Muse

Do you want to exchange Christmas presents this year?

I would love to.

Great.

How about the most we can spend on each other's gifts is zero dollars?

Really? You want to exchange creative gifts? Oh, well, you are the one that's in trouble now, buddy, because creativity to me is just like, it's like a bird, like a friendly bird that embraces all ideas and just, like, shoots out of its eyes all kinds of beauty.

Wow, Lemon, this is like watching Hemingway ride. Mark Hemingway.

Yeah.

TBTL!

I'm so excited about this show. It is weird, it is beautiful, it has a plot that goes in fascinating directions. It's so easy.

All you do is point, click. But how does it work? All you need is a computer and a regular phone line.

Well, with all due respect, I mean, I hate to admit this, but I don't think I've been online and, you know, a couple days or weeks or whatever, that's really not an important thing to me. My face, your face, instant face, go talk to whoever you want that does that stuff. I don't know.

What's on the website probably isn't going to be where it's actually going to be. Okay. A lot of times we will play like a Home Depot parking lot.

This is not your mama's podcast. This is too beautiful to live.

All right, hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a thursday edition of tbtl the show that just might be too beautiful to live scat man's world my name is luke burbank i am your host

coming to you from the hollywood broadcast center right here in portland oregon where

it is a spectacular thursday morning oh ma pa it's just beautiful absolutely clear blue skies

And this time of year when it's clear out and cold, it's, as the song says, you can see for miles and miles. Well, if you put your glasses on now, if you're me, you could see pretty far. Anyway, it is just a lovely day and a lovely episode of the show because it's episode 8,000. Excuse me, 3,800. Episode 8. The Earth is not going to last long enough for us to get to 8,000 episodes. I don't think, anyway. This is episode 3837 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. And you might be surprised to hear how often experts say you should actually be washing your sheets.

And when he said that, that shocked me.

We will tell you what the experts are telling us about how often we should be on that kind of annoying task. Also, fine, speaking of annoying tasks, we'll do it. We'll talk about the late football coach, Mike Leach. This whole conversation bothers me. He passed away a couple of days ago. He was a Mississippi State football coach. He was also the coach at Washington State. And he was a noted Trump supporter. He was a tweeter of bad memes. He was also a very interesting person from a football standpoint And from a just kind of like having on some level, I guess you might say some amount of normalcy that as often alludes people who become, you know, very, very well-paid, well-regarded college football coaches. Again, you have to balance all of that with the fact that he had absolutely terrible, terrible views as well. So speaking of football weirdos, by the way, we'll talk about Jim Irsay as well. He is the owner of the Indianapolis Colts. That's his part-time job. His full-time job is paying people to hang out with him so he can pretend he's a rock and roller. I'm ready to f***ing smoke the world with the rock and roll. So we'll get into that, too. Plus, it's a Thursday, a.k.a. a Blur's Day, so we'll do the Blur's Day messages. And we'll do all that with the help of this young man, the longest-running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. Speaking of football, he did play football at Walsh High in Cleveland, Ohio.

I am a large man. I'm a very large man, and I use my dad voice a lot.

He doesn't play football anymore, but he is going to use his dad voice today. He's Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend. Good morning, Luke.

I have to tell you about something, but I hesitate to do it because I don't want it to be like one of those, I don't know, one of those things where it's like a stand-in for having a real personality. But I, let me go back here for a second. Wait, hold on. Can I guess? Yes, there's no way in the world you'll be able to guess. There's literally no way in the world.

You just watched the Super Bowl for the commercials?

Why is everybody so mad?

That's a thing people use in lieu of having a personality.

Yeah, I'm, um, okay, do you want to guess? What's your opinion on bacon?

Well, actually, this might if you wanted to. What if you loved bacon in a way that seemed even more than the average person? Can that be kind of a person? I got to tell you something. Bacon is good for me.

I live for Pirate Day, Luke, where you are. OK, listen, I'm not going to dunk on things that people like. But also, I'm on thin ice here because when you hear the story, it is very similar to those types of things. Genevieve had a kind of a holiday cookie exchange party at work a few days ago, right? She made these rum balls, by the way. It's not a competition, but I find it incredibly hard to believe anybody made anything better than Genevieve's rum balls.

I call cakes big old cookies.

Amazing. That's not the story. So she takes the rum balls into work.

Is a rum ball a cookie, though, Andrew?

Oh, that's a good—maybe it was a holiday dessert exchange? I brought pudding.

Is a hot dog a sandwich? That's my personality.

That's what we're leading towards here. So she goes to work with one of our kind of, I call them a Tupperware container. This particular one is not exactly Tupperware, but it's reusable. It's not one of the really cheap Gladware ones that you use for maybe a year or two and throw away. Like this is like a, I'm going to again call it kind of a Tupperware thing that we've had for, I'm going to say, you know, between five and ten years. It's been a staple in our lives. I use it all the time. And I'm kind of, you know, I'm the guy who is in the kitchen the most, especially, like, putting foodstuffs away. In fact, this is a little sidebar I shouldn't get into now, but I astounded myself after Thanksgiving and, like, the days and weeks after Thanksgiving of my ability to constantly downshift food into smaller and smaller containers until it's all gone. Like, I hate having big containers that are, like, half full or less in the fridge.

in like a snuff box that you keep tobacco in and just put it in your breast pocket and you take it out take a pinch of turkey meat and put it in your nostril there was a um you would open up a

container that looked like they were for earbuds but it was just two brussels sprouts in there in the fridge i mean that's basically what i was doing because after thanksgiving like i think people know that feeling of having an overcrowded refrigerator but for me it becomes a real obsession and i hate it like okay let's say you have a thing of mashed potatoes and it's full and then And, you know, a few days later, everybody's had their mashed potato leftovers, and now it's like less than half full. Well, I am not putting that thing back in the fridge. I'm going to downsize it into an appropriately sized container, and then I'll continue to do that. And then eventually it'll end up in one of those, like, leftover soup containers that you get when you take out pho or whatever. So anyway, I'm very – I guess I'm laying the groundwork here for saying that, like, all of these little various Tupperwares and food storage things in our life I feel very intimately connected to. And Genevieve took one of them, and I'm also very protective of them. Genevieve took her rumballs to work in one of these containers. I don't think I even realized that. After work that day, I happened to pick her up. I was in the neighborhood with the car, and I picked her up, and she had a bag of cookies. And she said, you know, I had to leave our Tupperware thing back there. It's okay. I got it back. It's not going there. Don't worry. Everything's fine. But she said, yeah. That's where I thought the story was going. Yeah, no. She said, don't worry. Oh, my God. I would not be here today if that thing was in danger but anyway she said oh I had to leave our little Tupperware thing back at work so you know don't let me forget to pick it back up again I'm like oh okay yeah which one she said the one with the purple lid I said purple lid we don't have any Tupperware with a purple lid she's like yeah you know the one we use all the time the kind of flat flat one long one I'm like the one with the blue lid well you know it's purpley blue I'm like it is beautiful purple balls It is nowhere near purple. Like, never in my life would I ever describe this as being any close to purple. And I'm getting a little agitated in the car. I'm like, Genevieve, that's not purple. Like, it's blue. It's almost kind of lightish blue. And she's like, well, and she's super. She's like, okay, well, whatever. I guess we all just see things differently. I'm like, no, we don't just see things differently. Like, that's blue. She's like, listen, I think it's a little purple, but, like, that's fine. And we let it go. And then I kind of forgot about it. And then she did apparently get it back from work because I just woke up this morning. I saw in the sink is the is the container with the blue lid. And it's just all those memories of that ride home came flooding back to me. And I'm just like, I and I know this is like, you know, is the dress is the dress gold or what? What even were the options? Black or gold, right?

Seems like so far apart on the like color.

Yeah. Spectrum. And that's a photo. That's the difference, too. I mean, I know that we're all looking at the same photo, but we're looking at it on monitors with varying degrees of warmth settings and saturation settings and lightness settings on our computer. So that one surprised me a little bit less because, in fact, I think I had different results to my eyes depending. and whether I looked at that dress on my phone or on a laptop, right? But this one is, like, it's something that's in real life, and it just, again, I've just washed that thing probably 5,000 times in its lifetime. Maybe I've washed all the purple off it, and just, like, the idea that I'm living with somebody who just... You would have washed that purple off your face. He said, his purple just blows my damn mind. I just cannot get around that.

