Muse

This is Richard Splitt, and I'm here to say, you should leave a message for me every day. Your name, your number, and what you need, and I'll get it back to you, yes indeed. Just wait for the beep. You know how to do it, then later on, I'll listen to it. Unless I'm asleep or lost my phone, either way, wait for the tone. Which you'll hear soon, unless this is broken, so I may not hear a single word you've spoken. So send an email, or text me too, to increase the odds that I'll connect with you. TBTL

i don't want people saying uh andrew's a hero or you know andrew he's king feminist please yeah

no one would ever say that about you oh um what kind of rap do you do are you like sort of sing song a rap like bone thugs and harmony or are you more like street like will smith your mouth might

be saying hey we cool but your eyes are like no we not nice to meet you no it's not it's all good the story of this situation is it's extremely personal

all right hello good morning and welcome everyone to a wednesday edition of tbtl the show it just might be too beautiful to live it's an audiophiles nightmare my name is luke burbank i am your host yeah oh yeah buddy coming to you from the hollywood broadcast center right here in portland oregon where it was just raining buckets yesterday and now it's absolutely gorgeous

Oh, ma, pa, it's just beautiful.

Life's funny that way, isn't it? In that the weather changes. I guess it's not that funny. In fact, I know from my travels around the country that maybe with the exception of, like, the North Pole and Antarctica, almost anywhere you go, people will take you by the arm and they'll sit you down and they'll say, But guess what is unique about this place? You never know what you're going to get with the weather. Everyone thinks that about any place they are. But see, I'm doing this show from Portland where you never know what you're going to get from the weather. So that's why that's interesting. Here's another thing that's maybe even fascinating. We're at episode 3,876 in a collector series.

Let the fun begin.

We have a lot to talk about, including news from right here in Oregon. It's not Goonies related. unless somebody went into the Goonies' house and turned off a gas stove. In Eugene, they are not going to let developers of certain sizes of new apartment complexes put in gas stoves, gas ranges. It's going to be very hot, going to be very uncomfortable for everybody. We'll talk about the latest on the war on your gas stove and how it's probably not a war on your gas stove. Also, LeBron James did something quite amazing last night.

Cleveland! This is for you!

He set the all-time NBA scoring record. And, I mean, that is quite a feat. And it's interesting for reasons that are sort of specific to me and something that I used to get delivered to my home when I was a child. what that sounds way weirder than i meant it to but anyway we'll talk about lebron james and his big accomplishment and why i'm particularly fascinated with it and we'll talk to this guy he's particularly fascinating he's also the longest running cobro of the show maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships every morning to get himself hyped for the show he just stares into the mirror and over and over again he just repeats it is our turn he is andrew walsh and He's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

Is he holding six Washington State Lotto scratch tickets? Yes. Yes, he is. Where's the nickname? Yes, he does. Hey. Hey. Wait a minute. You were pretty quick on that, Luke.

Hold on. Uh-huh. Did you, were you in Auburn, Washington recently playing the Powerball?

No, I don't think I've ever played the Powerball in my life, but you know what? But I saw that headline, I think, in The Stranger yesterday afternoon saying that somebody in Washington state has won the Powerball, but they haven't claimed their their prize yet. And for a split second, I thought, wait, I do have those scratchers I've been carrying around in my wallet for a month. I'm like, wait, that's not how Powerball works. It was like it was, I mean, a fraction of a second. But just for I was like, wait, how about this?

I've been carrying these around. Do you want to talk about an even more delusional thought? I saw yesterday, somebody won the Powerball in Washington. This was in a national publication, and I thought, oh, somebody won in the District of Columbia. Because a lot of times they'll say Washington State, to clarify. We're not the default setting for a lot of folks, or you're not. I'm not in Washington at the moment.

moment but i was like well huh i wonder they must mean the district of columbia and then later i saw an article that said washington state like it was more like the ceil times washington state uh is where the latest powerball ticket was sold and i thought did i go into i hadn't been in washington state in a while maybe weeks i was like did i go into washington state and buy a

powerball ticket and i forgot about it like i was trying walk and buy a lotto ticket across state

lines at any point i was because that's so much closer geographically to me i mean forget if i was like if i was like you know year-round living in washington i would have declared myself the winner i would have gone out and bought some kind of rolls royce because usually you hear about somebody winning one of those things and they're in you know florida or new jersey or maine or somewhere very far away from where you are geographically it's rare that it's the state that you're actually in and because i have this kind of weird completely unrealistic sort of optimism and like i feel like if a plane were to crash i would somehow be the only survivor like it's illogical captain but i was just like if it happened in the state i was in even though that probably represents i don't know a hundred thousand or a million tickets that were purchased

i would assume i had the winner that's so funny i could be standing on the ground and assume an airplane is going to crash on me like that's the difference in our personality but the important thing is i would be in the plane i would survive the crash right because it landed on me that's right you'd bounce off my belly looking out for your co-bro and i do appreciate that about you you'd bounce off my belly like a like a cartoon he died as he lived covering for luke's bullshit Yeah, I've never actually played the Powerball before, so I guess I'm probably not the winner in that one. I know what I was going to say. I was stalling there because I had something I want to tell you. Did I ever mention this to you before? Do you know the 7-Eleven? We're going to get real specific here regionally. Do you know the 7-Eleven on Roosevelt Ave, Northeast, that is, I think, at the cross street of, like, 92nd or something up here in North Seattle? Can you picture that one? You're leaving Northgate. Yeah, you're leaving Northgate. You're heading south on Roosevelt. Oh, yeah. Like, you're heading into the... Yeah, yeah.

It's kitty corner to what used to be an Arby's and is now, like, some kind of... Yeah, it's... I believe I know the one you're talking about. said about a hundred like you said about 105th and and i don't know if that's maybe it's roosevelt but i'm picturing it in my mind is it by sorry i'm sorry i'm trying to figure out if this is the same place is it on the same side of the street if you were to go towards northgate mall would you

hit the hotel nexus no um this is so this is picture picture roosevelt you're driving north on roosevelt um you're heading towards northgate and then you're gonna pass like the maple leaf ace hardware on your right and then you're gonna go maybe five more blocks okay so so far just real quick shout out to our to our listeners in ohio is this pretty good did i do good podcasting today um anyway i was standing in line one time it doesn't everybody listening at samasky's pizza in um geauga county everybody everybody at the frog jump competition in valley city who's listening right now i'm assuming on loudspeakers it doesn't even matter where that 7-eleven was either way i would go in there a lot after the gym when i would still go to the gym i still pay for the gym i just don't go anymore it's a life hack um i would go in there a lot to get gatorade after my my workout and um i was standing in line one time with my gatorade and there were i think two customers in front of me and i think we were waiting for some time and they started chatting i think there were two women maybe around my age maybe a little bit older um and then it was clear that the one woman i think the woman in the front of the line was going to be buying a lottery ticket and somehow in the conversation she mentioned that she'd won a few cool mill at that 7-eleven before like buying some lotto ticket like she had won so then so then the other person behind her said well then i'm gonna buy a ticket here too which i said i well i didn't say anything i minded my own business but i i internally questioned the logic there but um yeah i stood behind a lotto winner who was buying more lottery tickets she said it happened years ago i i think i made a joke about her buying my gatorade for me she said the money is long gone woof wow that

took a turn well it wasn't three million dollars and the money's long gone well she just sort of

let me put it this way i didn't take it as a really depressing statement she didn't look hard up i think that she just sort of like laughed and waved it off and was like oh that money you know like that's invested i don't know maybe all of her kids went to college i don't get the impression that she like spent it all on the on the pony

or anything like that she was just sort of that's what i would do i could definitely turn three mil into a tidy zero dollar sum pretty quick with my patented system yeah now what's interesting about that is if you win like three million dollars at a 7-eleven my understanding is that 7-eleven gets a cut a lot of your money but they get yeah this is one of the i mean again i will keep referring people back to our friend chris hayes is really great why is this happening podcast episode from a few weeks ago about the sort of history of state lotteries and also of the Powerball, which is, of course, national. And just what a just terrible idea it is, really, across the board. It doesn't do any of the things that they claim it does in terms of paying for schools and all the things that we're told are the benefits of it. It's very low on, it's low impact on that, and it's high impact on people's pocketbooks. But that being said, one of the things that's kind of cool and interesting to me about the lotto is or the powerball is not even so much the person who wins because that's obviously a big story but it's also a huge windfall for someone oftentimes somebody who has immigrated to this country who owns a mini mart or a gas station to also be cut in on they get their own prize and that can be life-changing if you win uh you know a hundred million dollars and someone's getting i don't know what it is let's just say a million dollar prize for having sold the ticket that's a game changer for somebody and not to mention that that

