Muse

I think what they were doing was good. To me, you rehearse, you rehearse. You get it perfect. You know exactly what you're doing. And then what? And then you forget about it. Let me pinpoint you. You said they learn it, they forget it, and that's okay. That's great. Well, they've forgotten it. But they never learned it. So when do they learn it? I'm just saying, when do we have a time? But what I'm saying is if they're going to forget it anyway, then what difference does it make? I mean, you see what I mean? It's like one of those, it's a zen thing. It's like, you know, you know, how many babies, you know, fit in the in the tire thing that hold the old joke, you know, TVTL.

The new phone book's here. The new phone book's here. I'm somebody now. Millions of people look at this book every day. This is the kind of spontaneous publicity, your name in print that makes people. Where are you guys? Have I lost you in the land of never-never?

I've only ever said I love you to two men my entire life. Stone Cold Steve Austin and a guy in a dark club who I mistook for Stone Cold Steve Austin.

I know these guys are annoying, but that's all I got. It's party time, chumps.

All right, hello, good morning, and welcome to a Tuesday edition of TBTL, a show that just might be too beautiful to live i heard about that thing on the am radio my name is luke burbank i am your host he has purple drapes flowered underwear and a roommate named garson oh fabulous coming to you from the hollywood broadcast center right here in portland oregon where we are looking at another absolutely mediocre day it's not particularly sunny but it's also not raining i'll take it it's fine it'll be tolerable everyone will be able to go about their portland business uh our business today is getting to episode 3935 in a collector's series let the fun begin a story in the new york times about the denver international airport and some of the conspiracy theories and rumors about what goes on there and they are so we'll talk about that also i watched a couple of shows recently that i'm very excited about you want showmanship you got it one of them on hbo max the other stand-up comedy special on netflix that i'd

like to recommend how funny is that that's pretty funny i will do that plus some emails and v-mails

and we'll talk to this guy the longest running cobro of the show maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships oh fabulous he's andrew walsh and he's joining me right now good

morning my friend good morning luke sorry for my slow reply there a little weirdness with my audio board this morning but i got an email here i'm just sitting here blasting away emails right as we talk about on the show and i have a few google news alerts littering my inbox uh you know i have one for my name i have one for tbtl just in just in case we make the big time i want to know you know if we ever win the award for saying big time the smoothest like did you hear me just what is going on did i just hear something in the background what's that did i just hear something

in the background am i losing my marbles here no you're not losing your marbles i'm sorry i was turning my phone off well okay i was getting out of an app and it started playing audio in the oh okay sounded like a scream or something i got nervous it's a woman singing to celine dion who is in her car I'm sorry I want to I want to get back to the tbtl alert but I just so that this doesn't bother me or you for the rest of our lives this little video that I put up on Instagram that is Celine Dion is in like an SUV she's being you know shuttled somewhere and a woman clearly a huge fan is singing for her from her heart and she's singing really well and Celine Dion tells the driver to stop and then as the woman is singing Celine Dion just proceeds to without Outbreaking eye contact with a woman, roll the window up of the SUV. I think I wrote something like I'm retiring from comedy after watching this. It is one of the most perfectly timed things I've ever seen in my life.

So instead of just rolling away like she doesn't have control of the car, she says, hold on, stop. I want to have this moment so I can own this woman.

It's unclear. And to be honest with you, I don't even I have a suspicion maybe it's a deep fake. I'm not sure. It makes no sense, because she, and again, I would just direct everyone to my Instagram page to look at this, or just, I guess, maybe Google it on the internet. But, like, she says to the driver, hold up, hold up, so the driver doesn't pull away, but then she listens to, like, four seconds of the song, and then just stone-faced, she just rolls the window up. So she kind of gave it a day in court, as our friend Camara might say. She kind of gave it a day in court, but then decided no more, decided case closed.

Yeah, case closed, exact.

Right. It's just but the thing that's incredible about it and it really it raises some I should do some sleuthing today to find out if this is real or just a again somebody like me made this with some kind of AI program because if it if this really happened if Celine Dion really did this it's the funniest weirdest piece of trolling I've seen in a long time because she literally never breaks eye contact with the woman as she's rolling the window up on her. It is a bummer in that maximum it's maximum trolling.

It is a bummer, and I don't want to overplay this because I don't know how prevalent it is right now, but it really does seem like we're entering the age of like almost, and I know that I was on this tip literally 10 years ago, but now it seems like almost anything enjoyable that goes viral we have to like apply a lot of scrutiny to because we just don't know if anything that we even see with our eyes or hear with our ears is real anymore. I know.

Well, here, I just texted you this video. I very much want to get to the TBTL thing But will you do me a kindness It's like four seconds long Will you just watch it on your phone And give me your read on it First of all I want to hear your reaction And I also want to see if you think this is real Or this is some kind of computer generated thing

Okay just came through this second So we do have an issue of sharing video Between I don't know what it's like when I send you a video To your iPhone Is it super small tiny it's like the size of a poster can you put your finger on it and like i feel like the window might be fake i think the window might because it's a tinted window Hold on, let me Yeah, I am pretty sure Somebody just added the window going up It goes up so quickly There's something about that I mean, if anything's fake about it I think it's just the window part Because even as she's rolling it up She doesn't break eye contact You'd think if she was done She might turn away Yeah, I mean, it's funny But I think it's fake What's funny, though

was celine dion is such a kind of interesting character they've never touched anything in their lives let them touch those things for once that like it sort of seems like a thing that could have happened because celine dion it seems so eccentric um let's see here oh do you want me to

do you want me to tell you because first internet already know this is made up so first of all this is from 2021 or at least the first youtube video of it was 2021 celine dion rolls up her window on a fan but then there's something called fullfact.org no Celine Dion didn't wind her car window up I like the verb wind there we don't wind our windows well I feel like we used to wind our windows when they were manual right yeah I guess just a very old person who runs factchecker.com yeah so good I'm glad I'm on this site let's see here the video is edited in the original Celine Dion listens to the singer yeah so I think that window itself is the fake part so oh well oh golly it was i i watched it about a hundred times last night

i couldn't stop laughing because again celine dion is just odd enough to me that it seems like she could have done that like if it was kelly clarkson or something or whatever it would be like oh that's somebody's just having a laugh but i was like she could have just been celine dion it seems to be a person who lives so much within her feelings and so genuinely in her feelings that if her feeling moved to uh i don't want to listen to this anymore she would just roll the

window up on the it is funny i found the real one here and i'm sending it to you you can look at it on your own time or on our time it doesn't really matter i get paid either way i think talk to me in july um but she ends up fist bumping the woman through the window in the room oh yeah yeah so

anyway i don't know okay so back to tbtl alerts yes so this is this is somewhat interesting this

is this has never happened to me before tbtl breaking news i want to be somewhat cautious about this because it could have been somebody just kicking the tires on a new website or something but i got one of these tbtl alerts and you know when we get a tbtl alert it might just be hey one of our shows from last week posted to a new platform or something it's not it's often not news it's just like the you know it's just well the internet grabbing yeah i started following

the hashtag tbtl on instagram yeah yeah so it was a real mistake because it's all something called

tattoos by Tommy Lee yeah tattoos by Tommy Lee yep I follow that hashtag too I've been seeing tattoos by Tommy Lee and it's not the Tommy Lee it's like both not the TBTL and it's both and not

it's not satisfying any of the audience now would be looking for that kind of content they are

tattoos though I guess um and then also there's true theater by the lake somebody on Twitter always tags us uh they they think that the theater by the lake which I think is I can't remember if It's upstate New York or the maybe the Midwest Lakes region. But. people think that they are tbtl so we're always tagged in some really impressive performances that unfortunately we have nothing to do with but today i got one that says tens book club organizers planning meetup and it's hosted by the tbtl tens book club i mean this definitely sounds like us right and it looks like there's some tbtl book club going on this sunday but again i'm not going to give out any details because i don't know if this is real also So it says that the content is only available to members, so I can't even see what the details of this are. Wait, what? Usually if the TBTL 10s are planning some sort of a meetup, they will email me and they will say, well, you mentioned this on the show. And I say yes, and then I forget, which I did recently for a meetup, I think, in Texas that I feel so bad about a few weeks ago. Whoever was in Texas, wherever I missed your meetup. I'm sorry I didn't mention it on the show. But, yeah, so I don't know if there's a 10s book club this Sunday or not, but that's pretty cool if the 10s are getting out there and organizing IRL book clubs.