Did you think for a minute that maybe Genevieve had confused your prized almost Tupperware with somebody else's at her work I mean was the the difference in how you describe the color was that freaking you out because you thought oh my gosh we may be coming

home with uh the wrong baby no no I I knew what she was talking about it's just a perception thing that I it's just and then again I'm not trying to overstate this because we've had these conversations as a global community who are into memes but like just to have it in my life in this way just to like for me and views to just we could stand in the kitchen and look at this lid and like again I was I went into it with an open mind I saw it in the in the sink today and I was like oh oh yeah Genevieve said that's purple and like I tried I tried to like shift my perspective and like I just I just don't see it and so and we get a photo can this be the show pic yeah I think it

probably should be um although we'll be able to start a whole new meme war then i'll put it downloads on this on this program now you're talking about your refrigerator having too much stuff in it potentially and hence you're needing to continually sort of economize with that stuff i am suffering from a mild to moderate case of bachelor fridge right now in fact i don't think it's moderate i think it's moved into the severe category because i've been out of town some well first of all i'm just not really great at planning when it comes to my meals so even if i'm home for a month i am not super great at buying you know fixins and then kind of sort of systematically using them to make various meals throughout the week i'm bad at that i aspire to be better but i'm just not then if i'm out of town a lot which i have been i'm even less inclined to want to buy anything because i'm thinking oh it's probably gonna go bad so i just it sort of justifies me just ordering more food you know for dinner on that particular night and so i i will come home for like a day or two then i'll be back out on the road my fridge is like so barren right now i cannot even tell you it has this these are the contents of my fridge five american cheese like kind of like you know craft singles five like craft singles a half consumed jar of like artisanal sliced pickles that i bought at the salem farmer's market with becca that sounds great oh my god they're so good i bought four jars you know me right like i had i had a sample and i was like this is great and um and then i said uh i'll take four jars please and they looked at me like have you lost your mind guess what this is the last jar andrew for once one of my silly over purchases completely worked out because like i'm loving these things those yahoos are lucky you

didn't buy their company you kidding me four jars don't look at me a stance by the entire staff yes i'm gonna buy your entire pickle company and i'm firing the rules and morals board i'm firing

the person who knows how to make the pickles yeah but um and then i have a speaking of tupperware i have a tupperware thing of sauerkraut so i was um on a mission to try to find some some sauerkraut this is months ago now and um the store that i was in here in portland didn't have you know i'm a bubbies man like my father and his father before him they didn't have any bubbies so they had some other like i don't know what it was it was like boar's head so it was kind of like the it was refrigerated i wanted some like fancy refrigerated sauerkraut but it was in a plastic

bag have you ever have you ever seen this move i have seen it i don't buy it because it um i prefer

the jar obviously uh as do i but if i was going to go with a just a an unrefrigerated jar of kind of regular old sauerkraut or something that seemed high-end to me like it was artisanal sure yep i had to go for the bag but the problem was that's impossible to store really like it's a it's a it's a questionable design to me so after i had a little bit of the sauerkraut with like whatever my veggie dog i then put it all in a tupperware container and it's just been sitting on the top shelf i don't know if it's still good it doesn't look moldy also sauerkraut is fermented so is it just getting better in there i don't know depends on the seal too i mean i always think of

that stuff as being in glass jars and um sure you know with a nice solid seal and now you said a tupperware but we refer to tupperware as a whole bunch of things these days so that that might this This is legit Tupperware. Oh, nice.

This is the kind you burp it.

Oh yeah, then if you're burping it Then I'll bet you it's great inside there

But basically I've got the cheese I've got a little bit of pickles left I have the possibly edible sauerkraut And then I've got I've got condiments Of all kinds, including many condiments That were delivered with food That I ordered But then I didn't actually like I love food from this place called Huero here This kind of Mexican place And then I always send it with these little Containers, these little plastic things with the lid that snaps down on them that are round. I don't know what the name for that would be, actually. What would you call that? I'm not sure. Can you explain it again, what you're describing? It's like, you know how sometimes you could get, if you were at a place and you got a to-go container for your ketchup and you'd walk over to one of those pump-action things, you'd pump ketchup into a little round plastic thing and then you'd snap a lid on it?

I call it a ramekin. I don't know if that's right or not, but I consider it like a little ramekin with a little to-go ramekin, but I don't know if that's right or not.

So I've got – every time I order food from Wero, it comes along with these ramekins of this particular kind of mango salsa. I don't even like it, but I can't throw it away. I have about 100 small containers of mango salsa that I don't particularly enjoy because it's so cute that they send it. I didn't even ask for it, and I feel like maybe someday I'll have someone over, and they'll be like, do you have any mango salsa? I'm like, well, interestingly enough, I do. Luke, get rid of it.

Please get rid of it.

That's basically, that's the contents of my refrigerator currently, and I have just been, I've been kind of busy and not able to replenish it, but now I'm going to be home for a while, so I'm actually getting excited to make a list, check it twice, go to the grocery store. speaking of um productivity can i just can i just brag on myself for a minute here um this isn't even a humble brag this is a humble brag hold the humble i have had the most productive morning that i can remember andrew and it's because the cat is no longer i when i used to describe bubbles behavior as being like very very frenetic very active but what i liked about her is that she also could take a hint when daddy closes the bedroom door and he puts on that dyson fan and uh you know lies down or whatever you leave him alone until he opens that door again and that was the that was the way things worked around here for a long time well not anymore she now when she is ready to hang out this morning at five in the morning she will just come over to the door and start just wailing and then if i don't respond she'll walk around through the bathroom come to the other door and reach her paw under the door and start like trying to destroy

the carpet i know that feeling we had an apartment with um carpet that was wall-to-wall carpeting it was not a very nice apartment it was our first apartment in in seattle you were there luke the um the the capitol hill apartment that really i loved the location and it served our needs but it was by no means a nice place but um it had wall-to-wall carpeting and part of it and uh it would go under the door to our bedroom and i think this was probably pre-professor bananas but theo would throw a fit if we locked him outside the door and he would like kind of dig dig dig and then he started to like destroy the carpet there and it took a not so nice carpet and really made it depressing it was so goddamn depressing to see this like hole in the carpeting that i would

sometimes give a haircut to right i don't luckily uh she hasn't done what i can sort of assess to be a lot of permanent damage it's just annoying af and um and then so then i like this morning she's doing this at 5 a.m i needed to get up kind of on the earlier side but like on the earlier side being like 6 30 or something um because i've had kind of a packed day we're doing live wire tonight by the way revolution hall come through if you're looking for something to do tonight harry kandabalu will be there sarah schaefer danielle ponder it's gonna be a fun night but um so i try to put these i have these earplugs i have like a i have a container of earplugs like the you know single use foam earplugs so i put those in but then i start getting really worried i'm not going to hear my alarm like then i can't sleep because i'm anxious because i'm like these earplugs work well enough to kind of mostly drown out her caterwauling are they also going to drown out my iphone trying to wake me up so then i'm just toss and turn finally i was like you know what it's fine i went to bed really early i was like this is enough you're awake it's okay you can just you can just go out and embrace the day so i did i got up hung out with the cat it was actually really fun i rewrote an entire the cbs piece that's airing this weekend on the hallmark channel or about the hallmark channel we had some structural issues and some timing problems and this and that and the camera guys didn't get a certain shot we needed, so we had to try to ride around that. I did all that this morning. I worked on the live wire script for tonight i drove out to a discount windows place where i met a moving crew that was moving these giant sliding glass doors that i purchased from here in oregon up to washington where i'm working on that house i had to like supervise the whole thing i felt very very

like uh macho did somebody come like riding a bicycle down the sidewalk as they were carrying the the panes of glass across the sidewalk and narrowly averted disaster okay yeah it was that

And then the guy had just stacked the last orange on that huge pyramid at the fruit stand. Forget it.

That pile got completely and totally upended. Uh-oh. Look ahead. It looks like there's a truck with a bunch of horse poo in there for farmers.

