Muse

Well, so I'm tending bar down there at Eklund and Sweden's last Tuesday and this little guy's drinking and he says, so where can a guy find some action? I'm going crazy out there at the lake. And I says, what kind of action? And he says, woman action. What do I look like? And I says, well, what do I look like? I don't arrange that kind of thing. And he says, but I'm going crazy out there at the lake. And I says, yeah, but this ain't that kind of place. He says, oh, so I get it. So you think I'm some kind of jerk for asking, only you don't use the word jerk. I understand. Then he calls me a jerk, says the last guy thought he's a jerk is dead now. So I don't say nothing. He says, what do you think about that? And I says, well, that don't sound like too good a deal for him then. You got that right. Yeah, he says, yeah, that guy's dead, and I don't mean of old age. And then he says, geez, I'm going crazy out there at the lake. White Bear Lake? Yeah, well, at Eklund and Spedlin, that's closer to Moose Lake, so I made that assumption. Oh, sure. Anyway, he's drinking at the bar, so I don't think a whole great deal of it. But then Mrs. Mora, she heard about the homicides down here and thought I should call it in. So I called it in. End of story. TBTL!

All right, hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to day three of the TBTL Winter Games. This is our little sort of special yearly event, where really it's sort of biannual. We do some winter games, and we do some summer games. But it's a fun little adventure into sort of TBTL land, and also a chance for us to take a brief pause from the rhythm of making a daily podcast for all of you. My name is Luke Burbank, by the way. Right over there, my friend Andrew Walsh. Hello?

Well, that doesn't sound like a very good deal for him, then, does it? I love that intro tape so much. That line, that doesn't sound like a very good deal for him, though, does it? Lives in my head.

I just feel like there isn't any character in Fargo with my energy. Like, the closest, before we started recording, you mentioned it was a piece of tape from Fargo, and I was thinking it was this other one with William H. Macy. William H. Macy in Fargo has my sketchy energy. Like, he has my energy of, like, he's trying to get away with something and the walls are sort of closing in. But as far as just, like, the energy of those two people in that intro tape, which feels very true to Minnesota to me, it's a level of comfort with oneself that I will never have.

Well, unfortunately, I think that maybe you're like the Buscemi character that he's described. Yeah. I love hearing, like, they do such a good job of establishing the Buscemi character that when you hear those words coming out of this guy's mouth, who has totally different energy, you can also totally picture the scene. That movie is brilliant.

Do you feel like that was what they were talking about at Mancini's char house after we left? Probably. Well, that doesn't sound... And this one guy comes in and he says, I'm looking for action. Say, what kind of a pull tab action that supports the veterans? What do you think?

Well, he didn't win in any pull tabs. Well, that doesn't sound like a very good deal for him, then, does it?

We've got a good deal today for us and for the TBTL listeners. Another quiz. This one related to Seattle newspapers in the 1990s, specifically the funny pages. The funny papers. And that's because our special guest today is our friend, longtime TBTL friend, O'Megan Kelso, the writer and illustrator who has a new book out. It's called Who Will Make the Pancakes? Megan, of course, also famously drew the I anonymous, the sort of visual representation of the I anonymous letter in The Stranger that I had written. I had submitted the letter when I was maybe in college or shortly out of college. So this would have been like in the late 90s.

I anonymous is when you write an anonymous letter to The Stranger sort of complaining about some public behavior that you've seen. Or admitting to something.

It doesn't have to be calling other people out. It could take a bunch of different forms. Mine, unfortunately, did take the form of calling other people out. And Megan was the person drawing those at the time. And so this was our lives colliding long before we ever actually knew each other. Megan is joining us right now on the telephone. Hey, Megan, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me.

I'm excited about this. Congratulations on your new book, by the way.

Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it's been great. I've made it onto some end-of-the-year lists, some Christmas shopping guides. So, yeah, it's been kind of exciting.

It's a beautiful book. I'm holding it now. You also got interviewed by our pal Phyllis Fletcher at the Seattle Public Library, right? How'd that go?

Oh, that was so fun. It was kind of a dream come true. I love that library downtown with the big...

auditorium and um yeah it was just wonderful talking to phyllis she is she's sharp oh yeah

i know you think a little too sharp yeah i feel like we should have maybe it's frustrating to

try to keep up we could have done this first i sort of feel like now you're going to judge us you're going to measure us based on that yardstick and that does not seem fair to me at all no it's

I'm afraid it's not.

