Muse

I know we've only known each other for four weeks and three days, but to me, it seems like nine weeks and five days. The first day seemed like a week, and the second day seemed like five days, and the third day seemed like a week again, and the fourth day seemed like eight days, but the fifth day, you went to see your mother, and that seemed just like a day. but then you came back and then later on the sixth day in the evening when we saw each other that started seeming like two days so in the evening it seemed like two days spilling over into the next day and that started seeming like four days so at the end of the sixth day on into the seventh day it seemed like a total of five days and the sixth day seemed like a week and a half i have it written down but i can i can show it to you tomorrow if you want to see it

i'm starting my own podcast hey that could be fun it's sentimental it's emotionally dishonest

it implodes into nothingness it's got all the funny parts on it all the good parts celebrities dancing stuff and music i got recognized on the street today

The guy had already met me and then forgotten he met me, and then recognized me from TV, and then remembered me again.

I don't know a lot about business, but he did an internet, and now the computers like him, and Wall Street is Google.

Things are going to start happening to me now.

All right, hello, good morning, and welcome everyone to a Thursday edition of TVTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. Just when it feels like things cannot possibly grow any more sexually unhinged. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. Hello, everyone. Coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center right here in a very wet Portland, Oregon. Didn't know you like to get wet, though. Still thinking of our friends south of here, down in California and other places that are bracing for yet another atmospheric river. I will give them this, the weather folks, that is. the meteorologists of the world. Atmospheric river is a very, very specific way to describe something, and I think it really does frame in your mind what's going on. And I feel like I didn't, I'd never heard of an atmospheric river until like two or three years ago. I don't know if they just invented the term or they just started using it with us, the lay people. But I, and none of this is to minimize what's happening to folks that are suffering through this because it's obviously terrible. But I will give them points on clarity with that name. You can just imagine it, a friggin' river of water running through the sky and then dropping down onto people. So anyway, again, hope you're doing okay if you're at the, you know, delta of the atmospheric river. We are at the inflection point of episode 3,857 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. And we are getting close, my friends, to working our way through the last of a couple of stories that occurred during the Winter Games that we've been trying to get to all week. These are both cinematic. They're both movie related. So who needs a movie? Including the story of that movie Yesterday, directed by Danny Boyle. It's actually a really good concept for a film, in my opinion. A guy wakes up in a version of the world where no one has heard of the Beatles. But he knows all their songs and starts playing them. The movie's called Yesterday, and he sort of becomes a sensation. Anyway, there was something going on with the movie trailer for that film that a judge has recently said is enough, the harm to these two people who brought the lawsuit about the movie trailer, the harm is enough to at least continue pursuing potentially a class action lawsuit because the movie makers lie. Lying is like 95% of what I do. So we'll get into that also. So speaking of movies, Avatar Way of Water is at like almost $2 billion now at the box office. But there was a big piece in the New York Times talking about the frame rate and just how the movie actually, for all that money that it's made, looks really weird. This is a real assault on James Cameron's filmmaking and whoever his editors are editorial decisions. So we will talk about that, too.

And because it's a Thursday, a.k.a. Blur's Day, we will catch up on some Blur's Day message. I'm expecting an atmospheric river of Blur's days because we haven't been doing that segment for a couple of weeks. So we will do that as well. And we'll talk to this guy, the longest running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. He's always lording.

over me that he can grow a beard and I can't, but it is a time investment for him. It took seven months to grow and needs half an hour's grooming every morning. He's fresh out of the bathroom grooming his beard. He is Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Hello,

my friend. Good morning, Luke. I smell like that oil that they put in beards. Beard oil, I think. Is that what they call it? Beard oil? Uh-huh, they do. Are you thinking of

like Aqua Velva or something or one of those commercials of our youth where someone's, Although, of course, that's always after the shave. Yeah, I was picturing more like... So I guess that's where the analogy breaks down.

You know, you were talking about the type of place where everybody wears leather aprons. I was picturing more like going into some barber shop somewhere in Portland where there are young barbers wearing leather aprons and people have twisty mustaches. And I go in there and they groom my beard. And then I come out smelling like some sort of a combination of of a leather and oil. And maybe I smell like I've just been anointed almost.

You know, I actually did a TV story about beards many years ago. And I flew to El Paso, Texas to interview a guy who was making his own beard oil. And it never even got into the story. That part we ran out of time. And that was when I learned a lesson, which is don't fly to El Paso to talk to one person unless you've got it signed on the line that is dotted from the people at CBS television that that's going to be in the story. And that's peace and love to our folks in El Paso. I think El Paso is a cool town, but it was not a direct flight from like Seattle at the time or whatever for it to. But my point is I've spent a surprising amount – for someone who can't grow a beard, I've spent a shocking amount of time thinking about beards and specifically beard oil, and yet I couldn't call it to mind, Andrew.

Can you call to mind how that – I'm assuming that came in kind of a tub. Can you imagine how that smelled? Do you remember?

Yes, I smelled a lot of it because the guy was demoing it for me and stuff. It's not – it's in a vial. It's an oil.

Oh, okay. So it's – okay. So I was picturing something –

So it's not like a grease. It's not like a pomade or a gel. The stuff that I saw. Now, I don't know what, you know, maybe there's different kinds of beard applications that different people enjoy. Like, for instance, I put this stuff on my hair that's called fiber. It's not just to help me poop anymore, Andrew. It's also to make my hair look spectacular.

To make the hair poop right out of your head. That's right.