I'll tell you what, though. It is a whole. There's an energy. If you go to a place where people are doing physical work before 8 a.m., it's like they got the coffee. everyone's kind of bundled up there's a certain amount of kind of ball busting going on you know what I mean it's like a very sort of traditionally you might say masculine environment and I haven't been in that environment in a long time because I'm soft like a podcaster and I sleep in and I don't roll up to warehouses at like 7.30am and stand around kind of like bullshitting with guys as I was this time so I got that done and those those uh that stuff was making its way up to the house even as we speak i then as i was driving home i had a little extra time and i realized i've had these um three dress shirts in the back of my car they're made by the penguin company they're the kind that i always wear but i ordered them online because they i couldn't get them from the normal place and they were a little bit different they were a little off i didn't love them and they weren't cheap so i was like i'm gonna send these back but you know how now all of have you returned anything lately like it's a whole system you often have to sign up for a totally unrelated product that handles the returns for a company no i haven't returned anything other than and

even this has been a little bit um but sometimes genevieve would order stuff off of amazon and then when we lived across the street from the whole food she'd say can you return this for me and i couldn't have been as evil as that company is they really make life easy you would just like because whole foods is owned by amazon you would just take it to like the little uh customer service center at whole foods and say here's a qr code and this is going back and they say okay like that that's all i've done and i gotta give them credit it's easy peasy lemon squeezy absolutely i know

i'm you know i got respect where respect is due that is a very very sort of like seamless process uh the the thing is like i now have about three different apps on my phone that are related to a time i purchased one thing from a company that then uses they don't do the return themselves but they have a service that does more or less what the amazon thing does but it's some specific you know company that does it and that's the company they use this one was something called like pete or something i have to find it on my phone but like anyway i've been driving around with these shirts in the back of my car forever because i just keep not it's never the perfect time while i was driving by a fedex office and i like swung in and they scanned the thing and then they boxed it up send it along so that was that was handled then i remembered i gotta wear a tuxedo shirt tonight for livewire i don't have the like the studs that go in a tuxedo shirt you know how you got those little it's not buttons it's like another kind of metal thing that's got like a black knob on one side and then like whatever silver on the other i realized oh i don't have those why because they're with a shirt and tuxedo that have been at the dry cleaners they were at the alteration and other dry cleaners for three months you left your cufflinks with the clothes that you dropped off of the dry they were in the pocket i forgot oh yeah they were in the pocket of the tuxedo jacket and so i need that i don't i have another tuxedo shirt and i'm not even wearing that tux but i needed the those little stud thingies and so i like called the alteration place and they were like we sent it to the dry cleaner and then i called the dry cleaner and the dry cleaner said we don't have it i'm sorry and i was like what so i happened to be in the neighborhood wow well i go i'm in the neighborhood i drive over to the um to the alteration place and i talked to the by the way i was chuffed they have a live an ad for live wire on their bulletin board in the alteration i was like standing by it hoping someone would recognize me from the photo

there's no photo of me on the ad sir it's been six hours we really have to close

I just seemed like a I just want just one more customer please just let me see if someone will recognize me as the host of LiveWire so I go into the alteration place and I'm like kind of I'm sort of friendly with the the young woman who works the counter there I'd say she's probably in like her mid 20 one time when I was in there I made a joke and now every time I've been in there since she has referenced it like she sort of recognizes me and I've only probably been there three or four times but anyway she was there and I was like hey um I have you altered a tuxedo for me and sent it next door but they don't have it and she was like she went off and looked at the back she was like we don't have it and I was like well somebody has to have it she goes let me let's see we walk over to the dry cleaner together me and her and this tag And right when I walk into the dry cleaner I look at the window and I realize This is not the dry cleaner I had called earlier

I live in the dry cleaning district

There's like seven dry cleaners And their names are all like Tip Top Dry Cleaning, A1 Dry Cleaning Prestige Dry Cleaning They all have a name that sounds kind of like the same thing to me Like a place where the dry cleaning is Of a high quality And so I realized That I had actually called the wrong dry cleaners And in fact these folks did have all the stuff It was all pressed, the studs everything was in its own little plastic bag now threw that in the car got back home printed out the show sheet for today andrew uh and uh and here we are i am feeling very very productive today

which is rare for me i know that feeling i um that you're talking about kind of being in that kind of more industrial zone in the morning i'll tell you one thing that and this is just of my own doing and i'm not super proud of this one thing that i don't do enough is get outside in the mornings even on the occasion that i happen to wake up earlier than i need to for tbtl which happens from time to time you know me i'm the type of person who will stay up as late as possible and then a little bit more and then always feel like i'm in a rush in the morning and always try to like sleep in later than i should like it's a i don't know my whole life i've always just been the type of person who will if given my druthers i would just sleep past noon every day like i just love sleeping in i hate waking up um but on the occasion that you do wake up early and maybe have the kind of production productive morning that you're talking about even when i have those mornings often they don't require me to leave the house because it'll be like i work from home so i wake up and i maybe we'll do this and blast away a bunch of emails as my dad would say or just like get this done or that done but on the rare occasion that i have to wake up to take somebody to the airport around seven in the morning or i remember i don't know what my errand was like a few months ago and i was like out and i'm like why go to a bagel shop get a bagel and i got a very mediocre possibly south of mediocre bagel um but it was great and like having a bagel and coffee outside in the morning the air is different out there so as much as i'm a disgusting lazy loaf I will say that being outside in the morning is something that I should probably, for my mental health, try to do more.

As a person who just did it for the first time in four years, I can recommend it. Everything's different. For all the reasons that you laid out, it really is. The light's different. Look, we did an experiment on this show, you and I did, for a week where we got up at 5 a.m. and did the show super early. and we're so privileged in so many ways that are obvious, you and I that chiefly we get to do this for a job but one of the things that that affords us is the opportunity to not have to go out early in the morning like when I used to work for a plumbing company it was a given that you'd be at some job site at 7am I mean there's guys right now that are working on this house that I'm remodeling they were probably there at 7am or something we are very cosseted at this point and so if you don't have to do something like that you kind of if you're me you won't but yeah this morning just like actually running a bunch of errands and actually checking a bunch of things off my list and it's like the day is still kind of young and it doesn't hurt that it's also just like a beautiful day out it's not just like you know torrentially raining or something gross it's like it just yeah it was i thought i should do this more i should just bite the bullet and just get up earlier sometimes because it only hurts for like two minutes that's the thing like i'm lucky that i'm not one of those people that Like, don't talk to me till I get my coffee. Like, I go from being like, why is the cat harassing me to being like listening to Morning Edition and kind of puttering around my house in about five minutes. Everything's fine. It could be 530 or it could be 930. I would feel physically pretty much the same. How is Morning Edition these days? In what way exactly?

Well, I have a bone to pick here. And I'm I'm already anticipating sort of like, I don't know, blowback from our listeners or maybe I should say I can anticipate sort of reasonable blowback on this because I might be delving into an area of middle age man dumb that I've criticized others for slipping into before. But I don't hear Morning Edition much because usually if I'm up during those hours and I switch on the radio, it's still on the sports. station, so I listen to whatever sports show is on, like the AM dial, and I'm just sort of out of the habit of listening to Morning Edition, which of course for a big majority of my adult life, Morning Edition was always my companion. I hear a little bit more of All Things Considered these days, but I hadn't heard that kind of in a while too, and when I turn on All Things Considered these days, and I'm worried that I'm going to come off as being, again, just kind of old, cranky, and potentially even sexist here, but when I hear All Things Considered, which used to be my absolute favorite public radio show, it just sounds like it's a bunch... It sounds like a bunch of bad kind of actors. Not bad actors, like in a global sense. Oh, I know what you're talking about. But it sort of sounds like amateur theater actors pretending like they're having conversations that they've written out ahead of time and now are trying to make it sound like it's coming off the top of their head. Like, I'm familiar, I'm intimately familiar with the public radio two-way, as we used to call them, and maybe they still do. You're the host sitting in the host chair, a reporter comes in, or maybe even just somebody from the outside that you want to interview who's related to a story, and you have a list of questions for them. Well, public radio always tries to sound as conversational as possible, But sometimes when you're, like, writing in little, like, verbal flourishes, like, well, you know, Luke Burbank, one thing that I was just thinking about right now, but it's so clear that that was written either by you or a producer, like, probably four hours earlier, but you're, like, working so hard, it sounds like bad acting to me.

I do think that there has been a move at the NPR level to, and I've heard this from people that work there, too, who I'm sort of friends with. interesting that it's a very um it's a much more controlled and edited environment than it used to be because i used to do those two ways and my memory of it is you would talk to an editor or somebody from the show let's say you were going to do a two-way with all things considered or something you would maybe a producer would just kind of like write they would send you the question that the host was probably going to ask or something and so you'd want to like have a kind of a decent answer to those questions or whatever but i don't remember ever like submitting my answers in advance or saying here's what i'm going to say or you know like i think now because uh just i don't know just because maybe it's maybe it's better systems maybe it's more i mean what you probably have less of now are reporters making jokes about a finger a human finger in a bowl of wendy's chili like i used to do when i was doing two ways um so uh maybe if this is for the better but it's a much more edited rehearsed environment or scripted that the word i'm looking for a scripted it's a much more scripted environment and um and but yet they want to retain the kind of casual folksy like we're just talking here and i think the the the the intersection of those two those two things is probably what you're not loving that doesn't hit me my ear as as as sort of in in such an intense way as it does yours for me the thing that i'm kind of and this also can make me sound like old man who's yelling at cloud or yelling at whatever is i just miss some of the stories about some kind of weird quirky thing that doesn't serve any real strong news value that used to be a lot of what was on npr national programming or at least a pretty decent amount and because i think npr takes itself pretty seriously most of the show now is just two ways about very bleak news topics. And I kind of miss just, or even like they used to have commentators. Remember they used to have like Andre Kudrescu on, this like, you know, Romanian writer living in New Orleans talking about, you know, whatever, like Baxter Black. Yeah, the cowboy poet. Or like whoever that large animal veterinarian was.