What would the alternative possibility be that there's that there is a different group of people who call themselves 10s and like something called and like theater by the lake and are having a book club? There's so many.

no no for me the only other alternative would be that they are considering doing something like this and they wanted to see maybe how this website works in the same way you and i you know we put up a square space a while back knowing that we were going to be probably leaving apm but we didn't tell anybody about it and maybe if somebody had the right alerts out on their phone like they could have on google they could have come across it so that's why i'm a little bit like this might have been like i say somebody kicking the tires of the technology maybe but i don't know i don't But if anybody, let's see, today's Tuesday, right? If this is a real thing and you want us to promote it on the show, email me, andrew at tbtl.net. And, you know, I'm sure I won't forget this time. I wonder what book they're reading. I know. I have a lot of questions. I wonder where this is.

Yeah, like physically, where are they meeting up?

Yeah. Things like that.

Yeah. I mean, and what is the membership thing? Have they started some other, there's some other membership program related to tbtl that we don't know about? Let's see here.

Oh, well, now I see. Yeah. let's see the the the image on this is uh you me jen and sean all posing with a photo together i'm

guessing that's from i'm starting to think that this is related to tbtl you think so oh yeah no

i i'm sorry if you i'm sorry that if you misunderstood yeah what i was never saying that it wasn't that i just don't know what's going on but you're wearing a rainiers hat in this was this from the 24 hour live show or something when was the last time you me jen

and sean were all in the same room together and also i rarely wear a hat around you because you often wear a hat and i feel like two hats is too many hats for our show and i'm wearing my green

little castro hat which i started wearing but sean had one well before i started wearing one but he's not wearing any hat he's got a whole head he's got a full set of hair here a full set of hair

full set a brand new set of hair he's got a whole head or a full set of hair speaking of whole heads this is you know how you you sort of sometimes will be a little self-critical about talking about the levitard show uh too much on our show like it's probably considered bad radio yeah to talk on your radio show about a different radio show but let me just do that again and talk about the howard stern show so they're in that's true they're in miami this week um breaking in the new sirius xm studios and they're talking to one of the staffers on the show is a guy named sal governale and he's just kind of a he's a sort of legendary weirdo on the show and um they're going through all of his hair systems and he's like talking about topic that he uses this he had to check his bags for the flight to miami and everyone's mad because everyone else just carried on and they all had to wait for him to get his bags at the airport because of his hair situation which involves topic which i use and also they were like are you still using that laser helmet weird laser helmet thing and then everyone's like freaking out about this helmet and i'm like man these this guy and i have really walked the same journey well what surprises me unless unless you

have an update on this i asked you i i figured that that you stopped using your laser helmet long ago but you're actually on laser helmet number two and are still actively using it am i

right about that yeah i mean i'm not super duper regular about it but the the the first one that i had which was great well it's the one we brought to austin and made someone wear on stage right but that was another thing like stern was like oh we should do a thing where like um you have to wear the like make one of the listeners wear the helmet or something i'm like hey back off of our bits yeah we were doing that years ago in austin calm down it's like when ockerman did a 24-hour

podcast and said they were the first ones ever i shook my fist in the silence

but um uh the first one that i had that i really liked actually uh the battery died on it and you couldn't get in it like it you know it had a built-in battery so it was you know you charge it up and then you could wear it around so i could like vacuum the house while wearing this thing i don't know why that marriage didn't work out so well i mean who wouldn't want to come home to your husband wearing a laser baldness helmet I don't know.

vacuuming i'm picturing like freddie mercury's famous vacuuming video and he's wearing a laser baldness helmet is that the most famous vacuuming scene or is it marge simpson well i that but that's

not the one isn't there one with fred astaire oh didn't they animate fred astaire into a vacuum

commercial didn't i just raise that like when we were talking about um copyright law and music the other day i said there was some maybe it was fred astaire i think i gave the wrong name but it somebody kind of from that general era whose family sued because they took his likeness and turned him into a into a dancing vacuum man well that see that one I think was the

Fred Astaire one if I remember right I think was like a Super Bowl ad or something it was kind of a big story because it was considered pretty high tech at the time and again it might not even be Fred it was one of those people that's known for dancing could have

been Gene Kelly I don't know it might have been Gene Kelly because I did say Fred Astaire Based on my Google history here Let me look up Gene Kelly

Anyway all of that is to say the newer one The newer laser balding helmet is corded It needs to be plugged in at all times Which is less convenient but what it means is I can sit and watch my television At night or my mariners And I can just wear it For you know it's like a 20 minute cycle Or something and I probably do it like once Every well I'll do two cycles Of it so 40 minutes and I probably do it about once Every other week I don't think it does anything at all except it just is soothing it feels like i'm doing something and that is in and of itself providing some kind of

service to me i guess so it was fred astaire who danced with the vacuum but it doesn't look like there was a lawsuit associated with i think that one was all pretty clear okay yeah i guess we're

generally excited about that they were like look at this the inventiveness of him dancing with this

vacuum or something i made that so i had parts of that right but the main point was very wrong So there's that. Well, they're both named Fred Astaire, and they're both used in a commercial after their death. But there was no lawsuit, which was really the main point of what I was saying. But you also just said Freddie Mercury. Oh, no, no. A moment ago, I was talking about Freddie Mercury dancing kind of sexily with a vacuum cleaner in one of his videos. You don't know about that Queen video? No, I don't even know about that. Let me see. Queen vacuum video. I want to break free. Oh, I love that song. I'm trying to remember if he's kind of in drag in this, because I feel like this was one of my earlier exposures to drag, you know, growing up in a kind of conservative household without MTV in Ohio. I feel like he might be in, like, kind of a housecoat or something dancing. I might be wrong about that. Does this help when I just play a song that everybody knows? Well, this song slaps so hard. I'm never mad if we're playing Queen. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, he's totally in drag. He's got a leather skirt on, and he's vacuuming the house. Yeah, this is why it's stuck in my head, because I'm sure I was, as a young person at 12 years older, I was probably like, so what is this world? What is that line from Diner where he says, sometimes I just feel like there's a bunch of stuff going on in the world that I just don't know about. And I feel like that's me most of my life.

I also love that we've now settled on two people named Fred interacting with vacuum cleaners, but from wildly different cultural milieus. Yeah, definitely. Fred Astaire could not have been more sort of like middle American 1950s, you know, sort of non-threatening. And then you've got Freddie Mercury who's just breaking down all of these walls and doing things that were probably very edgy at the time.

Yeah, I mean, this is quasi-edgy now. This is awesome. Anyway, very high camp value. This might have been also my introduction to camp as a latecomer to John Waters' films.

When you said Freddie Mercury and a vacuum cleaner, I pictured him singing into, like, you know how you have like an upright vacuum cleaner that you hit a little pedal and then it, you know, you can basically vacuum, but you can stand it up too. You know what I mean? Most people understand how vacuums work. But I thought of that because we had one of those in our house growing up, the house I grew up on 77th and Aurora in Seattle. And, you know, we had obviously a lot of kids. there was a lot of like my sisters at one point there was four of my sisters sharing a room and the place that and all my sisters well particularly my sister hannah and sarah and maybe my sister rachel were particularly into like singing and being musical and there was this little there was a hallway between so my parents bedroom my sister's bedroom in the bathroom all opened into this little hallway and then there was the basement stairs i was down there and there was an upright vacuum cleaner that would just sit in front of a closet that had a full mirror on it and at a certain time of night invariably one of my sisters would have taken over the hallway where they would be performing into the back because they were also like small they were children so the the microphone level of the back of the vacuum cleaner was the perfect height for like a nine-year-old and they would be in there singing their

hearts out into the vacuum cleaner staring at themselves in the mirror and if you opened the door and i have to stress this was the only way to get to the bathroom you would get screamed at i'm doing a song in here we had one of the we was it a kirby by any chance luke we had might have been it was totally like it would if i could see a picture of it it would immediately teleport me

right back to my childhood that particular vacuum i exaggerate only i admit i'm exaggerating but only slightly when i say we had a kirby vacuum cleaner that had a headlight literally and figuratively weighed more than your car currently does this thing could have i mean this thing could have killed somebody if you got in the way of it what i think and i think that it had the smooth red handle as well that i believe sometimes also filled in as a microphone for me and my

sister we also had a canister vacuum which i hate oh rough although it's a cool object you could

drag it around it had the hose coming out of it and you drag yes and that was the one you had to

use in the basement and my job was to vacuum the basement every week that was one of my chores so i had this i mean i swear to god this canister vacuum might have been from like 1952 and you have to carry it around and it seemed like it was super heavy and it had this cord or you know hose that was always getting tangled up it was just always a hassle and i was always like dragging around this canister vacuum muttering under my breath about how much i didn't like doing my chores but again And I would love to see that thing now. I wonder if my parents still have that because, like, those are the sorts of objects that you just interact with so much when you're a kid. Kind of like we were talking about Tupperware the other day. And then we, like, I looked up one of those Tupperware pictures that has the weird airlock button on top. And just looking at that, it was so nostalgic for me.