It's a psyllium product that pulls together waste in the digestive tract. That is an ad that runs on NPR every single morning, and I just find it endlessly fascinating. they do an ad for metamucil and it's you know it's very npr in that it's i don't know if it's chioki is it chioki chioki anson who does a lot of the voice imaging for for npr or maybe it's somebody else but it's somebody just reading you know support for npr comes from and this is national metamucil a psyllium-based product that collects waste in the digestive tract i'm like do you need to explain to us how this works yeah that's in fact if there's a listener group that probably understands the basics of it i'd put npr listeners at the top of the list because a large

maybe a large portion of the audience would use the product a large portion of the audience understand science and a large portion of the audience um probably grew up with that brand

right that thank you andrew you know what you've really hit the holy trinity of uh public radio uh demos or or demographic sort of influences yeah for all of those reasons It just seems like you don't it's it's not jubile in the morning where they're doing a fake phone call where a guy catches his girlfriend cheating, except it's all actors. That show. Yeah. Explain how psyllium works. Yeah. They're going to need to know. Hey, I'm a Martinez doesn't need to have how psyllium works explained to him.

I have a little story here from my neighborhood that I was just balancing whether or not it pays off or not.

But I'll share it with you briefly here. And then I have a mystery that I think I just solved.

I'd like to talk to you about as well. OK, good. I'll keep this short because, again, I don't know that I have a great power out for it, but, you know, I am not on that website next door. We've talked about it before. I sort of have a distaste for that kind of like that, that kind of modern version of neighborhood watch or whatever you want to call it. But I did find myself without asking to be, but I'm OK with this, but I'm on some sort of a neighborhood list serve now that I've referenced on the show before where I will get emails from. I don't even know how big of a of a footprint this community is that I'm getting emails from. Let's say it's a five to ten block radius or something like that. And, you know, we do live in an area where, you know, we're a few blocks just away from Aurora, where various people in various, various versions of distress will sometimes kind of wander into our neighborhood. I have never had any issues with anybody in this neighborhood. But every now and then in this listserv, people will be like, you know, somebody, I don't know, somebody was walking in the neighborhood and they looked kind.

to pour they don't say that exactly but basically that or like you know here's a ring video of somebody who came up to my doorbell late last night draped in the american flag looked like they were off their meds and just kind of like a lot of that stuff i mean it's mostly okay but i'm always just very wary of it you know it always kind of gives me just a little bit of a bad feeling like what are we what are we doing here people anyway got an email i'm not going to use any names here obviously but i got an email that came in yesterday um uh i think afternoon and somebody said this uh man came up to our house and rang our doorbell in the evening yesterday said that he uh he thought maybe he was at the wrong house he was looking for a friend he hadn't visited this friend in a while and maybe even since covid and his friend was french and had a dog in a garden And the person who posted this was like, hey, listen, we're new to the neighborhood. I couldn't tell if this was a legitimate, you know, if this was a legitimate query or not. I just told him, I don't know. And I'm just throwing this out here. It wasn't like a super aggressive email to send out to the group. It was just saying, I don't know what was going on with this person, but here's this information for everybody. And I kind of appreciated them, their approach to that. But what I like. You like their tone. I thought their tone was pretty good I thought the underlying part of the tone was I think this guy was probably crazy But maybe there is somebody in the neighborhood who matches This description of a French man With a dog in a garden It sounds nice, sounds like a Beatles song But anyway what I like about it is I woke up this morning to see a couple more emails From people who've lived in the neighborhood For a while who are like Oh yeah, that was probably so and so He's moved out of the neighborhood Recently but he was French And had a really big dog and a nice garden oh my gosh it's like one of those things where i was like a real person all right i love and somebody else like a couple of people weighed in like oh yeah yeah i remember that person yeah nice dog and i was like and oh because i was just something that said french oh i think somebody else did say um oh yeah that i saw that person going up to other houses in the neighborhood too so there was just like the little hint of energy around the idea that maybe this person was just sort of knocking people get really you know on edge when strangers are knocking on doors everybody thinks somebody's casing the place or whatever you know and i understand i mean that some people

are like i don't know well that's the thing you know i think i i don't know if i'm just letting the you know fox news get to me because you know i'm a power user of that service but like i will say that um so the the house that i'm um working on um and and hope to someday move into uh i have all these like cameras now set up because it's basically an open construction site with like pretty expensive tools and materials and a lot of people coming and going and me uh you know

many miles away when you say people coming and going you mean like kind of contractors and workers

or yeah contractors traffic not a lot of foot traffic because it's um it's on a dead end road so it's not there's not a ton of foot traffic but there's um but there are just a lot of people coming out to do estimates and looking at it and some of these folks i've hired it might be a couple guys one day but maybe they're not making it that day but their other guys met you know it's just like a a lot of people kind of at and also my they have my the keys to my house there's not really anything in the house worth stealing but anyway it just seems like a good idea to have some sort of um you know record of like whatever happened up there so i've got these cameras set up and they're very apparent i'm not like surreptitiously recording anyone and i also don't have one of those like smile you're on camera and then there's like a loaded gun pointing

you know wait you do or do not have one of those i i can't tell from your person you do have one or you do not i do not have one of those okay gotcha i do not interesting um but anyway so uh the other

day i so i'll if you want to know the the honest truth why i have these cameras it's less to thwart any kind of property theft and more because I just want to know when these flipping guys are going to show up and swing a hammer in the direction of any part of the project. Because it's just one of those things. And it's not that it's costing me money per se because I pay them when it's done. It's just a progress thing. It's a constant what happens is I'll talk to the contractors and they'll say this XYZ should be done in two weeks. And two weeks goes by and at one point one person has come out and like straightened up a pile of like construction debris and then leaves they've been there one hour out of two like so what i really like to see is go on the camera and see someone is out there doing a thing that looks like construction that's it's mostly just for me emotionally to feel better but anyway i um was looking at the camera there to see if the folks came by they hadn't but i just see a mysterious figure who kind of looked like slender man tall hooded figure walking down towards the house oh because also the history is on there. So basically... for 24 hours if anyone if any motion kind of like activates the cameras i have that i can just like scrub through it and this slender figure with a hood pulled up very pale is walking and then is walking down towards like stops short of the house but is in my driveway very much in my driveway and then starts walking over to the garage and i'm like what is happening and then i realized oh it's my neighbor tanya she's just checking things out and i had talked to her about it and she actually sells like flooring and like tile and other things like she actually sells materials that I will probably need to buy from her like I have a catalog she gave me so she's totally just walking down the street and just probably was curious about the progress but I will be honest with you that a little jolt went through me when I saw someone I didn't recognize as part of this construction crew or whatever kind of coming into the zone my point in all that is to say we do for some reason now and i don't know if it's if it's paranoia or if it's a little bit based in real events it feels like we live in a world where someone coming up to your house and ringing your doorbell who you're not expecting seems like so much more of a deal than it was when i was growing up people were always at our front door like literally like it once a week if not more somebody was there like selling something a neighbor was borrowing sugar like it was just much more common

