Muse

Tell me about yourselves. What sort of music do you guys like? Rock? Yeah. Funk? Yes. Country? Yeah. Hairband? Yeah. Yes. Synth? Yeah. Blues? Yes. Jazz? Yes. Yes. Jazz fusion? Yeah. You like sports, Jermaine? No. Brett, sports fan? Not really. Brett, you read? Yeah. What do you read? I read the newspaper. Yeah. Favorite part of the newspaper, Jermaine, what is it? What? Favorite part of the newspaper. What is it? Pages? Nope. Articles? Mm-mm. I don't really have a favorite part. Brett, you got a favorite part of the newspaper? Um, I like the stories about animals when they've escaped from the zoo. Cool. So you guys got any questions you want to ask me? No. No. Okay, so I'll flip it back. You guys ever grow a mustache?

T-T-T-B-T-M. Uh-oh, guess what day it is? Somebody tell me.

uh-oh what day is it it's friday friday gotta get down on friday everybody's looking forward

to the weekend were you just using a synthesizer nope so you mean to tell me that all of those sounds were coming from your body yep i'm the president of rap music and i need to work with

you right away target target okay t-bone time for some serious crunching

All right, hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Friday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. Hey, Gorgle, what's a toy-ger? My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host.

Hi, I'm sorry I didn't see you there. I was too busy blocking out the haters.

Coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center right here in Portland, Oregon, where it's another gray day. Boy, yesterday was just absolutely torrential around here. It was not great.

You know, you had to get wet, though.

But today, at least, things seem to be drying out, and we are in excellent shape to bring you episode 3938 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. Including a story today, which we'll be talking about during Top Stories, of the mysterious dumping of some 500 pounds of cooked pasta in the woods of New Jersey.

Oh, my God, that's so crazy. Why?

We will try to figure out what is going on in, I think it's Old Bridge, New Jersey. Also, the funeral directors of America would like to have a word with me.

How dare you?

They have sent a formal response to something I said. And we will give them equal time We'll read the formal response from the Funeral Directors of America Here on the show today Plus it's Friday so we've got some music for your weekend And we've got this guy The handsome young stranger himself Also known as the longest running co-bro of the show Hey Romano Maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships Their elegance And all that rigging He's Andrew Welsh and he's joining me right now Good morning my friend

Good morning Luke Now I need to ask you before you go forward With this conversation about the Funeral Directors Association is this embargoed or is this for immediate release let's see here well the actually

the email that I'm seeing here says any thoughts on the below idea because it's the second it's kind of one of those hey moving this back to the top of your inbox thing although this person this is a PR person that works for the National Funeral Directors Association of America they sent it to my tbtl email it's clear that if you're trying to get a hold of me and you don't know how to do it the tbtl email is what must come i mean i guess if you go to tb if you if you were to gorgle me and then you were to go to gorgle what's a toy girl so if you're to gorgle me and see that i work on a thing called tbtl and then you went to tbtl.net and then you scrolled down that's probably the best easiest way to find a contact point for me because it's also where my neighbor not like

And I don't want to be rude to the people who designed our website, but maybe I feel free to say this now. Luke, go to tbtl.net and see if you can find, I mean, this would be a fun experiment right now. Go to tbtl.net and see if you can find a contact info for you. Oh, you know what? We might have, you know what? Our boy James might have made a special page to make it a little bit easier. It used to be one of the easiest ways to hide. If you were trying to get off the grid, you would put your contact information on TVTL.net. But anyway, so somehow they found that email address, which is interesting.

Well, because I've also noticed that. Well, OK, let's see. Contact. I'm at the very bottom of the page. I'm on contact. Let's see. That's a general line. Yeah, I don't know. Our general email inbox. My neighbor at the other house, Brian, remember he was trying to get in touch with me about my ragweed situation. Yeah. And he called the TVTL voice. Yeah, I heard.

I hate that. I have the voicemail. I won't play it for you, but at the time, I didn't know what the situation was, and I just got this voicemail from somebody. I'm trying to reach Luke Burbank, and you said that he's a very nice guy, but in the voicemail, when somebody's calling the voicemail line for personal business, I was shocked to hear that. I'm with the law firm of... Yes, exactly right. You've been served. Then he started dancing, which is not what I was expecting.

I guess my point is that those this being how the the NFDA is trying to get in touch with me. And then also that voicemail from my neighbor just makes me think there must be something about the SEO around TBTL and me that causes that to be the portal, at least occasionally.

Oh, that's good. So anyway. Yeah. And this is, of course, in relation to the CBS Sunday morning piece that you produce that aired a while back now. Right. About alternatives to the funeral industry as it is now.

Yeah, the headline, the email subject line, NFDA responds to, quote, Titan Caskets online sales CBS Sunday morning piece. And it's basically this person who emailed me says, I represent the National Funeral Directors Association, the largest association in the world for the funeral service profession and serves more than 19,700 individual members who represent more than 10,200 funeral homes in the United States and 49 countries around the world. god this press release just jumps off the page yeah no it's you understand why i couldn't wait

to read this right boy that sounds interesting we should have done a story about you the people who dominate the industry and have nothing interesting because you've dominated it for generations like i i just i sorry i sort of have a feeling i know where this is going as somebody who used to kind of deal with responses like this and it's like yeah the reason we did a story on the little guys is because they're doing something new and different it's weird to list your bona quantifieds as being like we represent everybody in the world right exactly and also in a way that