I'm looking on eBay at, I believe, the exact – I mean, I'm looking at the little foot pedal and everything. it i'm zooming in on this and there's little details about this that i totally forgot about but are totally accurate this is exactly the vacuum i grew up with this beast of a machine it's only 150 this is more old school than the one we had this thing is yeah this is like 1960s era kirby i mean just heavy as hell stand-up vacuum cleaner it literally has a headlight on it um and i'm looking at all the various foot pedals and everything it was like complicated i remember when i learned how to ride a motorcycle i was like oh yeah you got those foot pedals just on the kirby because like uh i don't know if you have you ever you've ridden a motorcycle right where you have to shift gears with your left toes i haven't i've only ridden a motor scooter i don't know how to operate a motorcycle there's a little like you have a clutch i believe it's been a long time i'm is it your left hand or your right hand is the is the hand clutch and then you uh switch gears with your left foot i believe it's been a very long time since i've been on a motorcycle i didn't expect that's how my life would turn out by the way i figured one way or another even though I wanted to be a city boy and I grew up in The country and I'm living more the life that I wanted which is to live in a City like Seattle I did think Somehow motorcycles would be more a part of My life I have not ridden which I have Not always shocking a motorcycle since I Was a child since I was a child I've Spent most of my life not riding motorcycles

That is so Interesting to me because I think of those things As being so dangerous Like I mean there's a reason they call Them donor cycles right like you Could not pay me enough money to be on a motorcycle on a freeway like it's terrifying to me and i think of you as being someone who's generally a little more cautious than i am but but you love motorcycles and i would i you i would not get on one that was going anywhere near other cars or going over like 10 miles an hour i i would

there was a while there where i really wanted a motorcycle like you know for here in seattle uh for travel and genevieve was highly against it but honestly my experience with motorcycles was mostly off-road you know it was growing up in the country and my small little dirt you know more like dirt bikes is more what i'm into um although i would take a uh i would take a street vehicle but again i i know that the people i just don't for whatever reason we were talking about heights yesterday like i know that i'm i'm definitely not a very adventurous person then also i have various phobias that you can lay on top of that but for some reason it may be just like kind of growing up in the country and being around a lot of motorized recreational vehicles like Motorcycles don't trigger a fear in me In fact Maybe Genevieve's right in me Not getting a motorcycle because I worry That maybe I don't have enough fear Maybe when I'm on a motorcycle I don't know, it's been quite some time

I would love to see you in that space I would love you to pull up to a TBTL event On some kind of bitching Like vintage Indian motorcycle You're in all leather You get off, you take your helmet off, you shake your hair out Your long, wavy locks Cascading around your shoulders Sexily and then you just like Walk into the venue and it's time to do the show I want to see that version

You've given this some thought Maybe more than I should even admit to here

Let's see the fan art I found, let's see the slash fic on that By the way, this matters to Absolutely no one, but I'm pretty sure what we had was a Hoover Okay And I believe I have found the vintage Hoover vacuum on Pinterest that we had. I think we had it in a different color, but this looks like the vacuum that my sisters would be constantly singing into. Oh, that's the one that you were singing into, not the one in the basement. No, the one in the basement. Yeah, right. Sorry, I'm jumping around here on vacuum talk. But yeah, no, the one that served as a performance space or whatever you want to call it for my sisters is the one that I just found. And it's for some reason very satisfying to be looking at it I don't know why

I can't believe this thing is only $150 But maybe that's just my Maybe people aren't looking to Maybe the price of a midlife crisis Isn't as much as I thought Why would I want A vacuum that was old in the 80s

If that's your midlife crisis That's pretty charming Some people buy a Mustang convertible Some people leave their partners If yours is I'd just like to find that vacuum cleaner we used to use I think that we can all get behind that

Well you know can I say one thing that was on my mind today And I wasn't sure if this is worth sharing on the show In fact maybe it's more something I should share on Spotless But Because I really don't know if this is relatable Or not but if you give me the floor for Three minutes maybe we can just At least dispose of it quickly

The chair recognizes the gentleman from Ohio

I think I love A nice smelling closet And I love The fact that I now live in a place I feel a real connection to our home here, the house that we bought a year ago, and plan on growing old in together, me and the cats, and I guess Genevieve, too. Let's be honest, older. Yeah, exactly. And I look back at my grandparents' house, which that's the coziest memory I can remember, right? Like having a weekend stay at my grandparents' house and my grandpa cooking a roast and the house smelling like that. But then at the end of the night, we're watching TV in the 80s. I'm trying to even think what would be on watching Knight Rider or something with grandma and grandpa. But then they'd say, you know, you can go get some graham crackers if you want to. And we didn't eat graham crackers because their name were grandma and grandpa. They're just they happen to be called graham crackers. And there's this closet they'd keep it in. And it was also their spice closet. And I don't know what else was in there, but you would open it. And it was just like such it was like just a a smell print, a very specific combination of spices and foods and whatever it is. That was Grandma and Grandpa Walsh's closet in the kitchen and I guess pantry and opening that up. And I realized maybe it was over the weekend or something. I went in this little storage area we have that could not be a rougher storage area inside of a house. like it's it's like a pretty crappy little plywood door underneath our stairs and you open it up and it's just kind of like you know there's no flooring in there and it's just like you know kind of the inside of a wall basically but it's a little storage area under the stairs and I keep some stuff in there that I don't have to get very often and I also keep my mop bucket and my mop and my Swiffer in there and I opened it up the other day to grab something and I was just hit with this the combination smell of i guess like pine saw and fabuloso and whatever other cleaning things i've used in that bucket and mop before and it's just like and again it's pine saw and fabuloso they're not totally unique smells but like it just hit me women that were like really pro-trump i'm just kind of surprising those two black women pine saw and fabuloso i think maybe or they appeared in a freddie mercury video i'm not sure okay right exactly but anyway I just had. And then I think I think I was thinking about it this morning because I passed the closet and that smell kind of hit me again. And it just made me feel so kind of comforted. I think I later in life, I've gravitated towards aroma and maybe even like a casual aroma therapy more than I ever thought I would. I never thought about it as a younger person, but it gave me such a feeling of comfort and maybe even stability and pride and homeownership and everything just for like this, this smell of cleaners coming from this little corner of my closet, you know.

But anyway, it just really, really struck me and it really just struck a chord deep down inside me somewhere.

well also I think part of it must be this is to maybe take it to a kind of a more sort of serious level but what's happening is you are now creating your own scent profile yeah that's like home yeah you know what I mean like you're you're now in adulthood and what was happening what your grandparents were doing unintentionally and was registering with you as a kid now you're the adult

doing that right exactly and I think I'm also very paranoid about smells I think that like last week I was telling these like I came down to the basement and it sort of had almost a chemical old paint smell down here and I don't know why and I'm obsessed with keeping the litter box clean. The idea of having a house that has a bad smell but I don't know it because I live in it but guests would be able to smell it is like...

it's one of my worst nightmares climbing a 300 foot tree and having a bad smelling house and not realizing it are my two biggest nightmares so smelling something that was very pleasant to me in my home might have been part of that as well you know i had to do this whole with the

the new tbtl studio which is also going to have you know the like it's an adu it'll have a little kitchenette and a little you know um and the bathroom and stuff so you could could also stay in there i did i moved heaven and earth so that i could have my stupid self-cleaning litter box in the bathroom closet and what it was was getting an instant on hot water heater instead of a conventional hot water heater that's a tank you know because this is a very small this is a fairly small space anyway and there was not going to be room for everything and i was like i cannot live with if i'm living in this place for a while with bubbles before while i'm working on the other the larger place I cannot have the litter box anywhere near where anyone's ever going to be it cannot be in the kitchen it cannot be in the it's just kind of a big open space it has to be in the bathroom but there was nowhere for it to be it was so complicated running the wiring it's a whole different gauge of wire because you're basically like blasting this thing with electricity so that it can then instantly heat up the water and my dad just kept being like why are we not just doing the regular thing here i mean it was it was a major expense and a major hassle just so that that place will hopefully never smell like a litter box needs to be changed yeah no i mean it's it's