Now, okay, so can you tell us a little bit about how this quiz, if you will, is going to work, Megan? Because you're an illustrator, and so you know from the world of the funny pages. So what have you put together for us?

Yeah, well, I call myself a cartoonist because what I do, yeah, is comics. And so what I remember as a kid is that each paper had a different selection of comics. And people had the Seattle P.I. and the Seattle Times and people in Seattle had had strong opinions about which paper was better, which had the better comics. One paper came in the morning, one came in the afternoon. So what I did is I took I took a specific day. I picked my birthday, my 15th birthday in 1983. And I just compared those two comics pages. And I know that's kind of before your time, Luke, but I don't really think a whole lot changed.

Are you saying they were doing Hagar the Horrible in 83 as much as they were doing it in 87?

Yeah, I really think not a lot changed. So I think you're going to find all of this fairly familiar.

Do you know that I'm actually working on a TV story about newspaper comics and it's about this collection of comics in at Ohio State University? It's at the Billy Ireland. Are you familiar with the Billy Ireland like museum and collection at Ohio State? It's like the largest collection of comics in America.

I am familiar with it. I've never been there, but they have an artist in residency program there, which I hope to apply to someday.

I hope you do, too, because it is freaking cool. And so this guy named Bill Blackbeard, not Billy Ireland, the place is named Billy Ireland. And there's a different dude named Bill Blackbeard who was collecting in San Francisco. he was collecting newspaper comics because he realized that these were ephemeral, right? Like basically once they were printed, if every copy of that day's newspaper was destroyed, you never, on Sunday in particular, you never had the color print again because what the artist would do would be in black and white and then the people at the newspaper would add the color. So he said about, he collected like two and a half million pages and was just, they were at his house in San Francisco and now it's all out at Ohio State. So this is a subject that's very near and dear to my heart currently.

That's awesome. I expect you to do very well on the quiz.

I know. Seems almost unfair a little bit.

I'm setting the expectations at unrealistically high. I'd like to bring them down to like the crankshaft level of kind of grumpy. Oh, the thing I was going to say is I found out something. I was digging through the archives under the Billy Ireland thing, like a climate-controlled archives of physical stuff, and I found out the backstory of Dagwood, Bumstead, and Blondie. Did y'all, like, you guys remember, is this, now am I cannibalizing the quiz? Is there a Dagwood question in this quiz?

No, actually there isn't. Go right ahead.

I didn't know this, but in the early days, like in the 19-whatever-20s, the story was Dagwood was from the Bumstead fortune. Dagwood was from a very wealthy family, and he falls in love with blondie who's just like a normal flapper person but not of any special elegant background and dagwood's family is horrified but he chooses love and so he is deprived of the bumstead fortune so fast forward to like the 80s when i'm reading and he just is sleeping on the couch and making sandwiches he's a broken man because he's lost the bumstead fortune I had no idea. Because of his love for Blondie. And we were a big Blondie house.

She comes home with, like, shopping bags and dress boxes, and she's spending all kinds of money that he doesn't have anymore.

Right? Because he walked away from the Bumstead fortune.

Can I tell a little story about my youth? Because I'm actually trying to, and I know we need to get into this quiz, which it sounds like it's more of a quiz for you, Luke. So I will I will let Megan give you the quiz and I will just try to trip you up however possible. But and I'm going to start by telling this story and I'm trying to fact check this online. But I don't know if you guys recall the comic strip, Funky Winker Bean, which was about, I believe, a teacher or a music teacher. I thought you just made that up. No. And it was a comic strip that was always in the.

newspaper when I was growing up and he was a teacher I believe a music teacher and I believe and I'm trying to I'm trying to prove this now on the fly I should have thought this out I believe that Funky Winker Bean was actually based on a real life character named Harry Fingston who was a incredibly close family friend Harry Fingston was the husband of my mom's best friend Hedy Hedy and Harry Fingston were their names I believe I believe Harry passed away somewhat recently um but i believe that he was the inspiration for the funky winker bean comic strip somebody should uh maybe fact check me on that wow and then wait is it possible i was i'm

i'm looking at a funky winker bean because i never heard those words in that order before and then i'm also getting crankshaft it's giving crankshaft were those drawn by the same person

luke i'm not joking i believe that crankshaft was a spinoff i'm unclear but crankshaft was a bus driver um and i believe that that was a spinoff because funky winkerbing took place in