is a little um wordy um maybe a little bit uh numerically dense yes the basic issue is we did this story and it was about it was for the money episode of cbs sunday morning which is could really be called the finance episode it's once a year and all the stories relate to something about the economy or your personal finance or whatever and this story was hey you know you legally are allowed to buy a casket from like anywhere you want if you if you know if someone you love passes away and that's what they wanted you don't have to buy it from the funeral home you can buy it from costco you could also buy it from the place that we talked to they're called titan caskets anyway i mean it was a pretty straightforward piece it was certainly not the the the point wasn't to try to be mean to the people who direct funerals i'm sure there's a lot of lovely people that do that but it is something that does cost a lot of money and a lot of times people are in a tough spot when someone passes away you're already grieving and then you're trying to make difficult financial decisions so the thing that's funny though is that the official response from the national funeral directors association is just this funeral directors offer a wide variety of options to meet financial needs and wishes oh you should that's their story that's that's that's what that's that's their response which you know i mean they could make that argument which is fine but it's i was when i got this i was like because i also got some pushback from the story we did about gas stoves that one the natural gas association was not happy like they were borderline like we're gonna sue you or something um because of talking about how there is some pretty compelling data that you know gas stoves in the home are are kicking out some stuff that you probably don't want to be breathing day in and day out in small amounts but even so it's like hey it's worth talking about also the infrastructure of them is problematic for cities like electric is a better is a better thing for the health of the people and the health of the city probably but so they were like they the natural gas people they don't mess around they've got like you know

half of washington bought oh yeah they're all wearing white cowboy hats i mean exactly like

they you know so so uh so they were like they were not pleased this one was much more genteel it was just kind of like we would like to point out and in fact maybe in the way a funeral director might just talk to you hi we would just like to really establish that we do have price points for every customer and we do our very best to help streamline the process uh we have a variety of options to meet the financial needs and wishes of our clients that's what they would like to officially say now i don't think we're going to put a like block out four minutes of sunday morning for me to sit down with a funeral director and give their response but i will say here on tbtl the official position of the national funeral directors association which by the way is a word I have a hard time saying it's like rural juror to me funeral director I don't know why I want to

swallow the end of funeral director yeah I got to think about it I got it kind of does a little

thing there the official I just want to I want to in because I don't control what happens on CBS Sunday morning I can't just call my bosses and go all right We've got to put the funeral directors on there. But did they think about going directors of funerals? Because that's a lot easier to say. Directors of funeral. Luke Burbank responds to the NFDA's response to the Titan Caskets online sales.

Did you ever think about making it directors of funeral? There's a harder version of that word I was trying to work in there, too, though. Isn't there a word that is like a funeral? Funereal. Now, that's the one, the adjective. That's what gets you. Yeah.

Yeah. So I want it. But listen, for the record, the response from the NFDA is that funeral directors, also known as directors of funeral, offer a wide variety of options to meet the financial needs and wishes of their clients. So there you go.

So let me just get this straight. So this was not a public release. I guess when I was asking you those questions at the very beginning of the show, I guess I misunderstood the thing. I thought they released a press release. This was an email to you just saying, hey, if you know, this would be our response were you to give it airtime and maybe encouraging you to do so. But it's I believe they did release a press. They did release a press release that went along with it. Now, when you get something like this, I assume that you don't usually respond at all. And this sounds nice enough. But when the white cowboy hats from the Natural Gas Association call you up and they're like saber rattling and saying, you know, we'll get legal. I mean, you personally, you don't even touch that, right? Like you forward that to a producer who forwards it to legal or whatever at CVS.

I think that's the that's the course of events. And I don't know. I don't want to overstate that. I don't know if they were if they were actually saying, like, you know, cease and desist from airing this piece. I think it was just definitely a more pointed response as opposed to this kind of, like I said, sort of pretty friendly, pretty genteel response from the funeral, the directors of funeral. But, yeah, the funny thing is I think now the state of New York is considering – sorry, I'm also battling a cat here who wants to – oh, buddy, I'm sorry. I gave her a little spray, but I think I hit her right on her nose. um uh in new york state now i believe that they are considering actually stopping uh you know the the sort of building of new infrastructure for new gas stoves something they've also done in eugene oregon here although that was not to go down this boring um gas hole but in eugene oregon they also passed a rule saying we're not going to build new um residential buildings and run gas lines to them but then the the natural gas association paid for a citizens initiative to basically pause that rule and subject it to a um you know a ballot initiative or whatever you call it and it was funny because i heard a story on opb that was like this initiative which costs i don't know i'm gonna guess at a number here a half a million dollars or something to fund like the getting of the signatures and everything it had one donor and that was northwest natural the gas people in the state of oregon so um so they kind of have managed to to table it for the for the moment in eugene but i guess there's reports that in white or in new york rather they're considering um doing this thing which i don't i mean to me it just look it's i think that the the misnomer from people like tucker carlson which we featured in our story was that joe biden that joe brandon is coming for your gas stove that's in your home like i have one here in this apartment i'm in like as if like somebody is going to come into this apartment and rip my gas stove out of my warm live hands and carry it down the hall and you know throw it through the the trash chute or something that's never been on the table no one's proposing that they're just saying hey maybe when we're building new things we should think about like what's the best way to do this But anyway, to answer your question, I did not get involved in the, you know, everything goes, all these stories we do have to go through legal and standards and practices and diversity and equity inclusion. I mean, there are a lot of folks who get eyes on any of these TV stories. So I kind of feel like personally, once it gets on TV, it's gone through the channels that I can have it sent through, you know, our producer can. And I'll let CBS take the wheel from there.