i feel like i was just talking about this recently so apologies if it was on this show but like veves and i if we found the right house for ourselves we would have figured out the the litter box situation like we've put up with the litter boxes in inconvenient places before but i'm with you i want it to be as tucked away as possible and it was funny like when we were looking at houses to buy like one you know a huge purchase you would think a pretty small consideration would be well where does the litter box go but we knew that we have a cat and we'll probably have a cat if not cats the rest of our lives and so it was an important thing and like we lucked out and we found this place that has like i can just you know keep a door a sliding door slightly ajar by a few inches and then the cats can use their litter box way back by the hot water heater and nobody would really be the wiser as long as i keep it clean you've never well you the thing is you can never ask your friends if your house smells because they're all going to be too polite but i hope that you know but i'll tell you your house does not your house has

never ever ever smelled any of the houses that you've been in probably because of your paranoia yeah i hope so but anyway trust your paranoia yeah exactly exactly just because you're paranoid

let your doesn't mean your house don't stay guide you yeah um but uh yeah so i mean it was funny we mentioned that to sarah our our realtor who was helping us find a place and it became a conversation everywhere we went well where would we put the litter box in here and like honestly the idea of if it was like well it would just have to and this is no offense to people who do keep it in the in the bathroom i've had litter boxes in the bathroom and hallways off of kitchens places that i found it very inconvenient but you do the best you can but like i really didn't want to go back to having a litter box in a bathroom where i might have to you no matter how much you vacuum and sweep you're always going to have little crunchies under your feet because it's just like impossible to maintain and so it did become a consideration so as you're building and customizing your own place my god of course you should you should optimize for that well i'm sorry though what did you say that involved

the hot water i kind of i missed well because there's basically like the bathroom has a spot for the sink a spot for the shower where the toilet is i see right in a little closet and that closet's going to have a potentially a washer and dryer stacked and then next to the washer and dryer is the only logical place for a hot water heater and that was going to be a big tank but i was like there's nowhere for me to put yes okay self-cleaning litter box situation which by the way i found to be very generally very uh happy with like it's it really mostly does what it's supposed to do this like self-cleaning thing but anyway holly your visiting cat uses it too huh i never even thought to ask that that's cool yeah she does um uh so it's it can it can handle a couple of a couple of cats and i mean the the drawer fills up a little more quickly but it you know it works fine for a couple cats but my dad must just think like what kind of what kind of a fancy lad did he raise because my dad is just so unfancy in the best way he just is not he just is great with whatever like for instance when we're working um on these projects it's like there's the floor in the tbtl studio is poured it's poured cement um which is like it's going to be polished later it'll be that kind of cool like industrial thing going on but he'll just be like kneeling on the cement for hours working i'm like do you want some knee pads or something he's like no i'm fine or like he has this rug this it's like he's praying to mecca he gets he has this like rug that he carries around the back of his truck sometimes he'll throw that down on the cement and kneel on that if he thinks of it meanwhile if i was going to be doing that same job i would have gone to home depot and purchased a hundred dollars of knee padding just like he just is he just deal he works with whatever he has he never complains he's just completely like chill and so when we're putting these things in the bathroom like well we got to make sure there's power next to the toilet and he goes okay why i go because i'm gonna probably need a bidet and it's gonna need its own power it's like what and i'm like and also we've got to have this instant on hot water heater because i have this you know robotic litter box that i can control from my phone and there's nowhere currently in the footprint for it so it's just like thing after thing where he's just like all right okay you're the boss whatever you want to do but it's just like thing after thing that he has no context for because this is not how my parents live their lives at all yeah it's

funny that the conversation should come back around to this because i was going to say before there's no way in hell you're wearing that laser baldness helmet in front of your dad while you're

watching tv right oh my dad who has a better head of hair than i do who's like pushing 70 yeah no

no no i i would i mean can you imagine you you're just both watching tv you know at night you know in your half-built house and you're just sitting there with a laser helmet on and he's just shaking

his head in disappointment i think that my like i said my dad's a pretty go along go with the flow guy but that might be too much like that might be the breaking point i don't want to push it because I really need him to help me actually get this project done. All right. Let us take a quick break, and then we come back. We've got some television I'd like to recommend. We're going to talk about Denver International Airport and whatever else comes up here on this wild ride called a Tuesday edition of TBTL. Stay with us.

On your mark. On your mark. Get set. Get set. Now ready. Ready. Go. Everybody rattle, dazzle.

Let's thank some dazzling donors. These are the amazing, generous people keeping TBTL rolling along with their dazzling donation of dough each month. Hey, look who it is. First up, our friend Broadcast Berry, known to the U.S. government as Berry Fott in Seattle, Washington. I am drinking some coffee from Broadcast right now, Andrew. I'm drinking.

Literally me too.

It's Ethiopia, Rico. It has hints of maple and limoncello.

I don't know what mine has hints of. Yeah, I'm just drinking it from a mug that says vacation in Cleveland. You're going to love it.

Barry is, of course, broadcast Barry, the new and permanent coffee king of Seattle. Out of the way, Howard Schultz. Indeed. And also of Boise. I believe that they've got a broadcast in Boise as well.

Indeed, yep.

Barry says, hey, fellas, I considered not writing a dazzling donor message this year because I'm lazy. Yes, Barry, one of the laziest people that we know. oh my god classically lazy person who owns like 15 businesses and runs like 10 miles a day he

will have started a new business run a marathon and uh i'm trying to think what is the the third i was gonna say sued someone although i don't think barry is necessarily the oh i i know uh and completed a degree in business economics by the time we're done reading this thing

Well, I don't want to pull the curtain back too far, but I will say as we were pondering the sort of taking TBTL independent again and making it like a real business with real rules and, you know, real bylaws, et cetera, we have been leaning heavily on the knowledge of our friend Barry, Broadcast Barry, because he's a successful business owner. and didn't he just mention like oh yeah i'm in some graduate program for something so i'm learning i'm brushing up on a few of these things it's like man yeah never the guy never slows down he

may have already put more thought into too beautiful to biz than we have to be honest with

you but it's oh i mean i assume he'll be taking the company over a hostile takeover oh my god that's awesome no no no the idea is we we make it a success and then we sell to bear oh okay okay

but also wouldn't it be kind of cool even if you're on the short end of the stick wouldn't it kind of be cool to be part of a hostile takeover just to say i was part of a hostile takeover

i feel like that was such a thing in the 80s i think it's arguable that that's what elon musk sort of did with twitter interesting yeah i mean i don't think it was technically a hostile takeover but it was what he did if i understand it right was he made an offer he basically overbid for the company based on what it was worth and it was then incumbent upon the like board of directors to accept the offer because if you owned stock in in twitter you were being offered a really good price for your stock and therefore it was in the financial interest of the shareholders to sell

i don't i don't want to step on your toes here but i don't know who the next dazzling donor is and on the off chance that it's elon musk maybe we know that's fair yeah that's fair i'll just stick to

the uh i'll stick to the coffee here uh barry says um but then i thought that's selfish he's referring to not writing a dazzling donor message

and I should take a moment to share a couple of reasons why I support TBTL. One, Luke and Andrew keep me company when I'm out for my morning jogs, and I appreciate that, so thank you. And two, I don't personally know too many 10s, but I feel connected to this community. You all hold a special place in my heart, and this boutique pod cart is what keeps us connected in a world that feels constantly disconnected. We all have our reasons why we love TBTL, and if you are able to support TBTL financially, please consider it. Oh, wow. Thank you. Thanks, Barry. That's an extremely kind message And if you're I'm just saying this now If you're looking for coffee If you're looking for baked goods Does he start a pizza place too?

I don't know what the status of that right now But I know it's in the works And I think it's okay to say that Or if not, sorry Barry

I didn't mean to get ahead of ourselves My point is If you're in need of anything That our friend Broadcast Barry is selling Go ahead and pick it up from him, because he's been an amazing support to TBTL all these years. Thanks, Barry. We really do appreciate you. Maestro?

On your mark. On your mark. Get set. Get set. Now ready. Ready. Go. Everybody rattle, dattle.

