, I'll be eating a rotisserie chicken every day for 20 days. But it was kind of a funny thing, this guy. I assume he's sort of an aspiring comedian of some type or just one of those folks. who in Philly decided that he was going to start eating a rotisserie chicken every day. And I think his goal was to go for 30 days and he was just doing it like in his apartment and then just like putting funny pictures online. But as it started to get more attention and then I did on Sunday, it was the 40th, he extended it and Saturday was a tough day in Philly because, and this is the first time that anyone can remember this happening. And this is because of the addition, by the way, of soccer as a professional sport in America. This really,

couldn't have happened otherwise because the championships of baseball and football and

Thank you.

basketball never happen on the same weekend as each other right but if you throw a fourth sport into the mixed soccer you do raise the possibility that your city could lose two championships in one

weekend yeah in fact I wonder did we ever find out what the ratings were like in Philadelphia um last sunday when i or was it monday i think monday night football was was philadelphia versus houston while the world series was philadelphia versus houston oh seriously am i wrong about that i mean maybe you could do a little googling there i can and because i was interested in knowing because i think i heard somebody say like oh yeah and it'll be amazing because in this day and age like football really is america's sport because the nfl monday night viewer viewership will be will just dwarf the the baseball viewership even though that is literally the world series of baseball i consider the world series to be like the world series of baseball i think i already made that joke on the show um so i don't know if you think you might be right by the way let's see here see if you can get any ratings information on that that would be i don't know if i'm uh the

phillies played in the world series let's see that was an all-day affair both teams played there sorry there's a little history from this uh i'm trying to find what the exact they say two games at once the night philadelphia sports fans will always remember so i'm not sure who was playing whom like if they were also playing the texans i.e the team from houston the the the eagles were but definitely yeah you're right the texans you're at you're exactly right so the that's wild I don't know how I didn't figure that out, that the Eagles were playing the team from Houston while the Phillies were playing the team from Houston, and both Philadelphia teams won.

Oh, they both won that night, so that was a good day, and then this weekend was tough.

Actually, let's see. Wait, no. No, I don't know. This is what happens when I try to do this stuff on the fly. This is a headline. The sound of glass breaking during the Texans' opening drive had nothing to do with their Cinderella bid to upset the undefeated Eagles. Those were shards of celebration. Kyle Schwarber had just tied Game 5 of the World Series one-to-one with a leadoff homer in the bottom of the first. So, well, this is confusing, though, because Game 5, I'm trying to do all the math in my head as to what day Game 5 occurred of the series. Anyway, there was a lot of sports excitement in Philly, and now, unfortunately, as far as it relates to the Phillies and then also the MLS team that's in Philadelphia, They both did not prevail in their respective championships over the weekend, which is really a bummer. But anyway, so a bunch of people went out. It was, I would say, almost a bigger turnout than we've ever had for a TBTL live event. Andrew, we're just basically on a pier behind a Walmart watching this guy just eat a rotisserie chicken.

He was on a stage or something?

He was just kind of on, not a stage. I mean, it was literally on, like, it might have been on the Schuylkill River or something. It was like, I think the sign said, I'm going to be on a pier behind the Walmart eating this chicken on Sunday. And the way it was written up in Barstool Sports was that it was sort of catharsis for a lot of people who were kind of bummed about their sports. But they all showed up out there and watched this guy, which I have to say, at first, I mean, obviously, it's a joke. I didn't, like, it's played as a joke. I'm going to eat an entire rotisserie chicken every day. But I'm telling you, it's actually a decent amount of chicken to eat in one meal.

It always has to be one meal. I was wondering, like, you couldn't just, like, eating a chicken a day, you could have that as three squares, right?