Yeah, and that's something that I've been seriously considering for TBTL going forward as well Starting July 3rd Yeah, because we're not going to have the protective legal umbrella of American public media Well, we have our Danny's So we do have our Danny's So let's just say that you and I do about, I don't know On average, I've been trying to figure this out lately On average, I think we turn in probably a 90-minute shows Some are shorter than that, but some are longer Maybe it's more like an hour and ten minutes is the TBTL average

I think that's probably about the average. I think 90 minutes these days in this economy, 90 minutes definitely feels like the edge of the show. Like we occasionally have done three hours. program it's been a long time yeah we've done yeah that's probably true and that's something i should probably remember but i've been sort of saying on average 90 but you're right maybe it's like the the average is a 75 minute show let's just say that um so what we're gonna have to do is and i think that we can probably use ai technology to help maybe scrub this a little bit as well but we'll um take every day show we'll run it every minute through the lawyers and i feel like more than one lawyer more than one pass through on this so if we're doing this right and we're handing it through the chain. I feel like we can get Monday's show posted by Thursday, probably. Sure. And as long as... Let's do Wednesday just to err on the side of caution. Oh, Luke, this is something I want to tell you about. This is bizarre. You know how on the occasion that you and I do something and we post it to YouTube or we stream it on YouTube? We've done that very sporadically, but mostly for TBTL-athons. We did some live streaming on YouTube and then you and I recorded our big announcement a few weeks ago and posted it to YouTube later. And I've told you how shocked I am when I get some sort of alert from YouTube that says, hey, you played Denver, the last dinosaur theme song from some 1990s cartoon for about 15 seconds. And we flagged it like and it just flags. It has all this like and again, it must be some sort of intelligence, right? Some sort of some sort of scrubbers of all YouTube content. I also told you how impressed I was and also, you know, kind of cool, kind of scary, as my friend Avishai used to say, as this Internet technology was new in the early 2000s. But, like, I would I posted a full also a great song by the shins. Yeah, I posted a full 1990s Mariners playoff game to YouTube just on, like, my private channel. And YouTube in the uploading process, it would scan for any copyrighted material. It didn't take it down, but it identified specifically famous plays within the broadcast, something that I grabbed off of VHS and digitized myself and uploaded. Somehow YouTube was able to identify somebody, you know, stealing a home run at the wall because it's been it's a play that has been celebrated in history. And somehow the robots were able to identify that. That blows my mind. OK, that's just the setup for what I'm about to tell you. yesterday I was working on some things and I went back to the YouTube video that you and I posted a few weeks ago. Again, this was a pre-recorded, I don't know what, a 30-minute segment that you and I did talking about our plans to leave APM and strike out independently. We posted it to YouTube people. We got a lot of good feedback from listeners saying, hey, you should do this more, which we're going to try to do. But now that it's been up there for a few weeks, Luke, the internet

or youtube automatically divided up our conversation into segments not divided up as in like you can you can download them individually but if you go to that video now you can hover over sections of the video and it has an automatic description of what you and i are talking about there so transcribed it not transcribed it but like it it'll here let me see if i can actually get to it the problem is a little bit difficult to get to but um like it'll say like big announcement at the beginning but then it'll like there will be some things that are like a little bit hard to um hard that are lost in translation a little bit like i think we were saying like tens but it didn't understand we were saying tens or something but it's like so if you were interested in this video but you just wanted to skip to a certain part where we talk about something like one you can skip to a part where it says gratitude and thanks and that's probably where i'm talking about how great it's been to work with apm through all of this and like we didn't do that and a human didn't do that like youtube just decided to i guess help index our video for us it's very strange the summary is

wild to me like i can see a world in which the program can just take the words that we spoke in english and then try to transcribe them i mean that's by today's standards a fairly straightforward thing and i noticed that a ton on tiktok like everything on tiktok is trans yeah transcribed now um but this is different this is now so it must start with taking a transcription and then based on what it knows pattern recognition taking out what you know sort of the gist of it is someone should start a podcast called the gist by the way i think that'd be a great so it must start with the transcription and then take the sections and then somehow develop what it thinks is kind of the the gist of what that section is about and then put that up so somebody doesn't have to read every boring word that we're saying but they will get a general sense of what we're

talking about exactly really something now i just sent an email i sent this link to you via email i don't know if that is helpful for what we're trying to do as a podcast right now but i'll walk you through it because I'm on the page. So the first looks like three and a half minutes has been identified as intro. And then if I go to the next one, it says, what happened to TBTL? We talked about what happened to TBTL from about four minutes on to about eight minutes. The next one is TBTL newsletter, something that we talk about a lot. TBTL relaunch, it identified. Real expenses. I don't even know what that means. Advertising. That's probably when we were talking about how we don't plan on having automatic ads inserted into our show. Read. No one really wants to spend money on the show yet. Hopefully that'll change at some point. You're going to love this. There's a gratitude section for about two minutes. The next one is benign neglect. We talk about for about four minutes.

Is this clip 43 minutes long?

Yeah, actually, it is longer than I said. Yeah, that was the open of the show that day. We talked for quite some time.

Whoa, I thought this was like 10 minutes or something.

No, it was our full segment. It was our first full segment of the show that day where we talked about all this cyber trading. That's the bad translation. cyber trading future of tbtl yeah um that's incredible tb telethon instead of tbtl if on it's tb telethon live show content tent and then content tent is what the last big section is content i invite you into the content i honestly think we should build a content tent we should

go to south by southwest we offer those as part of the thon at the dazzling donor level you'll receive a content tent which is a tent in your house that you can sit in and listen to tb chill so that other people in your household don't have to deal with it there has been a content tent at

south by southwest at some point they would call that activated yeah activated marketing experience yeah so i don't know how so i guess they're called chapters officially here i was sort of fumbling my way through the beginning of that explanation but um yeah so something something out there divided us up into chapters including the content tent i can't watch any more of this video oh god

i love it when did i start looking like randy quaid well when you started worrying about star whackers well honestly you turn your back for a minute on the star whackers no it's fair hey what's the resolution on that because remember randy and evie quaid that was a big topic on this show for a long time because they they ducked out on all these obligations in the u.s or they were at least accused of it you know of of running up these extravagant elaborate hotel bills and at these very fancy places and then just not paying and then they just went to canada because of the supposed starwhackers i think evie um quade might be canadian in origin or something and are they just still up there like they never had to come back they never got extradited maybe the u.s is Like, we're not extraditing people over, like, hotel charges? That's a really good question.

You know, I had forgotten that they moved to Canada because I thought, didn't they get up to some shenanigans, for lack of a better word, in Florida? Weren't they, like, basically squatting in a mansion in Florida? Or am I making this part up?