Hey, it's our friend Ben Neal. Ben. Down there in Tacoma, Washington. I was, I don't know why, why am I thinking of this? Why am I, I don't need to go, I don't need to go there with this, Andrew. I don't need to go there. i was in i was having a drink at my kind of local watering hole here in the neighborhood the other day and there was it was kind of late afternoon early evening was pretty much dead and there was a guy there who was um really talkative he was sitting kind of at the bar i wasn't really interacting with him but he was really talking it up with the staff and he was like clearly he was very excited to be on a work trip which is kind of charming but he was like yeah where should i see i'm important i have some here for this conference for six days it's like you know i'm gonna really explore portland and everything and everyone's like well where are you from and he was like tacoma wow okay that's not that far away he probably could have driven down his i didn't know

where you're going with that i was actually that was my question like where is he in from you know is he in from valley city ohio like i would be somewhere where it's like this is just a complete

as I was listening to him just marvel at what a wild and varied and untapped place Portland was for him, to hear that he was from just up the road. Even the bartender was audibly disappointed to hear Tacoma as the answer. I actually love that so much. No, it was actually really charming. The guy was the guy was like, again, kind of on the younger side and was just had zero chill about him, but in a nice way, like in a person who just still has What do they call it? The will to live. Oh, yeah. That's what that used to be like. The spark of life, yeah. That's right. Our friend Ben Neal is in Tacoma, Washington and says, I have four things for you two. First, thank you, nerds, for what you do. Okay. You're welcome. Secondly, my dad and I run an avionics business called Avionics Shop, Inc. at KTIW. If anyone has a need for that kind of stuff. Okay. Avionics business. This would be things related to airplanes?

Yes, it would definitely be things related to airplanes, but what does it mean?

I feel like we've gone on this journey with him before. I think we, yeah, this is not the person who's, somebody's brother, like, had a business out at the Port Townsend Airport, the, like, airstrip out in Port Townsend. I remember talking about that a lot when I lived there, and somebody checking in, having a connection to it. I don't know if that was Ben or not. Also, what is KTIW?

I'm assuming, is that the, because I'm looking at Avionic Shop, Inc. at KTIW, and I'm looking that up now. I see that they sell supplies for pilots. Okay. But I can't figure out what KIT, I was wondering.

Tacoma Narrows Airport.

Ah, there you go. Got it. Okay, what's the IW? International. Woo! That's what it is.

it's the uh yeah it's it's the Tacoma Narrows Airport which is where Ben's business is his avionics business okay that's so cool um so do you think how many I wonder how many of our uh tens of listeners are our pilots and you know have you know like fly Cessnas or whatever it is you know like kind of like for fun as opposed to being like a commercial pilot for Alaska or

something like that I feel like I heard from Ben and other listeners when I told the story about my step grandfather when i was a youth maybe around 14 years old he was going to take me on a he was going to take me on a short jaunt in his little private cessna style airplane i don't know if it was technically a cessna um but he wouldn't let me take my old school like uh camcorder with me he said you know that would be too much weight over the weight and then i was like well then i don't want to go up there i mean i did end up going up there but Thank you. It's like, if this puts us over the edge, maybe I should just stay down here and film you from down here. Go do a whirlybird or something. I don't know. I don't know. Ben, give me some better avionics language. Barrel roll. Yeah.

Loop-de-loop. Ben's avionics business is called Avionics Shop Incorporated. It's at KTIW if anyone has a need for that kind of thing. And no, I'm not adding that in just so I can try to make this a business expense. hey i wouldn't rule it out ben third anyone who wants something to do consider giving back to your community in any way you can for any comies might i suggest looking into oscars enemies and tacoma trash pandas for tacoma based trash cleanup interesting oh funny do you think oscars enemies is that an oscar the grouch reference huh you would think that let's see was i want to dissect

that a little bit because was oscar an enemy to garbage or a friend to garbage and if you're an enemy if you're an enemy of your enemy are you a friend uh-huh i think i've cleared it up here

absolutely the here's how you can find these places if you're in tacoma at oscar's enemies and at tacoma trash pandas on instagram my sense is that these this is a group of folks who go

around beautifying and cleaning up tacoma yeah i'm on the oscar's enemies instagram page now It's a Tacoma-based volunteer litter pickup group I'm always curious about that When I see people doing it It seems like satisfying volunteer work And I think it sparks something in me

What if the organization was just They hated the Academy Awards

Yeah, I know That's at first No more violence during the Academy Awards

That's right Lastly and most importantly I want to thank my wife For not questioning things When she found out about my apm slash tbtl monthly donation she's literally the best and i am so lucky to be in her life shout out to ben's wife for tolerating this foolishness uh on uh on our part and on ben's part and then power out the final comments i don't know if ben added this or sklaroff did apples are only natively found in central asia is that true i don't i don't know i saw that

and i guess like maybe sometimes you're just like staring at the final blank field in a dazzling donor form and you're just like final comments do i have any well i have a little bit of trivia

so that would indicate that apples started in central asia and now everywhere like in washington of course we grow lots of apples in fact i think washington might be the the leading exporter of apples as far as the state goes but those are all of those apples at some point got their start in

central asia would be ben's contention yeah kazakhstan in central asia east of the caspian sea is the home they're not they're not native to north america its main export not just being

borat but now also being apples exactly second only to borat apples yes well thank you ben for supporting the show and thanks also barry we really appreciate both of you hello and welcome to top story uh thanks to our listener bobby who um like dm'd these into like instagram or something i think that might be how i got this article uh from the new york times written by tiffany shu a towering terrifying demon horse isn't even the weirdest part talking about denver international airport and all of the weirdness around the place now um i want to start by saying we absolutely love our tenverites and we had such a great time in denver doing the thon recently and getting to hang out with folks so i don't want to sound like i'm going too going too hard on our on on our Denver listeners but I have always been struck by how remote that airport is like you just drive and drive and drive and drive it just feels like it's in the absolute middle of nowhere I haven't experienced anything similar to that you know large airports like O'Hare is it's not in the center of Chicago but it's in a populated area you know LaGuardia and Newark and you know LAX these are all just like in the cities that they are representing dia is like so so far away but it turns out that that's not even the um the full story on the denver international airport there are all of these different like there's a kind of there's a lot of public art in that airport which is you know the case in a lot of airports one of them is this kind of map of the world that people have now decided is actually a secret hint that the world is flat like flat earthers are rejoicing over this particular piece of art in dia because they based on various measurements and ratios i think that this is a way

of low-key indicating that the earth is actually flat because that's because that's how the illuminati would let you know like that's that's where these things always

break down like i looked at that i looked at that little like kind of built-in video in this interactive article as well and it's you know it's a globe i mean the depiction of the world often is flat like in maps right like and not globes and not digital recreations that we're used to today so like it's just so funny like somebody has this conspiracy theory and they're like well i don't know i'm sort of on the edge oh well the denver airport has a map and it's sort of

flat so yeah i guess the world is flat there's also this um there was a theory that there's an inscription in what's called the great hall of the airport that says a u a g and the conspiracy theorists decided that that was a reference to the australia antigen which is associated with viral hepatitis and conspiracy theorists think that there's going to be a genocidal plague from the australia antigen and the folks from dia had to say no that's just a reference to some of the metals that are found uh you know when you mine things in colorado au and ag are just references to some sort of metal um but that was you know something else that people were sort of obsessed with i what i thought was kind of funny was that the denver international airport decided to sort of embrace this a little bit and they basically set up these like animatronic gargoyles a gargoyle named greg which is short for uh gregoridan and the animatronic gargoyles will say things like welcome to the illuminati like they'll describe themselves as like senior illuminati experts like they're completely playing into the fact that a bunch of people think denver international airport has all these weird conspiracy things going on but they actually like it's funny they're sort of addressing it head-on like they're making fun of it which i thought was kind of edgy for an

airport yeah they were talking you know one of the people who's featured in this article is i can't

remember her title but stacy stegman she's the runs the pr pr person yeah and talking about how

leaning into some of this stuff has helped tourism and it made me wonder of course we we are friends with famed author Harriet Baskins. Is that Harriet's last name? Basquez? Basquez, who

used to always describe it as, it's like kissing a fish.

Basquez. Oh, really? That's funny. I never got that pronouncer. But she's a mutual friend of ours who writes a bunch of books about travel and specifically used to keep a blog about the quirky things you could find in airports all around this great land of ours. And why did I bring her up? Oh, well, I know that there might be the occasional person like harriet and and and her followers who would travel specifically to an airport to check out what's happening in the airport but like really what is publicizing something in an airport do as far as bringing people in like people aren't traveling to denver just to see the airport right

well that's one of the things in this article that mentions the publicity generated by the gargoyle campaign was worth more than eight million dollars now how do you get to that

exactly the line thank you i read this a couple of days ago that's exactly the line that stuck out

i'm like well what does that mean right um uh yeah i don't i that jumped out at me as well i don't know how you really quantify that but this is another thing i didn't realize so they're you know playing into it they have these gargoyles that are like you know set up to basically make fun of the fact that there's a bunch of conspiracy theories about the airport they said they had to back off some of them though because people were being triggered they said that they also had to lean out of like certain conspiracy theories that were racist or otherwise offensive in their origins such as the quote lizard people narrative which is rooted in anti-semitic tropes I had no idea like that whole like reptilian thing is like a big deal on the Alex Jones show I had no idea that that was like had it had origins in anti-semitism this was a thing too though that I was like pretty fascinated by it because again my big complaint with dia is that it's so far away from denver and that i was always like denver doesn't need an airport of this scale well it turns out according to this article uh the airport's enormous layout according to miss stegman was actually a visionary effort to factor in future growth and efficiency and if anything the design should have been more ambitious it was intended to support 50 million uh let me uh travelers a year but nearly 70 million people passed through last year and nearly 100 million a year are expected by 2030 geez louise to address the squeeze the airport recently began a 1.3 billion dollar project to upgrade and expand its great hall which is like so what you're telling me is that my complaint about dia is it's too far away and too big and it turns out it's not far away enough and not big enough yeah

Yeah. You know what I mean? Like I said, it's serving.