for someone to be up on your front porch yeah it's interesting i got a knock on the door from I mean, it is just so rare that you're that somebody is knocking on your door and you don't expect to knock on your door because somebody will text and say, hey, I'm coming over to drop this off or, you know, you're expecting something like door to door solicitation is completely and totally useless now as a way of trying to sell things. Are you kidding me? I need a vacuum. I've just been waiting for somebody to come and sell me a vacuum.

Are you in the market for some Cutco knives?

And, you know, like somebody did knock on our door. I happen to be in the kitchen. And the way our house is sort of set up is if you kind of come into our front yard and if the kitchen blinds are open, like everything in the kitchen is very much on display. So you kind of have to answer the door if somebody is knocking it, which I think I would anyway. But somebody knocked on our door and it was somebody, I don't know, it was a week before Christmas. It was somebody who was just kind of like welcoming people to the neighborhood with a little holiday or maybe just bringing in season's tidings or whatever with little bags of treats. And I think they were associated with a church down the street or something like that and inviting us to some sort of a street fair or something they were having around the holidays. And it kind of warmed the cockles of my heart. I'll be honest. I said hello to the guy and asked him where where he lives or whatever. And that was kind of nice. I want when I talk about like these ring services or the next door thing and my distaste for it, like I want to be honest about all of it, too. Like, I am the person who sees a lot of paranoia that is fed by some, I believe, I don't know, just paranoid forces in our society that that I see the news media and other people kind of stoking the flames of this sort of neighborhood paranoia. And again, I don't even like the term porch pirates. But listen, like, I also don't like stuff stolen off my porch. Nothing has ever been stolen off my porch in this neighborhood.

But you did set up a camera to monitor your garbage. Or do you not? Well, no, I just tell you to.

No, I don't have a camera on my garbage cans But I mean, that's what I

Didn't you on Roosevelt, didn't you?

No, no Oh, you never did My dad sent me some cameras I thought you set one up for like a hot minute

We did for something

But it wasn't about garbage It was like somebody was stacking up a bunch of cardboard Oh, right Right outside of our apartment And we weren't sure if it was somebody who ran a local business Who was dumping all of their cardboard food boxes

Which it was, ultimately, right?

No, it was not It ended up being somebody who was somebody who, again, was living on the streets and clearly had mental issues, who was collecting them, putting them down and not just putting them down as bedding, but also, I think, putting them down as some sort of obsessive compulsive thing. But honestly, and then I saw like, oh, like now I'm spying on this guy who I see around town all the time. He would sometimes sleep in our vestibule area. So it made me it did make me feel like a creep sort of. And that's why we took it down right away. And so anyway, that's what I wanted to say, though. like obviously i am somebody who's really um paranoid about my garbage cans like i am somebody who likes to i don't know maybe not likes to i kind of regret that term but i'm somebody who is prone to feeling like if you wake up right and there's some random i'm talking about anybody here and there's some random piece of detritus like let's just say a shoe or a or even a lighter or something in your front yard you're kind of like what happened here or certainly if it's in your backyard right you're just like yeah what happened like there's a bad creepy feeling and and I am somebody who's protective of my space so I don't want to make it sound like I'm above everything I understand this thing and for me this is the struggle and that story that you just told about seeing a figure on your property is like part of me understands the the kind of compulsion or the drive or desire to put up some cameras around your property. But then I always wonder if I wake up in the morning and I see, hey, somebody came up to

our door looked around a little bit and then walked away that's going to give me the creepy feelings but there's nothing i'm going to be able to do about it you know even if they didn't do anything wrong and what if it's tanya get in your own neighborhood damn she's got range you know so that's my thing right part of me does feel like hey maybe i should put up some cameras but then it's like well if i put up cameras does it really prevent anything or does it just sort of stir up more bad feelings in me when i see what was happening in the neighborhood at night that's

a really reasonable question and i think i mean when i'm finally living up at this place i wonder if i'll still want to have you know the amount i have three cameras right um i i wonder if i because it's just like it's like an acre and a half of property and there's like different little areas but i wonder if i want to have also i don't think the good news about that not that you asked but the good news about this particular place is it's pretty remote and it's at the end of a long dead end thing so other than my neighbors there's like really nobody goes down there and so i don't think i will actually need this when i live there because it's i'll be there you know for me it really is a thing where it's like well what if somebody came and fell and i got sued uh somebody was working and they got hurt and then we maybe we would know what the details of the event were if it's recorded or again legitimately like if there's you know thousands upon thousands of dollars of power tools that are sitting in uh a locked but like very easily kind of gotten into you know uh part of the house anyway um but

i'm with you that like you're making me want to break into your place more and more tell me can you describe more where this place is that's great you know andrew honestly if you want to roll