also gets people in the door as well so it's not even like something where you're you're operating you know because i mean running a little lotto inside your 7-eleven it's kind of like a business within a business and you could in some situations it could be like well that's kind of a pain in the ass but boy if we sold that winning lotto ticket a windfall would really come but it's not even that i mean you're also i'm sure by having you know the lotto capabilities in your store you're also probably bringing all kinds of people in who are then also maybe grabbing some snacks while

they're in there yeah it's i think it's i think it's a motivation for the people who operate the again oftentimes gas station mini marts what have you grocery stores but particularly on the smaller side i think it's a motivation to really make sure you've got your lotto machine in full working order you know and you're printing your tickets out just right and you're because like you're you're kind of playing along with the with the people who are buying the tickets um this is why i was i i feel like maybe a million dollars is the is the ceiling i thought that i had heard that the so the person who got the winning one in washington state just the other day um it was at a fred meyer in auburn and i thought that i had heard on the news that the fred meyer gets three million dollars wow and i was like i have to say i was deeply let down by that news yeah because i wanted to be a guy yeah again preferably who maybe came here from somewhere else and it's just been working his his his his fingers to the bone running some kind of a small convenience store type situation and now his whole life and his family's life has changed that's the story i want to hear about the lotto ticket or the powerball ticket seller i don't want to know that fred meyer can just license more 90s hip-hop to put it in their television ads with those weird animated people dropping low in their apple bottom jeans kind of like those commercials

by the way i kind of like that animation style but um yeah that's kroger i think too so it's just like oh good well it's a mom and pop yeah exactly there's two grocery chains basically in our neck of the woods now and kroger is one of them so yeah good lining their pockets a little

bit more you're right that's a bummer i'm looking at this again because i just want to double check Before I besmirch the good name of Kroger, let's see. Winning Powerball ticket. I'm going to go to peoplemagazine.com, Andrew. That's where I go for all my Powerball news. Let's see here. I'm just trying to scroll down and see if they're going to also give the Kroger Corporation some amount of money. I mean, I'm sure they will because the rule is the place where the ticket is purchased then is entitled to some sort of a payment. And if it's Kroger or if it's a small mom and pop, I don't think it really matters.

I have a little trivia question for you. I was going to bring this up. By the way, I've had these these scratch tickets, which, again, are not Powerball tickets. They're just scratch tickets that I've been carrying around in my wallet for, I think, a couple of months now. I think whatever I bought like five dollars worth of one dollar tickets around the holidays. And then I kept getting like one one dollar winner in them. So I would take them back and trade them in and throw a little bit more candy on that and get a few back. And then I just carry them around in case I'm somewhere where I'm bored and I need a little fun, a little opportunity to win some cash. I'll scratch them off. But I've had these for quite a while, but I've never looked at the back of them before. Actually, I didn't even look closely at the front. They're all like various types of vegetables with puns, like bean there won that or cached potatoes.

I don't think beans are a vegetable, but that's fine. you're right technically you're right just telling you you're no fun i have a picture of the food pyramid a picture of the food pyramid here and i don't see them on the vegetable part of the quadrant rather be fun than right uh no here's what i was going to say to you on the back of this thing which i've never looked at before um it says the odds of you know it says keep it fun know your limit it has all the rules blah blah blah but it says what are the odds of winning any prize luke so with one of these scratch tickets you can win one dollar two dollars four five ten twenty thirty fifty a hundred or up to a thousand so that that's it but what are the odds of winning any of those prizes one in three wow you ever gamble before luke you'd be good at it

probably have a one in three chance of winning a dollar i mean one one in three point eight three

how many do you have how many tickets do you have so i have six and it's almost one and two of them

will be winners based on that simple math and they will both be for one dollar exactly one or

two of these will have one dollar which will which will get me back in there and i'll say hey i'll cash this in and here's another five dollar bill um and i'll come out with six again and i'll carry them around in my wallet forever i this is all relatively new to me i don't think i scratched a ticket until i was probably 40 years old somebody got one for me like kind of a kind of a relative i don't know all that well got one for me for my birthday when i was visiting cleveland um like i don't know six years ago or more um and i was like oh okay this is fun and i think i won one dollar and of course i had to cash it in there and in in ohio because i couldn't bring it to washington but um then i was just like yeah why not like every now i think also the um the the pull tabs that we play in the bars kind of cracked that seal for me a little bit too this is like if you go to a bar they don't have pull tabs but i got some of these in my wallet that i've been carrying around

for a while why not i um i've never that i can remember ever won any significant amount of money on a scratch ticket um i think maybe one time i carrie's mom put some in my stocking and i think i won fifty dollars on one that was oh i mean by far and away the most i've ever won what usually happens on the rare occasion when i play those uh is uh like what's going to happen to you i'll get like six or ten of them i'll scratch them exactly two of them will be worth one dollar and now i have a problem now i have these i have two dollars worth of paper that will take up either some spot on my refrigerator like magnetized to the refrigerator or in some junk drawer or in the glove compartment of my car i will put them somewhere where i think oh yeah i'll remember to go get my two dollars and then they just they i never take them in they're just something to deal with it's not enough money to make a trip over it's the same thing i have with a lot of errant casino chips for the denominations of one maybe to five dollars i have i'm building and this is not a good thing one of the world's premier collections of five dollar chips from random casinos i'll never go back to because i forgot i had a chip somewhere in my pocket and i'm not going back to waterloo iowa or uh you know some other random you know casino that i have a five dollar chip from i guess i should just look at it as a collection now right like i shouldn't be thinking how do i cash these back in i should be thinking well that's a five dollars that i have for a memory of the time that i was at the um mediterranean casino in kirkland or whatever

I like the idea of an adventure I would like to not sign up for this Because we've already hitchhiked You like the idea of me having an adventure I like the idea of somebody A younger person With more zest for life Saying okay How can we Is there any way we can travel around the United States Cash these things in But not blow the money on travel Actually somehow come out ahead And the only way I can imagine being able to come out ahead because obviously you're going to iowa we're not going to fly there you you'd spend the five dollars on gas you'd have to love to get to iowa you'd have to hitchhike and then camp i think you'd have to spend money on nothing but threaten me with a good time yeah

the food that you'd be eating anyway i guess there's let me just throw one quick correction in before it makes our listeners crazy and then i actually want to talk about something related to what you're proposing um i'm thinking about the next tbtl-a-thon now um first of all fred meyer did not get three million dollars according to como news they get fifty thousand dollars it's a retailer bonus now i don't know where i got the number three million i was i must have been like listening to this like while i was you know still kind of waking up this morning or something i don't know how that number three million dollars entered my head that makes no sense they're saying it's fifty thousand dollars that seems low even for kroger like i feel like you should get you should get more of the prize when you're talking about a half a billion dollars or whatever this latest one was it was significant um i'm also just scanning around in california i think the max that a store can win is a million maybe i just think if if somebody's winning a billion dollar or half a billion dollars and you're a mom and pop store you should get a couple mil off of that that's interesting i you've

still though let's see yeah so it was 754 million dollars is what the ticket was so just just yeah i think you just said like over half a billion um yeah uh although i gotta say now i'm picturing like the guy who runs the 7-11 on roosevelt 92nd and like if he just one day finds out he just like got fifty thousand dollars he wasn't planning for that's that's that's pretty sweet that's

pretty good yes it is but i just had seen so this is the from powerball.net which state has the biggest bonus for selling a winning ticket california currently offers the biggest retailer bonus powerball sellers can earn a reward of up to one million dollars the last time a retailer received this sum was for the $1.5 billion draw on January 13, 2016, where three lucky ticket holders made history and split the jackpot to take home blah, blah, blah. The 7-Eleven store received the seven-figure bonus for selling the ticket. And jubilant scenes greeted store owner Balbir Atual following the news of the win as locals flocked to get the scoop on who the new millionaire could be. Atual told the press, I didn't expect this big crowd, but my Chino Hills customers love me and I love them. written like it's from the Powerball.net website where everything is always good when it comes to people losing their money.

It didn't mention all the sharply dressed third graders who are now going to school with new books because of all that money that went back into the educational system.