Oh, wait, yeah, that was not Baxter Black. Am I confusing those? Baxter Black was the cowboy poet, but then was there a different person

who was the... Yeah, there was some kind of... I mean, they just had these commentators on. Tom Bodette used to do it, and they would just be... It was folksy, and it was certainly not the most important thing that somebody could hear on that day, but I just enjoyed the kind of rhythm and in a certain way kind of hokiness of that. And that's really, really gone now because I think in these editorial meetings, if you're like, well, are we going to talk about Ukraine or are we going to talk about Tom Bodette being overwhelmed by the amount of coffee orders that he could now do at a starbucks or whatever i'm not trying to put commentaries in tom bodette's mouth but like i just i like that i i miss that a little bit because i just think it's a very serious news organization now and it's mostly very serious um interviews and pieces and the thing is i think that's what leads to what you're hearing when they try to then be kind of like conversation

and chill uh and and informal i think it sometimes can be maybe hard to make that pivot because you've been being very serious for a long time and now we're suddenly letting our hair down a little bit

baxter black was both the the cowboy poet and large animal veterinarian um and also by the way i didn't realize this he just passed away this summer r.i.p baxter black um yeah and i don't mind i don't mind if npr says hey listen we need to take the news very seriously we need to script these things more we need to keep somewhat tighter reins on this stuff i mean we just went through a very um you know we're in many ways still going through an era of distrust in journalism and and people just saying things are quote-unquote fake news when they're real like so if if the if the guidance is hey listen we need to button things down a little bit here because we don't want all of our reputation to go out the door with one little flounder which i don't think would happen But if that's the argument, OK, I can ride with that. But you don't have to just then just then just sound a little scripted, you know, just sound like a journalist asking questions that are off of a notepad like that's fine. It's this very sort of kind of flowery, overly like just trying so, so, so, so hard to sound conversational, but not really having the acting chops to do it. And it's fine. You're not an actor. You're a journalist like that's absolutely fine. Be a little bit more dry. I don't know. And again, I sort of the reason why I feel shitty kind of saying this, although it's true, is because, you know what I sound like? I sound like the assholes, if you'll excuse the language. I sound like the assholes who 10 years ago would never use that. No, we would. I sound like the assholes who would make fun of like the NPR vocal fry. You know, that was a whole thing. Again, I don't know how long ago it was. But, you know, people like me making fun of like the the somewhat younger people that you would hear on certain styles of of public radio or public radio podcast journalism. And I feel like there was a lot of ageism and sexism kind of mixed in with those criticisms. And I don't want to be that guy. So I'm willing to say like different, you know, different people like different things in their programming. And maybe I'm just out of step with what people want to hear on the radio. But for me, I got to say, when I turn on ATC these days, which was, again, one time, one of my absolutely favorite shows, it's amazing how I, even if the topic is interesting to me, I find it so cringy that I turn the stories off.

See, I don't have that strong of a reaction to it. And I will say, to this day, driving, and for some reason, I don't know why this is a wintertime thing for me, but driving around in the wintertime, listening to all things considered, in my cars, I'm going to do something and it's starting to get dark outside. it's a very comforting experience and i don't know i don't know why it's uh seasonal but there's something about like i'm running errands it's 4 30 it's already starting to get kind of dark i've kind of got dinner on my mind but i'm trying to get a couple of things done and i'm listening to atc as i'm driving around i don't know why i find that to just be a a massively comforting experience but it still is for me i'll say yeah no i love that feeling my friend paulie

He was in college, and I remember he would – near the end of his tenure in college, he started scheduling his classes around All Things Considered so that he could come back to his house and, like, have those moments with a can of really cheap beer. And I think that maybe set the mold for me, too. I loved that so much.

I saved the beer for when I'm watching All In with Chris Hayes.

That's when I bring out the cheap beer.

That's when – if I'm actually cooking, on the rare occasion I do, it's like I've got the – you know, I'm whatever. I'm making my lasagna. I'm drinking a little wine I'm watching all in with Chris Hayes it's like that's another kind of like now that one I have to say is not seasonal for me I love and he may hear this because he's a dedicated listener but this is just really true I love watching that show and making food and also drinking alcohol that's a that's a that's the real holy trinity for me uh as far as evening behavior

that is number one on my list of things it's actually maybe the only thing that I truly miss about having cable television because my sports are scattered across various platforms now

of varying degrees of legality well that's the thing we don't have to get into this right now but i mean i just that would be the part i think that would be the thing that would make it for me worth just ponying up the stupid hundred dollars a month because of the lake it was way more you're saying it's more than that yeah my actual cable business our cable and

internet kind of wrapped or something was like in the 300s or something it was couldn't you do

like a thing that couldn't you get rid of everything that wasn't just like the basic cable which included like the the espns and the network channels no i mean i'm never going back

i mean i haven't investigated this again and also like we're now getting our internet from a different company and like i mean they just always money there as well i mean i'm sure there's some introductory package luke and then they get their claws in you and then there's these and these fees and those fees and we're you know and again we are subscribed to a lot of the i don't know if you call them premium services you know like we're set with hulu and netflix and hbo and a bunch of other ones there are a bunch of really cool kind of like free streaming service apps again i got my sports in various places and the amazon prime i'll we oh i didn't even tell you this we got a new smart tv for our downstairs replacing 15 20 year old TV and and so like now tonight knowing that I can just like turn on that TV and without plugging in a computer or a separate device just like you know surf on over to Amazon Prime Amazon once again my favorite company and just watch Thursday night football like that's really appealing to me like

yeah that makes sense all of my problems

are really solved the only thing is those moments that you're describing that was like my favorite part of the day in my old roosevelt apartment which was i would take for me i had my little like my tablet device here my you know ipad type of thing prop that up literally on the toaster while i'm chopping onions drinking wine doing all my things and just like watching chris hayes and then also msnbc kind of as my lunch break like i would always turn on msnbc and then gobble a sandwich or some pho or something and just like that kind of casual viewing experience like i don't want to dial up um a podcast or a or or you know something that was on demand i just want to like kind of dip in

to that news stream for a little bit yes well um chris is a big enough fan of our show that he may agree to just reenact his program over like facetime for you but do it um well i mean if

you're going to be acting chris i just just go to acting school is my point sometimes i feel like he's reading a script that's actually a really good comparison right because when you uh when you think of like his interactions with guests on his show like it does not have that well

that i also think the thing i don't know why this is just turning into like uh chris hayes appreciation pod but the thing about chris too is that he is so steeped in the information that i think obviously he's got a plan for his questions but i think he's very very able to pivot or to respond to what the person's actually said and also to know what the question is but then ask it in a way that is also improvised not i'm reading these words but i'm trying to take a pause at the right place to make it sound casual it's like he knows what he wants to find out and now he's going to ask the question in a way that his brain is actually constructing in the moment yeah and that's kind of the that's sort of the sweet spot for that kind of thing Indeed. All right, let's take a quick break. I think we've reached the sweet spot of this Thursday episode of the show. So let's break, and then when we come back, we'll get into some of these top stories and do the Blur's Days as well on this Thursday. So stay with us.

Thank you, baby.

Hey, let's thank some of our daily donors who are supporting TBTL with a monthly contribution and that is how we do this five days a week. That's how we're able to not have to be out in the world at seven in the morning on a construction site like real people that have real jobs. We're able to be in these warm studios getting physically assaulted by our cats which just happened to me. It's a thin line between love and hate with that bubble. I'll tell you what The thin furry line They call it God And a sharp talon Part of the problem With me being Gone so much Is I haven't had A chance to take her By Pampered Pets Which is The most misleading name For a A place that You know Does pet grooming Doesn't Pampered Pets Sound like you'd walk in And it would just be like Just beautiful And almost like a place Where you're like I'd get my hair cut here Yeah

Very lush Very relaxed No

A lot of pink a lot of tufting, a lot of comfort. No, none of that. It's just like a kind of a cement room that smells of wet dog and no frills. But that's also why they only charge $5 to cut her fingernails.

The Abu Ghraib of pet grooming is what I'm hearing.

That was the first name. And then wisely, I think they decided to change it. But anyway, really what we're here to do is thank Mary Dutton of Port Townsend, Washington. I'll be back. Mary, I hope to see you at the Jefferson County Land Trust fundraiser this summer, where I will be once again coming on out and getting to see Port Townsend, one of my very favorite places in the world. Thank you, Mary. Thanks also to Lauren Jordal of Atlanta, Georgia. I've been there. Yeah, you have. Pretty cool. That's where Veeves people hail from. How many times did you say you've been to Atlanta?