a school well the quiz is over megan it's been great thank you for all your work prepping it i think we've i think we've pretty much answered every question we can no actually here let's do this let's take a break and then so we can just like we can come back and we can start this thing in earnest because i'm like i'm not even kidding i am really excited to play this game i'm not saying i will do well on it but i will say as i mentioned on the program at some point in the last month or so i did almost flunk fifth grade of daniel bagley elementary school because all i did was read the newspaper and where i started was the comics page so i really steeped in this stuff when i was a kid so i'm excited to revisit it perfect let's uh let's first let's take a quick break and then we'll come back and then we will do this in a moment all right let's get to this uh funny pages quiz from our friend megan kelso who is uh also the author of the um of the recent book what is it called again megan who will make the pancakes what is that what is that is that one of the stories in the book what's the origin of who will make the pancakes the book is a collection

of five stories they're all comics and um none of the stories are called that but they all sort of go around this theme of parenting motherhood caretaking and uh who will make the pancakes

is like kind of my metaphor for all of that it looks like a beauty i don't have a copy i'm not fancy like andrew no i gotta i'm holding it right here it's i'm looking at a picture of it and yeah i mean just the cover alone it looks really beautiful looks like it makes a great present this time of year even though this is airing after christmas it's not too late it's not too late no it is not um that should be the name of your follow-up book it's not too late by megan kelso um okay so uh you have put this quiz together uh involving uh the seattle times and the Seattle P.I. comic pages from 1983. What was the date of your birth again? February 5th.

February 5th, 1983, my 15th birthday. So, here's the first question. Lots of newspaper comic strips, like, for example, Dick Tracy, are the name of a man. Which one of these is not a real comic strip name?

Ooh, this is fun. Okay. Are these taken from—well, obviously, one of them is made up, but are the other ones that are not made up, are they going to be literally from the Seattle Times or P.I.? Okay.

Yes. All of these ran—except the fake one—all of these ran in either the Times or the P.I. Okay.

Hmm.

Okay. A, Buzz Sawyer.

Oh, please. Come on.

B, Snuffy Smith. C, Ernest Crumb. Or D, Steve Canyon. Again, which one is not a real comic strip?

Let's see. Well, I know Buzz Sawyer is real because I read Buzz Sawyer. Buzz Sawyer was like a weird outdoor survival-y kind of a thing, right? How would you describe—were you familiar with Buzz Sawyer, Megan?

I was, but I don't want to get into it too much because there's another Buzz Sawyer question.

Okay, fair. Snuffy Smith is also real. Steve Canyon is definitely real. So what was the one that was not those three? Ernest Crumb. I don't think Ernest Crumb was real, would be my guess.

You are correct. Wow. And were you doing a little shout out to who's Crumb? R. Crumb. R. Crumb, the cartoonist?

I was. I was thinking, well, maybe he'll think, yeah, Crumb is comics related.

Are you trying to trip me up on my own? holiday edition of tbtl question number one yes wow okay shots fired that's fine i just know i

gotta bring my a game all right what's the next question okay so which of these two comic strip characters was an aviator was it steve canyon or buzz sawyer ah okay now here's where i'm going to

embarrass myself because i just said i thought buzz sawyer was outdoorsy but maybe did buzz sawyer did buzz sawyer like um crash his plane in one up in one part of the thing and that's why i think he's out outdoorsy also buzz is kind of a flight term that's what i was thinking i haven't heard

someone but i feel and you buzz the tower right isn't that what maverick did i but i i swear i

have this strong association with buzz sawyer like standing by a stream at some point like i feel like if buzz sawyer was always flying i would have known that i'm gonna say steve canyon was a pilot

okay well the answer is they were both aviators oh okay i'm giving myself half a point which i think like i think that was just the apotheosis of heroic guy back then was like aviator because like it could support two strips kind of exactly the same but you might be thinking of mark trail

i was thinking of mark trail megan that's exactly i had mixed buzz sawyer and mark trail in my head mark trail was the outdoorsy one of course it's in the name god damn i love this yeah mark trail i would get into did you ever do this where you would actually start reading those ones the ones that were just story like they weren't funny but you like if you sort of get if it's like a soap opera if you start to understand what the plot is then you're like well damn it i got to read mark trail again today because i got to see what happened with that badger yeah you got

you get caught up like i got into apartment 3d my friend and i we would like ironically read apartment 3d but then we got kind of caught up in it yeah that literally happened to me earlier

this year with mary worth because we have a friend brandy brown in minnesota in minnesota who um was like completely dragging mary worth and like complaining about she's also like deep into the heathcliff world um and so she's through her twitter threads drags me into some of this shit i mean not me personally but i end up getting sucked into it and everybody was complaining about some mary worth plot line early like early in 2022 and i swear on my life guys i was to a point where i was waking up and going to the mary worth website on my phone in the morning to see

