Muse

A group of acquaintances of mine invited me to go clubbing with them this weekend, and I said, no, I don't particularly like clubbing. I instead like to spend my weekends inside playing video games. And one of them said, oh, you're not like other girls? Like, yeah, I'm not like other girls. I got low blood pressure and low blood sugar, all right? I got hit with two God chuckles right there. If I go clubbing, I don't come back. It's much like Jaws.

T-B-T-L Guess what day it is Guess what day it is

It's Friday, Friday Gotta get down on Friday Everybody's looking forward to the weekend

Well I've read everything on your syllabus And how do I put this delicately It's all stupid garbage

First of all, a podcast takes a lot of work Okay? today you have to organize the guests you have to do a google calendar and then you build a following it takes a long time and i've been working on it for a while if i told you once i've told you a thousand times i love you with him out of the way i think we're just going to be

360 spins and slam dunk pointers

well hello good morning and welcome everyone to a friday edition of tbtl the show that just might be too beautiful to live it's called the internet and it's a fresh new way

to check out sites buy clothing and surf music my name is luke burbank i am your host coming to you

once again and hopefully for the final time in a while from chicago illinois magic carpet ride Where we have arrived together at episode 3,918 in a collector's series.

Let the fun begin.

Golly. What is that? 82 episodes away from our 4,000th? How time flies, my friends, when you're having fun. And we're going to have some fun today talking. These are words that are not usually in the same sentence. We're going to have some fun today talking about Elon Musk.

You're a gross person.

Who is really getting up early to troll everyone, including the New York Times, NPR, people who have blue check marks and got them because they are notable or well-known. Anyway, talk about the latest going on with Twitter. We'll also do some music for your weekend on this Friday. and we'll talk to this guy, the longest-running cobro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. He's spent the last 24 hours honing his Daniel Stern jokes. Jokes are really difficult, I must say. He's Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

More like home with a bunch of friends and family who love and support you and would never let you hang out to dry. these are the jokes i had 24 hours and that's the best i came up with yeah well it's that was still

that was still a less bad toss from me than when i asked you to make up a political song on the fly

i already i might have edited that out of the show i forgot about that i totally blacked that

out yeah i've gotten some emails from people saying why was andrew not in tuesday's episode

We do that thing sometimes, we record these backup recordings where you'll record what's called an isolated track on your side, I'll have an isolated track on my side. Usually we don't need them if we have good internet connection, but it's a backup recording so that if anything goes wrong, we can take those two files and match them up and create a backup podcast that way. All of that is to say, those ISO files, as they're called, are weird to listen to when you're only listening to one of them. It'll be like one of us going on for a while and then a long pause. In this case, it would be a long pause with just like low level music tinkling in the background and nobody's talking and then somebody reacting to nothing.

And are you listening to those files as part of your editing process? Are you doing some kind of black magic with the audio so that you unleashed a beautiful political song that you spent days writing and then plugged back into the show?

I mean, if I cared at all about my job or my reputation, maybe I would do something like that. I'd like to thank today's dazzling donors. But sadly, the answer is not yes. No, I did not use that power to improve my performance, which I should have done.

i had a i wouldn't call it an interesting experience andrew i had an experience take your time with the story then i was coming when i was arriving in chicago remember i took a red eye to get here and so it was like six

in the morning or something and i was listening to morning edition on wbez the fine public radio station here in chicago and um but i had my airpods in because i didn't want to bother the lift driver and i noticed something i never listened to morning edition on you know on headphones it's just on my sonos in my apartment or maybe on my phone if i'm somewhere you know i always do listen to the local station i'm weird that way like yeah me too when i'm in a town if i'm gonna listen to morning edition i'm going to do it through the local station that's playing it not even though i have you know opb set on my phone and kuow and all these places i i like to uh you know hear what the locals are talking about but anyway i noticed that many of the people on the air whether it was a martinez or um i think david broncaccio everybody sounded like they had i just woke up voice which makes sense because like that show starts at like three in the morning on the west coast or something you know wild so like that that that would make sense but i'd never actually heard it before or noticed it because i'm always listening over speakers so i would say because i know you and i have are fairly self-conscious about sometimes sounding like we just woke up or our voices are a little scratchy or froggy or whatever i would just tell people stop listening to this on on headphones just blast it out through your sonos or whatever you have in your house subject everyone in your household to it and will sound amazing but luke wait i'm gonna say

some things here that might be wrong but let me puzzle this out it is all could it also be that you're often you know when you're listening to these shows you're listening on the west coast and i believe a show like marketplace keeps updating their morning so they don't necessarily those presenters if i can be a little a tad british there those presenters but only a tad probably don't have as much morning voice by the time you usually hear them on the west coast right

true but what about morning edition i wonder do they re-record all of that i don't say re-rack

a lot of that i think some stuff obviously the newscasts are new but that's not what you're talking about here i do think that they kind of keep an eye on things and re-rack things if or they re-rack most of it or replay most of it and then i do think they do some updates you know to scripts or whatever as the as the morning rolls on and the news changes but that's a good

point i guess that wouldn't apply to the morning edition folks as much i had like a an intrusive embarrassing memory shoot through me the other day speaking of the npr newscast i was feeling i was driving somewhere and shay stevens was doing the news and shay stevens has been doing the kind of night shift of the national npr newscast for well since i was basically a sort of glorified intern in D.C. at NPR and I remember one night for some reason I had a little TV at my desk and I don't think I think I was living in a hotel which also would have had a TV so I don't know why I was doing this but I was somewhere out like it was out and about in Washington D.C. I think I think I'd had a few somehow I found myself sitting at my desk at NPR on like a Friday night at like 10 30 at night and i'm watching casablanca on the little tv at my desk that's for like you know watching cnn or something you know what i mean and just crying and shea stevens just walks by it's like are you okay and i was like yeah just watching casablanca like and i had completely buried that memory until i heard shea stevens doing the news the other night i was just like oh, that was a weird, that had to be a weird moment for her.