They were squatting in a mansion somewhere. They had a huge hotel bill, I think, in California. I mean, they were basically being accused of theft, theft of services, you know, but for significant amounts of money. and and like sort of we're on the lamb to some degree i mean we're up in um we're up in by the way uh let's see i don't i don't know if evie quade is canadian i don't want to i don't want to put some uh our lawyers are going to kill me if i keep putting out misstatements about evie

say of all the things we're probably going to say about the quades i doubt that accusing her

of being canadian is one of the more problematic things um but like uh let's see here i'm just seeing a piece in the las vegas review journal from when was this oh 2015 uh randy quaid and evie quaid attempted to cross the u.s border from canada into the u.s and were detained at the high gate port of entry so as of 2015 they had been put in a vermont jail um let's see nearly a week after they were arrested trying to enter the u.s from quebec um the pair walked out of the courthouse wearing medical scrub-like jail uniforms. What a great judge, Evie Quaid told reporters. Totally fair. This is Vermont. This is why we crossed the border into Vermont. I knew that the people of Vermont, the judge, understand us. But let's see. The Quaids turned up in Canada in October 2010 after missing a California court appearance over felony vandalism charges. They were accused of doing more than $5,000 worth of damage to a property they once owned in Santa Barbara. Oh, part of that thing was they had owned a house and sold it and then didn't want to stop living in the house because of some reason, right? That I don't remember. I can't weigh in on that. Yeah, I think it's coming back to me now. I think part of the issue was they had owned a home in like Santa Barbara, sold it, but then refused to vacate the home they had sold. But let's see here. I'm seeing an article. just sent me that said that they bought a home in burlington yeah so this has some details this is

totally off the point of what we're talking about 2022 yeah so this is at least closer to now than

what i was yeah so here's what i found i just did a google news search and pulled the most recent randy quaid news so this is from november of 2022 so like what like seven months ago or what have you uh and it's from a independent journalism project out of vermont called seven days vermont's independent voice, right? Headline, Randy Quaid buys a home on Randy Lane in Burlington. Of course, that's Burlington, Vermont. And you see the photo. The reason I sent you this article is because you see the photo of this very humble house, a very, very small kind of rundown house on a small plot of land. And it says that they've essentially bought this with financing for $280,000, almost $281,000. And it's going to be the beginning of a project, a real estate project the Quades hope to purchase several other homes on the same street and make them more energy efficient. And they're already calling it Randy Quade Lane. But there's a I believe Evie is trying to do that. Yes, exactly. But that makes sense because your article just said something about that's why we came back down to Vermont. It seems like they're still in Vermont buying some buying

some property in Burlington. It sounds like this is I'm looking at another article from this same website seven days and this one is i only like to read the articles from 2015 and yeah no that's i was i was into covering the quads before it was popular i like their original stuff um but it sounds like the charges whatever charges uh were filed against them coming into vermont were dropped um back in 2015 um so that was it says they plan to move to lincoln where evie's ailing father lives and when a franklin county judge dismissed the charges against him that's where they headed um a few days later the lincoln fire chief found a note wedged in the station's door that he read over the phone to a reporter hey boys count me in for 200 hours and i wish to be your santa claus signed randy so it sounds like they are i guess you know living a quiet life in vermont and and the whatever the theft charges have just fizzled out or maybe it just wasn't worth it going after them. It's good to know you can steal $5,000. No, I mean, you know, if you just if you're willing to move to Vermont and also, by the way, get approved for a mortgage. I'm curious what Randy Quaid's current income streams are.

I got to give credit to seven days. The Vermont is well-revoiced, by the way, because they're giving a great backgrounder here. A lot of the stuff that you just covered. But again, this was written in 2022 and is looking back at that. It says they have a storied history in Vermont. They ended up here in 2015 after fleeing prosecution for squatting in their California home, et cetera, everything that you set up. But it says that they were apprehended at the border and held for six days in jail. But then it was all, yeah, it was thrown out when the judge said that the paperwork wasn't in order from California. So that's why they were free to go.

So I guess that's the last we've heard of them is that they're just living in Vermont doing the thing. He must get some kind of like SAG pension or something because, I mean, he was in some pretty big movies. He was in Independence Day. He was, of course, Cousin Eddie from Christmas Vacation. I mean, he's had he had a big career and there must just be if you if you've been in that many movies, there must be some sort of SAG SAG pension, Screen Actors Guild pension or something. Because I don't I haven't seen him being in anything else, you know, since this whole Starwacker thing started. Like, I haven't seen them doing anything to make money.

I forgot he was in Brokeback Mountain. I'm just looking at this as well, too. I mean, and do you not get residuals? Do you only get residuals for TV shows that go into syndication? You don't get like money if you're in vacation and that gets aired a lot in, you know, on television. Right. That doesn't that doesn't work for movie actors.

I do not know the answer to that, but I have to say I am I am always curious about actors who are in films and who seem to be fabulously wealthy when a lot of times now, if you're Tom Cruise or something and you're in a movie, you're obviously going to be, you know, you're first on the call sheet, as they say, and you're getting 30 million dollars or something. But actors who are just in various movies But then have some amazing home in LA But are not the top line folks The actual day rate for a lot of movies So the SAG mandated or whatever The Screen Actors Guild day rate on a film Is not like enough money That you can be in like two movies and retire Like it's a Again if you become a name And the people making the movie want you Then they'll have to make you a direct offer And they'll have to offer you like you know a million dollars or something But it's really weird to me Or it's something I don't fully understand How it is that there are people I can't think of a good example But how there are actors who have been in a handful of movies And then are just like financially set off of it because it might be like $4,000 a day or something. I don't know what the SAG minimum is. But it's not like, okay, great, you were in eight movies, particularly when it's somebody from like the 80s and they were in a handful of movie in the 80s. And then they're just living on a ranch in Santa Barbara. I'm like, how did you parlay that? Because on a day-to-day basis, and also if you're on a film and you shoot for 20 days, it's just the day rate times that many days. That's what you got paid for. It's not like TV where there are syndication rights as far as I understand. So the economics of all that are confusing to me.