the dice on my google nest cam picking up your face i mean now this is this is gonna in a way i think probably support your suspicions about this sort of surveillance state which by the way what i was going to say is there's a setting there's something called like familiar face setting on these things yeah so it like starts to like facially read like i haven't like set it up but i'm assuming that if i did it and scanned my face it would like know that i'm like me and it wouldn't send me i don't have an alert i don't have a push notification but i'm sure you can set it up so anytime one of these cameras starts seeing something you get a push notification but it won't if it's a familiar face the thing i was going to say though and i'm just i don't mean to extend this conversation but it's kind of interesting because my guess would be i don't want to actually i don't want to answer this for you i'm gonna i'm going to answer it for myself and then i'll ask you how you would answer this question i am somebody who is not particularly concerned about government surveillance of me um i don't have a problem with the fact that more and more street corners have sophisticated cameras um because i don't i don't think of the government as being or let's say a store surveilling me you know if i walk into home depot there's a million cameras you look up above you and there's those kind of on a piece of conduit that black bubble that's got like nine cameras in it i don't care about any of that stuff because i just a i just am not overly concerned with my personal privacy privacy and i'm not somebody who's worried about government surveillance i'm also not worried about people surveilling me i don't get a bad feeling if i walk by someone's house and they have a ring camera or something like that for you is there any difference between people kind of turning their home into a surveillance state and our government or our our retailers or what is it all does all of it bother you or are there

kind of different levels oh that's interesting yeah no i'm i'm like you i i will give the caveat here that from a societal standpoint some of this tracking technology has a lot of has a lot of bias in it in both the way it's used and so like I want to give the caveat to that especially having lived in the like in a post 9-11 era where you would see this kind of surveillance stuff used disproportionately against people of color like that that is something that you can't ignore as far as me some middle-aged white guy walking around the idea that I'm walking down the street And there are a million cameras, whether they're, you know, traffic cameras combined with convenient store security cameras combined with somebody's ring doorbell. That doesn't really give me any issue at all. Like, I never feel like personally like, oh, no, I can't I can't get any privacy. In fact, not to be super dark here, but I'm sure a lot of people listening are familiar with this terrible story out of Idaho where there were some murders recently and the murderer was on the lam for quite some time. They didn't even identify a suspect for a while. And now that's they have identified him and he's currently in the court process or in the trial process. But actually, his trial hasn't started, but he's in custody.

No, he's actually in court today. Back in court today. For one of his kind of, you know, preliminary sort of points in the case or whatever you want to call it.

Kind of got my legal jargon messed up there. But anyway, my point with this is as I'm reading these stories somewhat, somewhat voyeuristically, I guess, about, you know, there's something very intriguing about.

this terrible story but then like how does somebody do something like this and then just disappear for a while and then how do they find this person well obviously um you know there's a lot of pinging of cell phone towers there's a lot of cameras involved all the different kinds of cameras I just listed and I was reading that in Hawaii with Genevieve and I said like it's just it is just a reminder that at any point like anybody if we did something wrong or even if we didn't do something wrong but somebody wanted to put somebody with the resources and access anybody could put together all of my movements in one day you know i just don't care because they're not if i was trying to get away with something or again if i was just somebody who was targeted for purposes that uh or you know reasons that aren't fair even it you can put together somebody's day i just sort of as somebody who doesn't really get into a lot of trouble and isn't on anybody's radar it just doesn't really affect me you know right until um it's like the

way that china has treated the uyghur population right you know and that and that's very much run through this i mean if we think our surveillance is uh is is intense it's got nothing on what what they're doing over there and so i guess i'm you know we have probably have some listeners who are a little more suspicious of this stuff than i am again i'm just sort of i just i just i'll whistle pass any graveyard you give me andrew like i just generally i'm like i don't know you know when are the seahawks playing like i just don't think and probably deeply enough about these things because all of this is fine as long as the government is not actively and you're right they the government historically has not actively been trying to surveil people like me as in straight white men of a middle age so i've been living in a real privileged space for that stuff but i mean it's We've given it all away. I've given it all away, and like you said, my entire day could be tracked. I mean, I haven't left. Well, that's not true. I did actually. Sorry, Andrew. I forgot to mention I went to the gym today. Oh, my God. Where's the fanfare? Don't want to miss a chance to throw that in. I was going to say, like, I haven't even left my house today, and yet all of my device, you know, my phone is next to me. I've got my Apple Watch on. Like, I'm being tracked in my own apartment right now, you know, like geotracked and stuff. And it's all sort of fine and convenient Up until It's being used nefariously against me Or us, so I'm hoping that That sort of doesn't happen Can I tell you about a mystery that I solved I think, a minute ago Well, not a minute ago, exactly 27 minutes and 48 seconds ago

Should we take a break before you tell me the mystery?

Yeah, although it's not a great Well, yes, let's do that

I'm doing to you what you sometimes do to me And then you're like, shit, no, it wasn't that good It wasn't good enough for the break

I'm walking a mile in your shoes, and this is actually good for me to think about when I'm doing this to you. Yes, everyone keep your expectations low for this reveal that will happen on the other side of this break. Hey, let's thank some of our daily donors who are making a generous and regular financial contribution to the program which funds the entire operation and possibly other operations at APM. It's kind of a black box. I'm not going to lie, Andrew. We've got to thank Robert Burton, though, of Willits, California. Willits, float, California. Willits or wonits? Willits, when I said that, when I read that word, it jumped out to me as a place I may have been in California at some point. I wonder if I did a story out there. I can't tell you geographically where it is.

Do you do requests? Will you say the word willits in the voice that you say, Louis? I will.

Willits.

Did you know that that was my request before I even said it?