I kind of like that. I thought it was going to be like you said, you know, like at least, okay, so somebody saw you watching, you know, a central movie at work.

At like, drunk at nine at night on a Friday, there's two people in the building, me and Shea Stevens.

I mean, it's better than like, yeah, I mean, better than like a story, you know, you have various stories of you, I don't know, maybe big dogging somebody or not being. Like, I didn't fight her, that's good. You didn't headbutt Shea Stevens. I didn't yell, you bleed for me. You got that going for you. Yeah, exactly. That's right. Shea Stevens, that name rang a bell, and I had trouble, like, kind of placing it. I mean, obviously, you said an NPR newscaster, but that's right. Like, did Shea do the overnights? And so, like, when I was in college and I was, like, pulling all-nighters or just, like, drunkenly typing bad poetry until the jazz music ended and morning edition started. and I hated myself as I saw the sun coming up outside my window and realized I had not slept, but I still had a whole day ahead of me. Would that have been Shea Stevens doing the update throughout the night? Probably.

At this time, it wasn't – I mean, it wasn't 3 in the morning, thankfully. This would have been like 9 or 10 at night. But I just – I wish I could remember the series of events that had led me to that moment because, again, I could have gone back to – my hotel room and watched Casablanca in peace and cried I don't know why I was sitting and I remember I had my big like studio headphones on were you just maybe feeling like you were pretty new at

NPR at the time where you just maybe feeling like how cool is it that I have access to go in here

and just watch TV maybe I had to run in and fix something and then I just got distracted I mean that happened a few times in DC I brought this up on the show a while ago I think you might have even played the audio but i was i was out wilding out with my friends and got a call that a piece that was going on morning edition i had mispronounced somebody's name and i had to go in and fix it and i was definitely a rolling 08 like and this was you know before the days of you could just re-record this at home and email it in so to physically go into the building at like four in the morning right before morning edition and redo uh you know redo it and it was a guy named peter hookstra which it looks like hoakstra when you when you see it written but i guess it's pronounced hookstra and again i i think we actually literally found the story and played the audio but um so i did my point is that i was a very bad employee there and it's amazing that i it's amazing i

lasted there as long as i did there's only um one time that i can think of where i realized i had to talk into a microphone but i'd already imbibed a little bit too much this is not a very high stakes story i did not ever work for npr i was gonna say i've never worked for a national public radio network actually i do right now but um but anyway i've never worked for npr nobody woke me up in the middle of the night um to like come and do some breaking news but there was a time well i can it was several years ago now actually it might have been the first year of the pandemic or something and it must have been um how many days are in march we just had march is it 30 is it 31 okay so much it must have been kind of late-ish at night on march 31st several years ago and i got a frantic email from my friends saying hey tomorrow is april fool's day and we want to play a prank on our kid i can't remember the d i think it was they wanted to play a prank where they told their son that the Minecraft servers have crashed across the country and so that he couldn't play Minecraft. But what they wanted to do is they wanted to make it sound like there was a story in Morning Edition about it, and I had the best radio voice they could think of in the moment. So they asked me, could you quickly write up some copy and do a fake NPR news report about how all of the Minecraft servers have crashed and there won't be Minecraft for a while. That's a really good spoof. It was pretty good. But I wish, shoot, I wish I had a copy of it because I remember being like, oh, this is a good idea. But I am a little tuned up right now just having some house beers or whatever. And I remember popping the mic and being like, nope, that's not going to do. I had to really work on sober voice in order to make that pay off.

Did you ever get an update on how it went? I did.

I think they even maybe took a video. I think I can't I can't remember I think Elliot is pretty sharp that was the the the target of the prank and so I can't remember if if Elliot fell for it or not I apologize for that but yeah that was so that was the only time I can again very low stakes but it's the only time I've had to crack a microphone no that is true and like listen to myself in my headphones and I had as

my dad would sometimes say a thick tongue ah i um yeah that that's a that's a really good idea for it for an april it never occurred to me that you could actually like so they were presumably like playing it you know from their phone through the speaker but it was being presented as it was a

newscast yes i'm trying to even remember if they or i tried to bury it amongst other like real npr reports that might have been beyond what they were looking for but um yeah they they basically

Elliot was like I'm I'm bummed that Minecraft is is you know out right now but I'm curious

why the newscaster is drunk yeah exactly the bigger story here is why is this person on the radio why does he keep on saying nobody's told a sailing man when he's had enough to drink is that another thing your dad I don't know that it's this isn't even a I don't even

that the joke is like really appropriate more bukowski no it was a line from a stand-up routine

that i don't think would like probably pass scrutiny um based on how we talk about these things but i remember being pretty young like i think it was like in the early 90s i saw some stand-up who said that you see somebody walking down the street who's like clearly got some mental health issues and they're like talking to themselves and um and and this comedian's joke was that he had a theory that these people aren't talking to themselves, they're talking to somebody else who's in a different city. having the other end of that conversation. Oh, that's an interesting idea. I think I like that. Exactly. And I just remember, like, he said, so for every person that you see walking down the street screaming something like, I can't believe you're having another drink. There's somebody in Chicago saying, what do you mean? Nobody tells a sailing man when he's had too much to drink. That is the broadest. Like, that is a memory that goes back. I'm sure I'm messing up all of the details. But that was the main thrust of that joke. And so for some reason, that line, nobody tells a sailing man when he's had enough to drink, has stuck in my head. I don't even know how close I am. That's an adventure for me. I should see if I could figure out who that is. That was from a period where I was just mainlining so much stand-up comedy. I think we had just gotten cable in the early 90s, and everybody had stand-up comedy. MTV, VH1, Comedy Central, Marc Maron's One Drink Minimum, and I was just, like, taking in so much stand-up.