You know, not as much as I... it is not Because Genevieve's family is also going to spread out around the country, like we'll visit each other in various locales. So unfortunately, I have not been to Atlanta as many times as I'd like. I'm going to say probably about five times, but I always like it. And I always think like, you know, I don't think that Genevieve is kind of like me. I don't think that she's interested in kind of moving back to a place she's already lived. But if it weren't for that, if I were to visit Atlanta, I would definitely consider that a place to move.

Atlanta is a it's a cool town. I've also only been there on mostly work stuff, so I always have kind of a – I would like to go there on vacation and actually, like, take it all in and not just be, like, eating at the Fogo de Chao by the airport on, like, whatever it was, New Year's Day. I had one trip years ago when I worked for NPR where I was doing reporting in Georgia, and it somehow happened that I couldn't get back to – I think I lived in L.A. at the time. We couldn't get back to L.A. It wasn't like Christmas or anything. And I know you're on the record, Andrew, as saying you wish Christmas were canceled. That's what I took away from yesterday's conversation.

I said much more problematic things today, so I'll just let you get away with that lie.

But I forget what day. Maybe it was like 4th of July. It was some day where it was like a holiday, and I was the only person in a Fogo de Chao by myself eating. and it just didn't feel like I was living my best life. But that's not on the city of Atlanta or that Fogo de Chau. That's really on me and my lack of boundaries with my various bosses. Actually, I have great boundaries with our APM bosses. I mean, I've got the most intelligence. None of them have my email address. That's a really good boundary.

In the HR department, it can never track you down.

It's my CBS bosses and the bosses I used to have at NPR. Anyway, thanks, Laura, and also thanks to Gretchen Van Miller of Lakewood, Washington.

now I've never been I don't know if I've been to Lakewood Washington maybe through I used to live in Lakewood Ohio but I have a good authority that that's a different location yeah these are

different Lakewoods actually I've been I've been through Lakewood I think when we had um that competition many years ago we were still a radio show and we I know we had a band from University Place that played our themes like a high school marching band that that um I think they might have won it but like we had them play catch my disease and um like send in a tape and then the winners like got a visit from blue thunder the seahawks uh band marching band and um i feel like there was also a school from lakewood that did really well that placed very high in the competition so thanks gretchen thanks also to colin twos in arlington virginia it's for lovers i don't think that's oh virginia is yeah i think arlington that's a whole other situation um uh thanks to darren malihi in oakland california which is also for lovers i mean really every city if you're interested and if you can find someone to agree to it is for lovers if you think about

it'd be funny if somebody took like the the other side of that you know what i mean like new hampshire platonic only yeah like um colorado welcome to the friend zone

yeah right exactly uh how do you think virginia is for lovers got started i don't know i'll bet you that's find out of the bowl though i mean it's ironic in a way because i'm virginia i'm assuming was named for um somebody in england you know in like the royalty or whatever but But it's also the word virgin means to have never, you know, to never have experienced the sweet, sweet embrace of lovemaking. So Virginia being for lovemakers is an interesting juxtaposition.

I'm trying to figure this out, both on the Virginia.org site and Wikipedia. I mean, it was just basically it was just something created by a creative team. george waltz of martin and waltz in uh one says 1968 one says 1969 i'm gonna go with 1969 given the context here uh it has become a well-recognized and often imitated part of american jargon but it is just something that somebody just made up i'm trying to figure out why though why it seems very

bold for that era too like for lovers like i mean this is if you uh if you're looking to get frisky

this is the state for you that virginia is for okay they came up with history ads virginia is for history lovers beach ads virginia is for beach lovers mountain ads virginia is for mountain lovers this was the original campaign the approach was eventually discarded as too limiting so maybe it didn't they never rolled this actually out and they just dropped the qualifiers and just said

virginia is for lovers so they went from being like it's too niche to try to appeal to history buffs but we know everyone's horny that is a our our marketing um you know surveys Show us that 90% of Americans

Are horny so this is going to reach Them here's a little bit more context too And now I'm reading from Wikipedia by the way But it says the slogan Was first rolled out in its first Ad campaign In an issue of Modern Bride Magazine in March of 1969 So then you're like okay who are We advertising to here we're advertising to Newlyweds who are planning their honeymoon Virginia's for lovers that makes sense

Got it okay that makes sense that makes sense well thank you um colin twos for for helping us get to that explanation just by being from arlington virginia i've already mentioned darren malihi in oakland but i just don't want to i don't want to skip right past darren uh when i'm on my way to talking about michelle hall of long beach california long beach strong beach one of the guys that i was talking to today one of the movers um at uh down at the um at the yard the warehouse uh saw that my number was 310 and he said where are you from in LA and I said Echo Park where are you from and he said Long Beach

Long Beach is for fighters

Michelle do you know a Michael from Long Beach because that's the guy that I've been working with at the Willamette Valley Moving Company so anyway just wanted to let you know he's still thinking about you so thank you for supporting the program thanks to all of our donors today for making TBTL possible we just could not do this without you hello and welcome to top story um i sent you something uh yesterday or maybe it was two days ago that was a from tiktok and it was concerning something that mike leach the football coach had done while he was at oklahoma and that combined with another article that i saw today i believe in the Washington Post about the particular bar in Key West, Florida, where Mike Leach used to ride his bike and then just like hang out getting loaded on a particular bar stool. There's something about both of those, both of those kind of articles, if you will, that tipped me over the edge into talking a little bit about Mike Leach. So he passed away of a heart attack. I believe he was 61. He was most recently the coach of Mississippi State. He had coached a number of different places, Texas Tech, Washington State University, and he was always really known for his very, very creative play calling. He just seemed to have a really clever approach to getting the most out of his players. He very often would have the most yards. His quarterbacks would often throw for the most yards in the NCAA, and not because he was getting the most premium players at, say, Texas Tech, But because he would devise these incredibly clever schemes for getting people open and how he would line his players up. The thing he did while he was at Oklahoma that I thought was wild was he created an entire fake playbook. You know, each each game when you're talking probably at this point all the way down to the like middle school football level, because all these all these different things are over coached at this point. like you have a play sheet you basically come up with i don't know a bunch of plays 50 plays the first 50 plays of the game that you're planning on doing on offense that you think are going to give you the best chance of succeeding against the other team and mike leach went to the trouble of making a completely fake one and then having one of his coaching assistants pretend to lose it to drop it in an area where the other team i believe it was texas would find it and then they would think that they had found the key to everything that Oklahoma was going to do and it worked perfectly every for the first I don't know however many plays of the first half Oklahoma went up 17 to nothing because this worked exactly as he hoped it would the Texas folks studied the play and in fact this little news clip I sent you Andrew that was pretty interesting they actually got the Texas coaches to talk about and they were like yeah we were looking at the thing we thought

was the playbook i mean are we i mean you've told the story now i don't remember i think it was like a two-minute clip i mean can we just play it or is that just stealing wholesale from i just wonder

if it'll work as audio because it's so many different people kind of clipped together i mean

sure give it i think it was i wasn't i mean a lot of the images are just sort of things that are just you're right like maybe you won't be able to tell exactly who's who but i actually was mostly listening to it while i was washing some lunch dishes the other day including a blue lid so if you don't mind let me just try it i think it'll work especially given the fact that you've kind of laid it out and i just think it's really good audio and so you hear from mike leach you hear from like you said coaches on the opposing team you hear from players how honest texas was so we decided to write up a script a dummy script the challenge for leach in the decoy script was to

come up with complimentary plays to the actual one so if you're running a play to the left you one of the decoy script

to say something was going to the right.

The next part of the plot? Call it the drop. Leach used one of his players' pregame to deploy the decoy so Texas would be sure to find it.

He's like, I want you to run past their sideline, and as you're running up the tunnel, I want you to take the script and act like you're putting it in your belt loop and let it fall out onto the ground. And it was kind of the first real, like, espionage I'd ever been a part of.

Which really raised, by the way, I want to pause that. Yeah, what was the other, because I've watched this a couple of times, and every time we get to that, it's like, wait, have you been part of other espionage as a football player? Like, what are you talking about there? Trying to be too cute. Is that what you were going to say, too?

Yeah, that was just like, this big, this big, like, humunculus of a college lineman was like, and this was the beginning of my espionage.

Like, what else have you gotten up to? Anyway, so that player kind of drops this fake, kind of conspicuously drops this fake script on the field after practice. And then the other teams, one of the coaches, sees it. He's just wandering by and, oh, what's this?