what the latest three panels were anyway sorry to interrupt it can happen okay so i got half a point on that i'm giving myself half a point um all right okay um but also if you google buzz sawyer you get a pro wrestler named buzz sawer yeah right that's the proper response megan it's not

good at all um okay what's the next one the seattle times and the seattle post intelligence are each featured a different strip about a badly behaved orange cat which paper ran garfield and which paper ran east cliff oh this is so good oh my gosh i thought this was going to be a bloom

county reference like with um mr bill the another demented orange cat oh that's true i could have mixed it up with that but no okay um i boy i'm gonna have to go with what do you want to say

i was just gonna ask a question while you think about this luca how did you what was the adjective you gave these orange cats and misbehaving is garfield i'm not trying to put you on trial here Megan necessarily but is Garfield or just Davis is he a misbehaving cat well I mean he's not

pleasant no he's definitely not pleasant I mean I wouldn't want Garfield to be my cat no nor would

I mean I guess if you're eating lasagna that was not for you that is a misbehaving cat there are

times yeah and i did say badly behave not misbehaving so more just like yeah you know

it's broad i'm with there are plenty of times though when bubbles is being a maniac that i would happily have her personality to be don't talk to me i'm just going to be in my box with the with the covers over my head because it's a monday or don't talk to me till i've had my lasagna like a little more antisocial behavior from her on occasion yeah welcome to me because She's got much stronger Odie tendencies. Yeah, needy.

She's more needy. She's more needy.

Oh, I haven't answered the question. I was just going to give myself the point.

I am going to hear that.

Here's what I'm going to say. And this is where, again, I'm probably going to be combining things. We got the Seattle Times in Mrs. Wharton's class. So that would have been in the 80s when I was reading the comics, it would have been likely the Seattle Times. We were a Times family. If my mom found a Seattle Times when she was doing her babysitting job at Evans, the community center, she'd bring home a Seattle Times. so I'm trying to think of which one of those two Garfield or Heathcliff I was more I'm trying to picture it I feel like it was more of a Garfield head and I'm gonna say that was because Garfield was in the Seattle Times and Heathcliff was in the PI you are correct nice

your deduction was perfect like that's sort of what I was hoping like you would like think back to like, yeah, which paper did I see more of? Exactly. It was definitely the Seattle Times.

Definitely. I've always thought the Times, and this is, I don't, you know, I don't have anything to base this on, but I thought of the Times as the real, well, I would imagine that at one point, one of them was the morning paper and one was the afternoon paper, probably, right?

Yeah. All along. All along, the P.I. was the morning and the Times was the afternoon and the Times was considered more conservative editorially okay i was considered more liberal editorially and then didn't they combine on sunday or something crazy i think at one at a certain point they did yeah the sunday paper

just became this this giant project i think between both of them uh because i know there's

some sort of economic advantage to that both both garfield and heathcliff got top billing like they were really like dueling orange cats like they were each the top one of the top strips in each paper i thought that was kind of hilarious that makes a lot of sense and i was going to say like

as an outsider to this area um during that time i still like in my head i think of seattle times as being the more kind of mainstream paper and like the pi being more scrappy more investigative and whatever and so like it sort of makes sense to me that that kind of middle of the road slightly you know slightly right of center i guess editorially speaking for this region like that would be the garfield comic and then like in the scrappier paper you have the heathcliff who's definitely i mean does any of that make sense that checks out yeah totally checks out i mean

heathcliff is like you know he's out there trying to woo uh i forget the name what was the name of his cat girlfriend um he was trying to i'll look it up i'll look it up sasha or something and he was doing the thing where he would eat a fish but then pull out just the skeleton and like Garfield is just like living in kind of a pretty, I'd say pretty profoundly depressed single middle-aged man's apartment with very kind of limited movement Sonia, you were very close

yeah, it was kind of this slightly scratchier art almost, I mean I wouldn't call it underground but yeah, it definitely was more

scrappy yeah yeah definitely yeah okay i am megan i can't stress this enough i am loving this quiz this i don't care if the listeners are enjoying it this is such a fun trip down memory lane for

me so um please if you can what is the next question okay what were the names of the two female characters in the bc comic strip oh gosh that was the one where the guy was always riding

around on a wheel my dad loved bc my dad had a special set of glasses like drinking glasses that were bc glasses that at one point kind of got lost in the move or something like that and so i believe my sister like years decades later had to track down on etsy or something or ebay these these bc glasses i never quite as a kid i never quite quite understood bc or my dad's absolute