They forgot to talk about that part. By the way, in Florida, it's $100,000 is the max that you can get. Tennessee, it's $25,000. And I'm guessing Washington would be $50,000 as evidenced by what I just said. now back to me taking my casino chip back to waterloo iowa andrew there is a whole thing on the internet and particularly on places like tiktok that i'm a little bit fascinated by but i also have sort of a problem with it which is i don't know if you've seen this it's where someone says i'm gonna trade a paperclip for a house and they go through a series of trades and then they end up with buying a house have you have you ever witnessed this i feel like i've

I've heard somebody describe this to me before, but I have not gone on one of these trips on the internet itself. But it's just ringing a bell. I don't know if maybe you've brought it up before. Maybe so. Walk me through a little bit. So you trade a paperclip for something just slightly more valuable.

Yes, exactly. I was able to trade a paperclip for a ball of yarn, and then I was able to trade that ball of yarn for a Pez dispenser, a rare Pez dispenser. I was able to trade that for this. and you you're sort of going up a little bit each time and and as you go up a little bit of course you're now increasing the the theoretical value of this the problem is once these things go viral which the only way i would see them is they're viral it's no people are no longer trading you and then somebody traded me an above ground swimming pool for for that pez dispenser at some point the trades start getting out of whack because people want to be in on the game And then you're just running a GoFundMe

Oh because people are documenting it As they go along

And every day it's a new post About like what did I trade for today And then I heard about somebody who was offering this And then there's like 100,000 views Or a million views and now we're all following it And not all of us but some of us And now it becomes In a way maybe it's also good Because it's kind of a community Activity for that community But it's not a strictly sort of like what the market will bear well i guess if you consider the market of attention and people paying attention to you because you traded your above ground pool for something i mean maybe there's a value there as well but it's it's not nobody's doing this in silence it's always being really really publicly documented and so of course people are kind of like you know want to get in on it and so uh and also i'm just jealous that i didn't think of it but also like

who and you can't literally trade a house anyway like i don't know what you've got to the level that's the trade right before the house like i can see people like you know i've had cars before that i've paid like nominal amounts of money for like my one of my favorite cars i paid 200 for it was like a 1990 toyota tercel uh manual shift love that guy it was like a little go-kart bought that for like 200 bucks off my uh colleague john greenberg um so i could see somebody being like okay i'll trade you my chrysler le baron for like whatever but once you get anything for your jericho labonte signature um i uh i just think that after you get higher than a car like you're not really trading anymore right we're not in trade town this is the wild west yeah like whatever

you're doing for the house like there's going to be lawyers involved some sort of like real estate

law involved like there needs to be a conversion into a respected and recognized uh currency of

some kind right at some point right like i'm chase bank and i have the we have the biggest ball of

yarn in history as collateral we drove 8 000 kush balls to this chase bank where they gave us a

mortgage balls god i i had a coosh ball when i was uh a tween i love that thing it was like kind of dark purple and blue luke i have a question for you well not a question i have an idea that you this smacks another adventure for me to go on yeah it is like it would be like it well be an adventure that um would be much less interesting uh and also kind of tedious but you know what you could do is i wonder i wonder if this is illegal but what if you just like you It's getting more interesting. You're a man with a podcast. You say you have, what was the city in Iowa that you threw out there? Waterloo.

That's just where we went. You and I stayed in a casino in Waterloo.

I remember that. That was on our hitchhiking adventure. So we just say, hey, any listeners in Waterloo, I'll mail this to you. Like, I'll spend 45 cents on a stamp. No, it's probably more than that. I don't know what stamps are these days. I'll spend the postage to mail you this chip, and then you can go cash it in for $5 if you want.

I actually really think what I want to do is take all of these chips and drill a hole in them and then make a necklace kind of like somebody, you know, in like heart of darkness. Like I could see Colonel Kurtz wearing a necklace of like teeth of like all of the people he vanquished. These are this is a necklace of all the places that vanquished my bank account. Yeah, it's kind of a reverse. It's sort of a reverse trophy. uh-huh yeah i i wear this to tell everyone else not to go to northfield casino up in like blaine washington i do have a lot of chips from that place i'm not like and not a lot that are worth anything they're all dollar chips they're used when i lived in bellingham there was a casino called northwood casino and it was actually i don't technically maybe in like Ferndale or something it was on some tribal land and it was kind of a far drive it was you know and and one time I realized that I had like seven single dollar chips in my pocket still and I've never been back there since that one time I went there and I'm never going to go back there for those chips but I refuse to throw them out they're just they were always living in some backpack of mine and I've now I'm back I mean in Portland I've moved out of Bellingham like I'm going to move again at some point those things will always stay with me because so because they seem like they have value I can't throw them away they're nine dollars well here's the thing that we're

not talking about like the scratch off tickets yeah I mean you know how Luke I am not interested in doing karaoke a lot of my friends are you're one of my friends who is what if I told you that

I knew the name of the mysterious beast that we were trying oh yeah we could oh my god my phone

will not stop buzzing I'm getting so many okay more on that in a second but you know I'm not super into karaoke but I'm not against karaoke it's just like you know like friends do it sometimes people will be like oh you should try you know sometimes people get drunk and they're like why don't you do karaoke go and it's like it's not because I'm not it's not because I'm afraid of doing it I don't have any desire to that's fine well I'm the same way with poker like I know like here I love hearing you talk to people about poker I don't quite understand it but we were hanging out with a friend this weekend and you guys went on a short tangent about some poker tournament or something and I always find that interesting but there's no part of me I don't think there's any part of me that wishes that I could be sitting at that table it's not a life for me except except the thing I'm missing out on are the chips and I don't mean the money I mean the way the chips feel like on the rare occasions that I've had those clinking around in my hand I love it I love that there's a bit of a heft to them I love the way those things feel So you having a collection of them Is not the worst idea Maybe you rent them out to me Maybe you have a poker chip library A little free poker chip library Sure, right in front of my house Where I can come and I can carry it around for a little bit Listen to them jangle in my pocket

You can leave a Tom Clancy book

And I can leave my Koosh ball

Like a slightly torn cover

Yeah, anyway, do you agree Or are you so kind of you know you've been playing poker your entire adult life it's the tactile experience

of it's called riffling the chips actually the tactile experience of riffling the chips and the little kind of tricks i don't know that many of them anymore but you know when you're playing a lot of poker and you're just sitting there for so long you get all you can do these little kind of tricks with the chips it's it is part of the it's part of the enjoyment in the way that the smell of the fresh cut grass at a baseball field is part of the enjoyment of watching baseball there are these things that are to the side of what the

actual uh you know sort of draw is but those things those ancillary things are a big part of the overall experience and i'll tell you this if you go to someone's house and they're like we're having poker night and you come over and they have those plastic chips right yeah out of here with that yeah immediately immediately leave immediately leave and report them to the poker authorities because and that the chips that you think of as having that heft they have clay in them they're called clay chips and uh and i've got actually um i've got a good start on my little free library because i also have a lot of poker chips around these are not worth any money right these are just used to play poker but i love absolutely love the tactile experience of those

chips so the difference being i mean you just have poker chips that like you would just have for a home game or something yeah i have like a couple of little like you know like a silver

suitcase yeah yeah that's you know you open up it's got all the chips in it and stuff kind of things i've i've been given those at times people know about my poker love i probably acquired one we used to uh in bellingham uh you know carrie had a really cool um poker table that was in her family uh actually yeah it was not really i don't think it was so much a poker table it was like a blackjack table actually and that's only important because of the shape a poker table would be an oval you'd sit completely around it and a blackjack table would be there's a position for someone who's the dealer and then it goes out almost more like a horseshoe and um and uh it was her grandparents and she had these great stories about you know at all their family get together because all of her extended relatives love to gamble for like pennies but it would be a thing where all the adults after the meal was done they'd be sitting in the garage around this table playing like penny blackjack and the kids would sit on the laps of the grandparents and it was like a whole fun thing and um her like aunt and uncle got that table and had it totally refurbished and gave it to her as a gift and it's really fun except for the time when I was hammering her family at blackjack as the dealer and it was making me so stressed out we were playing for real money I was being the house because the event was at my home and I couldn't lose I could not lose and I did not want to win I did not want to take more money from her family but everybody kept and then people were getting mad and they were upping their bets and then I was just

continuing to win it was a terrible feeling and there's nothing you can do right like there's not a lot of strategy you just have to you just have to deal the cards like that if you're playing