you've also described exactly the experience of people walking by my hotel room they just hear what sounds like a person who's dealing with mental health issues as you have one side of a podcast conversation exactly yeah like uh i'm sure that people i mean this is this is a tired stand-up premise but it is also very true that i would say at least once a month it just happened to me yesterday and i guess it doesn't really matter one way or the other but at least once a month i am walking down a street and i am approaching someone who i think is dealing with a mental health crisis and i realize they're talking on their airpods yes i know it's getting a little bit difficult all the time now i mean it's a very real thing and again i i guess it doesn't really matter one way or the other but so i'm i do find myself checking for airpods to sort of figure out how do I need to navigate this situation that's coming my way on this street. Luke

I just googled nobody tells a sailing man when he's had enough to drink and one thing popped up. Literally one thing popped up. No The guy's bit. It's a photograph of the top of a wine bottle posted by me to the website Flickr back in 2006 and this is when I was first getting into photography It's not that great of a photo, but I'm clearly messing around with perspective and colors or whatever. And I this is like kind of when Flickr was my main social media outlet. I think I had a whole community on there. This is 2006. I'm living in New Hampshire. And here is the story that I wrote. So this is very similar to the story I just told you, except the details are better because it's, you know, however many years ago, almost 20 years ago and closer to me actually watching the stand up as a kid. um here's the story i wrote when i was 14 we got cable and i watch a lot of tv i watch a lot of stand-up comedy one comedian had a joke that went something like this you know those people that you see on the street talking to themselves yelling things to nobody what if they're not actually talking to themselves what if you're just hearing one side of a conversation what if for every old man standing on a street corner in pittsburgh yelling nobody tells a sailing man when he's had enough to drink there's an old woman in la shouting shut up you were never in the navy i forgot about that part that is a better that is a better construction of it it starts with him and then it ends with the woman saying you were never in the navy so that's it's just funny to google something and literally have one result and it be something that you posted 20 years ago almost but do you remember who the comedian was no i'm no closer on that but um and also is it possible

that you invented the line nobody tells a sailing man when he's had enough to drink i don't think so

because rereading this little um caption that i wrote here i'm remembering that joke now like i do i mean it's it's it was something very close to what i wrote here that there's an old woman saying shut up you were never in the navy so this is a nice photo by the way i'm looking at your oh you found it too yeah this is the top of a wine bottle there's not a lot going on there

i'm just looking at the comments by the way a thousand views so this is pretty popular well it's been you know yeah it's been and it's gonna be i bet you i bet you it'll be two thousand by the time you know this show has been out in the world i bet you a thousand tens will go over i don't think so what do you what's the okay over under 300 under visits under you think it'll be under 1300 visits uh by monday so like a whole weekend of people going people googling the phrase nobody tells a sailing man when he's had enough to drink and then looking at your flicker page and then uh and and looking at the wine bottle do you think under 300 people will do that i think

under 300 people especially as i've said several times it's not that great of a photo you have to google that particular line do you want me to make it the show photo yeah i think it's a nice

picture okay i'll do that all right um uh we have to take a break but uh when we come back i want to talk wordle i want to talk twitter there's a lot going on with twitter

right now and i also want to talk about this guy who's doing something very satisfying on a rooftop that i'm looking at um that could go one one of a couple of different ways yeah uh so you're going to find out which way it's going when we come back on tbtl on your mark on your mark get

set get set now ready ready go everybody rattle dattle everybody rattle hey let's thank some

dazzling donors this is the part where you say yes andrew oh uh okay remember our new thing okay

yeah these uh folks andrew's okayed it so now we can thank the dazzling donors i second the motion um these are the wonderful generous people keeping tbtl rolling with their donations it's not an insignificant amount of dough either so we heartily thank christine blake who's in New Malden, Southwest London, United Kingdom. Nice.

Hi, Christine. Can you hear me all the way over there?

Christine says, you're London-based Scottish 10 here again as a second year dazzling donor. Still loving the podcast. Still yelling answers to your questions and comments that I know you can't hear. Still deeply puzzled by football and baseball, but hanging in there. keep up the good work you guys ah christine thank you so much um we've got to come up with some kind of an christine hasn't done enough by listening by correcting us by donating money we got to come up with some kind of job for christine where she reads things for the show because the scottish accent is to my ear one of the most lovely things ever i think christine left a

voicemail on the uh voicemail line 206-414-8285 somewhat recently fulfilling your dream of that and i think i used it as a as a little bit of tape at the end of the show when you were on the road

and i think you missed it the second you know that the second that i say um no mountain too tall i close my laptop i run out of the room and i go hide so why would you put christine's beautiful voice uh and a part of the show that you know i scottish accent admirer would not hear because

you always tell me to hide my light under a bushel isn't that what you say christine's

light under a bushel never always i always get it wrong always um well christine i haven't heard that message but um i will i will um i will ask andrew to email it to me and i will listen to it but anytime you ever want to just read the phone book and send us a tape of it we will play it That's my commitment to, that's my promise to you. I need to sign off on that. Okay. Maestro?

On your mark. On your mark. Get set. Get set. Now ready. Ready. Go. Everybody ready.

I'm also very proud that I stifled the urge to do my own Scottish accent.

I respect that as well. I don't think that Connor Mulcahy will be able to be so lucky. But Christine got off the hook

We've also got to thank Ryan Young today Ryan says Hearing Luke talk about finding lodging in Anaheim This got me to Fill out my dazzling donor form Whatever it takes Ryan I grew up in Anaheim My grandparents lived in Brea And I used to go to straight edge hardcore shows At the Showcase Theater in Corona If anyone wants to chat about The glory days of Earth Crisis Strife snap case and other bands i saw there hit me up spoiler no one wants to talk about this i love it those are some great names for southern california uh straight edge hardcore bands earth crisis strife and snap case yes snap case especially ryan says on a heavier note i struggle with depression and i have to credit tbtl as a major coping mechanism it's the weird well-trod parasocial phenomenon that so many other listeners have mentioned. You guys become part of our lives. You're a reliable trip out of my head and a reminder that there's something else, some friendly, fun place that's accessible and real. Even when I disagree on a take, how dare you, Ryan?