Yeah, me too. Genevieve always quotes something that she read a long time ago, and so I'm telling this like a copy of a copy of a copy. And you know how well I am able to give you information accurately based on my bad brain. But apparently Bruce Willis used to really take advantage or at least he was he would just like he was a day rate actor. Even after he was pretty famous, he would just be like, listen, this is my day rate and I'll basically do anything if you pay me for it. And he was just like he just worked a lot like that. And that's why he will appear in like as almost like more like cameo work in a whole bunch of different movies. But then you put him in your trailer and then he only has like a very small part in the movie. But apparently he really leaned heavily on the economics of day rates.

Well, there's the other side of that, too, which is a lot of times an actor who could command a lot of money will agree to do it for SAG. In other words, for the minimum rate, because they want the film to get made. This was more in the olden days. Now all we do is make the Emojis movie and Guardians of the Galaxy 9. But, you know, back when it would be a thing like somebody really wanted a movie to get made, they would agree to just do it for scale is actually the term for it. They would agree to do it for scale just so the movie could actually get filmed. I guess I don't hear about that happening as much because those kinds of movies, a movie that like Julia Roberts really wants it to happen and be on screen. So she's willing to just come in and make the same as all the other actors that are making scale. I feel like those movies don't get made anymore because there's just no like that's just not how the economics of the Hollywood industry works anymore.

Yeah. I am excited to watch that film that I didn't even know about that you told me about the other day because there are so. Bo is Afraid. Yeah, Bo is Afraid. By the way, we named the show the other day Beowulf is Afraid. I thought that was a pretty good little spoof I came up with after the show. Quick little quick little button on the end of this Quaid story. I'm just specifically quoting from the Seven Days article near the very end. They're talking about how neighbors are reacting to the fact that Quaid lives here. And there's some neighbor who's working on the house who's super geeked out about it. He says he's an American icon. I would say settle down a little bow wow on that one. But but then there's another neighbor who has no idea who Randy Quaid is and just says, quote, he sort of looks like Papa Smurf, the man said with a chuckle, referring to Quaid's bushy white beard. And the reporter then says, will you watch his movies now that you know who he is? Probably not. It's not my kind of stuff. I like that neighbor. That's very New England

How does a neighbor know what kind of stuff it is Does he think it's Smurf related What is not this neighbor's kind of stuff Watching film Probably watching movies That's the most New England answer Is that the most Vermont answer of all time Yeah exactly

Just like Whatever you're asking me about

It's not my kind of thing

I'm sure the reporter probably listed a bunch of movies And he's like no not into that stuff He probably doesn't really watch a lot of movies I'm guessing

I also think it's an interesting Well I mean the person made a Smurfs reference that's well that's true which is which is interesting that answers your question anti-semitic actually now we realize well you know that the guy that oh because of smurfs is an anti-semite and the gargamel character is like shit it's basically like a very if you look at the the drawing of gargamel and like just his the way he is i mean i think the roots of the smurfs are an

anti-semitism well do you know how to just ruin your next halloween costume how long is a tattoo on you before it becomes permanent, Luke?

I gotta go. Do you know how freaking stoked I would be if you had like a brainy Smurf tattoo?

You know what's funny? I mean, before you said this, I'm not a tattoo person. I'm not going to get a tattoo. But honestly, if you were to think about the type of tattoo I would get, something Smurf-like wouldn't be totally out of the question. That'd be Smurfing awesome. Something simple with really bright colors that would really pop, like honestly papa smurf but obviously i did i did not know that you know as you said that i was like oh is this a gargamel thing and so i'm wondering if maybe i heard it years and years and years ago and buried it because i didn't want to believe it you know my i mean obviously this is a second a secondary problem now for the smurfs but my issue was always the um the claim that they're three apples high that just doesn't i don't remember that part that's in the song right they're three apples high i believe that's how they're described song oh wait this is la la la maybe the end of the show did they um i know the three apples high was a claim they made in some sort of credit that's a de la soul record yeah three apples high and rising is the uh but anyway um oh i see because it comes from yeah the french i forgot that it was uh originally a french story But anyway, that doesn't make sense, because if you think of something as being three apples high and then these things live inside mushrooms, how huge are those mushrooms? Like, clearly, these things are not three apples high or everything else around them are huge. And like the Smurfs would like walk on Gargamel's foot. Right. So that makes Gargamel a giant. If that's a three apple high thing walking on your foot. The app.

See, this is everything comes back to scale for you. You're like, what is the scale of the Smurfs versus Gargamel? I was just such a sort of easily entertained youth. When I was allowed near a TV, I was just like, oh, my God, that one Smurf is hot. That other one is vain because he looks in a mirror. And also that one is smart because he wears glasses. That was my level of interpretation of the Smurfs. Oh, I loved Grumpy Smurf. He was definitely my favorite, maybe not surprisingly. I think also Papa Smurf is an interesting reference. By the way, I'm not like – I'm not seeing it as a slam dunk that the Smurfs are anti-Semitic. So if you love the Smurfs, I'm not trying to yuck your yum. I'm reading a Mother Jones article right now titled Here's Why Some People Think the Smurfs Are Jew-Hating Communists. Jeez. Also, if I can, and I probably shouldn't, wasn't Karl Marx a Jew? like i think of communist jew hating and communism seem like those are different corners that people go to like the there are the anti-semitic people and they're rarely communists in my experience

that's actually a really good point yeah because i'm looking at what you said you're looking at an article from where mother jones that's funny because i have a the atlantic has something similar very similar headline from back in 2011 i don't i don't think so i think those are on par

i'm i'm looking at the it doesn't seem like it's a it isn't again i just want to be careful i don't think it's a total slam dunk um it's these are the reasons that mother jones listed for the idea of the smurfs being communist they live in a utopian society where individual initiative is rarely if ever rewarded there is no money in the smurf economy the smurfs are ruled by papa smurf a 546 year old autocrat who resembles carl marx and then they have a side-by-side of papa smurf and Karl Marx. This is the one that probably seems the most questionable. The physical characteristics and profile of Gargamel with his hook nose and unquenchable lust for gold might as well have been lifted from anti-Semitic literature. Also, the name of the evil wizard's cat is Asriel, which is the name of the angel of death in some Hebrew tales. Okay. And then let's see here. I'm just continuing. The Washington Times ran a piece titled, Sure, They Look Blue, But Are the Smurfs Closet Reds? Which was picked up by Fox Nation, The Drudge Report, and National Review. See, this is—