A piece of paper. He looks at it and his eyes get kind of big and he sort of hides it and looks around to see if anybody saw him get it.

that makes me think that mike leech or somebody was spying on this coach who thought he was alone on a football field picking up a piece of paper but did was like leech behind the bleachers with

uh binoculars yeah i don't know sure enough the fake play script made its way straight to the

texas locker room we all thought it was real because we thought that the alternative would it would be just so far-fetched that somebody would go through the trouble to create a fake call sheet and actually leave it and drop it, you know, where we would find it.

Carl Reese takes it up to the press box. He starts studying the script, trying to figure out what defense they're going to call to match up the script. When I wasn't calling defenses, I was

looking at it, and it was a huge distraction. And on the second play of the game, the script says

double reverse pass we were trying to get them over there to the left we hit savage and everybody

was over to the left and savage was to the right it's very hard in the course of a football game

to go back and see a wide receiver at any level of football that wide open then i think it kind

of cuts off abruptly it says like after it's 17-0 lead I don't know what happens after that but they get up by 17 points

and I mean it's a pretty clever idea which makes sense based on how kind of as they say outside the box in unorthodox Mike Leach's coaching was he just was so fascinating from that sort of perspective unfortunately he was also like a big Trump supporter and was like constantly getting in trouble rightfully so are getting pushback for like tweeting out things that were just offensive or incorrect uh he you know he just he was he was the he was this person who was tremendously interesting to me as a football person and even as just a character and then also just had like very bad takes which i could never square i could never figure out how i felt about him because i couldn't feel just only negative about him even though he again was a supporter of a political ideology that i find very odious because he was always doing things like also just hanging out at this bar in key west this guy kent babb writing in the washington post today a key west regular mike leach leaves a legacy and an empty bar stool and he basically writes about this um this bar called captain tony's that mike leach used to ride his bike to and just hang out in there just drinking like uh what was the drink that he writes about in this he said uh he could jump on his bicycle and ride from his cozy bungalow to his bar stool at captain tony's in three minutes flat he would sit among the and again this is also the thing key west i can't decide if i like key west or hate key west andrew because that's also key west is a complicated place it's kind of cool and weird and at the end of the world it's also just like full of kind of you know misogyny and things like that he could uh he would sit among the signed bras draped over a pipe the dollar bills stapled to the wall downing crown apple until closing time sometimes he would mix it up by ordering nothing but tequila when he was feeling aristocratic as the man who forever changed the way football teams play offense he would spend all night drinking brandy alexander's like this is You know who's not doing this? Urban Meyer.

Right.

Nick Saban.

even like there is this is like if i if i were to have somehow become a successful college football coach there's a decent chance and in the summertime i was able to go take a few weeks off and go down to key west there's a decent chance i would have been sitting in this bar downing brandy alexander's whatever the hell that is like it's just there was something about this guy that i find i have to admit i find deeply intriguing and kind of human about him even though again i have to keep saying this and you know you can email in examples of this but i've already seen most of them he also

had a lot of very bad opinions yeah i mean i'm i i understand the intrigue he's i mean and he was a great like kind of storyteller or seemingly kind of off the cuff like he would have so much fun in press conference he was a very entertaining man and he was very good at his job as a football coach i end up net negative though because you trade all of that for using a huge platform to spread misinformation and to support onious people who are causing true harm to the world like donald trump and for like of course donald trump already you know like when mike leach passed away i think the news broke geez was that just yesterday luke that felt like that was two days It was two days ago. OK, yeah. And in, you know, in who who's, you know, sending out statements, you know, talk about what a great man Mike Leach was. Oh, none other than former president Donald Trump. And I'm just like, nah, I can't. I mean, yeah, there are fun, funny people who have different political opinions of me. But when you're using your platform to do like fake news shit or to go after, which I think I'm right about this one, I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure he also was like kind of publicly complaining about COVID protocol and stuff like that. I'm like, nah, not for me, buddy. Not for me.

I guess the thing is there are there are funny or there are interesting, weird people who kind of live by their own code and say a lot of things that are sort of off the cuff. Those people rarely ascend To the heights of college football coaching That Mike Leach did And I think that's why I find him very intriguing There's something about Getting to that level Where it just takes all of the interesting elements Of your personality off of you Like if you are genuinely quirky You just can't get there anymore Because it's just It's now for the Nick Sabans And the At one time the Urban Myers of the world It's just like there's a certain kind of very at this point and again here's the other thing I will say it sounds like I'm just really trying to defend Mike Leach I bet you that 85% of college football coaches have bad takes their actual politics are bad and the way they view the world is actually probably pretty lousy I guess I the fact that Mike Leach was at least calling he was telling on himself he was actually out there being like this is this is what i think as opposed to secretly thinking it or you know having like putting forward one thing so he can continue to get paid this massive salary but then behind the scenes like you know yucking it up with his assistant coaches and saying things that are you know awful for one reason or another there was something about his kind of just what felt like his bluntness and his plain spokenness that was kind of refreshing in a way or at least it was again it made him intriguing to me uh just the way that he moved through this world that mostly is full of these just like cliche spouting boring robots now that run these college football

teams yeah and of course his uh his uh not predecessor but the person who followed him up there at washington rolovich rolovich i couldn't think of his name of course now he actually is that lawsuit over now or is it still uh i i think it's still is it still pending but he'll win and uh you know he's suing the school i mean why do you think he'll win what's that why do you think because i thought it was going to the supreme court and he's saying it's a religious issue and that's we kind of have a council of religious elders i thought it was

great though isn't it great to know that if something gets to the supreme court there will definitely be the wrong outcome oh of course feels good if it's involving religion i

mean that i'm so furious right now about this case that they basically that the court basically almost like sought out to um of this um web designer who doesn't want to make websites for

gay weddings even though defense there's been asked thousands of times to make gay websites

never once thousands of times oh really never once a thousand would you say it's zero times it's less than one times this person has ever been asked to make a wedding a website for a gay wedding but is somehow taken a legal case all the way up to the supreme court to say no i i want to refuse my services to people if they're gay like it is so retrograde and then you have kind of a similar thing not not involving gay weddings with uh nick rolovich who was

the the coach at WSU he refused to get vaccinated which was against the school policy if you were going to be a you know somebody working with students then you had to get vaccinated during the pandemic and he is suing saying uh for religious purposes he didn't get vaccinated his religion is catholic I grew up catholic like I know catholic you've really turned your back on the there's nothing really in the I mean I believe the pope was even encouraging people to get vaccinated he might not have stepped out that far on it no i believe he did i believe the catholic

church for its many missteps i think on the vaccine they were actually like in the right yeah

so and like but but he'll win like it doesn't it doesn't matter and here is i was i was i was

reading a little bit about this this plaintiff in this web case and i was just thinking like now i'm i'm i'm generalizing and i'm assuming a lot here okay but if you are a web designer who has decided that you also would like to be the test case for anti basically lgbtq plus stuff right if you just i bet you're so fucking bad at web design like that is some real graphic design is my passion shit can you imagine the fonts that this person uses like there's just i don't think a brain that wants to go out of its way to deny basic human rights to people that haven't done anything wrong to you is also the brain that just has really good graphic design and web design

ideas just like shitty cartoon gifs of wedding bells ringing in the corner something that you

and i could 100 build this afternoon grumpy cat with a wedding veil on like just the most like the most kind of like template cut and paste drop down menu uh kind of like low level website That's, I bet, the kind of website this person is building There's just no way they're a good web designer

I don't know how we got there So hateful, though But anyway, yeah I'm angry The sea was angry that day, my friend Like Andrew Walsh trying to return soup at a deli

There's a right way to rock And a wrong way to roam You can't just listen to your soul Just remember that life is number one What do you do with old checks, Luke, after you've deposited them?

I assume that you deposit checks using an app or some such.

Yes, I take a picture of it now. I rip them up into a million pieces. do you okay because but i'm always stressed when i'm doing it i'll like i'll sort of i'll triple check the account to see that it went through that's why i asked that's what i'm doing i'm always thinking like i for a while in the early days of that technology i was always just saving the checks in case me too now i i have to say i trust the technology but i still like triple

check it okay so here it is i'm looking so i deposited a check two days ago it's been sitting here on my desk i'd love to unclutter my desk i just logged into my bank account it looks like it's posted. It's there. I can just tear these up now? I don't have to save it forever. I think you can. Do you want to do it together? Here we go.

Look at that radio. Theater. What are you, The Whistler?

God, I hope you listen to The Whistler. I love listening to The Whistler. Late at night when you're by yourself, scare the bejesus out of you. Hey, let's do some Blursdays. Thanks for the help there, Luke. Hey, I skipped this one last week accidentally. I got a little bit confused, but this is from Ann in Oklahoma, who says, happy birthday to my 10-pal Natalie in Minneapolis. It's always a special treat to get your letters, and I hope you have a truly awesome birthday and a wonderful year ahead. I promise to write to you soon. So happy Blur's Day to Natalie in Minneapolis.