I would have edited that out. I'm sorry, I didn't look at that closely. No, will you please? In three, two, one.

Even though I always agree with you and Andrew, i relish it because that dissonance feels real rough and ready somehow if you want to fall asleep a little faster check out my talk about technical document documentation at a conference all about

technical documentation let's see here how can we share this because it's a very long url but i guess if you go to write if you go to write the docs and look for ryan young you'll be able to find this.

That's right. Okay. Everybody go check out Ryan's talk about technical documentation at a conference dedicated to technical documentation. And Ryan, thank you so much for supporting the show. And thanks for sharing with us sort of what it means to you. And I'm sure that your experience with it is similar to a lot of people's experience. So it probably helps a lot of people feel seen. So thanks, Ryan. We could not do this without you. hello and welcome to top story what is it andrew do you think what do you think the guy on the roof is doing that i'm finding extremely satisfying uh power or pressure washing it you're pretty close he's like power shampooing a giant like area rug oh okay okay yeah so he rolled out this big on the roof he rolled this rug out and he's got a hose and he's got like one of those like industrial like it's it's a you know got handles and a big rotating kind of circular thing at the bottom and he's just going back and forth on this what was a kind of dingy rug and

it's just getting progressively lighter because you can see the rug well enough huh yeah oh that

can see it happening it's extremely satisfying i was on rug talk for a while which was just the side of tiktok where people are like like it's industrial washing of rugs and cleaning of rugs and they have whole you know like an entire facility built for this that's got like drainage and all these you know and i'll tell you watching a really dingy rug come in and then get just like repeatedly kind of blasted with soap and then and then you know wash and then they put it in like a centrifuge that actually like rings all of the moisture out of it yes do you get to see that reveal oh yes dirty water is like so satisfying to look at anyways uh that's my visual here in chicago let's um uh let's talk quickly about wordle but let's not we do need to talk about ticked uh twitter because there's a lot going on over there but yeah actually i'm

interested i'm interested in hearing uh what's going on with twitter because i have not been following that closely but i just wanted to give everybody a much anticipated update uh to a story that i started talking about i think on monday's episode of tbtl i had mentioned that uh in my wordle group where we always share our results without actually spoiling the answers um i had sort of accidentally figured out what a couple of my friends starting words were in wordle which made it easier for me to play the game because i could eliminate certain things based on their first their first attempt um and i ended up getting wordle in one turn i believe on monday and uh that was i think a first for me i'm also fighting a sneeze here i think if i stop to sneeze it's not going to happen so i just got to power through for now but i want to let you know my journey millennia but yes i'm powering through i think i'm better i think i'm on the other side of this who knock on wood anyway um so i got the wordle in one which is you know pretty unprecedented it was unprecedented for me i'd never done that before i didn't tell the gang in the moment that uh i had figured out what a couple of the starting words are and that i had sort of a leg up um i told you on the show and i know a couple of people on that chain sometime listen to the show so i don't know if they heard that conversation or not but then two days later on wednesday it happened again it happened to me i got a wordle in one again because again one of my friends i knew that his starting word was stare most of the time s-t-a-i-r times it was rodent's word that tipped it for you he always uses that word and the word on wednesday i think was ratio and so there's some shared dna between those words and i also know one of my other friends words i think or at least i know most of it and so by by doing that i was just able to like i actually did take out a piece of paper i'm like well if it's ratio and it's or i didn't know it's ratio but i'm like if it's stare that's the a that's the r blah blah blah i was like and i know that they can't go in this position there was literally only one word it could be and it was ratio so i got it in one now keep in mind i'm fine at wordle i usually get it in three or four But, you know, Genevieve is the one who I think Genevieve and Anita are the best at it. And so for me to get it on my first try, almost two days in a row on Monday and Wednesday, two out of three days. And I think I got it in two on Tuesday. I could be wrong about that. It was a two for Tuesday. I had to I had to say, well, actually, as I was typing, OK, I got it in one again. I think I need to, like, kind of have a conversation with you guys that I have realized what some of your first words are. And before I could get that out, our friend Katie, who may end up hearing this on this podcast, wrote in, this is it. We need to change our first words like this is this is getting ridiculous.

which is fair enough um so now it became a whole thing camaro kev is like this is why i don't want to share our results the way that you know the app tells you to share our results and it's like everybody's like a little bit so maybe i was a little bit ruffled no you're sharing my wordle results with the with the group you share you took a snap of all of your attempts and what the answer was that is the worst don't even don't do this you're better than this but uh anyway so now like i think people were legitimately kind of pissed at me on wednesday and i'm not what are you supposed to do what am i supposed to do like our friend katie who again will probably hear this so i'm not trying to talk through the podcast but she's like well i think i know what some people's words are too but i just don't use that information i'm like well i can't how can you not use the information once you know it it's hard for me to just be like it's like so anyway so now that i mean that's the update so today i saw that everybody only shared their results like they said they shared their final five green squares and how many turns it took them but everybody is hiding their process now so you don't get to see like the yellow squares and green squares as they figured it out which you know i think some hardcore wordlers uh agree with that i've heard from listeners who say hey with my text chain we don't share the way the app defaults to it because you got to kind of keep your cards closer to your vest but for me it's more fun i'm going to continue sharing um all of my i'm going to continue sharing the old way and people can use it or not but i'll mix up my starting word a little bit more but um anyway i did sort of i think i think my friends were a little bit i mean not like not like kicking me out of the group but i think they were a little bit legitimately irritated with me yeah i may need to nominate becca for uh inclusion in

this group because right now she just has to send them to me her results and i have no idea what's going on yeah you're just like oh colors yeah exactly greens that's a real green day yeah um i think she would really appreciate having some other people that are taking it this seriously

um it is it is a it is a whole thing yeah well i'll let you know i'm sure everybody's dying to know i'll let you next week i'll let you know next week how things shake out if we go or you

You and Becca can just form your own chain where you can both guess each other's starting word and solve it all in, like, one try.