blackjack and you're the house you have absolutely no yeah i don't know how we turned into america's um 70th best gambling podcast but like uh yeah if you're the house you don't have any decision to make you you hit up until 17 and then you stay and if it's an ace uh and you haven't gotten to 17 yet it's soft and you keep hitting like you're just you're you could be a robot you have no control over the matter and i was a very successful robot that night at alienating a carrie's family and i think that was the beginning of the marriage yeah i think so yeah that's that's what once nick and patty no longer liked me i think you know the other shoe eventually fell so all right uh let us take a quick break and then we come back uh we will talk about what's going on with gas stoves and also LeBron James and a lot of other stuff, including what that mysterious character is from the karaoke universe that we were trying to remember yesterday. In a moment, here on TBTL. Hello and welcome to Top Story. The city of Eugene, Oregon, here in Oregon, has passed a new rule that new low-rise residential buildings will not be allowed to have natural gas infrastructure. The city council passed this on Monday. And there are other cities that have done something similar. I think Berkeley has done this. But it's the first major city in Oregon to do this. And it's sort of part of this bigger, larger story where there's a lot of talk around, is Joe Brandon coming for your gas stove? I believe that was how he kicked off the State of the Union last night, didn't he say? um you know thank you uh for joining me here the first thing i want to talk about is gas stoves i'm coming for them absolutely um i did a tv story about this uh last week and so i've been kind of immersed in it i just thought maybe i would run through the what is happening and not happening with the gas stove thing first of all there is not uh any conversation around taking gas stoves out of people's homes or out of existing buildings um what is going on in certain places is a question of do we want to keep running gas lines out to new developments do we want to keep expanding it's sort of like do we want to keep building gas stations or do we want to have some of those gas stations instead be like electric charging stations that doesn't mean that anyone's going to come and dig up your arco it just means if we're putting new stuff in maybe we should do the stuff that's a little bit more environmental

friendly and the reason the gas stoves are not super environmentally friendly is because the gas that runs through them is methane and methane is a very good very efficient insulation in the environment so when the methane leaks out of all of the pipes that it's using to get to your house which it does a lot particularly in the northeast or when your stove which is leaking about 20% they found in some studies of the methane that is leaking out of your stove is when the stove is not even on, that's sort of like a bad outcome for the planet. And so there, again, certain municipalities are saying like, maybe this is not the best way for us to heat up our steaks or something. The other thing in the home that's not great is there's something called benzene that is in natural gas. It's not supposed to be there. Natural gas is supposed to be very filtered and very clean. But in a lot of cases, it's not because we live in an imperfect world and benzene is something that uh is carcinogenic it's not good for humans it's not great to have it you know in your house if you're not ventilating things and then the last thing is there are basically when you light a fire inside your house even if it's a gas fire it creates something called nox which is nitrous oxide which is just the result of any fire you would have in your home but it's the combustion of it and it is also linked in some cases to asthma in people so all of that being said all of the people that are talking about we should try to do more induction and electric are saying is just make sure you ventilate your shit so if you're building a new house and you want to have gas just ventilate or like i have gas here although it's funny andrew because i've been home kind of you know i've been under the weather the last few days and i've been on a steady diet of vegan chicken noodle soup and making toast on the stovetop because i don't have a toaster so the way that i make toast here is i get out a frying pan and i put some butter on some bread and then i basically just cook it in the frying pan and i really like it for some reason it's the most intentional toast i've ever made that's interesting

i would think the the best recreation of a toaster would be the oven but i guess that's just a lot of energy i guess that's a lot of energy for one or two slices of toast well i don't know the answer

to that as far as what is what's using up more energy it could be more efficient to put it in the stove or the oven rather you're right though the oven probably just like letting it toast and then turning it over or something but somehow I got it in my head and I've been doing this ever since I've lived here now which is going on a couple of years if I need to make toast it's a whole production I got to get out a frying pan I got to butter up some bread I got to put in there let it get nice and golden and then flip it over it's it's so much more time intensive but it's somehow way more fun than using the toaster it sounds see i want to say something here but i

don't want to ruin i don't want to ruin i don't want this thought living in your head the next time you do it because you're describing it it sounds nice and intentional but it also like if if a few things were off about this situation it sounds so divorced dad has custody for the weekend kind of vibes to it i'm only making it for my cat we have daddy we have toast at home

i can get you toast sweetie um i don't know welcome to the bachelor arms apartment rick

sanchez there that was a weird i feel like i just did i can get you toast sweetie um that might be your best impression i just accidentally stumbled into it right as that guy's canceled so good job so uh wait is that guy canceled um uh justin roiland is um is accused of some pretty heinous

shit yeah oh no i didn't see that oh man yeah um uh so the last thing i was gonna say on this and then we don't talk about it because it doesn't really matter but i just want to clarify i talked to like the the main scientist who did the main study on this and here's what he said he was like you know if you just have a good ventilation hood and you run it and it vents outside of your house you're fine just do that like all they're trying to say is if you have a gas stove and you have kids in your house or whatever just run the fan and ideally it's not a fan that just circulates the air right back in your house like if you have you know if it vents outside of your house that's great um that's all that they're saying really it's just like keep it properly ventilated they're like the way that it's been turned by like tucker carlson and stuff into like they're coming for your stove is it's really interesting only because the natural gas industry and even calling it natural gas is a pretty big win for the gas industry of yeah yeah they have been they have spent so much money convincing americans that there is nothing that could be more healthy for you and also better for your cooking needs than gas and as i said in the tv story there was a period of time where that was very much true like there was a time where electric was really not up to the task and uh your choice was gas electric or i guess going back to a stove like um the grandma from the beverly hillbillies cooked

just like a cast iron pot belly thing that you just put kindling in and lit on fire that would have been the worst by the way of all worlds but you know it's like this idea that that that blue flame of natural gas is like as american as apple pie that is very much the result of a lot of lobbying from an industry that extracts natural resources from the ground now i drive a car that Uses gasoline I have a I have gas In this apartment I'm in Like I have a massively Outsized carbon footprint So I'm not On any high horse about it I'm just saying It's funny because I grew up thinking Natural gas Was like It was like A babbling brook Somewhere There was like A waterfall of natural gas That just like Like two cartoon rabbits From Bambi Used to hop up And just sip from And then it just Flowed naturally Into my house And then I just Used it to cook It's like No this is a this is a fossil fuel that they're getting that they're that they're selling and that they really want to keep selling and so i just think that's also worth keeping in mind

when we talk about this you mean just like the term natural the fact that it's kind of yeah

yeah just it's like well you know if it's just laying around and someone just scooped it up with a ladle and just like poured it into your kitchen or something they should start calling it organic gas they will they'll start talking about how it's um uh uh it's a gluten-free is that a show title maybe i'm actually moving over to that tab to write it out yeah i mean the other thing that i'll just say i i think i've been having i'm i like to do this thing andrew where at the age of 46 a good 30 years after everyone else i like to have some i like to come to some awareness on things i like some scales to fall from my eyes well after these scales have fallen from everyone else in the world's eyes right And I was reading an article in the Washington Post yesterday that I thought was really fascinating. The scales are, hey, I don't know if the oil and gas industry are that great. That's the realization I'm coming to at 46, Andrew. Or at least I'm more aware of some of the things, some of the PR stuff that I guess I wasn't aware of. And maybe because of this gas story or because I'm putting one of these things in at the house that I'm working on. It's called a heat pump. You might also know it as a mini split. I'm sure that you've been in Like an Airbnb or someone's house Or apartment where they've got The way that the house is heated and cooled Is that kind of Almost looks like a fan but it's encased In a big kind of plastic Sort of roundish thing and it's mounted Usually above a doorway and it's got those little Louvers on it, do you know what I'm talking about?

Kind of like a hotel?