I mean, as you just alluded to, it's in that part of the country where it's serving a whole bunch of different communities.

Right. And it's kind of it's sort of this jump off to the you know, it's in the West, but it's not all the way over on the coast. It's kind of a jump off to, I think, a lot of points, both East and West. You know what I mean? It's not exactly it's not O'Hare, but it's it's located in an area where I think it's probably convenient to get to a lot of other places. The other thing about this article that stuck out to me, they're talking about all of this art that's in the Denver International Airport, and they talked to this professor of global contemporary art at the University of Denver. Her name is Sarah Magnata, and she's talking about this public art that's there, and she said, I actually think this is the best way to view art. when it kind of happens to you dr magneto said it's art that is made part of everyday life and you're forced to encounter it whether you want to or not which can be a really powerful thing and a starting point for conversation and it started to have that had me thinking about the art that's in c-tack because remember we've talked about that truly bizarro thing where it's like a magician and they get in a tube and then like we looked this up one day yeah i don't know if it was a rat hole or a rabbit hole but we went down a hole on this thing yeah and like i think that's a really interesting way to talk about art like because you know if you were just being extremely parsimonious you would say why do we spend so much money on art projects in public spaces like airports when mostly people just want to get there they want to get on their plane they want to get where they're going but it is an interesting idea to have art sort of in for lack of a better word sort of foisted upon you to where you because maybe you're not the kind of person i'm certainly not who spends a lot of time in art museums but i see a lot of art when i'm in airports and i think about it you know pdx has some really interesting stuff they have this area you walk through where just all these bird sounds are playing and i have to say like when i get home and i walk through this corridor by the way it's annoying because the reason you have to go through this corridor is because they've been they blocked off the main way to get through pdx because it's been under construction for like the whole time i've lived here so you're really being rerouted But as you're being rerouted, you hear these bird sounds and I hear these sounds when I'm getting home sometimes on a Sunday night and I look forward to it like it comforts me. It's audio art, you know, I love that, too.

You know, I went back to I know we rat hold on this a while back, too, but I went back to the shoreline dump yesterday to deliver to deliver a bunch of trash. Hey, and how much did your whole thing weigh? Oh, by the way, you were you were right. I first of all, should I just end it there? you were right yeah i'm good with that i don't know how much it weighed but you're right for actual trash disposal like that it's up it's like a flat fee up to 300 pounds so wow yeah so i was definitely below that i was a little confused because i i'd remembered it was like 18 last time but that's for yard waste they still charge you for yard waste and even recycling there and so it's like a different it's different fee structure but yeah so it's like 30 30 and 25 cents for up to 300 pounds so it was one of those things i was like should i have thrown those chairs away in the garage i can't afford not to throw the chairs away uh but anyway we kept the chairs but i was going to say that there's that public art as you kind of drive in that is made from big truck tires but like inside the tires and inside the wheel area are these speakers so as you're driving into the dump with your window down because your window is automatically down because you just talked to the teller as you drove through the the preliminary waiting area um your window is already down and then it makes all these like kind of animal sounds and it both is it looks compelling but also it's got this audible component to it it's like it just it's really striking and it like it brings pleasure to a trip to the dump it really does i mean easy mark i guess well but

i think that's also a really interesting idea for the art there because i think it also is sort of transmitting a message of like we do still live in the natural world even though we have sort of dominated it and and and sort of bent it to our will we are living in nature and when we throw stuff out sinks etc it has to somehow be reintegrated back into nature and i don't know how anyone behaves differently based on hearing that but this idea that we're doing this very unnatural thing as humans which is we create all of this shit and then we decide we want new shit i'm not trying to like say that i'm not trying to like single you out at all because there's nothing i love more than going to the dump and throwing stuff into that oh dude the sink broke

when it hit the bottom and you were hoping it was gonna break too are you shitting me of course but i there are also other people dumping stuff off there so i tried to make it seem like it wasn't my first trip to the dump you know what i mean like if i were totally by myself and it was just the workers and maybe like a security camera i wouldn't care if i look like a doofus and i would have been probably putting things over my head and throwing Thank you.

them down as hard as possible but there's like one of those rage rooms yes oh that is sort of tempting um but uh i was trying to be a little bit cooler about it and also not create more mess for the people who have to like kind of scoop it all up in the piles or whatever but when the sink kind of broke in half when i dropped it down the 15 20 feet whatever it is that was

satisfying yeah but it's yeah which is like it's deeply unnatural the way or at least it doesn't fit in with the other like forms of animal life on this planet the way that we build these environments and then we tear them down piece by piece and replace them with other pieces of environment and then have to throw it away and then it has to go back in the ground so the idea that you're hearing animal sounds it's like a subtle reminder that we do live on planet earth with other living beings yes that's kind of a nice thing to have there definitely yes at the

dump specifically it does make you think about the connection and and also like what what you're doing with the stuff in your car that you're about to dump uh the other thing i wanted to

mention today is two uh very i think good television programs one of them i've already talked about on the show which is the show somebody somewhere with bridget everett it's on hbo well i guess it's on max i don't know i had to watch so many promos for the new max andrew when i was waiting for the show to start oh really i have not seen that i've been watching a lot of hbo huh maybe i just have the maybe i have the low rent version but it's funny because you could really see that they're trying to make one big happy family with their content but these are wildly different levels of production yes and definitely there's a real i would say there's a real prestige gap between you can tell what the discovery shows are and what the hbo shows are

well supposedly and i think i said this and not to be super tedious here or more tedious but um i guess that's the argument for calling the whole thing max and then having a sub group under you know within the app that is called hbo so that hbo can still be a stand-in for quality high budget programming underneath this umbrella thing called max as opposed to having it all just like mixed up like hbo can still maintain a certain brand identity within max but i still think the thing is a mishigas oh wait i was told that things are not a mishigas things are just mishigas did you know that really i didn't know that at all yes listener rachel wrote and she said i don't know if you've heard from a bunch of other jewish listeners but and i and i looked it up because i've always heard it and same with on the radio today i heard somebody say a myriad of and that's wrong too it should be myriad and mishigas is the same thing it's like oh mishigas is like insanity it was total mishigas not it was a total mishigas this is i have always said a mishigas me too and so i'm gonna try i'm gonna try to do it right because i love that word we've learned something

today uh don't make jokes about lizard people and also it's just mishigas just mishigas Shabbat Shalom so anyway this show Somebody Somewhere is really good I would highly recommend it it's starring this woman Bridget Everett it's set in Kansas she's somebody who's kind of a big deal in New York these days she had this cabaret show the thing is the cabaret show like her whole thing with that is not really for me like it's not a style of you know she famously would sort of come out and drink a lot of champagne and be very bawdy with the audience and kind of you know go up and you know sort of just be very sexually provocative and stuff like that kind of that level of comedy that kind of comedy doesn't really hit for me all that much but it's funny because the show could not be more of the opposite it's just played so subtly and it's a really great representation also of like queer life because her character is living in manhattan kansas but then kind of finds this little community of of queer folk and people that are just like into stuff that generally the manhattan kansas population is not really vibing with it's just a really beautiful uh show that is i just always every episode when i'm done i'm like oh man i

wish there was more of this to watch so i only just started season yeah okay they just started season two because i remember you telling me this exact story before now and i didn't know why so there there's a new season season two i see gotcha sorry i missed that part gotcha um but then the

other thing that i watched yesterday that i was just like pretty pretty knocked over by was john Mulaney's new comedy special on Netflix it's called Baby J I will say this I have sort of had I wouldn't say mixed feelings about John Mulaney I've always thought he was funny I was never quite as obsessed with his stand-up as some other people were or other people like you know who really love comedy there was something about his you know his stand-up before that felt a little bit like it was a shtick or something because he has a very he had a very kind of specific cadence how he would tell jokes and you know he just it almost felt like a character to me where I think what I like in comedy is when I feel like I'm getting some real truth out of somebody and of course as everyone knows John Mulaney went they had an intervention he went to rehab he got divorced he's you know now in a different relationship with a kid it was kind of a big for people that care about that kind of stuff. It was sort of a big story.