I'm happy to. I would like to talk. I haven't seen Becca in a while, but I do have a lot of questions for her about her word. Do you know if she uses the same word every day, the same starting word?

That would involve so much listening and remembering.

You're a terrible boyfriend. What do you talk about if you aren't talking about the cats in a wordle?

um i'd like to mansplain things about the seahawks to her good good easy ladies i'm taken um okay let's talk about twitter this has actually been a wild couple of days over there um first of all i'm always a little surprised twitter still exists honestly like when you think about the revenue plummeting the fact that elon musk i think owes a billion dollars in interest a year just on the loans that he had to take out, basically, to buy Twitter. And it seems that other than they're trying to charge people to have a blue checkmark, right? So that was his big, that's his big, his big sort of revenue driver is that anyone can get a blue checkmark if they're willing to pay for it. But it sounds like very few people are availing themselves of that. And so to try to pressure people, Twitter has now started, or they say they will soon start to take away the blue checkmark from what they call legacy accounts. So if you're someone who had a blue checkmark back in the olden days, which obviously was sort of a coveted thing if you were real into Twitter like I was. I never had one, by the way. That's going to be taken away, and you're going to have to pay, I don't know what it is, $8 a month or something to have one. and there's also a special category for businesses which you have to pay like a thousand dollars a month if you're a business so the New York the New York Times

I think it's like

I might be wrong on that maybe you can maybe you can if you click on the link I put in the show sheet I think it might list that I know that sounds insane maybe maybe it's a thousand dollars a year I mean it was it was a pretty pretty spendy thing well like the New York Times said we're not going to do that we're not in fact a lot of people have said there you know people that have the blue check marks like lebron james has said i'm not going to pay eight dollars a month to have a blue check mark he's like basically saying you need me here yeah like exactly you have celebrities making free content for you right i'm you're not going to get me to pay for it um and so um anyway this i thought was pretty funny so the new york times said we're not going to pay to have the blue check mark and so i guess they lost it for some period of time and bill oakley you know bill oakley the um the the executive uh producer for the simpsons and also a creator of all kinds of fun content. He's a great follow on Instagram, by the way, where he does fast food reviews. Oh, okay. This is what he wrote. He got the New York Times blue checkmark, right? Because it was available. There was a brief moment of time when the New York Times didn't have their blue checkmark that said the New York Times. He, I guess, registered it for $8 or whatever.

You mean he created a fake New York Times account, though? I see.

He created a fake New York Times account, but if you looked at it, it totally looks like the New York Times. You have to look underneath it to see that it's at Bill Oakley because it's the logo of the Times, that T, then it says New York Times, and it's a blue checkmark. And this is what he wrote as the New York Times. A six-year Pulitzer Prize-winning NYT investigation has revealed that Seymour Skinner was not actually cooking a roast that was ruined but was, in fact, baking a ham. and then it's a picture of Skinner looking into the flames of the steamed hams and then the next tweet or the next Instagram post from Bill Oakley was well they kicked me off Twitter but it was well worth it

that's great so he got

kicked off Twitter for that joke

he actually got well that account did right because there's a fake account representing I mean to that's kind of a good ending right like to the degree that all this is kind of bullshit it's good that an account was Oh, even his personal account is banned as well?

I think if they catch you impersonating someone, they'll ban. Because he wrote, he goes, he said, I may be banned in the morning, but you all can follow me here rather than there, so you will not be affected. I don't know. I'm a little confused as to if his real account was banned or not. But certainly they figured out he was in the New York Times. But I thought that was a pretty good spoof. Now, here's the thing. uh elon musk tweeted out well twitter changed npr's status to state run media state affiliated media is the label that twitter now gave npr and elon musk retweeted this a picture of it and he wrote seems accurate

so they updated like their bio it's not there now it's not it's been changed if that's the case but so like the bio this just seems odd oh i see i see it's not their biography but like there's a little automatic tag and it says u.s state affiliated media interesting yeah and the other

things that have that assignment are like the russian like rt media which is literally an arm of the russian government this is the craziest part twitter's own guidelines i'm reading from david gura my pal david gura's twitter feed now uh yesterday elon musk's twitter labeled npr a state affiliated media even though the company's own policy stated the organization shouldn't be labeled as such so i'm just going to read from twitter's what twitter's um rules were for this um how state affiliated media accounts are defined and then it kind of goes into it and it says state-financed media organizations with editorial independence like the BBC or NPR, for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purpose of this policy. That was the Twitter policy, Andrew. Guess what the new Twitter policy says? State-financed media organizations with editorial independence like the BBC in the UK are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy. They went and removed NPR from the example of something that is not state-affiliated media. They went back into their own guidelines and took out the NPR part so they can continue to label NPR as state-affiliated media.

Oh, God. You know, I just started spending a little bit more time on Twitter because I was going to say, you tweet your mom with that account? It's a big part of my baseball experience is, and it really has been, like, me kind of opening the app now more and, like, occasionally tweeting some bullshit about the Mariners that literally, like, I think the last thing I tweeted got, like, three views or something. I'm not even joking. And that's fine. Like, I'm not doing it for clout. But for me, like, it was like seeing a bunch of friends after taking six months off from my relationship. Like, people I've never met before, people I don't know IRL but who are my Twitter friends. And some of them are just fans. Some of them are media people. Some of them are people I used to work with at Cairo. But a lot of these are just hardcore Mariners fans who I've developed like some sort of an online relationship with. And it was so cool to see their avatars again and everybody just living on every pitch and dying on every pitch, you know, and like and so that was fun. But like this just everything that you're just saying and I'm on the NPR site now or I'm on the NPR Twitter feed right now and it still says U.S. state affiliated media. And it's just like he's still just using this as a cudgel to target journalism and journalists, which is what like was finally this.

The straw that got me off the Twitters, I don't know, like three or four months ago when he was like, you know, like banning journalists like this is really bad. But I also sort of think that it's also just going to collapse. Right. Like it is going to just like collapse under this bullshit.