love of it is a little philosophical for my young brain yeah what is the like was the joke basically that these were just cave people with modern problems because i also would read bc but i

never understood it yeah i think there i think it's that yeah like people we never change we're

just the same basically i also i don't think i realize that the characters had names yeah i know this is shocking to me unless this is a trick question again i feel like maybe their names are like we're like uh you know grog and like whatever like whatever we come up with for like cavemen names also i i mentioned this on the show i don't know some time ago i only recently learned that neanderthals and cave people or humans and neanderthals are not the same thing i thought we were the descendants of neanderthals like like

I think I kind of did, too. Right? I just thought, oh, when you see the Flintstones, that's just us before we, you know, that's us when we used to have to use birds for record players. But it's still us. And that Neanderthals, like the idea of the Geico Caveman or whatever, it's like that was the Pepsi to our Coke. And we lived and they didn't. And we think of them as being somehow dumber. There was a hole on the media about it. It was very interesting, honestly.

I play a piece of tape from a TV show where somebody is like being philosophical, like asking these weird, unanswerable questions. And they say, why did the Flintstones celebrate Christmas? And that always blows my mind.

B. C. Look it up. The B is for before. OK, I don't I don't know the answer to this one, Megan. What were the names of the characters on B. C.?

OK. Okay, so the names to those female characters were Cute Chick and Fat Broad.

Whoa, okay. I guess I'm glad my brain erased that.

And the fun fact that my husband contributed is that they were finally changed in 2019. 2019!

when will this woke culture just let us enjoy something the way god intended it they changed

fat broad to thick chick and just called it with two c's fat broad became dumps like trucks

that is astounding wow so were they using like was it what so how would that have come up in the so in other words was i just because i was a little kid i didn't catch it was would there be like a cave guy on a wheel referring to one of the characters as cute

chick? I think so, yeah. Mm-hmm. Like talking to one of the other guys. Ah, I see. Yeah, I think that's how it came up when they were talking about

them. I'll tell you this, in that strip, BC, the B does not stand for Bechdel, I'll tell you that much right now. That's loud. Andrew, that's a next

level. So, I'm now at a news article about this, about the new names for these characters, which, by the way, appear to be Jane and Grace. Jane and Grace are the new names. And this is the quote. Let's see. Let me find it from... So John Hart, I guess. Was it John Hart? Was it the creator?

Johnny Hart.

Johnny Hart was the original creator. And let's see here. I'm trying to find. We work hard to keep the strip fresh and relevant for all fans and audiences, said Perry Hart. the strip's letterer and colorist and the daughter of the late Johnny Hart and it just seems like the right time for the girls to have names

the girls

it just seemed time for the girls to have names by the way, Dateline 2019 and he's still referring to them as girls I love it wow, were you a BC fan when you were reading these things as a 15 year old

I think I had a similar experience that Andrew did that like the grown-ups in my life thought BC was hilarious and um and I never quite felt like I got it but I was kind of titillated by the way they drew the by the way Johnny Hart drew the

women I'm looking at this right now and yeah they're very buxom and they're wearing a very sort of skimpy you know yeah kind of garment that I guess you could say well it was hard

strapless cave yeah cave dresses i forgot now that you guys are describing it i actually can picture them because when you said the women like i was like a i don't know i can only picture that guy on the wheel or somebody climbing up a mountain for wisdom which i think was also in bc not just in um you know baldy and the who's the bald who's the bald guy who is ziggy ziggy yeah i think they climbed mountains for wisdom in bc as well but you're right now i can totally picture those out those cave outfits like like you said like in the strapless dresses but almost like push-ups

sort of and very busty yeah right their boobs like really prominent yeah the guy on the wheel

is named thor i didn't know that either oh that makes sense um you would feel like thor would be i mean i don't know if this was in the comic or not but i'm looking at the whole list of everyone there's there's peter there's clumsy carp there's thor there's wiley there's curls there's the women with their previous names and um everybody seems like they're kind of doing the same thing you would feel like thor would have a real competitive advantage the guy on the wheel shouldn't he be living in a mansion like he should be out he has a killer app he is able to ride on a wheel when everyone else has to walk places like that should have been a real difference maker for him by the

way clumsy carp is an ironic name actually one of the most graceful characters in bc yeah just