I think the way that he was presenting it, like, through the photos and videos and the online part of it was he would just sit down and eat an entire rotisserie chicken very methodically. Which is, you know, you've got, what, two chicken breasts, two drumsticks. There are no thighs, right?

wait there are five sure of course you're eating the whole chicken right but i mean okay so well that's you know yeah now there's some ones you get the pre-made ones the pre-wrote you know the rotisserie ones uh that you get at the store like that um they do tend to be somewhat smaller it's not like there was a while there where it was actually you can believe it or not it was a more healthy period of my life where i was like kind of going to the gym every day and often coming you know and stopping at the grocery store and getting like one of those smallest rotisserie chickens and the little plastic carrier and some like salad fixings or whatever those um you know they are somewhat smaller like the the i'm not trying to take away from the story i didn't read it i don't have a vested interest in this but like listen eating a entire chicken um in a sitting is is a lot but it's not like a thanksgiving looking turkey sure things you know i i thought it was

like nothing i was like back in my when i ate more meat i'm like oh i'm sure i've killed an entire rotisserie chicken by myself which is also possible so i was thinking this is just a total joke it's like someone saying i'm gonna

to eat a drumstick from kfc every day for a month or something but then when i saw i'm actually eating it i was like you know what there's a you know it's more than i was kind of remembering it as being but you're right not it's not like a competitive eating challenge or something where you're you're doing this unbelievably um uh you know intense thing but anyway uh mostly i just wanted to say thinking about folks in philly if you're one of the good people in houston if you're one of our listeners and you're happy about your baseball team i salute you i'm glad you're having a happy feeling um and uh let's just hope that we pick up trey turner or one of these other uh hot shit free agents that are going to be hitting the market apparently i mean by that by we i mean the seattle mariners because the offseason starts well it started a few days ago andrew it started

sunday morning so i um hey let's keep it here though for a second because one of our listeners who is a big Phillies fan and has been kind of texting us as her emotions go up and down over the past, whatever it was, 10 days of the series, is listener Maggie, who's in Swarthmore just outside of Philadelphia. And she left us this voicemail. So while Maggie's heart is probably a bit heavy today because of her baseball team, she does have this story of good news, something good that happened very recently.

Hey, guys. It's Maggie from Swarthmore. I'm calling because I realized I don't think I remembered to call in with my amazing story that happened a couple of weeks ago. My husband and I went to Bermuda for our 20th wedding anniversary, the third week of October. Congrats. And it was kind of a stretch for us financially, but we did it, and we went, and we were, like, having a great time. We're staying in this Airbnb cottage so we can eat two meals in and only pay for one meal out because it's expensive in Bermuda. It was a beautiful place, amazingly friendly people. It was fantastic. But the best part, I went outside the cottage one day to look around the outside of the cottage to figure out where the outdoor trash cans are because the kitchen trash was full and I needed to find where I should go. And I'm looking around, and there's kind of some mud on the ground of this little courtyard area that's just off the street, just a half high fence off the street. and I see out of the corner of my eye this pink paper. And I think, oh, that's like a blown-over receipt or something, I don't know. And then something clicks in my brain, and I pick this up, and it is money. And not only is it money, this Bermudian, beautiful Bermudian money, it's $500 of amazingly beautiful Bermudian money. and you know we look all around there's no way that there's any place to report this there's no way that there's anybody to turn this into um there's a little bus stop right outside on the other side of the fence and so one scenario is you know someone reaches in their pocket for their bus pass and all their money comes flying out um speculation in the family is that it was some kind of drug drop that went wrong but everyone always thinks it's some kind of drug i

I was going to say the same thing. Yeah, I don't know, man. Are there that many? I guess a $500 bill is a lot. So I guess I understand why people's mind go to. You can eat out twice a day on that money. How many rotisserie chickens could you get? I mean, I guess you could see, like, why would somebody be carrying around that kind of cash in this day and age when things are so digital, you know, or, you know, plastic? And so I understand why people's minds go there. Anyway, actually, Maggie's voicemail kind of cuts off anyway, kind of hit the time limit. But basically, I guess they did find a couple of other dollars around there later that they kept as souvenirs. But $500, and Maggie said it all went right back into the economy because, as she was saying, they were trying to have this nice trip, trying to be frugal about it. Yeah. But then have this kind of miracle, just as this manna from heaven for a- Literally, almost literally. Yeah, and then was able to spend that and was able to maybe go out to eat a little bit more than they were planning. So congratulations on that.