Yes, there are many hotels And you've got a remote control for it And you turn it on and off And you can control the temperature and outside there is this thing that's called a heat pump that looks like a giant box fan and you install that outside your house I don't understand the science of it but what I read is that it heats your house by pulling heat out of the air and putting it in your house and it cools your house by somehow pulling cold out of the air and putting cold air into your house so it can find warm air when it's winter time and it can find cold air when it's summer time which seems to me like magic yes like the bloodhound of heating units yeah how in the world how is this possible i don't know and yes uh these these um heat pumps or heat exchanges or whatever they might be called mini splits they are powered by electricity and sometimes electricity is coal so that's not great but even in those circumstances they are still so much better for the environment than heating your home with oil right well here's this brings us to the great state of maine And what they wrote about in the post yesterday was Maine has been going through, as we all know, a very cold winter. There have been some very cold days. And what these very cold days have tested is the theory or the question of if these heat pumps are sufficient to heat a house in Maine in the wintertime. Because guess who? the home oil heating industry has been on an all-out blitz in Maine to try to convince Mainers that their mini-splits or their heat exchange or heat pumps will not get them through a Maine winter. And guess what's been happening? They've been totally fine through a Maine winter. And they're like, I'm reading about these so-called experts at the heating industry, the oil heating industry is getting onto AM talk radio to talk to the KVIs of their world and the KTTHs and all of this and just putting out all of this really questionable science and scaring people into thinking their house is going to turn into a giant icicle in the winter if they don't keep heating with oil like it's so sinister it is so sinister I

thought it was interesting the other day when you mentioned that I think you said this on the show kind of in passing as you were working on the story saying that like just the idea that that that phrase now you're cooking with gas was originated from the industry itself like what what a great

way it's just like planting these ideas in our head it's so effective i i think i tend to think of because i worked in dc for a while clearly i wasn't paying good attention or i would just know this but like i just think of lobbying and all of this dark money that gets spent as being a lot of it is just kind of a waste like can you really move people's opinions on things and can you it's like i guess you kind of can because like when i was i think i mentioned this on this show but while I was traveling around doing the gas stove story, if I happened to be chatting with someone in the airport or at the restaurant or whatever, and I brought it up, the number one thing that people would say is, oh, aren't they taking away gas stoves? And it was like, wow, that was effective marketing. And also it was like, doesn't gas cook so much better than induction? And I was like, that's also pretty good marketing. I mean, induction is a relatively new phenomenon, but it's, I have to say, like all of the demos that I watched, and it was pretty extensive what I looked at. It was pretty great. I'm also, let me just say this. I am not a good cook. So for me, the difference of the nuance is a little bit lost on me. And you're a better cook than I am. So I think you're more into the nuance than I am.

But I'm but I'm far from a good cook. I would guess that the vast majority of people who are listening to my voice right now are better and more experienced cooks than me. So it is weird that I and I have not tested one yet that I am after everything that you just said. If I'm just being honest, it doesn't matter. You can't yell at me because I haven't bought one or anything. But, like, I still was talking to the audience. I know that you yell at me. It's part of the post-show process, as we all know. I'm trying to get you to change your instincts or just ignore them. Anyway, yeah, even though you hear all these people who are, you know, like, just a million people who are a thousand times better cooks than I am, if not more so, say, no, induction is great. But I'm still like, yeah, but I still like being able to lift the pan off the stove a little bit, seeing the flames lick it. I mean, Luke, have you ever lit a cigarette off of a gas stove before? I mean, tell me you don't.

Only right before I blew up the stash house that the bad guys were keeping the loot in. Oh, I'm sorry. That was Sylvester Stallone in the movie Cobra.

I need to rewatch Cobra. Cobra is the movie where they also bang baseball bats over their head, right? There's like some sort of dark underground, I believe. They're literally subterranean Am I right about that?

Are you thinking of the Warriors?

No, I think it's in Cobra I think we've had this exact conversation before

All I know about John Cobretti is that there was one scene It wasn't even a cigarette, but there was a scene Where he turns the gas on in a house Presumably a bad guy house And he lights a match And I feel like he flips it over his shoulder And as he's walking away It's like the place, you know, slow-mo The place explodes and i also think he might have either had a matchstick usually in his mouth or a toothpick one of the two and i was like i think yes and i was like that is the freaking coolest look of all time but i don't know i actually don't know anything about the movie i just know more about

stallone's vibe yeah i'm looking it up too because i swear i saw this in it like you know maybe in college or something i rented this i was renting a lot of vhs tapes back then and um i feel like it'd be like whatever the setup is and i just watched the trailer i just scrubbed through and so it doesn't seem to be as iconic but i swear whatever the evil presence is in this in this movie like and maybe it's more of an establishing shot or something but we see i guess a bunch of like you know soldiers for whatever gang this is and they're all they're all like i again i swear it's almost like they're in a tunnel system under the city or something and as they're listening to somebody speak or something like that they hold metal bats over their heads like an x and bang them and clank them together but that's my memory um i could be thinking of a different movie i could be just totally making this up and if i am making it up then i think we should make that movie

um it's and because the the only things that are coming and these are these are very far apart and you're you're actually a pretty keen observer of like the film stock so i don't think there's no you would have these two things confused but in the warriors there is first of all a crew that's like sort of yankees based and they have baseball bats and there's also a thing where they clink bottles together to like show their like you know like it's a thing they do to menace people or whatever so i'm i'm hearing baseball bats and clinking and those but that's that movie was way

before cobra so and i've never seen it that's also a huge uh oversight on my part because i know that That is a very classic movie, and I should have seen The Warriors, but I've never seen it.

It's not, I wouldn't say it's the, you know what? I'll just play this for you, and then you'll know. These are the Warriors. We know about the Warriors. They're a heavy outfit. They're from Coney Island. Warriors? You guys are the big dudes, huh?

Now, they're in the Bronx. We're going back. 27 miles behind enemy line.

It's the only choice we've got. Between them and safety stand 20,000 cops and 100,000 sworn enemies. I want them all. I want all the warriors. They've got one way out. They've got one chance. They've got one night. The warriors.

So there you go. That's the whole plot. You don't even need to see the movie.

I just I'm my friend John in college I took a lot of my movie tips from it was a big Warriors fan I feel like or just like felt like it should be something that somebody of my generation and predilections should have seen by the time I was in college I never did see it though

Let's talk about LeBron James for a minute. I know that we don't talk a lot about basketball, and we also don't talk a lot about just, like, I don't know, something that's this broadly in the culture, because it's like you could turn to many other places for a more informed conversation. But I have to say, it is quite remarkable what LeBron James has done. Last night, he scored his 38,390th point, which pushed him past Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for the all-time scoring record. This is like, I mean, on par with said, you know, Barry Bonds breaking Hank Aaron's home run record, except LeBron James doesn't has not operate under the scandal of PED cheating. So it's even better. It's like becoming the all time football is weird. Football is kind of different because it's it's amazing if you become the all time rushing leader in the NFL or the all time passing leader. I guess there's a lot of different individual statistics, right, that you can kind of get. But like for the NBA, all time scoring, that's it. That's it. That makes you the very best thing at what would be considered to be the most important part of the game. And I think really raises the question of if LeBron James is the greatest NBA player of all time. I kind of think he is. I mean, I don't know how I don't really know what the argument would be as to even Michael Jordan, who I love. But what I think is so remarkable about LeBron James doing this is I remember when I was a kid and I used to get Sports Illustrated magazine because I saw an ad for it on TV. And there was They offered a Jonathan Winters video You get a free football phone And a Jonathan Winters sports video That was the weirdest thing And so not working for me when I got it I wanted the phone But I was like I'll take a sports comedy video And it was I don't think I don't think that these bits by Jonathan Winters Were like made for Sports Illustrated I think what happened was like Jonathan Winters like agent Licensed some comedy bits he had done on TV that were nominally sports related and they clipped them all together and then offered it as a thing but like imagine nine-year-old Luke watching Jonathan Winters like even by then he was it was like 30 years old it made no sense to me

but you did get the phone though too I assume that phone is long gone

yeah I don't know what happened to it probably I could go back and buy one on eBay but yeah it was the football phone and it was the Jonathan Winters You know A sports comedy video thing But because I started getting Sports Illustrated and it was one of those things where I just kept getting it forever I think I even got it when I moved to college And I remember Seeing a cover of LeBron James When he was in high school and he's doing If I remember right he's sort of almost Doing The pose like so there's a famous Michael Jordan poster where Michael Jordan is spreading His arms out kind of like his wingspan And I feel like LeBron James, he was in like a green jersey from his high school in Ohio. And he was doing something kind of similar to that. And it just said King James. And this was a high schooler who was going to be the number one overall pick in the pro draft. He was identified at like eighth grade or something as being a really good basketball player. and starting then and going up until through his high school years and then getting drafted into the NBA as the number one overall draft pick the amount of pressure on this human being to be good at this thing is it's like he might as well have been on Mars where the gravity is 15 times what it is here like the pressure must have just been like so crushing like everyone has all these expectations of you Everyone's coming for you Everyone's studying all the film of you So that they cannot be the person Who like gave up 40 points to LeBron James Every defense of every other team Is centered around like shutting you down Everyone is all the time Either expecting too much from you Or doing their best to keep you From achieving what everyone else thinks you can achieve And through all of that This motherfucker has scored the most points Of anybody in the history of this game That's insane to me

I don't know if it's the exact same cover because I think the photo is slightly different, but I...

I could have been Mandela-ing.

I think you're sort of Mandela-ing what it looked like. But the reason it's top of mind for me is, do you know who wrote that iconic Sports Illustrated cover story? Totally right.

It was the chosen one.