I don't think that I mean, it just doesn't seem from a business standpoint like it's going great over there. You know what I mean? Like I can't I just it's it's a very expensive toy for him. And there's a like I said, I think that's like a billion dollar billion dollars of interest alone that he has to pay every year. And Twitter has never made a billion dollars and it is now making significantly less than it made when it was at its at its most functional and profitable. So I don't really understand. I mean, is he going to just continue to to basically like sell Tesla stock so he can keep this thing Twitter going? because I don't it doesn't seem like it's from a business standpoint really his what he's trying to do to you know make it profitable doesn't seem like it's really working and yeah just the idea that he's like going to war with the New York Times and with NPR and like I just don't understand do we agree that Elon Musk is smart like that he I mean he he I I think he's smart right I mean he has done some pretty incredible things in his life or you know notable things and I bet you if you gave him an IQ test he would be pretty smart I just don't understand how someone who is probably as smart as he is can be as wrong as he is about this stuff like how can you be both both smart

and really wrong I mean I probably say this too much but it just I put under the umbrella of like the modern troll behavior I mean and he's just like a troll with a lot of money and thus a lot of power but like him going around and just like claiming things that aren't true as being you know I do kind of group a lot of his activity into that sort of Trumpy era of just saying things just owning libs like that sort of he's just so obsessed with like that kind of behavior and sometimes when you're just a troll like that it doesn't even necessarily it certainly doesn't reflect your necessarily your intelligence or even how you really feel about things you just

get whipped up into owning people i guess i just i mean the thing that i really don't understand and i'm obviously sort of in the bag for them which would be the new york times i don't understand how somebody reads the new york times and thinks this is biased no i know like now i mean i think if you were to uh poll the people that work at the new york times i my guess would be it's overwhelmingly people you know who vote democrat but i also feel like i mean when you just look At something in the New York Times Versus something on Fox News I just don't even think it's It's even remotely close And like I just I don't understand that criticism Of the New York Times As being As being liberal I feel like they And also as As making up stories That's the other thing I don't I really don't understand Is people And it happens all the time People will be like Oh well the media Just makes up stories Like the New York Times They just make stuff up It's like you really think That's what they're doing You really think that's why You really think That's why because tim robinson face like i i just i don't understand how people think that the new york times is a little i mean except the time they did which was what jason blair so i guess and the and some and yeah yeah i mean and maybe actually you know maybe i'm coming around to elon's perspective on this maybe they should be banned from twitter well yeah i mean that that's and i don't even

want to talk about it because that's kind of what in my darkest moments when i start to like debate people in my imagination who you know people in my life who i love who are just like getting all of their information from like fox and like and and worse now unfortunately um and just knowing that when they get a constant feed of that that they that this constant source of of lies and misinformation from that network has convinced them that the new york times is the equivalent of fox on the other side sort of and just kind of saying like well you have your new york times and we have fox and it's kind of like no that's this just like such a false equivalency um certainly not that the new york times gets everything right all the time we have listeners who will write into me because they're they're they are furious at the new york times half the time because they feel like they're bending over backwards to be too conservative or to kowtow to that or some of the bullshit that the new york times does fall prey to new york times is kind of trolling in its own ways sometimes with some of its like kind of opinion related stuff about like this woman only spent four billion dollars on her wedding but she still says she had an okay time and then it'll be a profile of somebody that we're all supposed to hate um like you know the new york times does that stuff too and it's kind of more entertainment uh pages but um yeah it's just it's such a false equivalency and then that's where i end up just like just collapsing into a puddle And just being like this democracy is fucked Right

I wonder if NPR should consider Getting rid, I mean obviously There They're laying people off. NPR is not, you know, rolling in the dough right now. But a lot of people from NPR were pushing back on this Twitter thing by saying NPR gets less than two percent of its funding from the federal government. Because generally what happens – I think that might be a slightly kind of squishy fact because I think what happens is a lot of stations – the way that NPR is supported is that the stations, the local public radio stations, pay money to have morning edition and all things considered and wait, wait. It's called carriage fees. Now, where do the stations get the money from? A lot of it's donations, but if they're getting government funds and then it's sort of filtered through the station back to NPR. But I was going to say, I wonder if, I mean, your average moron thinks that NPR is like 100 percent financed by the U.S. government. I wonder if it would be worth just dropping that two percent of funding so then you could you could basically totally break free of that.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, that that shit's complicated. And like you say, now is not a time that they're going to be looking to be eliminating any funding sources. But and in either way, and again, keep in mind the people who are making these arguments, they're not making genuine arguments. It's disingenuous. And so it doesn't really matter. Like, don't let the trolls change your behavior because you're going to keep on reacting to them. And because you you you want to be honest and truthful, like it doesn't work. They're just going to they're just going to say whatever they're going to say.

You were talking about the New York Times writing about someone's like lavish wedding and kind of infuriating that can be or whatever. I had an experience. I really love Dwell magazine. And although, as I wrote on on Instagram, why do I love this magazine that hurts me so much? I picked up a copy of Dwell recently and on the cover it was the money issue. So they were breaking down like what stuff costs and various projects, which I'm very interested in that I'm doing a project right now. And on the cover, one of the like, I don't know, what do you call that on a magazine when it's basically like previewing one of the articles? Yeah, a little headline. A little headline. The headline was radical restraint. An L.A. family's home, an L.A. family's home leans into its limitations. So I'm like radical restraint. Oh, that's interesting. OK, let's see what they did, because I'm having to exercise some radical restraint on my project because, you know, I'm running out of money. And then I turned to the actual article And it is one of the more beautiful homes I've ever seen