Nobody cares if they're communists who give a shit about that.

Exactly, like, well, Fox Business News does, Andrew. Sure, whatever. I love that that's the story of the Smurfs, is that they're—if it's anti-Semitic, that's one thing.

Yeah, okay, and it sounds like there's some gray area on that now.

I think it's pretty gray, so I think it's pretty blue, Andrew.

So it's not like—okay, it wasn't like the person who wrote it has direct links to it.

They uncovered a big, like, his personal diary was somehow damning. So, anyway, I want to walk that back. I want to apologize to the funeral directors of America for my statements about the Smurfs.

Like, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, why am I blanking on that author's name? I used to love his stuff. Roald Dahl? Roald Dahl at the end of his life. He's just like, yeah, I'm an anti-Semite. Like, absolutely. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. It's just like, it's a bummer to read that because then it just, you know, you don't go back to it the same way. I think I have that right. maybe fact check me on that but here's one more little point on this that'd be that'd be pretty bad if I was wrong I just love how

many things we've somehow said today

well I just sort of feel like that's a hell of a seven minutes of the show could be actionable I mean yeah that's a hell of a statement for me to say if I'm wrong about it I'm pretty sure that you're following my lead I just declared the Smurfs anti-Semitic what are you talking about but let me let me ask you this you're a Smurf okay like putting all of this aside and I'm actually kind of glad I'm somewhat relieved to know that that that is that's sort of like people kind of stirring things up and making accusations but there's no direct tie that's good to know at least as of now having said that you're a smurf you're going around your smurfing day you're doing this you're doing that somebody hands you a gift do you open the box you don't open the box you know it's going to explode on you it's always from the

smurf that that gives you gifts that explode i don't remember that guy's name jokey smurf yeah yeah i don't remember his name but yeah like why fool me once right yeah yeah there are no gift boxes in that universe that don't explode in your face stop it i i'm actually seeing that jokey smurf

is a thing i was i was i was myself that is named jokey smurf i couldn't i mean something like that so we've got grouchy of course uh i don't know how many of these are are are um like og smurfs and how many have been added over time you know i could definitely see there being like um tiktok smurf or whatever if you went to the smurf store in times square they'd be like troublingly updated you know it'd be like selfie smurf going forward vanity smurf will be known as selfie smurf the ones i'm seeing are

Jokey Smurf is the guy I was talking about, though. Yeah, he gives you the package, you open it up, and it blows up in your face.

Remember Handy Smurf, carrying around the saw in the log. Oh, yeah, you're right. Hero shit right there. Absolutely. That's your dad. Uh-huh. Definitely. Walt Smurf, Farmer Smurf, Chef Smurf. I guess they've added. I only remember Smurfette being the only, like, woman Smurf. Yeah, me too. But now they've added some other. You know, they've got Smurf Willow, Smurf Melody. Oh, really? Somebody called Vexy She looks like she might be a bad Smurf Because she's different Like her hair is different color than the other Smurfs Anyway What about the Snorks though What is their policy on socialism

I forgot about the Snorks Now that's not from a video game right I get the Snorks confused with Qbert Is there a reason for that They kind of look like Qbert

The Snorks I always thought the Snorks were basically the Smurfs But underwater Oh, okay. They're underwater. They have these little breathing. They've got like a breathing hole on their head, like a little tube that goes up.

I'm looking at this, yeah.

And they were like, they all had, I mean, their names were like, I guess one was called All Star. That was like the star of it. Then Casey, Tudor, Daphne, Baby Small Star. Did you watch this stuff? Because I did not watch the Snorks. I knew they existed. The Snorks was a Hanna-Barbera thing, and it was on TV. It was in the consciousness when I was a kid. But even as a kid, I was like, isn't that the Smurfs with a blowhole? He's a Smurf with a blowhole. You're nothing but a Smurf with a blowhole. You know, honestly, the only answer for a bad Smurf with a blowhole is a good Smurf with a blowhole, Andrew. We all know that. All right. Let's take a quick break, and then when we come back, we'll talk about the pasta mystery of Old Bridge, New Jersey. Stay with us.

On your mark. On your mark. Get set. Get set. Now ready. Ready. Let's thank some dazzling donors

These smurfingly generous people Have supported the show With a donation each month And it is really important To keeping this thing going And will be even more important Starting July 3rd Before we started recording, Andrew You and I were just talking about Various production costs That are now moving, let's say, in-house That are now going to be our responsibility to pay for with our business, Too Beautiful to Biz. And I'm not going to say I'm not a teeny bit anxious about all of this. I have faith it will go okay when we do that TBTL-a-thon the week of July 4th. But yeah, we definitely, you know, this is an undertaking, that's for sure. Definitely. Who wants to pay for my Adobe Audition? That's what I want to know. Jamie? Maybe Jamie Julian of Columbia, Maryland. Jamie! Yes, Jamie, this is a project that I've heard of other people undertaking. I haven't heard about it for a while. I thought maybe everyone interested in that had already done it. But yeah, there are a select few who go back to episode one.