Sorry if I sound a little distracted. I was having to respond to an email. So, you know, I'm getting a construction loan for part of this project of this remodel. And it's funny because, you know, I have to, like, verify some stuff that I have a job, etc. And so one of those jobs that I'm offering is, I guess you would say, collateral or proof that I can do it is Livewire, host of Livewire. And it's so annoying because the people that I'm dealing with are really nice, but they hire some outside company that verifies these things, right? And so they said – they emailed them back, and it's actually a third party. There's like, there's the people that I'm getting the loan from, the company that they hire to verify that I have the jobs I say, and then the company that that company hires. And as you can imagine, it's not a great process because. They're like, we're hearing back from Symmetra verifications that they can't verify you work at LiveWire. Is there a phone number for LiveWire? Like, I guess, like, there's probably a voicemail or something they can call. And I didn't do this. I don't want to be a jerk. But it was attempting to just forward them the website and or the list of radio stations and or the Wikipedia page. and like there it would be so easy for me to have a friend answer a phone number and say yes i am the boss of live wire and luke does work there it would be so much harder for me to gin up the very obvious evidence that this is a thing that exists do not mention the julia roberts thing

that is going to that is not going to work in your favor well actually i was the host of live wire until i made a major on-air gap let me just jump in with one more quick thing because the conversation has sort of led to it again you don't want me to keep talking about loan verification talking about wikipedia edits and the conversation that i mentioned before about um about how i i find it to be a very complicated world the the back end of wikipedia and um listener steve wrote in to say that he had actually there's twice in his life that he's found himself editing wikipedia pages the first time i was listening to a song by nick hayward i don't know nick hayward i don't know if you do luke but uh he says i was listening to a song by nick hayward called caravan and there was a mention of a place called camber sands i'd never heard of it i go to the wikipedia page to look up what camber sands is the page contains a section where it references mentions and popular music and they didn't mention the nick hayward song so i added the reference okay good on you the second time was after i started listening to tbtl i went to the too beautiful to live podcast wikipedia page and it listed the host as luke burbank there was no mention of my friend andrew i suggested they add andrew's name as co-host and a few days later there it was thank you steve as i said you are my wiki hero and he said that that's exactly what nick hayward said as well but uh

thank you for that now nick hayward that's not no i'm thinking of somebody else like do you know the guy who sends the or sends who who records the um weird like they're weird songs that are like The time that I told, the time I met Paul McCartney and asked him to let me be in the Beatles. Is that Nick Lutz or something? He's always very sweaty in the videos. I have no idea what this is. You, if you saw him, you'd be like, oh, I know that guy. He's got, he got very sort of internet famous. Let me see if I can find.

I'm guessing it's not Nick Hayward. It sounds like Nick Hayward is a singer songwriter. Doesn't, there's nothing that seems to lead me to think that this is the English singer songwriter.

so maybe no he's american he does a lot of uh the listeners are going crazy camaro kev is really obsessed with this guy and he just does these actually chris hayes has sent us some of his songs too he will he just does these weird songs that he records like in his basement one he did he did one as like he's one of the gremlins like um let's see nick some gremlin song i will get there and then we will get out of here uh yeah where did the gremlins go let's see What is this guy's? Nick Lutzow Nick Lutzko I bet you anything If you saw this guy's face You would be like Oh yeah, that guy Definitely He's always sort of like His vibe is always like Way more intense Than you're expecting And he's like in his basement And he's always singing about Some sort of pop cultural thing Here's a little bit This is Where did the gremlins go? First I'm going to turn off Doogie This is Where do the gremlins go by this guy

Gotta keep myself together Gotta take a deep breath Oh, because there may never be a Gremlins 3 So tell me, where did the Gremlins go? It's been so long, but nothing to show We could have had Gremlins vs. Home Alone Or at least a cameo, an attack of the bones I should have been a Gremlins 3

Is this ringing any bells?