And you're a regular reader of Dwell magazine

Right, exactly I'm like looking at house porn all the time In this magazine It is this like palatial home With a swimming pool And like an ADU That I would happily move into And live permanently And this unbelievably gorgeous kitchen And living room it was just like i don't know how and again dwell magazine is its own ecosystem and i don't know how many of our listeners read it or care about it but it's like that somebody at that magazine felt okay signing off on the headline radical restraint when they had presumably seen the photos of the home they were referring to i was just like these people are such assholes well i

know i use this example all the time um so i probably shouldn't introduce it as evidence again But like literally, I think the perfect example of The New York Times doing something like that was when I think this is maybe about two years ago, they were maybe just about a year ago. They were profiling various people who are now, quote unquote, house poor. It was supposed to be supposed to be sort of a look at or some insight into the blazing hot housing market in places like Seattle. And there is one woman who had bought a house, I believe, on Queen Anne here in Seattle for some ridiculous amount of money. Like, she's such, I mean, she was like, I don't know if she was like an influencer. It seemed like the type of person who was very much born into wealth, you know, and was living just like the absolute, like, living in the lap of luxury. But now she was house poor. And the quote was, and this sounds ridiculous, but it truly was her saying that, like, well, you know, I used to be able to just kind of hop on a plane if I was in the mood for Italian food and I could grab a late lunch or dinner in Italy. And now I have to stop doing that now. And it's like, they know what her quote. I mean, they know what they're doing when they put stuff like that.

You're saying the New York Times is intentionally holding this woman up for ridicule when they put that quote in there.

Oh, I mean, that and also that we that I think the New York Times also knows that, like, we, the readers, are going to think of them as being tone deaf. Like, the New York Times, like, I would say quarterly will go, like, some piece of theirs, some opinion piece or something in the opinion pages will trend because it just seems so tone deaf, which I guess I'm not supposed to use tone deaf. I'm not sure. But it's just, like, so out of touch maybe is the better way to put that. that that that they're they're doing it because they know it's going to go viral because it's ridiculous like the first person account of somebody who's just like so ridiculously privileged

but not reading the room my my latest obsession with dwell is there's a person in a guy who lives in Silver Lake that neighborhood of LA which is a obviously beautiful neighborhood very expensive and he did this amazing renovation of his home and of his like studio because he's like a music producer uh supposedly but i was i first of all i was just deeply jealous i was just like i want to have this guy's house and his life basically but then i was like how have i never heard of this person and then it was like i started like internet stalking him sort of googling around And it's like he's written a couple songs for like a Nickelodeon or like a like a he had he had like written. He had done some musical production for like one animated TV show or something. What he didn't do that I could find was enough work to in any way justify the expense of this house. So I just became obsessed with this guy. Oh, no. And they kept they kept referring to him as like a music producer. And I'm like, yeah, but music production didn't buy this house. So you're getting money from somewhere else. And I spent like a week obsessing over if this guy bought his house and renovated it from music production money.

Did you end up like did you Google his background in finances like you like you would one of your poker opponents?

I did. And then I sent him some messages where I told him that he sucked me out on a hand. No, I couldn't ever get confirmation, but I'm guessing he comes from a bunch of money. And I don't know why. I guess I have a massive chip on my shoulder about class, which I'm trying to work on, but clearly I'm not making very good progress. I just was like, there's something about somebody being super wealthy but then being described for something that strikes me as maybe a sort of a hobby. I don't know why that rankles me so much. Again, it's just because of my major class envy and my hang-up about the finances of my childhood or something. But it was literally like every night I would go back in and I would look at this guy's house and then I would try to find a new way to cross-reference if he'd made his money from composing music or not.

So I was a little distracted during the first half of the show because I really wanted to find the audio of me.

You're putting the Blur's Days together for next week?

Yeah, be somewhat drunkenly doing a fake news report about Minecraft. I cannot believe that I cannot find that on any hard drive or in my email where I probably

You with all of your data management.

I know, it's driving me bananas. But anyway, I put that aside a while ago, but now I've been looking for this New York Times article and I have it here just just so that I can see how close I am to this quote. First of all, this isn't this is just over a year old. This article they rushed to buy in the pandemic. Here's what they would change. This is from The New York Times real estate section. About a quarter of the way into the article, the sub headline is the cost of being a house poor. And we see a woman in her nice living room with her dog. Everything is just beautiful and attractive. And this is how it begins. This section three months into the pandemic, Stephanie DeSantis felt claustrophobic working from home in her 800 square foot townhouse in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle. So like millions of other Americans, she started looking for a bigger space. She set her maximum budget to nine hundred thousand dollars, but soon realized that if she wanted to stay in the central neighborhood, she'd have to pay more. She pushed her budget up to 1.3 million Reassessing her priorities

That's the other thing that cracks me up about articles like this Or anything having to do with like Buying a house when they're like Their initial budget was going to be 900,000 But then they had to expand it It's like, had to, where'd you get the 400k from?

Right, why were you sitting on that? What did you give up?

You had an extra half of a million dollars You were like, okay, we're going to tap into that

Well, that's exactly it So she had to push her budget up to 1.3 million reassessing her priorities Luke now here's a quote I decided I've done a lot of traveling I've had a lot of fun I've done the thing where I'm like I'm hungry for pasta I'm gonna go to Rome for three days says Ms. DeSantis 47 who works for Amazon I can stop doing that I can afford to be a little

house poor wow that's uh that's pretty much exactly as you remember I'm hungry for then did

she say i'm gonna go to rome for three days but now i'm house poor with my 1.3 million dollar home

in queen anne then did she say no one tells a drunken sailor when he's had too much you were never in the navy all right let's do a little music for your weekend before we we head into

the weekend uh andrew what would you like to play um i just had to restart my computer um because my Spotify wasn't working, but now it's working here, so that's good. How about I...

play a song that I just added to my playlist yesterday. It's called Prizefighter by a group called Youth Lagoon. I think Youth Lagoon might just be the name of an individual performing under that name. I can't remember the details on this, but I'll play it. I'll do a little Googling during the song. The name of this song is Prizefighter. I'm also stalling because it might begin with a bunch of ambient sound, but I'm not sure. Okay.