And this special is so interesting because it just is basically him talking about his about the intervention and about kind of what was going on with his drug use and about rehab. And it is so funny. He has a bit about equine therapy, which, you know, I've been like I was talking about going and doing that like years ago. I still think it would be interesting. but he was he was talking about equine therapy when he's in rehab like and how you know you can if you sort of if you make it through the rehab and you get to some level you're allowed to go out and like do this equine therapy where you stand next to a horse and he was like basically his joke was like i feel really bad for the horses like the horse grows up thinking it's gonna like win the kentucky derby and instead it just has like a junkie patting it going if you i'm told that if you if you lift up your leg that way it means i'm ready to have my own apartment which i laughed so hard at that joke based on somebody who wanted to do equine therapy probably still needs to do it but it was a tote my point is it's a different john mulaney vibe Than the other kind of more staccato More sort of performative More whatever that he was doing It really feels like this guy went through The ringer And came out the other side And just has now this level of kind of Honesty with the audience That really worked for me It's just him telling some very interesting stories That of course do have jokes woven into them But if you have not checked out Baby J I would highly recommend that as well

Veves watched it the other night And was telling me how great it was too and i've been hearing so like i know my friend saw him i think maybe in tacoma i don't know if ben was there too or not um but somewhere somewhere on tour somewhat recently i think it was around um thanksgiving that he was telling me i'd just seen him and that he was talking about a lot of the recovery stuff and and talking about how like how maddie i can't remember exactly what the deal was being mad at nick kroll for not being there in person but being there on zoom instead and being like oh if this is so important to you why are you on zoom but did i assume he did not redo this one of my favorite i'm with you on john mulaney like i some of his stuff really makes me laugh but i'm not like i know that some people were like really really into him and i don't follow him i also know his voice from things like big mouth and and that spider-man into the spider verse thing so i kind of enjoy him generally speaking but i'm certainly no john mulaney expert but um did we ever talk and maybe i know about this because you played it for me about his monologue on SNL in the past year or so where again he's talking about being out of the hospital and being on his journey to recovery but then talking about how he had to reach out to his dealer and say hey I need to take you out of my phone now he talks about that in the special and does he do the whole bit where he talks about like and the guy's like oh that's great you should get clean and then he's like wait a second how do I know you again and then like it turns out the whole the whole thing is this guy has just been selling him drugs because he's not a drug dealer but he just cares about John Mulaney so he started finding safe drugs for him and he's like I'm the only user who has taken a good person and made them a dealer usually it's the other way around so he does that

whole bit in the special does that bit in the in the special good it is the guy's like he's like what do you do the guy's like I'm a painter yeah right right and malaney's like how did we how did this start he goes how did you start being my drug dealer he goes you just kept asking right like like it's a really kind of yeah like again i i found to be the perfect amount of storytelling and humor it wasn't just like peace and love too i mean i like the moth but it wasn't just like the moth where malaney is just He was not dispensing with or getting rid of his comedic chops, but he was just doing it in this way that the stories are really riveting. And as somebody who certainly has some pretty questionable relationship with alcohol and have dabbled in various things, a lot of what he was talking about, I really saw myself in that or my potential self in that. So maybe I have an extra interest in it. um but uh but yeah it's just really it's it's really good and it just feels like he's hitting this perfect sort of spot now of of like again not so much of the shtick which i was a little bit which which sort of wore me down um a little he also did this thing that was very interesting where at the beginning of the show he sort of looks up in the crowd and he notices that there's like i don't know like a 12 year old kid and he starts talking to the kid and it becomes i was basically his thing is like he's a little nervous about having like a kid in the audience because he's going to be talking about drug use and things like that and i was trying to think was that a plant or not because when they do these specials i mean it's a whole thing the taping of it and if you do Thank you.

something like if you decide to start doing crowd work and it doesn't work and now it's it's baked into the show like that was your special like and i was trying to figure out the like i was putting myself in john mulaney's shoes thinking did he plan this is he doing a calculation on like this is working so i'm because he keeps going back to it and i'm like that's a really rolling the dice if you're doing anything that's not the plan in a show like that that's being filmed for netflix I mean, maybe they just did multiple Maybe he did multiple nights and they just, you know They liked the stuff with the kid, but I was like That's a daring move if you're doing this One time, and now you're gonna Like, you're gonna make this part of the show

You know, I know That I was at a stand-up Special one time, and they were Filming it for You know, whatever their feature special Was gonna be, and I might have been Brian Posehn, this isn't interesting, I'm just trying to remember Brian Posehn was here, I can't remember if it was In Seattle or LA, it sounds like it'd be more of an LA thing but I swear it might have been up here in Seattle by the way I don't know if you're a big Brian Posehn fan he was touring again recently was again in Tacoma I think two weekends ago but did you happen to see he posted something on social media he had like flipped his family's minivan like it was in like one of the worst he posted this picture of one of the worst auto wrecks I've ever seen before but he said don't worry Tacoma I'm still going to be there if I don't miss my flight and I don't think it was a joke wow no I did not see that anyway that's my contribution to the conversation what were the adults saying uh the adults were saying everyone should watch somebody

somewhere and probably check out baby j uh john mulaney's uh comedy special because it's pretty

good 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 i've made a huge mistake andrew it was uh kind of warm in the apartment when i was getting started this morning so i put i actually put the cool air on and now it's the air is too

cool i'm freezing in here do you have to go to the bathroom too because sometimes those go hand

in hand that's a bad feeling i sort of always have to go to the bathroom i made a stir fry last night

with way too much garlic in it so that's not helping oh i just mean pee usually sometimes like when if i'm in a cold air-conditioned office and i have to pee it's kind of they work in tandem

i have to do everything you have to do all the different ways i have a quick question Everyone in my life Who I've asked this Has one answer And I am the outlier I don't particularly have a problem Using the minced garlic That's like already diced up In the little glass jar Everyone I know who cooks Is like that's a That's a Shonda Like you should definitely Cut up your own garlic Where do you come down on that?

I don't want to Point fingers or judge I just never use that stuff It's just never really come up I just have one of those We're a family with two different garlic I don't think they're mincers or crushers or whatever I like the kind that's in a handle And you grip it like pliers Genevieve doesn't like that because it's hard to clean out Those things are tough to clean But I'm the one who always cleans it out I don't understand why But she has another one that you sort of rock on the counter And that will also sort of mince And kind of crush and mince the garlic But that's what we do I just like playing with garlic

The process can be satisfying, but sometimes when I'm just like, and I don't cook very much, but sometimes like last night, I just wanted to make some broccoli and rice, and so I was cooking up the rice, and I was cooking up the broccoli, but I wanted to add some garlic in with the broccoli, and it's just so convenient to just take that thing out of the fridge. But what happens is I use Then I end up really over-garlicking things Because if I had to cut, hand, forage all this garlic I would, you know, I might do like a I don't know, like a couple cloves But this is just like, hey, one more spoonful And it's just smelling amazing Because you're getting that garlic You know, that smell of garlic cooking up in the pan So the downside of me using that minced Pre-cut stuff, pre-minced stuff Is I tend to overdo it And hence have to go to the bathroom

You know what? I have a great voicemail I'm going to play for you here So I'll try not to belabor this. But one thing that I've been doing the past couple of times, I've made tacos. So when I make tacos, we make them very, very basic. I just take like chicken thighs and I season them with like a taco seasoning rub or something. Heat them up on the skillet. Try to brown them as much as possible. Then just chop those babies up. Put them on tortillas with just like basically chopped up tomatoes, onion, and cilantro, right? Like some hot sauce. I keep it very basic. But one thing I always like when I go to, like, a Chipotle or whatever is, like, when there's some sort of corn-based salsa. So what I've been doing, and it's very rare that I don't follow – like, I don't really know what I'm doing here. But, I mean, it's very simple. But, like, I've been just buying a bag of frozen corn and just, like, cooking that up with some garlic and hitting that with some, like, cilantro and cumin and – Yum. And what do you call it? Not paprika. What's the – I guess chili powder is what I'm trying to think of there.

or whatever and it's like and then what i do though and i don't know if this sounds good or terrible to people is i like to make that first and then let it really cool off like i'll even scrape some into a plate or something and like put it in the fridge because when i want to use it as a topping on my taco i actually want it to be cold kind of like the tomatoes or whatever and that has been that has up leveled my taco game i will tell you that much i just had it last night which is why that sounds delicious and i was thinking about the garlic i put in there so okay A good story. Now, let me tell you this story from listener Abby. Actually, let Abby tell this story. I think that Abby sets it up perfectly.