can i use this opportunity luke to give people a peek behind the curtain that they might be excited about now there's a lot of there's a lot of smurf behind the curtain just a little smurf behind the smurfing um i this show ends with us just saying smurf smurf and smurf smurf you um i uh i i'm gonna say this nothing is in cement yet nothing is cemented down yet but But as we are looking at all the technical hurdles it's going to take to kind of like kind of shift things around when we leave APM, and of course, we have a huge backlog of shows. The plan right now, if it goes according to plan, and if we don't run into any issues, the plan is to make the entire archive of TBTL. available not just on a website we're actually going to be working on that right now they're all available on the apm website but um actually in your podcast feed so the idea will be if you want to just randomly like kind of scroll back a thousand episodes and just see what we were doing did you know this by the way that is the plan to me but my brain didn't fully store the information so i think some people are going to be excited about that we still are trying to figure out how we can then turn that into an archive that is surfable online or whatever but i think it's Smurfable online. Smurfable online. But I think for folks like Jamie who maybe don't want to have to go to an actual website and listen on your phone, that way it'll be much easier just to use the app and just go back and you can randomly listen to shows or start at episode number one. So anyway, that's the plan.

Do we know we're going to have an app?

Just like whatever your podcast app is. Oh, I see. I see. We had a TBTL app long ago.

Yeah. You could play sound effects on it. A listener built it for us. Yeah, I know. It was pretty cool. I don't know if that's how the industry works anymore. Like if we're better off having our own app or we're better off just, you know, having people listen to it and experience it in the, you know, the way that they normally do. Because they're probably listening to a lot of other stuff as well. But anyway, that's something to hopefully look forward to. So Jamie says, I'm up to episode 1350 in a collector's series. And man, what a wild ride. I've laughed through the traffic situations in Digstown and trips to Goodwill. Oh, man, Goodwill. I forgot about that kid that we, let's see. We used to play this drop a lot Wait Is this sequins? No it was Oh that was where we went But we had a kid Let's see Who walked up to I think they were talking to me But Jen was recording it And this kid said something like You have tall pants and a tall hat or something There was something this kid said to us in Goodwill That became a drop on the show But I can't find it anymore

Oh so you guys were actually in Goodwill With a microphone Like kind of doing rock's pop as we used to say

Yeah, I think we were doing some kind of – it was something that Jen had seen somewhere that people were doing where it was like glamming up Goodwill stuff or something. I remember being there. I remember recording it. Jamie says, I've cried through the untimely death of Rap Master Maurice. Now, that one – Yeah, explain that. That scares me, but that's not right, right? I don't remember. Maybe we had a funeral for him. I see. Maybe Derek Erdman, who was Rap Master Maurice, decided to put the character to bed. as far as i understand the person who plays rap master maurice is very much alive alive and well in chicago had moved to seattle maybe he's moved back to chicago he was in seattle for a while oh okay but um uh so i'm i'm i'm maybe we had some kind of funeral for him on the air or whatever also the cancellation of the radio show on cairo gotta admit i didn't see that one coming i'm guessing jamie is being funny there uh i've heard the old episodes both loud wrong and oddly prescient about what the future holds. I'm glad we got a little bit of the oddly prescient in because all I can think of are the loud wrongs to use a lebitard phrase. Like I just think about all of the things that I said that I wouldn't say now or just attempts at humor that probably fall flat, you know, stuff like that. Let's see. Jamie says, some things never change, I guess, and for that I am grateful. I guess that Jamie's implication is that we're still loud wrong sometimes. I don't think I've ever been wrong

about anything in my life.

Right.

Got to look up that Roald Dahl stuff, though.

Yeah. No, I looked it up. There's more to that than the Smurfs thing. Yeah. Yeah. So thanks for all the years of whatever this nonsense is. We love you guys. And if you find this to be a sufficient suck up, is there any chance you could play the long version of the Fran? It does not bother me.

It does not bother me.

Now, I can. I can play that. I've got it right here.

You got it already? Okay.

A little context. this was a list back in the radio days we had a listener who i believe they had put a i want to say a heavy bag like you know for boxing they put some kind of heavy bag maybe on their porch or somewhere in their house for their kid to punch on like it was a piece of exercise equipment i remember that and they were worried that it was making noise for their neighbor fran um too much noise for the neighbor, Fran, who I think was sort of elderly, and this was the voicemail they got from their neighbor, Fran.

Hey, see, this is Fran. It does not bother me when you do it on that thing on your porch there. You bang on it. It does not bother me. In fact, I kind of like it because I know there's somebody around. So you bang that thing any time you want to. this is Fran bye bye

oh my god I love that so much I literally feel like choked up hearing that message

it's so sweet that is really sweet I love it I always had it as drums I was clearly so wrong I always thought it was drums in the basement or something now i why i'm why am i taking we need we have so much we still have to get to i don't know why i'm taking this where i'm taking it but like people get now when someone is making way too much noise at a very you know in the middle of the night that's a thing that is can be life-ruining so i don't want to minimize that but like people get so crazy about stuff like oh some kid is out in the backyard you know like bouncing on their trampoline or something people can get very weird about noise intrusion and again if we have listeners that have a neighbor problem and the neighbors playing house music at 3 a.m that is terrible i don't want to like i don't want to low-key that but i just think it's adorable that this was the outcome of this because you could also see somebody of fran's age being very uh cantankerous and maybe set in their ways and maybe not into any bs you know and being like you better you better knock that off but for fran to just have the take that she did i just love that so much well i think this is actually an