Hope it filled the sky at night time Diamond in the ring don't feed your mind Maybe I had never pictured bad times Brother in the drugstore falls behind He's got knuckles that no longer fit my eyes Knuckles that a prizefighter can't buy I've got the world so I'll be fine

I've got the sunshine to figure me out I'm back to work, that's over now All I want is fun And I'm working hard, but it's got to be done

Youth Lagoon, I believe, is the name that somebody named Trevor Powers performs under And took a break as Youth Lagoon for a while But is back with a brand new record In the Boise, Idaho area Is where this is from So anyway, yeah, very nice It makes me want to listen to more of their stuff

I would like to Have you play a song by Boy Genius Have you been Hipped to Boy Genius yet?

Yeah, that's the super group With Lucy Dacus And who are the Phoebe Bridgers

And Julian Baker and um actually there was a really nice npr kind of interview with them the other day i've heard i was talking about the the the sort of memorial or the not quite obituary but for that japanese composer that i just found to be really incredible and and then i think it was maybe towards the end of last week there was like an interview with the three members of boy genius and then playing a bunch of their music and it was a really nice piece and it felt like it was about 12 minutes long so you know tip of the cap to npr for bringing back some of that good cultural programming but anyway i really like um i really like this new album that they have out uh i do have to i do have to quibble with one thing that uh lucy uh dacus uh i don't know i think you're right i think you're right i think she's got a song about vacation bible school yeah it was it's actually But it's a camp, and I can never get over that.

Yeah, we litigate. That was my music for your weekend, and we ended up litigating that for weeks.

I know, and I still – if that guy in Silver Lake really made his own money, and if you can call it Vacation Bible School when you go camp, go stay somewhere else, because that's not how I experienced it. But anyway, I'm putting all that aside to tell you that this new Boy Genius record is really good, and I would like it, Andrew, if you could play the song $20. I can. I need to find it here.

All right, here we go.

It's a bad idea And I'm all about it Give me a run or a chance And then I finally had it When you wake up, I'll be gone again

Motorcycle in the front line It's an all-night drive From your house to Reno To the T-Bird graveyard

So there you go, that's a little bit of Boy Genius. Really great harmonies on this record, by the way.

Yeah, I have not heard any of the new record. I think we have one EP out before this one, and I think we might have even played some of that on the show. I don't recall, but Phoebe Bridgers is another one that it seems like every time I hear anything by Phoebe Bridgers, I like it. But I just never got into her stuff, and I'm not exactly sure why. It might have been, and I'm embarrassed to say this, but it might have been one of those things where she was just, like, so popular among the people who like the kind of music I like that it just sort of felt already. I can't it's a terrible thing about me that I think I brought with me from my youth that sometimes it feels like well there's no sense of discovery here because it's already huge so I'm sort of jumping onto somebody else's parade or something like that sometimes I'm like that with new music and I hate it I I've shed a lot of that shit but um I think that's one of the reasons why I'm not as familiar with her stuff Thank you. Yeah, she was the guest on Wait, Wait back during the pandemic when we had to do the shows at our homes. And she was absolutely could not have been more, you know, I was going to say charming, but I do feel like saying charming as it relates to like a woman in her 20s. Does that – now, you know, listener Diane's really got me in my head about how I'm describing people. Do you think if I were to say Phoebe Bridgers couldn't have been more charming, is that kind of diminishing in some way for me to say?

I don't think so because I think charming is a very specific thing. Like when – like I think I use that descriptor a lot too when I find somebody charming. And I think charm is a very specific – I mean, again, this is just me talking. But like – who else would it be? But I just sort of think that like – Well, me. yeah there's somebody you know to me it doesn't have to do with physical attractiveness at all but it does have to do with a very specific kind of attractiveness which is like when you're around somebody that they just make everybody in the room or maybe just you feel a certain way which is just like they are warm they are charming you feel at ease around them to be able to have charm I think is a wonderful thing that I think I lack

that's not true well you're very likable I was trying to think is it charm yeah

it is I don't think so I don't think I put people at ease I think that's part of

is that what you think is that what defines charm

I feel like that's part of it I feel like that's part of the thing I don't feel like people might if they and I'm not saying this again to I don't know why but the focus on me now I'm stuck doing this

but like not charming is not a charming personality trait.

Somebody might have a good interaction with me, but I don't think they walk away being like, oh, that was charming. I was charmed by him. I don't think that's what I'm putting out there.

But you are really fun to hang out with. I very much look forward to us hanging, so that's good. Whatever it is you're doing, it's working. It's called nervous energy. Let's play our listener suggestion, which is from listener Steve, who says, this is such a catchy song. This whole weekend, I've been muttering big lizard energy, cold-blooded enemy, not so scared when I'm 320 feet to myself. The song appears to be Big Lizard Energy by Ellie Dixon.

Oh, yes. Okay. Yes, yes, yes. I listened. I was like, this is all sounding familiar. Yes. I don't have a show sheet in front of me. Who sent this in?

Listener Steve.

I think Steve sent this to me as well because a lot of times I don't look at the music for your weekend. because that's specifically your role. You pick these things from the listeners. But he said, I think you'd be into this. And I do. I don't know if you listen to this yet, Luke. This is very poppy. And you know what, Luke? The video is kind of charming.

Oh, okay. Wow. Ending the week on kind of a gross take, but all right. You're a gross taker. Yeah. That's my Tig Notaro impression. Anyway. I get it. All right. That's going to do it for this week of TBTL. But guess what? We're going to be right back here on Monday With more imaginary radio for you So have a great weekend everyone Take care of yourselves And please remember No mountain too tall And good luck to all

Jurassic killer Problems are big but I'm bigger I'm a Jurassic killer It's a monster

It's rough for your life

And now I'm feeling so reptilian Taking down my issues like they're just civilians New blockbuster making their millions Don't really care about their opinions Cause I've been growing Call it a five star thriller Tiptoeing When are you two gonna learn how to shut up?

You're like Lucy and Ethel without the charm. Power out.