and clumsy carp has on prescription I

glasses in this photo i'm looking at which is also a competitive advantage i feel like maybe that's even better than the wheel guess who could see clumsy carp i mean that's got to help with life everyone else just blind just massive macular degeneration owing to a diet high in organ meats and then one dude can actually see everything and he's like oh god look what we're eating oh shit right right he was kind of miserable yeah right he was like he did the thing our favorite uh twilight zone uh episode to reference he did the thing where he smashed his glasses like actually i need to go back to not yeah right yeah right i don't want to be a part of this like

me at the beach i honestly don't know if i'd be able to take off my shirt at the beach if i had good eyesight but luckily when the shirt goes off the glasses come off and i just feel like i'm just in a totally different world anyway so it doesn't matter you're living in a fool's paradise

that's where i've been spending most of my life um i uh as this is airing andrew i'm in palm springs and i know you're gonna be in hawaii yep but i still have unfortunately enough of my eyesight that even without my glasses i can see what's going on with my body and it's uh we've rented an airbnb and it has like a hot tub and i am um and some uh it's not just becca but becca's family is some of their family is coming too and i am already dreading like being you know being shirtless it's okay i mean thank you god megan that was the most maternal that was a very like who will make the pancakes kind of response from you i felt very cared for but um i'm gonna make sure i'm gonna confiscate everyone else's glasses while I'm in Palm Springs, and then I'll be fine.

One hot tub, please. Extra mirrors all the way around it, if possible. Thank you. Thank you. That'd be great.

All right. Next question, Megan.

Okay. Now we're broadening out a little here. One of the two papers scattered its daily puzzles, games, horoscopes, and amusing trivia throughout the classified section. but the other paper concentrated all of that stuff on one page what was that one page called oh my god it had all the puzzles and amusements did that you said this to me before luke was that

also the page megan that had the like egg thing on it do you know the single panel that was like this might have been a kind of a later invention more like a i don't know 90s invention but like it was a thing in on in the sunday maybe it was in the combo sunday paper that was like excellent jokes and it would be like an egg play on words but you could also i feel like you could color it in or there was some participatory element of it i don't know

about that but it had hocus focus you know pictures and you try and find like what's different between the two of them it had this thing called bio rhythms or something that was

like scientific horoscopes um and i'm trying to remember what the name what the name of that page was yeah okay um the name uh can i get a hint um well imagine you're at work and oh oh coffee break coffee break yes coffee break it was called coffee break i totally remember the second you gave that hint i was like yes because it had a little some little puzzles right didn't have not sudoku but like you know some stuff like that like it was kind of it was more grown up it was for you fold the paper in half right then you have your coffee break and you do those little activities exactly i totally like sublimated i don't know if that's the word i'd completely buried that memory but that was yeah i was terrible at all that stuff by the way once i had burned through and for me there was a real hierarchy of the comics i like i like the ones that were the most overtly funny to me so i'm trying to think what the jokiest ones kind of were for better or for worse i really

liked really that seems so serious an adult to me for better for worse isn't it like the parents trying to um kind of like 30 something boomer parents dealing with like the travails of running

a house well you know one of the things was and megan this is something that i'm sure you've given a lot of thought to as a cartoonist is oftentimes i responded to the drawing that's what told me it was funny versus yeah um the the actual kind of jokes and the message so and this is as a kid i went towards the things that that just somehow indicated to me that these were funny um even if Maybe I don't for better or for worse, maybe the topics were actually kind of serious. But I just remember thinking that they didn't have a kid with a baseball cap. It was always like a couple of kids and like ones in a.

baseball cap for better or for worse yeah and the drawings were really kind of friendly they didn't have that kind of angular dick tracy 40s style there were there was yeah they were just really welcoming drawing right you know i was really attracted through the art to the lock

Oh, my God.

Which is a terrible comic. And, like, I never really got the jokes and just totally misogynist. But I just thought the art was so cool that I read it religiously.

I was probably 15 when I realized the, like, the wordplay of the name of the strip. Because it's a husband and wife that just, it's basically like.

They hate each other.

Yeah, it's basically Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf playing out in a newspaper comic over the course of 30 years. And, of course, they're always locking horns. But, yeah, I think that I, because I didn't have any larger sensibility about these things, I think I thought the lock horns was really funny because it was like, they hate each other, don't they?

Boy, he just got a good one in. I adored the lock horns, and, like, I look back and, like.

So bad.

Oh, man, that comic was terrible.

Yeah. Looking back, I'm thinking, like, almost all, I thought all of the comics were too adult for me, except for, like, Calvin and Hobbes and Garfield, because I remember Shoe was also a big mystery for me. Like, why did everybody think Shoe was funny? How about Beetle Bailey? Oh, Beetle Bailey I think I kind of liked. That was my level. Beetle Bailey was inviting.