I did, and I enjoyed, honestly, Andrew, I enjoyed being a part of that journey together. It was fun. Thank you for doing it. Thank you, Robert. Thanks to Tamara Stubblefield, who's, oh, right here in Portland, Oregon. When I said Portland, Oregon, when I read Portland, Oregon, Andrew, it felt like a place I've been. Maybe I've got a story there or something. It rang a bell? It did. Hey, in stereo. Thanks to Jessica Hamblin as well In South Kingston, Rhode Island

Nice, we haven't had anybody from Rhode Island On this list in a while

Haven't had any co-hoggers checking in in a while We love that, thanks Jessica Thanks to Ingrid Mayer as well Who's in San Francisco, California Ingrid, hope you're doing okay San Francisco, yeah, wow Part of the world getting real heavily hit by the water Yes, scary Majorly Louisa Cohen is in North Vancouver, British Columbia. Now, I wonder if that means the...

northern part of the city of vancouver no or if it means it must be northern part of vancouver island oh i see what you're saying well i can look that up if you want because it's vancouver

island is is huge and wild and quite beautiful um but then that might just be like being from north seattle or it could be like being from the um arctic circle looks like it's just north of

vancouver but across the water so there's a inlet there and yeah it looks very beautiful

Thanks, Louisa. Thanks also to Ryan Manar, who's in Liberty Lake, Washington. Have I heard of Liberty? How have I not heard of Liberty Lake, Washington? It sounds like the cradle of freedom. It sounds like you really want to go for that 4th of July parade. You've got the old guys from the VFW. They're more nose hair than man at this point. their little hat on from the war just marching with their uh with their little uh you know whatever kind of um wooden guns or something that sounds like a very very americana place thanks ryan thank you to all of our donors today for uh helping keep tbtl going we really do

appreciate you hello and welcome to top story uh this the quick

kind of pin or whatever reveal on this thing that i think i just solved so in this room that i'm talking to you from this apartment that i have in portland it's a two-bedroom apartment but i use one of the bedrooms for tbtl central and they the so which means i i don't other than when i'm working in here i'm not in here a ton i don't do a ton of living in here and the carpet is i don't know how to describe the color it's kind of white and gray it's like very very narrow white and gray stripes so that if you kind of crossed your eyes a little bit it would look maybe grayish or something but some number of months ago i noticed like a brown all kind of long brown stain on the carpet i know she's a brownish area with points and my first thought when i saw that was bubbles did you do something in here but it's not from a cat because it doesn't have a smell there's no um you know crust on it like it's you know you can tell if a cat had an accident on a on a gray carpet you would see it and you would it would be recognizable this is just a brownish area with points not really it looks more like a long oval with points and i have been staring at this thing now for months every time i come into the room just thinking what in the world would have made that because i'm the only person that ever comes in this room other than the cat and i know she didn't do it and then today andrew when you started the uh audio from steve martin to begin the show i realized that i wanted to warm up my coffee and so i hustled out to the kitchen but then i started doing this thing that was so ridiculous which is because i'm right when we're done recording today's show i am uh heading to the airport because i'm going to las vegas for a tv story and so i started like i poured my cup of coffee and then i emptied the coffee pot and turned the coffee maker off because i'm going to be gone for a few days and i started like organize this is all while the intro to the show is playing and i'm in the other room i start like organizing the kitchen for my departure which is like why does the human brain like do that like why is that what i try why did i try to do that in that moment it's like when you have to go to the bathroom real bad and you grab the you're out of toilet paper and you're doing a jig but for some reason you want to put the toilet paper

on the roller that's a very specific thing that i think this is not the time for this it's okay

put the toilet paper on the countertop in the bathroom and do what you got to do this doesn't and then the spring flies out it flies across the room it's just like a disaster i have that Weirdly in my brain sometimes When it is the least ideal time I will get really granular with shit So I'm in there I'm like trying to I get into my mind That I need to make sure That the coffee grounds Like that are in the filter Are in the garbage And the coffee is poured out And rinsed out And like I need the coffee machine To be basically shut Winterized for the next four days

Yeah Sounds like a man Who learned his lesson After the last time You left town On what was supposed to be A two week adventure That turned into a three week adventure And you ran out the door and you came back to a coffee pot that was more science experiment than I heard it brushing its teeth.

And yeah, wasn't good. So I'm doing all this. And then I also realize I don't know if the talking part of the intro has ended. It is time for the Luke talking part to begin. So I grab my cup of coffee and I come not quite sprinting, but hustling into this room. And the coffee does like a slow like it's like it's like a bounty ad. Oh, by the way, I have a lot to say on those bounty ads.

I don't like the slow motion spill.

I don't like that they use plastic tumblers. Like, of course, they don't they don't want the glass to break. That's not part of the ad. But the tumbler, the glasses that they use because you're watching it in slow motion, they're going to do it 8000 times. They were like, well, it has to be plastic. It's so noticeable to me that it's like a cheapo plastic. They should have found someone who could make something That was glass that wouldn't break

Do you not think that people Drink out of plastic cups growing up I mean maybe as a kid

People do but that plastic cup is very much meant To indicate that it's a glass

Oh I see you think that they're It's like wearing glasses that are supposed to be prescription But they're just flat glass And you don't even have glass in them They're just trying to fool us

They want it to read as Someone poured a glass of juice And it's spilling Like I understand that people drink – I mean I probably – no, I drink out of mostly glass stuff. But yes, I totally get that. But I think in the case of one of them where the juice is spilling, they want you to think it's spilling from a glass because that's the shape and the look of it. But it's clearly plastic, and I just – I wish they would have done a better job with that. My point is, Andrew, it was like that commercial where like the coffee was starting to like – like it was starting to like almost come out of the cup in slow-mo. and then i like moved the cup and i got it back contained and i got back over here and i realized oh my gosh i totally must have spilled coffee running in here some morning in that exact situation and the reason that i wouldn't have noted it was because i was hustling in here to like start talking on tbtl sloshed a big a big you know slosh of coffee onto the carpet because it also has like we need to get you know a forensics expert in here because that also explains the shape of it i'm gonna take a picture of this flash yeah it's a long like now that i know what happened it totally makes sense because it's not like a circle right it is it's elongated it looks like a sea cucumber shape because the coffee was going you know the physics was taking the coffee out of the cup and sending it in this elongated sort of narrow thing that i went then it went and it hit but i was completely unaware because i was like i'm sure in that moment three months ago my thought was uh has um you know why can't i think of any of our intros andrew there's only thousands of them has whoever it is is in the intro stopped talking yet right my mind was somewhere else so that's what that was and i have to tell you i know no one except me cares about this but it's a major relief to my brain to now know what happened all right open up the text