I know that Chris has sent us some musical comedy stuff before, so I'm assuming this is it, but I don't think I've heard this.

Oh, that's surprising to me, only because it's like 5% too weird for me, which, I hope you take this the right way, I figured it was right up your alley. I think you have more eclectic taste in certain things, and also you're just more able to just enjoy something, as opposed to being like, I don't get, this is strange to me. So I thought maybe it would be something that you would be aware of.

But you also know that I'm not huge on parody music or novelty music in the sense that it's pretty novelty.

Yeah, well, that's the thing. I guess the question would be is it considered – if it would be considered parody or novelty. I mean I guess it would have to be novelty because the songs really have kind of comic messages. But anyway, that's not the guy.

That's not Nick Hayward So no one go and update Do not go to either Nick Hayward Or Nick Lutzko's Wikipedia pages And mess things up Because I was thinking Of totally different people So please But I should go to Everybody stand out

TBTL Wikipedia Do you think I'm still up there It would be interesting If somebody took me down From that Julia Roberts took you down It's funny They replaced me By your ex-wife For some reason

Well I mean She obviously had A pretty big influence Let's see here I don't think I knew I know this sounds crazy I mean I did it some point but i think i maybe forgot that we also had a tbtl wikipedia page yeah i'm looking at it

now and because i also think it was listener cheryl because we had joked about it that like of course you have your bona fides here and your your name luke burbank is linkable to your page and mine is not it just says andrew walsh in text and so i think it was cheryl and corvallis who created a wikipedia page for me and linked to it here and wikipedia did not accept it they they said no he's nobody like literally somebody made it and they and they um rejected

it they rejected me that's really bs in my opinion i feel like the idea of wikipedia to me really seems like anyone should be able to create a wikipedia page for anything and if it's factually correct and if it you know survives a sort of peer vetting process i mean i guess is their logic and again i don't think this applies to you but is their logic that if everyone if everyone and everything had a wikipedia page then it would somehow be overwhelming for folks i don't i guess i'm trying to understand what the downside is of more people having wikipedia pages as long as the

information is accurate the disambiguation thing like if you just end up being like oh there's a because i believe there was a soccer player named andrew walsh i used to get those updates all the time i know that like the the the comms person the spokesperson for the las vegas las vegas police department or maybe yeah I believe it's no it must be a sheriff's department because he's a deputy but there's a deputy Andrew Walsh that is always popping up Clark County PD yeah it must be Clark County that is confusing because I know he's a deputy but they always refer to him as Las Vegas but Las Vegas is not the county so now I'm confused about this but whatever where were we are we starting the show we were wrapping the show I can't remember did we do a show yet

We did but we cut a lot of it out So we're only 10 minutes into it So it's time for our first break Let's do an early break

Andrew Walsh is an assistant sheriff With the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Interesting I don't know how that works

I guess you can be a sheriff in a police department If they decide that's how they're going to do it Yeah I guess so

Well thank you everyone for listening He's a better Andrew Walsh We're fine

He probably does

He should.

All right. Thanks, everyone. We are going to be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you. Again, I don't feel like you need me to tell you this. You're all smart people. But as the person who once said voting doesn't matter on this program and ruse the day, I would really advise and encourage everyone to get out there and please vote.

Have you dropped off your ballot yet? You guys have mail-in voting. I'm doing it today, actually. Mine's filled out.

I'm voting in Washington, actually, because that's where that house is. So I'm going up to the local voting office there, and I'm actually voting in person.

Oh, interesting.

Because I didn't get my ballot in the mail, so I'm going to the elections office. I already talked to him, and I'm getting all the stuff, and I'm voting.

Okay. Tiffany Smiley?

Do my part to keep Tiffany Smiley where she belongs, which is not the U.S. Senate. Yes. Okay, good. All right. Thanks, everyone. See you tomorrow. Until then, have a great Monday. Take care of yourselves, and please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

you gotta keep him out of the sunlight sunlight will kill him number two keep him away from water don't give him any water to drink and whatever you do don't give him a bath and probably the most important thing don't ever feed him after midnight power out