Yeah, I liked Beetle Bailey was good for kids.

Yeah. It was pretty easy to understand. I already mentioned this, but what about Hagar the Horrible? Yeah, I liked Hagar.

Yeah, that was another one I really liked. I think for that same reason, like, I liked that sort of short, dumpy art.

Mm-hmm. Uh-huh.

Yeah.

Are we missing any other Any other classics from the 80s That were in one of those Seattle papers That you liked Megan

I mean I was a big Blondie fan Again I don't know why Like all of these like Husband and wife travail comics Like and we're reading them As kids it's so weird But I really do think it's because of the art Like it drew us in

We enjoyed you know the pictures At least Dagwood wasn't a drunk like okay so Andy Capp Andy yeah that's right Andy Capp and wasn't the guy from the Lockhorns a drunk too didn't he have bubbles around him sometimes yeah always drunk yes yep

oh my god it's such a dark it's such a dark concept for a comic the Lockhorns a husband and wife who loathe each other and he's just a raging alcoholic just like if you break it down like that you're like I can't believe that's what we're putting in the paper ostensibly for children to read

right and for laughs and yeah

Do you have any more questions

on this quiz? I have a couple more questions.

Ready? I'm looking at the time. Do we have time for more than one? I feel like we might have to choose one.

Okay, so this is the last question. So, back at this time, newspaper classifieds had a lost section. So, which of these items was not really in the lost section on February 5th, 1983? Wow. A, a tan wallet. B, a pair of gray suit pants lost either on Broadway or 119th Street in Bellevue.

Gosh, those are such different places.

I know, what a night. C, a pair of bronze shoes. And then the last one, D, Grover Cleveland Historical Material.

These were, you're saying all but one of those were real things that were listed as lost. Someone had lost these items and was turning to the whatever it was, the P.I. or the Times, hoping somebody had found the stuff.

yeah putting an ad in a classified ad in the newspaper in order to try to find yeah exactly

what's your guess andrew well i have i mean just i'm just trying to game this out a little bit here i feel like maybe if megan made one of these up and sorry to talk about you in the third person but if megan made one of these up maybe inspired by the the bronze shoesteps in capitol hill maybe was playing on your mind a little bit so maybe the made-up one is the bronze shoes wow that's

an interesting take okay i'm gonna agree with you on that i i'm hoping to god the pants one is true just the like you said andrew what a night like i've had some nights i've never not known within a two-city radius where the pants might have been lost right right Thank you.

So I'm going to say, yes, the bronze shoes are made up. Everything else was really in the paper.

Okay, well, it's another one of my trick questions because they were all listed in the paper. Oh, my God.

That's a good outcome, though, because it means the pants thing is real and the Grover Cleveland. Yes, materials.

I know. They really, like, paint a picture for you, don't they?

But this is not all the same person. These were just different items.

Yes, different items, but just, like, the idea.

Imagine if the same person lost all of those things. What was that person up to?

I, like you, was just like, what happened the night that they lost the gray suit pants?

Right, exactly. Somewhere between Capitol Hill and Bellevue. Also, this is the 80s. Like, I don't even, like, did they even have I-90? Yeah, they did. Oh, they did?

They had gold floating bridges.

Oh, okay. All right. Well.

Yeah.

But they did have to take a horse and carriage across the floating bridge of their choice.

No, they had a car with a crank on the front of it and a horn that goes a-ooga, a-ooga.

Well, you did really well on the quiz, Luke.

I did okay. It was mostly just fun for me. Again, I lost track of the score a while ago, but I just like, what a fun little chance to reminisce about the Seattle newspaper culture and Seattle comics culture. So, Megan, thanks for putting that together. Thanks to your husband, too, for helping out.

Oh, you're welcome. It was my pleasure.

Yeah, thanks, Megan. I just want to mention one thing, too, that I should have mentioned at the beginning of the show, that I know that Megan actually went to the library to look at microfiche to put that quiz together. That is a level of commitment to this show that certainly neither one of us have. So thank you so much for putting that together. And thank you again for the book, which is absolutely beautiful. It's called Who Will Make the Pancakes. And please, TENS, support other TENS and get Megan's book. Absolutely. You're going to love it.

Thanks, Megan.