message i just sent you with a link to a bounty commercial in there while you do that because i want to ask you if these are the because these definitely are glasses that are supposed to look like um like pint glasses that people are drinking maybe iced coffee out of they don't i'm wondering if these are the ones that that bother you they don't seem to bother me too much um but i also wanted to tell you in all seriousness and i don't know if i've given you this advice before it's like the only cleaning advice i can actually give out that i stand behind is um folex is uh like this carpet and upholstery stain remover stuff it is like magic okay good so you know you know folix that that will probably take care of that it's not this one andrew i'm watching where's the

lotto ticket almost yeah that seems that seems okay because that one reads fine in fact it might even that might be real glass there's another one that my memory is it has like red juice in it okay and it just looks to me like it's especially not convincing as uh what i thought they were trying to make it but but um who knows let's speaking andrew speaking of the way of water how's that that's pretty good i mean honestly that was i'm proud of that uh this piece by uh ben kingsberg in the new york times is really something avatar and the headache of high frame rate filmmaking basically what this guy ben um kingsberg or kenningsberg is saying is that james cameron decided to shoot a lot of avatar way of water uh with much more than 24 frames per second 24 frames per second is kind of the standard when you're watching a movie from the 1980s or 90s that was shot on film it's 24 frames per second almost all the time because that's just kind of uh they arrived at that amount of basically photos per second so because of course film is just a series of photos that's and that's what we're used to when you think about what a movie looks like what your brain has been trained to look at is 24 pictures every second but james cameron really wanted to have a high degree of like i guess you could say resolution or like he wanted when people were doing something fast like shooting an arrow he wanted to have many more frames per second which is

now possible to do so that you could see the movement more so it wasn't blurry because when you're talking about in fact that's part of what i love about film is it's a little blurry that's again what tells my brain it's a movie and it's not a soap opera or something else that's also by the way what video interpolation is all about and we've been down that road before on this show um with our friend uh tom cruise and his buddy yeah he's been on the show to talk about moment of your time to talk to you about video interpolation um and so uh this piece just goes on to basically talk about how shitty avatar looks because of james cameron using uh this like highly uh increased or highly more rapid amount of frames per second he says there is no discernible rationale for cameron's choices the rate often shifts within a scene when he cuts to another angle on the same object and the technique isn't simply used for action scenes and fast camera movements the most obvious potential source of blur or judder some of the action is shown at 24 and some quiet character driven shots are at 48 frames per second the first three shots of ed falco as general ardmore are at 48 frames per second but the fourth shot switches to the standard rate uh zoe saldana's character hugs one child at 48 frames per second and then two children together at 24 frames per second the character played by jack champion grabs a fire extinguisher at 24 frames per second then uses it to smash controls on a panel at 48 frames when the poacher brendan cowell loses his arm there are two shots of the severed limb the first is at 24 the second the reverse angle is at 48 you wouldn't want to miss anything on a flying arm like uh he just basically is and this is that's just one little section he's just going through roasting james cameron's choices of when it's using that like again if you've watched a soap opera in your life you know that look because that's shot on video versus what a film typically looks even though now most films are shot on video to look like film but even so they use these techniques that make

it look like 24 frames per second we got a newish TV or we got a new TV it's I don't know when it goes from new to newish but this thing is still only like I think under two months old and um it's a big screen TV or it's like 55 inches which Genevieve was very mad about getting a TV that big it was you it's almost hard to find TV smaller than that but Genevieve just has something like She just thinks TVs are too big these days. And we also bought, yeah, it was a strange journey. But also, and it's not a top of the line one. It's like one of the most affordable that you can buy, right? But we, it was just for the basement. You know, neither one of us are huge, like kind of snobs when it comes to like kind of, you know, frame rates and watching TV. I like my electronic. If I were buying it myself, I'd probably put more money into it. I'm a little bit more of a techno geek than Genevieve when it comes to that stuff. But, like, whatever. Like, we got this TV. It's fine. It was definitely going to be an improvement over the 20-year-old TV that it was replacing. But anyway, my point is this. It's a smart TV that comes with a bunch of apps, and so we don't have to have a separate device to watch all of our streaming services. It's pretty cool. I generally like it. But there's something going on with the TV, and I think this is just part of the design where it doesn't give you the controls over the way the picture looks in the various apps, if that makes sense. Like if I were to plug in a different device to this, if I were to plug in like my Xbox and then I could watch HBO via my Xbox, I can control the brightness and the contrast and all those things we grew up with, as well as motion blur and the other things I don't understand that makes it looks like you're watching a, like you say, a soap opera if it's set up wrong. But if you're watching any of the TV programs that you enjoy on any of the native apps, just like on the TV, I can't control those things. and so I when I first got it I couldn't tell like am I watching we put on Chinatown as a good example of a movie that has like you know beautiful cinematography but I've also seen it a million times so I know what it's supposed to look like and I'm like sitting there watching I'm like is this better am I seeing good quality picture for the first time ever or is this a little flat that's the way I always describe it is it like is it a little bit too bright and almost two-dimensional in in the way that these these modern viewing technologies sort of flatten everything out and it sort of depends on what you're watching newer stuff is fine if you're watching an old black and white uh like a western or something which i don't watch a lot of those but i was just kind of flipping through looking for examples like the old black and white movies almost look like they're new movies that are filmed in black and white for nostalgia purposes