It was the chosen one. And the person who wrote it, and not to take this to tragedy, but that's Grant Wall, the fellow who just died recently at the World Cup. And he was like kind of – I heard a lot of – he worked closely with a lot of the people on the Levitard show. And so there was a lot of talk about that. And so now that's iconic to me. I didn't know that you had actually received that because that is one of the most iconic Sports Illustrated covers. Also, the green jersey, I have a connection to that. That would be St. Vincent, St. Mary. That was – when you're going to school, if you're Catholic and you're looking for a Catholic high school in the greater Akron area, You're looking at like Walsh Jesuit, Our Lady of the Elms or St. Vincent, St. Mary, which was the co-ed school that I actually almost went there. But when I heard that LeBron was already there and sort of cleaning up, I'm like, maybe I can carve out more of a name for myself on the Walsh Jesuit football. It's better to go somewhere where you're going to get reps. Exactly.

Maybe even a smaller school, but you get to play. Oh, yeah. So, OK, I was wrong on about 80 percent of this. You're right. It was the chosen one. He's got a basketball. He's not doing the Michael Jordan thing. It doesn't say King James Other than that I was pretty close

Yet I knew exactly what you were talking about I knew about the cover

The human mind is a very strange thing Because if you would have locked me in a room And given me a pencil and a piece of paper And said draw that Sports Illustrated cover I would have drawn something that literally never existed Except in my mind

Well I do that shit all the time

But even more Calling him the chosen one And the sub-headlining is high schooler lebron james would be an nba lottery pick right now the reason that that cover struck me was because first of all at that point very few people were going from high school to the pros maybe kevin garnett had had done it um but like it was really rare like it was not like it is now if you're good in high school you might not even go to college because you can get you know now you have to go play like in in europe for or you have to go play in asia for a year because they put some weird rule they basically the nba created a rule to try to protect college basketball Because they don't want kids going directly From high school to the NBA Because then no one would go to Duke And then what would Dick Vitale yell during March I don't believe it baby He'd just be like Standing at a Walmart doing that So we need to make sure there's a college basketball industry

That sounds like a commercial that you would write Like him going through the grocery store Looking at the prices of cabbage And saying that

NBN baby nothing but nylon um but anyway uh in those days it was so rare for someone to make the jump from high school to the pros and i remember looking at this cover and just thinking there is no universe in which this high school junior who they're calling the chosen one and they're going to let go play basketball among grown-ass men there is no way this guy is going to be as good as they are trying to make him out to be because it just never happens that way it's never the case that the the person who we're all expecting it from is able to then navigate this life within nba basketball and also outside of the nba and actually be probably the best person who ever did it wow sounds like

somebody's still a little bit burnt by dustin ackley that's what i'm hearing from every mariner

top every number one overall Mariner pick except for, well, Ken Griffey Jr., who wasn't the number one overall, was he? I think Alex Rodriguez might have been, but those guys both were pretty good. Now, the other thing I want to say, and this is where I, my, you know, first of all, I didn't know what I was talking about with LeBron James. I know even less talking about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, previously known as Little Louie on the playgrounds in New York, Lou Alcindor. I think it's also worth noting that it's an amazing accomplishment of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. like that he played as long as he did and he scored this many points in converse yeah what

tell me if this is the one question i heard because i heard this on morning edition today too um and i whatever i didn't totally love the two-way on that but um what they didn't address was what is the playing times for both of these guys how do they compare uh lebron james i think

has played three fewer seasons than Kareem Abdul-Jabbar did. So Kareem played, and all assumptions are LeBron will continue to play and maybe get to 40,000 points, which is pretty crazy. I will say this. I'm completely blown away by what LeBron James accomplished because of all the expectations, and I'm completely blown away by what Kareem Abdul-Jabbar accomplished because of the lack of expectations in a way. I mean, he's a seven-foot-tall, really good basketball player.

There were certainly expectations, but like he was playing at a time when they didn't have all of the, you know, amazing training techniques they do now. They didn't have all the medicine, all the like, you know, they were again, a significant portion of his career was played on in Chuck Taylor's probably like there was there was there was just so much. my sense is that the players there just was there were fewer resources for the players as far as their longevity as far as their health as far as um i'm sure hugely racist crowds when they'd play in certain towns you know i'm looking at you and coaches and owners i mean like i'm not here to say that it's a great time to be a black man in america 2023 but i am feeling like kareem abdul jabbar got some shit in his life you know i don't think 83 was a great time for it i don't think 73 was a great time for it like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar just is a Is a remarkable human being to me That he was able to Thrive amidst all of these things That were stacked against him other than being seven feet Tall he had that going for him which is Nice but um okay one more

Question for if you don't mind speaking of Kareem I was okay I don't know why I took a shot at the morning edition Too late it was fine I guess Whatever were you just trying

To brag that you were up during morning edition No, I listened to it on replay on the app, Luke.

Right here. But it was just kind of top of mind because I heard it before I came into the studio. But what I was going to say was, so they mentioned that when he reached this achievement, when he broke the record, they stopped play. They stopped the game right there in the third quarter. They had an on-court celebration. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar came down, gave LeBron the game ball. I was kind of, I didn't know that that would be part of the culture of the game. I figured you would do that in the course of the game. It's a fast-paced game. Again, I know nothing about basketball. It seems fast-paced. The crowd goes crazy. He gives, you know, maybe he gives a little salute or a peace sign or whatever to acknowledge it. You keep playing, and then after the game or maybe between quarters, then you can have, like, some sort of celebration. I was kind of surprised to hear that they actually stopped the game. I didn't know that was a thing.

um you know it's it's interesting because depending on the sport i feel like the sport that can tolerate something like that the most is baseball like when ricky henderson uh stole like his base that put him over i think it was lou brock's stolen base record it was a whole thing but like it's baseball yeah it's a slow game it's a slow moving game football is kind of weird because you might get a competitive advantage if like your team is tired Let's say your defense has been on the field too much. But basketball seems like the most like you like pausing for a long time in the middle of basketball games seems especially like really breaking up the flow. But it's a big deal. I think it's probably I didn't realize they were going to do that, but I guess I'm OK with it for what that's worth. Now, I'll tell you this. It's extremely gracious of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. I mean, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, I just think, is, again, an exceptional human being. But one of the things is that he was not allowed to go straight to the pros out of high school because in those days it was literally illegal. So he went and played for he went and played at UCLA for John Wooden, the legendary UCLA coach. So Kareem Abdul-Jabbar played, I presume, four seasons at UCLA, meaning if he had gone right to the pros. I don't know, LeBron James might still be LeBron James might be three years away from breaking the record That's interesting And I'm not saying that's like, you know, LeBron James just He came of age at the time he came of age So, but there didn't seem to be any Like, for Kareem, as far as I could tell From watching some clips and stuff, I mean He seems, he seemed totally Totally there for it and happy Which is kind of interesting because There was another story Of someone being Much less gracious, whenever I go on these tangents that i don't plan on andrew i get so much wrong so just be my fact checking cuz please okay but there was a um there was a guy who had the uh he had the all-time um he had the best record for made free throws in terms of percentage for an entire nba season and i think his name was calvin something this would have been in the probably like late 90s early 2000 probably late 90s and there was a player for the Denver Nuggets named Mahmoud Abdurraouf who was about to break this guy's record it was the last game of the season and he was shooting a free throw and they let for some reason he shoots the first free throw and he makes it and if my memory serves he's he's about to take the second free throw and this will be the one that somehow locks it in or you know gives him the record for free throw percentage for a season and for some reason the referee bounces the ball to the guy who has the current record and he takes the ball and like rubs it and puts like a hex

on it, and then they bounce it back to Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, and he shoots it and misses the free throw, and I believe did not get the all-time record for free throw percentage for a season. After the guy who had the record put a hex on the ball, is the internet saying any of this happened? Okay, all I have

so far is, Calvin was a good hint. So Calvin Murphy it looks like. Yes, it was Calvin Murphy

and Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, who I think his name previously might have been like

Chris Jackson or something. Do you think he would have been playing under Chris Jackson at the time, do you think?