Hey, Demis. This is Abby from Pittsburgh. I just finished listening to the episode about cart marks and the shopping cart theory about what you do with your shopping cart, being a window into your character. and I developed a similar theory about hotel rooms because there's such a level of anonymity like you're in a different city this isn't your space you're not responsible for addressing whatever situation you leave behind um and you'll probably never interact with the person who who does um so I worked hotel housekeeping for a couple summers while I was in college and it was a pretty miserable job for all the reasons you might expect especially as a young woman uh yeah it was just people are gross in every sense of the word so i would survive the day by um like going into a room and analyzing the character of the person who had just left the room starting with the obvious things of like did they leave a tip is there buffalo sauce on the bedspreads and and into more quirky things like why did this person need 17 miniature bottles of coconut lime rubina body lotion what were they hoping to accomplish by taping the remote control to the wall above the thermostat and why is there underwear in the freezer and at what point on their you know on the next leg of their journey are they going to realize like oh my gosh i left my underwear in the freezer at that holiday and someone got paid $7.50 an hour for taking my underwear out of the freezer. So, all that to say, do be nice to your housekeepers. Do leave the tips and if you're going to eat in bed, at least use a towel. Power out.

Why do you think somebody would

tape, Luke, a remote control to the wall? That sounds like an urban legend that says it'll trick because sometimes in hotels, the thermostat is hard to control because they don't want you wildly like you know swinging it between hot and cold so there'll be kind of a governor on it and they could see a world in which there's some like supposed hack where it's like if you tape the remote control above the thermostat then you can get around their controls or i mean that's the only thing i could think of

yeah i i don't know i was also wondering if it's something like you know you tape a you tape a gun above the commode in case you need to murder somebody, but maybe I've watched too much of I almost said Goodfellas. What is that? The Godfather, right?

Is that The Godfather? Maybe. The Godfather is a real cultural kind of blank spot for me. I have seen the films, but only once, and it didn't make a huge impression on me. I've said this before on the show. The problem was I had already watched The Sopranos. Yeah, very different vibe. But also, like, to me, The Sopranos is more my speed as far as, like, the What I would say is the kind of Naturalistic Kind of performances like And of course I think most people Would say well the Sopranos kind of only exist Because of the Godfather I know the Godfather is considered The height of filmmaking but I had Already seen like a more updated more relatable Version of that story and a faster moving

One like the Godfather movies are very Slow I mean I like Them I remember finally I think being allowed to Watch them maybe in eighth or ninth grade My dad loved the first godfather movie but he spoiled it like he was so strict we weren't allowed to watch those types of movies where when we were young but he would tell us all about his favorite scenes out of that movie so by the time i was old enough to watch it i could a lot of the shocking scenes um were already somewhat spoiled for me but then the godfather part two is a very comp very complicated plot slow movie flashbacks back to old italy a lot of courtroom scenes that that were very subtle and so i have an appreciation for it but you compare that to like like i just almost said goodfellas or even casino which would come later which is such a flashier faster vibe with a lot of humor you know like the the godfather movies don't have a lot of humor in them right whereas goodfellas it's a very dark scenario but there's some there's some you know there's some humor in there as well so yeah i totally i totally get that by the way i couldn't agree

with that caller more about treating the housekeeping staff with the utmost respect that

can which includes tipping somebody somebody else said this but i've sort of taken it to heart i think might have been hodgman was like let's say you have like let's say that you look in your wall you're thinking of leaving like five bucks for the housekeeper and you look in your wall and all you have is a 20 leave the 20 you will not miss that 20 and you will make somebody's day like always just like err on the side of being as generous and also just as courteous as you can to folks that are cleaning hotel rooms because that is a truly thankless job yeah um there's always

that moment when you're leaving a tip even if you're like writing a tip out and like i don't know if you're like me luke you know i just always my first instinct is like we'll figure out what 20 on the entire thing is and then you know maybe throw a little bit more candy on top if you want or something but like that's basically it but sometimes i'm just like i just get into this automatic mode of figuring out the 20 and then you're like writing out so like whatever the tip would be like 745 or like why am i writing 745 out right oh well they don't they weren't 55 cents extra good like what the fuck sorry hey one other thing on that you can leave

a tip on your card oh you're checking out i've done that many times if you don't have cash you can just ask the i mean at the hotels that i've been to you could say hey i want to leave a tip for housekeeping can you just add that they have some kind of line for it so you know yeah that's one of those things again i'm just restating what the caller said but it's sort of it's like the dave ross principle right i feel like dave our former colleague dave ross is the kind of person who just just was such a upstanding person kind of when no one's watching which i just really admired about him and continue to admire about him like just just a solid solid person and it's like being good to the people that are not given a lot of thought is an indicator of where you are sort of as a person it's weird because i'm a terrible person but i do do that with housekeeping like so maybe there are some people like me who are both amoral but also for some reason are really interested in making sure the housekeeping staff is doing okay right yeah um i did also i don't want to sprain my arm patting myself on the back but i was at new seasons here in portland buying some groceries on on sunday and i wheeled the cart out to my car put all my stuff in and wheeled the cart back to the cart corral as the person who worked at new seasons and was collecting the carts was putting them in and she looked at me she looked me right in the eyes said thank you so much for bringing this back and i was like yes birds for the win i had

to park in the Lowe's parking lot just like two weekends ago and it was so crowded I had to park you know kind of far back in the parking lot which does not bother me it does not bother me I don't mind a little stroll through a parking lot but the only spot was way in the back of the parking lot and somebody left their goddamn cart like kind of there were two spots next to each other and somebody just left their cart right on the line between them I had to stop my car in the middle of the parking lot and push the cart up onto the curb so that I could simply park my car that is something that that you shouldn't have to do everybody i mean just like who was the that would never happen if cartnarks were there that's what i called cartnarks um here's what i'm going to do i have i've been struggling with something i have two voicemails that i pulled off the voicemail line um earlier this week or late last week and i find them both charming in a certain way but they both involve vomiting and so i am well actually me even saying that you know what i was going to say I'll put up a poll do people want to hear Two voicemails tomorrow in a special Vomit centric Voicemail segment but I'm also like first Of all why and then secondly I just Told you what the outcome of both of these Stories are I feel like I've really I would like to hear them you would want To should I put up a poll to see if listeners Want to hear you know what let's get a little bit Of hashtag engagement I'm going to do That on slack I'm literally on a web Page right now that says how to create A poll on slack because I was trying to do it and it doesn't seem as intuitive as I thought it was going to be so if I can put this on slack I will let the slackster tens vote on whether or not they want a vomit roundup although I am a little bit disappointed in myself because do I take away some of the interestingness of these stories if you know that that's where they're both leading

but I think it's good for people to know what they're getting into that's true too yeah once again I was listening to the Howard Stern show the other day and they were discussing I won't actually even say it but somebody was discussing a medical phenomenon that can happen that literally had me feeling like i was not imminently going to vomit but like getting in the neighborhood and i don't have a a super easily triggered gag reflex i'm not the kind of person that if i hear someone throwing up it then causes me to need to do it or whatever like i'm i'm not affected that much but hearing about what this thing was that they were talking about it made me start to get that like over salivating in your mouth. That's kind of your body telling you something's about to happen.

happened yep i was like this is this is intense anyway so hopefully we will not we will not create

that environment for the listeners tomorrow and who knows maybe they'll vote it down so i'll try to i'll try to post this immediately after the show now and that'll give us like a little less than 24 hours for people to weigh in and if you're not on slack and you feel strongly about this go to tbtl.net and under the contact us page you should see how you can uh sign up for slack

All right. That's going to do it for today's program. Thank you, everyone, for spending the time with us. We are going to be back here tomorrow with more Imaginary Radio for you. So we'll see you then. In the meantime, have a great Tuesday. Take care of yourselves, and please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

Hey, it's Kim from St. Pete. I was just listening while I'm cleaning my house, and I hear from the corner of my ear Terry Schiavo. So, of course, I'm like, what the fuck are they talking about? so I went back and rewound and was listening to how Nick said he lives in Pinellas Park which is where I grew up and went to elementary school next to Terry Schiavo's home that she lived in and I just remember one year we walked over there and like sang Christmas carols to the elderly people that lived there and I'm pretty sure Terry Schiavo was there when he sang to them So that was fun. That's my connection to Pinellas Park. And, yeah, it's just Pinellas. Nothing exciting. I'm sure this is not going to be played and made no sense. But bye. Power out.