if that makes any sense totally have you seen those videos where they've basically um taken film that was shot back in like 1900 like 1901 and it's like somebody it's the staten island ferry unloading oh yeah in southern manhattan and they've basically taken out they've

smoothed it yeah some of that's i kind of like that because it reminds you that the world was

real then exactly that's exactly how to describe it it's like that world seems to me to just be sort of sepia tone and like weird and other and like not real people it's the intro to cheers right or whatever isn't there like a heavy dose of like people experiencing gaiety in the beginning

of cheers yes i don't think they're moving images though i think it's a slideshow right people but

see that's the thing even that is how i picture it yeah but then when you see people walking down a street and the Bowery and they're not jittery because they fixed it now they look like real people with hopes and dreams and like they were just doing their thing that day that to me is a really cool development but what this guy in the Times Ben Kenningsberg is saying is that the problem is basically with his eye what Avatar looks like when he's when Cameron is using 48 frames per second and it's a person who's costume they just look like an actor wearing a costume because it's too real it's too real he says shots that are submerged so he says the underwater stuff works pretty well at 48 um the high frame rate in general the device is less unnerving when the image simply involves water uh the navi and tolkien the whale like creatures um we're watching visuals heavily augmented with effects but the format becomes a liability when a human being or any recognizable real world object enters the frame suddenly the actors in costume documentary effect is back and it has the paradoxical consequence of making this 600 million dollar movie look cheap like i know exactly what he's describing because when it's too vivid you suddenly realize oh this is just a person with a like blue paint on their face instead of blue face baby sorry that was just a blue face reference um it's like it's too real somehow like we need there to be a little or i do maybe it's just age too maybe it's my generation i need there to be a little bit of sort of gauze over the or like gauziness to the whole experience i don't want to remember that it's just humphrey bogart in a hat standing in front of a pretend airplane at casablanca i want to believe uh that he's rick and that he's got the letters of transport and this is uh his only chance to

get out of Casablanca yeah certain eras you know like I think growing up in the 90s when we look back at like whatever the um kind of the the essence of of the media we watched then I think especially TV it's like at the time it just seems like well this is what normal TV is everything else looks old compared to this now you watch 90s TV and you're like why is everything in blues and purples and extreme lighting and black and white and why is everything like super contrasty and you look back at these various eras and certain ones just seem nicer than others now that 90s look seems kind of cheap to me but I like for me like I don't even know if I like the movie Jaws but I love having the movie Jaws on in the back I was watching it in a bar a few weeks ago I was beautiful right oh my god it's gorgeous and like that era of whatever like whatever and i know nothing about this ship or whatever that era of like film stock and also you know it's just beautifully directed and there's great cinematography in there but also like but that era of film stock is my favorite it's like it's like warm and yes and a little bit rounded and i don't even know what these words are that i'm saying i'm so with you but yeah that's that's that's the pinnacle to me but i also wonder like do people's eyes just get used to things like you know i i'm still somebody who'd much rather see practical effects in a movie more than digital effects but like i am all my eyes are old now you know the people who grew up watching the type of content that has been kind of given away to like you know digital doohickeys like that's what's

normal i guess i don't know yeah this is as old man as i can old man but um i'm with you on that like i just i sort of actively avoid movies that i know are mostly going to be cgi because my my eyes are just conditioned for a different kind of film watching and even when i saw the first avatar um because i was interested in the sort of 3d aspect of it um but this one to me it just everything that i've seen and by the way i'm in the minority here it's going to be a two billion dollar movie before it's all said and done so clearly a lot of people are interested in this but just based on the trailer so much of it just looks like a cartoon to me i'm also not against cart

cartoons it's it's the other than roger rabbit i don't want to have my live people and my cartoons in the same movie i kind of need it to be one or the other right for me like and this was kind of

my take on this article as you were describing it was and this is going to be real shitty so for those of us in our audience who really like the avatar movies and um and enjoy it like keep on enjoying it and i i apologize we really do try not to yuck people's yums but in this case i'm just going to be brutally honest like i i hate i mean these movies i didn't see the second one i I thought the first one was just from a storytelling standpoint and a story standpoint was so basic and ridiculous that the one thing I don't mind Cameron doing with these movies is monkeying around with the technology. And so if he wants to be like if he wants to be like a filmmaking lab. Yeah, exactly. Because that's the only good thing that I can maybe say about the first Avatar is that it kind of pushed to the forefront the idea of, hey, let's explore 3D in movies again. I mean, I think that was definitely like kind of on the vanguard of the modern 3D movement. Right. Which I don't really care. I prefer not to watch movies in 3D, but like just from an outside standpoint, that's cool. If your movies or whatever your art is is sort of like getting other people to explore new ways of telling stories, that's kind of cool. So if he's taken some swings, even if they appear to be random swings with this 48 versus 24 frames per second thing, like I don't really care because I'm not going to see that movie. I think that movie's a mishigas anyway Like who gives a shit Like yeah play around there just like you play around with your submarines And maybe some of the stuff you explore Will make the world a better place

But Andrew you don't think the story Of basically mostly white Saviors coming to a land Of noble but simplistic Savages You don't think that story needs to be told

So wise

There's a right way to rock And a wrong way to roll You can't just listen to your soul just remember that life is number one you can be having so much fun

all right we have a nice uh batch of blurs days here luke nothing overwhelming i'm glad to say even though we were on tape for a couple of weeks. I can make some up. Sure. No, I think we have the perfect amount of blurs days. I did want to say, though, if you don't mind me doing a quick Andrew PSA here, wanted to let everybody know that I'm still digging through a lot of email from the past several weeks. And so yesterday I went through a lot of emails and I was reading them, but I just want to let people know that I apologize if you send me something and I'm very slow to get back with you. I'm just digging through a lot right now because I stumbled on some emails yesterday that I felt bad that I hadn't addressed sooner. So thank you, everybody, for your patience. But I think we're caught up on the blurs days, and we're going to kick things off here with Timothy, who says, happy birthday to the best co-bro. Wait, I thought I was the best co-bro. Huh.