If you just do Calvin Murphy free throw hex Let's see what comes up there Let's see No, that's not helping If you just look for karaoke butterfly It's a B, it's a buzzy B This will give us something to look forward to tomorrow I'm going to look this up and we'll talk about it tomorrow I watched this happen I was obsessed with NBA basketball there was a period there was a moment where the guy calvin murphy who had the record was allowed to touch the basketball that the guy who was about to get the record was shooting and i thought that was even as a kid i was like that's wildly inappropriate can you believe could you imagine if they gave kareem the ball and said you're allowed to put some stank on it before lebron takes this next shot that's going to break the record it was wildly inappropriate i have something

here i think that this is an article from the time i mean you said for tomorrow but if you don't mind I'm on this now. I love it when this happens. I'm trying to figure out the date of this. What came up for me is the Washington Post article from 1994 when this happened. I think I'm onto something here because the headline is official says free throw flap was, quote, just a joke. The NBA says the free throw flap involving Calvin Murphy and Mahoum Abdul Ralph was nothing but a joke. Everybody was laughing about it. Let's see here with the Nuggets Ralph. Am I saying his last name? I feel like I'm saying it like a cartoon character. It's Roth.

Well, when I was a kid, I haven't said this guy's name a long time, but I remember being Mahmoud Abdurraif.

Raif. Okay, it's R-A-U-F, whatever that's worth. So he's playing for the Nuggets. He's trying to break the retired Murphy's free throw percentage, and he sat next to the Rockets owner. When he was fouled for the first time, he took the two free throws. I think basically at that point Referee Derek Stafford Inexplicitly tossed the ball To Murphy who rubbed it and threw it back To the official when play resumed Abdul Ralph hit the first shot And missed the second ending with a 9-5-6 percentage Murphy stood And applauded after his

Miss that did but did Mahmoud Abdul Get the did he get the record That season or not because my memory is That like that shot And this is, again, see previous Sports Illustrated cover comments. My kid brain was like, that cost the dude. And can I tell you something else interesting about Mahmoud Abdur-Reef? He had Tourette's. And the only time his Tourette's would calm down, there was a baseball player named Jim Eisenreich for the Royals who also had Tourette's. Mahmoud Abdur-Reef's Tourette's would calm down when he was at the free throw line. So he would have tics, but when he was playing basketball, in particular when he was shooting free throws, his tics would completely subside, Which is a very interesting thing About how that particular neurological issue works But I was just like You really, Calvin, you're really going to Cost this guy the record But that might have just been my own brain Maybe he has it, maybe Mahmoud Ali Reif Actually has the record

Because it looks like going into this And my apologies for kind of butchering that As I was reading it cold But it looked like Murphy had a 9-5-8 record And with the second missed ball Abdul Raif hit 9-5-6 Right, that cost him that cost him the record now i'm just kidding the one thing that confuses me is was this near the end of the season it looks like this article was written in april so like doesn't he have more

time in the season to still work on this so maybe well i mean i guess if you if that was like the only free throw he missed the whole season which is not possible but i guess you're right i guess really interesting so i so to take it back to how my brain had constructed this story it was literally the last game of the season it was literally the last free throw of the last game of the season and calvin murphy comes out and just rubs his booty all over the ball and then pretends to poop it out and then mahmoud abdura you've tried to take his second shot so i had some of the details wrong because you're right if it's in april that that could i mean that's that's not the shot that cost him the the record it would have been a different well it would have been a

combination of a few yeah combination and where it goes from there but um yeah but it does look like murphy still holds the record according to an nba site unless this is not updated so

i'm wondering do you know who i think calvin murphy might have taken it from or do you know somebody who did have it for a while this is the last

last fun little fact that i'll throw out there about basketball it was i believe at one time held by a player named rick berry rick berry's kids actually john berry and brent berry played in the nba brent berry was a sonic his nickname was bones rick berry was not good at free throw shooting and so he started shooting granny style as we used to call it and he shot all his free throws granny style and he was remarkably effective like would regularly lead the nba in free throw shooting percentage under like you know doing like the kind of so-called granny style

shot does anybody come close to doing anything like that today like can somebody just say hey listen i'm gonna just do something that looks goofy like are there any ball any bowlers who

use both hands i wonder i'm you know they i feel like that sadly that era of sports has kind of gone away of the weird like you still might occasionally get an ethos pitch which is like where the pitcher just throws it like 10 feet high in the air it's going really slow but it drops straight down so it's like harder to hit huh they're like they're like a cut in baseball i mean you know knuckleball is always fun because it's so unpredictable but like yeah there aren't you know you had sometimes you'll have basketball players who are having trouble with free throw shooting they'll shoot with their opposite hand as a way of trying to i don't know rewire their brain or something but yeah there isn't anything exactly like there's nobody doing granny shots That I can that I know about in the NBA Although they should because there are guys who don't have a great Free throw shooting percentage like what's the harm There's a lot of speculation That it just has to do with it doesn't look quote unquote Masculine yeah I mean aren't there

Some teams that are really good but they're just terrible At free throws And then also the opposite again this is Just for me listening to the Levitard show and knowing Nothing about basketball when they get Deep in their basketball conversations my mind sort Of wanders a little bit but I keep They have a regular segment now A daily segment with Mike Schur Of The Good Place et al He's wonderful he's just opening baseball Packs on the Show now from the 90s he's Obsessed with 90s baseball Luke you would This is so up your wheelhouse I want to make you Just a mixtape of Mike Schur's appearances On the Lebitard show I probably have better things to do with my Time but I don't know what they are right now Anyway Mike Schur has been complaining About the style of basketball that the Miami Heat has been playing now I know that you haven't been following basketball that closely but i don't think that it's just him trying to razz the gang i apparently their style of play is terrible but they're winning games based on the fact that they're just they're just really good at the free throw line and they're just playing a terrible like i don't even have the word for it because i don't watch it but just like a boring ass terrible ugly style of winning basketball games i can see that they made 40 out of 40

free throws on january 11th breaking the nba record oh okay so i'm not totally i can see that being a thing where like if your team is just basically taking it in the paint with no real chance of making the shot but getting fouled but then being very effective at the free throw line that's a real you're really taking the air out of the ball at that point yeah um i could i could see that criticism oh this is the first i'm hearing of it but i now agree with it

here i go once again with the email every week i hope that it's from a female no man it's not

from a female sorry if that was extra loud i was trying turning strong bad down and then realizing no i'm turning my mic down that's not helping it's like what are you screaming for strong bad it's like well because i'm not turning him down that's the problem well luke do you want to um

do you want to kick things off i don't know if you've received as many like i have i haven't received any i have the text line as well so i probably received like 30 texts about this yesterday and some emails and various things on social media but we were flopping around like a

wounded butterfly yesterday we were buzzing around like a beautiful butterfly of ideas

i was all wrong i was trying to recreate the path we took trying to remember because you and i both had in our heads a logo that we see during karaoke stints of i thought it was a b at first and you reminded me no it's a butterfly singing into a microphone although i don't know honestly yeah now now we couldn't remember we were on kara fun for a while which is a karaoke brand but that's not it and then i was calling it shutterfly that's right you were calling it shutterfly which is like the photo sharing right right exactly and so we now finally have an answer

and i will let you take yes and i i'm gonna give credit to this person because they're a dear friend of the program and because they hit me up first with the info and that is our good friend uh Lynn Pham that's right who messaged me and said I think you're thinking of Sunfly and then Lynn included a logo but I will say this Lynn included a more updated logo So this little, I guess we're going to call them a sunfly, whatever this magical animal is. So like a butterfly, but kind of also, if you go with the old school, and it's a very specific, almost like 8-bit image that I'm thinking of. I think that you're thinking of too, Andrew. Yeah. That I ended up putting on Instagram. So Lynn figured out who, I don't know how Lynn did this. Good job, Lynn. Lynn figured out what I was talking about, and good job to everyone who figured it out. And then sent it to me, but then the logo was like a new, kind of like a way too updated cool one. And I was like, no, no, no, we don't need updated. We don't need cool. We need this very shitty 8-bit looking monkey butterfly.

It's almost like a copy of a copy. Like the lines are so thick on it. It's so bad. It's like a tattoo that's gone bad already, which is what makes it perfect for a tattoo.

It's like the microphone it's holding actually looks like a shower nozzle.

I mean, look at this again.

So I then searched around, and there's actually – this, I think, is part of what flummoxed us yesterday, Andrew. There's not that many good images of the Sunfly Chimera. What are we calling this thing? Whatever this is.