Look at this one. Coming in from somebody well-known on the program, our friend Phyllis Fletcher. What's your name? Fletch. Full name. Fletch F. Fletch. Spells hers with a P, but anyway, Phyllis says, happy Blur's Day to Gus. Gus, come on. We started listening to TBTL together when you were four. Now you're 13. Gus is 13. He's looking 13. Phyllis sent us that video of him just like slapping the bass. Yeah, so cool. Playing that upright bass and, you know, just growing up right in front of our very eyes. I know. You're an awesome musician, mathematician, and cat sitter. Congratulations on your up. Oh, good. He got in. I remember talking to Phyllis about if he was going to make this Japan trip out. Nice. Congratulations on your upcoming trip to Japan. We love you and are excited to be your mom and dad every day. Oh, that's come on.

And that's very true. That's from me and Andrew. We're excited to be your mom and dad every day. That is true. That is true. But, of course, I meet up with Phyllis quite a bit, as much as we can. And you can tell that.

It's important to keep Phyllis in his life, I think.

It's been an open adoption. You're absolutely right. Kelly says, happy Blur's Day to Bridget, OG10, wife of Sacramento10, Mike, and sister of Denver10, Kelly, who's Mike's 10-in-law and was mentioned in last week's Blur's Days. Clearly, it's a family affair around these parts, but Bridget was the one who brought us in many years ago. We love you, and we wish you a very happy Blur's Day from Kelly.

Indeed. By the way, Andrew, I don't know this for a fact, but there is a chance that this thing that I just randomly played today.

I am a large man. I'm a very large man, and I use my dad's voice a lot.

That might be listener Mike.

Oh, that's definitely the one you just played is definitely a listener named Mike.

I just don't know who I know I I seem to remember that listener being in NorCal Sacramento yeah I

think you're right I think you're also I'm glad you brought this up because I think I I think I well I can't think of a better way of saying this so I'm going to say it the crude way I think I sort of screwed you over today with the drops did you notice that I think we both had that Mark Proach scatting in our intros today I didn't notice that maybe I'm wrong about that I've been going through a lot of intros looking for things and so maybe I'm hoping we didn't double up and if we did that's totally on me because I would have been if we double up though

that's like a four leaf clover those are the special episodes that's true I think yep this is the upside down airplane of podcast Danielle in Seattle says I'd love to wish my five Iris a very special ninth birthday that's a good name Iris I like that one you're an amazing smart charming kind person. You're also a loyal friend. You also have the best sense of humor and can laugh at yourself. It's a rare trait. Yeah, especially in a nine-year-old. I only recently learned how to laugh at myself, Andrew. I'm 46.

Do it. Could you do it now?

I'm still learning. Like, right now I feel very self-serious. I'm no Iris. Don't ever lose that, but maybe slow your roll on the poop jokes. Wait, is that... Is Danielle talking to Iris or me on that one? Because I feel like that could apply to both of us. It does. Papa, Ezra, and I love you so much, you light up our world.

Happy 9th Blur's Day, Iris. I would lay on the poop jokes if I were you. No, stop it, Iris. Luke is a bad example. Listen to me, not him. Just wash your hands more. Sean says, I'm sorry I got a little drunk and told you that even though I like the Mariners, the Astros will always be my first love and that Robbie Ray should have pitched around Jordan Alvarez in game one. that's on me I was on deployment and it was late night early morning and I had three mid strength beers and the thrill of victory in me please unblock me with that out of the way my 42nd blurs day is Friday so I'd love to get a shout out that isn't what you texted what you texted was five minutes after the most painful loss of my Mariner fandom the direct quote was it brings me no joy to say this but go Astros that was that was You know what, I forgive you, Sean. But you've been unblocked for quite some time.

Don't worry about it. I speak for both me and Andrew when I say, I forgive you, and Andrew was wrong.

And I do forgive Sean. That blocking was not about punishing Sean. I blocked him just because I didn't need that. I just needed to not get those texts for a while. And then when the pain went away, the unblocking happened. That was not punitive, Sean. I promise you, you'll know. You'll know when it's punitive in all seriousness. this i remember meeting sean at the um i believe tb tell live at sea show we did i remember that

yep and sean's a great might have even maybe asked a question from the audience i think so yeah some

sort of participation and so um anyway yeah no sean is the best happy blurs day sean i recently

unblocked jan in sierra vista and i'm glad i did because i was able to receive her message which said happy blurs day to my sister sharon who's also a 10 in hillsborough oregon you're a wonderful caring person. I hope you have a great day. Nice. I do too.

Happy Blursay, Sharon. Jeff says happy Blursay to my lovely wife, Jenna. She thinks she's getting older, but she's only getting better. Her impressions of the Bluey Grannies is spot on. That's an inside thing, right? Luke, you don't know what the Bluey Grannies is, do you? I've never heard of the Bluey Grannies. Okay. Bluey capitalized. Grannies not. And her taming of our little four-legger is yielding some wonderful results. I'm thankful for being able to share life with her and wish many more Blursdays to come. Love you more. Happy Blursday, Jenna.

Granny's Bluey and Bingo figure.

Maybe the show is called Grannies The internet is not being Totally clear on what the bluey grannies are But whatever they are it sounds like Jenna is a Really great The rich little of doing impressions of the bluey grannies

Oh I see I think it's a cartoon The show is bluey And they play a game of grannies Okay let's get out of this

Christina says happy birthday to my real-life sister and a fellow 10, Malia. Malia is a great mom to her boys and a great sister and a daughter. Also, happy birthday to her birthday twin.

What?

The Stubot?

I did not realize we were missing the Stubots for Thursday, I'm sorry.

We are not good. We're not good. What is our relationship to Stu now? Friends. We're friends, obviously, but what? I mean, I'd like to make it more than friends.

I consider him to be an advisor to me

Yeah, trusted advisor Oh yeah, buddy Bit of a role model Happy Blur's Day to both of you Yeah, happy Blur's Day, Stu And also to Malia

Taylor and Mike in Everett, Washington Say, hope we're not too late To wish our incredible five McKenna A happy seventh Blur's Day We are blown away every day by the fun, thoughtful, intelligent, cheeky, and super kind human being she is. Mac, we love you so much and are so proud to be your mom and dad. Happy Blurs Day, Mac. Would you say she's a cheeky monkey? Mm-hmm. That was on this show, right? I just had

that thought. We're in that most special time of year where we're also recording a bunch of extra programming and at some point I totally lose track. I wasn't even sure if that was an after these messages thing. So when you said that for a second. You didn't even know what cinematic universe you were talking to. No, it's in TBTL land, but it may be some of the winter game shows. Who can remember? Brad says, happy Blur's Day on the 27th to my in-law, AJ, in Norfolk. May you continue to be as gleeful as in 2023 from your favorite brother-in-law, Brad.

Nice. Happy Blur's Day, AJ, longtime friend of the show. Aaron says, I'm writing to wish myself a happy one day belated 46th, Blur's Day. Aaron, if you were considerate, you would have turned 47 or 45 because 46th is a very hard thing for me to say as somebody who struggled with a lisp. I forgive you, though. That's my birthday gift to you. Aaron says, after living abroad for 12 years, it's great to be able to celebrate my birthday stateside and with my family here in Portland, Oregon. And yes, I know the rules. I will definitely say hi to Luke if I see him in the wild.

Took the words right out of my brain, Aaron.

Happy Blurs Day, Aaron.

Sybil says sending out the biggest and happiest blurs to celebrate the one, the only Veronique. Amazing green thumb. Storyteller extraordinaire. Incredible apron maker. The OG Midnight Cowgirl. I wonder what that last... Some people call me the space cowboy, but Midnight Cowgirl, that one I'm not familiar with.

Are you being serious? That is, Veronique left us a voicemail one time, and then she powered out by saying, Rock on, you midnight cowboys, which was apparently... Oh, that was Veronique. Yeah, she was, I think, trying to just accidentally coming up with a catchphrase on the fly. And so I like to drop that audio, sprinkle that around from time to time.

I love you big, my dear friend, and I can't wait to celebrate birthdays together soon. That's from Sybil to Veronique. Nice. Happy Blurs Day, everybody. I feel like the Blur's Day lists are growing again. For a while, we had whittled it down to just a person or two, and now it's back up to a fairly substantial list of folks.

I think that is because we have very astute listeners who know that the Winter Games are coming up and that the Blur's Days will take a brief pause for a couple of weeks. So having said that, next week will be the last Blur's Days that we do for a couple of weeks. So if you have any Blur's Day wishes you want to share before the holiday break. Get them into us by next Thursday, and then we'll be back in the new year.