Longest running and best are not the same.

I see. Okay, well, Timothy says, happy birthday to the best co-bro, Katie. You're the best mom and person. Tacoma till we die. I'm the loudest co-bro. You are, yes. When I play my little audio drops. The droppiest, yeah.

Mary says, happy Blur's Day to my delightful daughter and fellow 10 Kelly. Your wicked quit is always on point, which in this family is a weapon best kept sharp. I've heard the movie Knives Out, Andrew, was based on Mary and Kelly's family.

I finally watched that on the airplane. I'll give you a full review tomorrow. I've been needing to.

I've heard good things, although now the second one is out, and I feel like do I have to start over on the first one? Is there an overlap? Do I need to know what happened in number one for number two?

Genevieve, who was a huge fan of number one, was very confused why people like number two so much. So if it means anything to you, focus on the first one.

Dave Bautista in his Speedo. That was the scene that I saw on Netflix. Oh, I didn't know about that. I didn't know about that. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Anyway, back to Mary and Kelly. In this family, it's a weapon best kept sharp. We all love you and are really glad we have you on our side. Wow. I know. Keep your friends close and your Kellys closer, apparently. You are the best daughter, wife, sister, and aunt Keep up the good work Okay, that part seems like a weird pep talk But do it anyway, I'm the mom Nice Happy birthday, Kelly

How about this from Gretchen who says I'd like to wish my daughter and fellow 10 Olivia a happy birthday That's interesting We have two, are these two in a row? Yeah, two in a row that are two daughters and fellow 10s I love this mother-daughter 10 relationship that we're celebrating today. But back to Gretchen, who says, I'd like to wish my daughter and fellow 10, Olivia, a happy Blur's Day. I have had the pleasure and honor of being your mom for 30 years. Enjoy your day in wintry Spokane from Mom.

Wow, this is really, we're just going, we're going, you know, intergenerational here today, Andrew. Lindsay says, I wanted to send a Blur's Day for my mom, Sherry, whose birthday was last week. This year has been tough, but she is tougher. Thanks for sending your love along to her. Sherry, we're sending you our love. Yeah. From all of us and also Lindsay. Happy Blur's Day, Sherry.

kj says wishing jk in salem oregon who is not my lover no matter how hard luke tries to create that narrative wishing jk the happiest of blurs days may 2023 kick 2022's ass to the curb you're

making me swear kj come on happy blurs day i believe i talked to kj and jk after a live wire recently, and they said we're not together, and I said don't rule it out. Yeah, who knows? So I'm sticking to my guns on that. Jonna says, I want to wish a very happy 18th Blur's Day to my fantastic son, Isaac. You're officially a grown arse man. I feel like we can say, I mean, it's written arse, but also, arse is, it's just, language is so funny, right? Like, arse seems so not sweary to me, just because it's how people say it in, you know, England and such.

How do we have an ass followed by an arse? how do we have we do it all the different ways in the words of Kenneth

I couldn't be more proud of what a thoughtful hilarious bright young man you've become that's really sweet my parents would say that to me I suppose you might as well also I might as well also wish myself a happy mid 40s blurs day which is this Saturday John I tell all my mid 40s

listeners to wish themselves

a happy blurs day so happy blurs to you as well yes

laurel says happy 35th blurs day to andrew in linwood andrew has been a loyal 10 i almost said royal 10 well maybe it is a royal loyal 10 since tbtl's inception and we couldn't think of a better way to say happy birthday than have luke and andrew say it for us we love you forever and always love laurel grant and cc ps thanks for getting us hooked on tubs subs andrew and luke tub thumping is now a part of our young and impressionable children's vernacular. I love it. I can't take any

credit for that. That Tub Subs thing, that's a pure Andrew project.

Yeah, I get the body to prove it. Body by Tubbs. Can I get a t-shirt that says Body by Tubbs? Oh my god, I'm getting you

Andrew. I'm going to get you a t-shirt where it has like an airbrushed male torso on, but it's much more like a normal male torso. It's not like all ripped, but it's like a Body by Tubbs. Hey, one other quick thing. i wanted to say a shout out to our listeners i know tara is one of them uh who are nurses in new york and uh tara was at one of the hospitals that actually was on strike because of the contract that the uh was being put forward to the nurses i think there was like 7 000 nurses that were going out um at a couple of hospitals and they have apparently reached an agreement tara had emailed me during the week and said i don't know if this is appropriate or not but i wanted to just she wanted to kind of like tell us about like what it was the nurses in new york were dealing with and what they were hoping to have remedied specifically like the number of patients that they were responsible for tara felt like it was really unsafe uh for them and so um i what i heard this morning was an interview with the head of one of the hospitals so i don't know if i could take that person's uh you know take on the um on the situation to be fully truthful but tara hoping you and any of our other listeners who happen to be nurses in new york city and really anywhere are doing okay, and I'm glad to hear that there was something that was reached there, so I guess that's going to do it

Look at us, Luke, a little internal convo here I mean, we had a 10.20 out time today, it is 10.15 as I start this music that never happens

that has literally never happened

I like having a little buffer, I like saying

I think I need to go to the gym more before the show, did I mention that I went to the gym this morning? Oh, congratulations And I think it just puts me in a really efficient state of mind where I'm able to really keep us on task. Actually, it's probably more you than me. But, yeah, I am going to go to Las Vegas, and I'll be checking in from there tomorrow. So we will see you then. In the meantime, have a great Thursday. Please take care of yourselves. And remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all. mom it's not real it's a jib jab power out