Well, it's almost like a moth because you think of a butterfly as having very colorful wings, right? Isn't that kind of the hallmark of a butterfly? Yet here we are in every single version of this logo, and there are a lot. the wings are always just kind of grayish white

but I feel like there are not that if you do an image search for this particular like the one that I want which is the one I have on my Instagram now which is I think of that as being the like prime sort of late 90s early 2000s version of this Sunfly there are not that many images because then I thought oh maybe I can find some funny moments where it's like it's a funny lyric from a song that's happening adjacent to the Sunfly but there I found like three or four images of this version of it and then the

rest are kind of lost to history you know what I just found on Reddit and it took me a while to figure out what I was looking at I'm not allowed on Reddit anymore it's white what is that a reference to talk about I'm sending you you can go on red I'm giving you permission to go on Reddit for this I was hoping this was going to be like an oral history of the Sunfly logo like that would be what what was your favorite um uh magazine online magazine for a while that was from mel mel magazine why mel magazine never did a story about the oral history of the sunfly logo is beyond me but i just sent you something it's a slideshow it says this is the sunfly logo history and you can click through it to the right and it shows you throughout time how the logo sort of changes and morphs and it actually looks like the I mean the one that we like or homing in on here looks like yeah 96 is when we start to see that

98 that would make sense that's right around when 2003 I'm about to turn I'm close to turning 21 oh that's a good one now I'm obsessed with finding the perfect song that's on the Sunflower so this one is What is Love the Hathaway song and then Blanket on the Ground I don't know what that song is but see that's more from I don't know if it says exactly what era this is or what year this is but the one that the second picture in the run Get Down on it okay that's pretty good Casey in the Sunshine Band looks like that's 96 that's a good era of the Sunfly

we're coming up to a good one that we talk about on this show a lot I think two more slides you got Mr. Wendell in 1996 Go ahead, Mr. Wendell. That is a good karaoke show.

Oh, man, I wish I would have put that up as my Instagram post about how I'm going to get a tattoo. Yeah, then you get up to 1996. I Remember You. Is that? I wonder what that song is.

It's a schmaltzy song, right? Or am I thinking of I Will Remember You?

I think maybe I will remember. It's Sarah McLaughlin. But this one is being written by somebody named Schertzinger and Mercer. And then we jump up to 96 again I Got ID I don't know that

Is that an Eddie Vedder song I Got ID What a weird poll for karaoke Let me look that up

I would be shocked If Vedder was writing a song called I Got ID in 1996 I would have been all over it Like a sunfly on shit Because I loved everything

Pearl Jam I Got ID That's a Pearl Jam song But it looks like it might be a cleaned up version of um i got identity i got it says i got shit song by pearl jam but then all over youtube is pearl jam i got id and i wonder if they change the name of it or something for for if not the radio because i don't know if they care about that um but uh for distribution i'm trying to get into the history here. Well I'm loving these

thank you for turning me on to this Andrew mostly I'm just loving the songs except I'm confused like there's one from 2003 Breathe that's gotta be the is that like the Faith Hill song Just Breathe maybe that I don't know was that written by Bentley and Lamar

I will say that I have confirmed on songfacts.com that I Got ID is also known as I Got Shit and in Freudian psychology the id so I've been saying ID And then they put ID. I got ID. They don't know what the ID is. Wait, did I do that, though? No, yeah, they put the period. No, it's on the thing. That's why I was confused. It's I got ID. Okay. Okay, that makes a lot more sense. That was tough. Our Pearl Jam fans did not survive that conversation.

Look, I had a semester and a half of community college, so I understand Freud.

I don't know. Was that Bill Murray?

I mean, the impression is terrible.

Okay.

But it was Tony Soprano getting mad at Lorraine Bracco. What was her name in the therapist in The Sopranos?

Melfi, Dr. Melfi. Melfi.

Andrew W. Wednesday.

I panicked there for a second. I'm glad I could pull it out. But then he got there.

He's kind of getting mad at Melfi, and he says, look, I had a semester and a half of community college, so I understand Freud.

This is a great freaking line. anyway thank you everybody who sent this i still think like honestly luke great tattoo idea actually

have we searched uh sunfly i did later and i saw one and it was i'm gonna be honest not great so um i feel like the it looks like something that someone had done maybe by someone who was a little

under trained in the tattoo arts so i don't know it doesn't seem like the wrist there yeah and like

the inside there's room i think there's still room for my contribution or my participation

it would be again like these colors that would be pretty dope like no joke that'd be pretty awesome all right next time you see me i'll be i should i should bring my uh tattoo gear and give you a

tattoo yeah bring out you know what actually just bring some um wire and like a ballpoint pen and a razor and we'll just rig something up jailhouse that sounds good now let's see today

is the last day before we start doing Blursdays and then music for your weekend. Do you want to hear a quick little story about home repair, Luke, from Listener Kelly? Yeah, always. Or I'm sorry, it's not Listener Kelly. I think this is Listener Justice. And it's also about breaking the rules, Luke. So this seems like it would be right up there.

Breaking the rules of whole repair?

I said home repair. Wait a minute. I said breaking the rules on home repair, yes.

Hey guys, this is Justice calling from Thunder Bay, Ontario. I just had to call because i had a chuckle listening to episode 3780 at the end of it luke mentions his friend kelly buying a house and then tearing up the floors before uh before he had the keys and my wife and i just bought our first house this summer we were very excited and we had the closing date all set up everything was finalized and um we had a three-day window after closing before we were already scheduled leave on vacation that i was planning on sanding and refinishing all the wood floors uh so i was in a hurry to get started and not having bought a house before i assumed that on the day that we were set to get the keys i could just show up at the lawyer's office first thing in the morning grab the keys and get to work but it turns out that's not how it works there's still a lot of stuff the lawyers have to do on that day uh so i showed up in the morning and they said that the keys wouldn't be there until the afternoon but i was in a rush and i already had the door code for the house um from the realtor somehow so i went to the house punched in the door code, got all the equipment in there, and started tearing up the floors. And I did feel like I was getting away with something and hoping everything would work out, and it did. Later that afternoon, I showed up to the lawyer's office all covered in sanding residue from ripping up the floors, and I picked up those keys, and the house is ours.

That's it. Power out. Well, congratulations, for starters, and congratulations on hopping on that project right away, because I'll tell you, as I've said many times on the show, those projects that I put off, and here we are almost a year later, still aren't done. The ones I jumped on right away got done right away. The other ones, it's like, well, I'll find the perfect weekend. This weekend's too rainy to do this project. This weekend's too temperate. This weekend's too hot. There's always a reason to put stuff off.

I think I told you this story that I heard from my, I guess she'd be my aunt, technically, about my biological father and his lazy ways. that he was like sort of allegedly, he was like, I don't think he ever had any kind of real job, but for a while he was doing some kind of roofing in Philadelphia. But he was always like crashing on a couch somewhere of one of his sisters or some gal. And he was staying with my Aunt Patsy, and she was like, why aren't you working today? And he was like, it's too cold.

And one day she was like, why aren't you working? He's like, it's too hot. And then, why aren't you working? He was like, it's so perfect. I wouldn't want to ruin it with working.

Right.

That can really waylay the home improvement projects if each day presents a new reason why it's not the ideal day for it, even if it is the ideal day. Now, let's talk about Thunder Bay, Ontario. Oh, Thunder Bay. Oh, Thunder Bay. Thunder Bay. That sounds like the coolest freaking place on earth Can we do a live show in Thunder Bay Maybe at Justice's house on his Beautifully sanded floors

Sure what do you know about it other than the fact that it's got a badass name Okay that's it

I've done no follow up research I just think the name Thunder Bay Sounds really boss

Are you saying boss because I was immediately Thinking of the boss

Well I was just singing Thunder Road Oh I see there you go Thunder Bay in the style of Thunder Road And if you couldn't pick that up as a masterful Bruce Springsteen impression, you need to listen more closely.

Well, you know, what do we say? Like, I don't know Bruce Springsteen songs except for Girls in Their Summer Clothes, which I love that song, by the way, that 2006 song, Girls in Their Summer Clothes, that sounds like the Magnetic Fields. Like, I cannot get over that. I've put that on my winter mix, my little, you know, mix of songs I've been listening to on repeat. And God damn, it's so good, man. Maybe I'm the only person who really likes the 2006 version of Bruce Springsteen at the exclusion of everything else.

Maybe you're the only person who actually gets Bruce Springsteen.

Oh, yeah, you're right. Everybody else, they're all, oh, sure, you like the hits.

You're looking at it with fresh ears, Andrew.

Exactly, exactly. All right. All right.

Thanks, everyone, for hanging around with us today. We're going to be right back here tomorrow with more Imaginary Radio for you. So please do join us for that. In the meantime, have a great Wednesday. Take care of yourselves. Please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all. Actually, you know what? I can email you. Or, you know, you can email me at splat2 at splatnet.net. Splat1's my father. I mean, I'll be sad to see him go. It would be nice to get my hands on that handle. you know power out