Absolutely. And we've already been recording some of these winter games, and I have to tell you, they're very fun. Yes, they really are. We've been having a really good time, mostly thanks to the listeners submitting fun games and ideas, and we've had some special guests. So these are going to be good. So we can keep our jobs. Please continue to download and rate on iTunes the winter games.

Yeah, I mean, I don't want to give away too much, but we do a music-related quiz that was created by the children of your insurance agent. and then submitted through the official TBTL portal,

which is my email address, but I like to say the official TBTL portal. I need you to use the portal for that, please. I feel like everything has a portal now, right? My apartment building has a portal. Oh, yeah. My health care has a portal.

This is a weird – okay, we've got to wrap up, but I'll just say this quickly because I don't even know if it makes any sense or that you'll glean any of the emotion I had around this. But I was walking in the university district the other day grabbing some lunch, And I passed some young people on the sidewalk because there are a lot of young people in the university district, as you might guess. And and I guess we're kind of near the beginning. Yeah, we're still kind of near the beginning of of school. Right. So there are probably some freshmen who are still figuring things out. And I just heard a quick snippet of a conversation of one kid advising another kid just saying, oh, yeah, if you just go to my my UW dot com. And then he just kind of kept walking. And that's all I heard is, you just go to my UW dot com. And I was just kind of like, it's just I had this feeling of how different me. I don't know what feeling I had, but like, first of all, how different colleges from when I went to school, we had no portals. My God. I mean, there is one portal under the math and science building, but we were not allowed to go near that portal. But also that's how we lost Jeremy. I think the feeling I had more that I was thinking about more was that not that it's some grand marketing name, but somebody behind the scenes was creating some sort of portal for students and said, what are we going to call it? I don't know. Call it my you dub or whatever it's called. Right. And the way that it is just it's just called that now, like it was probably I don't know how big of a decision it was to call it that. But now you just have students who are adhering to it saying, well, just go to my just go to the my UW portal or whatever. And just like that, it's a thing. I can't really. I don't think I'm making a point here. I had some feeling that I can't describe.

They could have called it a Stargate. Yeah, right. Or Graystar.

Just go to Graystar.

Oh, that's taken. And I don't think you want to mess with Graystar management. What if like you are a like, you know, a lot of these quarterbacks like Brock and, you know, folks like that, they get into this like after they're done playing. If they were played at a high enough level They'll run these quarterback schools or something For kids If you had been an NFL quarterback like in Jacksonville And then you were going to start these camps But you want to make it easy for people Could you start a Bortles portal?

I was wondering where you were going with that

I didn't listen to anything you said For the last four minutes as I composed that joke I just want to be honest It was a lot of work to try to figure out How Blake Bortles would have a portal

Absolutely worth it I say, also, I do think that you and I should start not a podcasting camp, although we'd be well equipped to do that. But I think we should just start our own football camp. Like, how awesome would that be? A football summer camp where you and I earnestly try to teach people about football.

And all we're using is the fake playbook that Mike Leach would be around. Like, none of these plays make sense. Why would the person do that?

my version of football is just everybody would just like kind of swap jerseys and hang out on

the bench and chew their mouth guards that was you know more or less what i did i was only good at football for one season and it was the season i ended up breaking my arm so i missed like 90 it was like the day that they announced the starters and i was one of the starters in what position were you starting like linebacker oh this was defense oh that's right i knew that grade football This is not, you know, this is this is not even high school. So this is you could be five one, apparently, and play linebacker. But like they were like, yeah, you're going to be a starter. And I was very excited. And then the next day I broke my arm. So that was as close as I got to being in any way a decent football player.

So in all seriousness, and this really underscores my ability to teach a football camp, when you say a linebacker, does that mean also you are sometimes playing like a cornerback? Were you swatting at the ball, trying to break up passes? Or what was your main role?

No, I was probably... First of all, at this level of football, there are very few successful forward passes.

Oh, okay.

It's a run-heavy offense because it's just kids and the timing of a pass play. For the blocking, the route to work, the quarterback to throw it. Now, by the way, in 2022, I'm sure there are highly sophisticated eighth-grade football offenses. in my day it was pretty much just pitch it to nick stefanik but um but i was a his dad his dad was the guy who would come to practice of you know like three off of his whatever his regular job was wearing jeans but also wearing a cup oh that's the yeah you've talked about that before adjusting his cup under his denim and it was like i don't think you have to have the cup on for this I don't think you need that for coaching us here in your jeans and your, like, polo shirt. It was solidarity. It was a sympathy cup. But I was like, I would have been a linebacker, meaning my job would have been to try to, like, kind of gum up the middle.

Maybe blitz sometimes and get, if I got lucky, get to the quarterback. You know, that kind of stuff. But I was too small to be a lineman and I was probably too slow to be a safety or a cornerback. I was probably there more because of my lack of physical abilities than anything else.

I think that you would be pretty fast and squirrely. That's why I sort of had you at the cornerback.

I was never like a fast, fast kid. But what I really liked was hitting kids. I'm not kidding. I don't mean like punching. I mean, I really enjoyed the contact of tackle football. and that was kind of and it was also at the time you know we didn't there were zero conversations around cte or heads up tackling or any of that stuff and it was very much a it was a very rewarded thing if you were a kid and the coaches thought you just liked hitting kids that was and you would that was how you would establish yourself in the drills and the things like that you would just really be trying to knock the living shit out of any kid that you could which is sort of how i got my arm broken we were doing this drill called bull in the ring and i was like taking on two guys and trying to just like level these two dudes who are probably bigger than me and then i fell and one of them fell on my arm and shattered it but um you know i really did enjoy the physical contact of of tackle football you know when i was like a little kid i don't know what that would have felt like in high school if i would have gotten to a level where the kids were really big and strong and i got my bell rung a couple of times it could have been a very different experience for me did you ever play bore on the floor um no we did not play was that how they did it in ohio

no i did you watch succession you watched succession right no i did not i watched the first episode oh you didn't oh that's oh okay i think it was it's some cruel game that the patriarch plays and putting all these adults in their place it's like it's presented as a child game but it's just his way of bullying a bunch of people in a room oh i thought you were just You're making a joke about Bull in the Ring. You said Bull in the Ring. It just made me think of Boar on the Floor. And the way it's presented in the show, I thought for sure that Boar on the Floor was a real thing. But when I looked it up, it was something that the show just invented, just like this cruel game. I'm kind of surprised. Did you not like the first episode or did you just not kind of get into it?

I don't know what my mood was when I watched the very first one. But it could have literally been that I was distracted with something or stressed about the next day. I am very excited about getting all of my stuff done and sort of handled and ready to go in my various job capacities so that I have a couple of weeks where I'm not on a daily deadline because I am planning on watching The White Lotus. I'll probably check in with Succession. I really like Brian Cox. Him doing interviews about Succession has made me, and of course his McDonald's ads, has made me, you know, even more intrigued about the show. So I have this grand plan to just like completely and totally like couch potato out for a few days. So I'm looking forward to that. And it may cause me to actually watch Succession.

Well, I don't want to over, I really enjoyed watching it. It's been a while. I actually watched, I think I binged a lot of it on vacation last year, actually. It's kind of, it's definitely a heavy show. It'll kind of sit with you. I don't want to overhype it for you at the, you know, Risk of potentially having Having you disappointed In it but I really did enjoy it And I'm looking forward to it coming back

Oh I mean if anything was Disappointing me it was just the general cultural Hype around it I mean people were obsessed

Right so the

Good news is it's been built it's been So built up for me that if I If I find it at all watchable that'll actually Exceed the Unrealistic expectations so Alright good stuff that's gonna do It for today's show But we will be back here tomorrow With more imaginary radio for you It'll be wedged between Live Wire tonight The Live Wire Holiday brunch Midday tomorrow for me And then of course At 5pm West Coast The TBTL Holiday Hangout

Oh yeah folks can sign up Apparently we did get the extended license Excellent As of this morning according to our boss john sklaroff we were at 294 participants so uh if we have more than six people sign up we're gonna need that flex plan luke we're gonna get our money's worth we put our asses on the line

to get that special clearance from apm and if we don't get over 300 we owe them our asses i don't know who would want that i really don't but i barely have one unfortunately so um You're going Hank Hill on it. I was just like middle-aged dudes with no butt. Yeah, my pants don't stay up. It's okay. Love it. All right. So we'll see you tomorrow. Until then, have a great Thursday. Take care of yourselves. And please remember, no mountain too tall.

And good luck to all.

and uh uh right on you midnight cowboys that's not a thing power out