Thanks. Bye.

hey let's thank some of our daily donors this would be like haggar the amazing i was trying to think of a follow-up joke to that and i just don't really that's the only one i can think of where their name is terrible uh and so um how about howard hugs do you remember howard huge do you remember that one that was in parade magazine vaguely that was again he was a dog but he was a a real sweet kind of a sheepdog or something

hager the horrible thanks for asking yeah just trying to riff just trying to riff Unsuccessfully, yes.

We can't lock horns this way anymore, Andrew. It's becoming troublesome for the listeners. Let's thank donors like Sarah Templeton of Portland, Oregon. Hey. What the heck? When I read the name of someone in Portland, Oregon, I look out the window to see if they're just standing in the street. Any luck? I don't see Sarah out there, so Sarah's probably at work earning money so that she can help support TBTL. Thanks also to Colby Blanton in Seattle, Washington. Do you see Colby in Seattle, Andrew?

You know, I'm looking at this name. I feel like I do know Colby Blanton. I feel like we've emailed before. I don't know if we've met in person, but I feel like we have. I feel like we have a connection.

How about Stephanie King of Kansas City, M.O.? Oh, M.O., Stephanie King. Thank you. Is Box Elder, M.O. a real place? It must be, right? Box Elder, Missouri, yeah. Quite sure. Okay. I mean, I know it's in the song, but I just was wondering, Is it a thing that Malcolm is, like, made up or something?

Let me double-check that, but I always assume that, let's see here, Box Elder. Well, yeah, it's a, wait, Box Elder is a tree. Is it not an actual place?

Well, Box Elder, yeah, it's definitely a tree, but I thought maybe there was a Box Elder, Missouri.

He might have made it up, Luke. I was so gosh darn confident. There's a Box Elder drive in St. Louis, Missouri, but that's not what we're looking for. Wow, made up. this whole time. I thought it was a real ploy. Stephanie King,

if you wouldn't have donated to the show today from Kansas City MO, we would have never found out that Steve Malcolmus is a dirty liar. So thank you for that as well. Thanks also to Cheyenne Lively of Bellingham, Washington. One of my favorite cities to be from. Thank you, Cheyenne. Thanks also to Jason Lumpkin in Little Rock, Arkansas. We drove through Little Rock. Didn't we kind of hit the corner of Little Rock as we were heading down

to um uh mississippi maybe when once we had like kind of uh realized we weren't going to make it

in time so we yeah once we'd given up on hitchhiking straight up in a rental car like listening to the mariners get just like destroyed by the boston red sox why does my brain retain that yeah i do think that we did hit little

Because I think that's the only time I've been there Yeah, well thank you Jason And then thanks to Dan Sundberg In Seattle, Washington Another place That we have driven through before Thank you Dan Thank you to all of our daily donors for making TBTL possible We really do appreciate you On this Wednesday edition of the program Thanks also to Megan Kelso I know we just said it before the last break But definitely go out and grab a copy Of the book Who Will Make the Pancakes because, honestly, they're not going to make themselves. They're not going to make themselves.

Luke, can I read something to you really quickly? This is from the Chronicle.

Only if you do it like the Micro Machines Man.

I'll do it very, very quickly. This is from the Chronicle. I don't know where in Ohio the Chronicle is published, but it says here that this is an obituary for Harry Fingston, who did pass away, sadly, in April of 2021. He, again, was a close, close family friend back in the 80s and early 90s. And it says here, that was not part of it. That was me just bragging about knowing Harry. And it says, for those of you who are a follower of the syndicated cartoon Funky Winker Bean, band director Harry Dinkle was a tribute to Fingston, his favorite teacher.

Wow. That's really, that is a cool backstory. I still doubt that there's something called Funky Winker Bean, but everything else about that story is great.

I think it's a great name for a comic And I'm just glad to know that's one of those things From my childhood that actually Withheld the scrutiny of the internet Unlike Pinch Me and Punch Me went down with a leg

Withstood yes it's like totally I'm sure that 90% of what I take Is a given from my Well I didn't come from people who knew any funky Winker bean types So I don't have any stories like that but most of the stuff I believed from my childhood probably stuff my mom told me If there were a way to Actually like factually cross cross-reference it, it would be wrong, you know, or it would be, my memory would be off. So that's got to be rewarding to know that this story actually holds up as well.

Yes. So there you go. And also rest in peace, Harry.

Yeah, man. All right. Thanks everybody for listening. We are going to be back here tomorrow with another edition of the TVTL Winter Games. So please join us for that. Until then, have a great Wednesday. Take care of yourselves. And please remember, no mountain too tall.

And good luck to all.

Power out.