interesting conversation like you said we have other stuff to do so i'll try to keep this brief but like i also think it really depends on the type of sound it is and the type um can mean a lot of different things like where we live right now we don't have any shared walls with anybody which is absolutely great but as a renter most of my life when i was living in places where um i had a shared wall or maybe a shared ceiling with a neighbor you know like my ceiling was their floor I hated the sound of hearing neighbors like playing loud video games and on a desk like a decibel wise or in terms of decibels it might not have been as loud as like our neighbors here have a motorcycle they and you know it's loud when they turn it on they don't do a lot of tinkering with it but like I hear this loud motorcycle next door sometimes that might run for five or ten minutes before they warm it up and take it out like it's an old Harley Davidson. And I think of you sometimes, because to me, that sound is not bad. It's not a blaring sound. It's kind of a comforting purr or whatever. But I know you kind of hate the sound of motorcycles. We have some people who live across the street from us who are clearly in a band. And now that the weather is nice, we open up our windows and I can hear them doing just like, you know, just like bad cover songs of Centerfold or whatever. I mean, maybe the covers are fine. Yeah, maybe the covers are fine. Just like generic, whatever. And I can hear the drums coming in from across the street. That doesn't really bother me too much. There might be a quieter sound that somebody could make if it was coming down through the ceiling that would drive me bananas. So I think everybody's sort of got a Genevieve loves hearing the sound of me thwacking darts into the dartboard while she's upstairs watching TV. We have a very thin kind of membrane in the in the in the in our house there. And so it comes in really loud. But she really likes that sound because kind of like Fran, it just lets her know that like there's a bunch of people or, you know, a couple of people living in this house.

yeah exactly so anyway yeah i'm i totally agree with you it's like some sounds are much more nails on a chalkboard for people than other than other sounds i just think this is really sweet yeah it was a nice chance to revisit that so jamie thank you for the prompting and also thank you so much

for all of the support maestro on your mark on your mark get set get set now ready ready go

We've also got to thank a listener and Dazzling Donor, Lisa Marlinen-Potz, who's in Olympia, Washington.

Lisa, long time, strong time TBTL10, hanging out at TBTL events, baseball games, I remember.

I've chatted with Lisa after Livewire episodes. Lisa says, I sent in another Dazzling Donor message, but it was dumb. So please give me a brark and use this one instead.

Did you see the other message, Andrew? I did. It was a long time ago. I don't remember why Lisa would. I remember reading, I mean, like, I don't think that's dumb at all. But anyway, I don't remember the details now.

Lisa would like us to use this one. So we are because you're the boss, Applesauce. All I want to say is thank you for continuing to put out amazing phone throwing content. Would you say something was loud wrong, Lisa? And thank you to the tens for being the best community. You're the best. Please play a cat role Love you guys Final comments TBTL is life Now the problem is Lisa here's what I can do I will try to find an opportunity The next few weeks to do a cat role The problem is Andrew is tipped off to it now So it's like I feel like the element of surprise we've lost it Because it's mentioned in the message But I um you know There will be A moment where we will be needing to play some tape And when Andrew least expects it, that's when I spring it on him.

I want you to know that I do expect it for the top story sound effect you're about to play. So don't even try it.

I actually hadn't thought. You know what? I hadn't thought of that. That would have been a good way to do it. I wasn't setting you up for that. But now that you mention it, that would be a pretty good way to bring in this next.

segment i am not going to do that though i am going to thank lisa for her support and tell her

we absolutely could not do this without you so thank you so much hello and welcome to top story

by the way i almost feel like that was my version of cat rolling you there by playing the top story sound no i feel like you were so ready for it to be the cat roll yeah i was pretty sanguine at that point i didn't think really yeah i because even as i was talking i was not intentionally i was doing that thing where i'm talking but trying to find audio i felt like that was being said in my voice um and so i thought you might have suspected it but no that was a top story sounder to tell you that it's time for top stories um one quick update ed sheeran was found not guilty of

plagiarizing the uh marvin gay song let's get it on yeah i saw that you know i've only saw i only saw the headline i don't know if they're dazzling deets here but i take this as good news

yeah i i didn't uh well one thing was i before the the the verdict came out i saw some poll quotes from ed sheeran saying he was literally gonna like quit music if they found him guilty

of it wow that's interesting because i understand it must just be so frustrating like well what am

i doing here i'm just playing chords yeah exactly sorry i'm trying to find um the actual songs here i don't know people can probably remember it was that um it was the uh ed sheeran song what is it talking sorry i'm trying to download this audio re-download this audio to my computer as we speak anyway they're the not marvin gay's estate but the estate of someone who's credited with co-writing let's get it on with marvin gay um somebody bob townsend maybe or something townsend isabel yeah They, you know, their estate was suing Ed Sheeran Saying that he had ripped off the chord progression And yeah, I mean, look I could understand how Ed Sheeran would be pretty I don't think he was going to really quit music Maybe that was just, he was in a moment But like, if you write a song And it's a huge hit And then someone can sue you Because it involves the same four chords It's like, there really are just only so many chords in the world And I, so I haven't seen To be honest with you I haven't read deeply into what happened Other than he was found not guilty Or he's not guilty of the charge I mean not liable or not he didn't owe money Or something like you know So in case you were wondering I feel like there's been sort of a little bit of a reset Judge Clears Ed Sheeran of copyright infringement Is the Is the headline on CNN And I mean It sort of feels to me like Thinking out loud Is the Ed Sheeran song by the way I think what it feels like is there's been a little bit of a kind of the pendulum has swung back a little bit like i think it it got way out there when when pharrell and robin thick were like you know found liable same for that sam smith i don't think that went to trial i think probably sam smith oh by the way i i had sam smith's pronouns wrong last time i didn't realize that sam smith uses they them so me too correcting the record on that but um i think with the sam smith thing my guess would be that the tom petty uh well tom petty and jeff lynn somebody associated with them was suing sam smith and my thought would be sam smith probably just settled because they were like well we don't want to go to trial with this and then lose a bunch of money so it seems like now it may be a little bit of what i would consider to be common sense is sort of returning to the conversation yeah and it's a it's a tough

one to talk about because you don't want to make it sound like we don't respect the musicians who write music and you know there should be some protections around that as well we don't want to see musicians getting hurt by other people potentially profiting off of their songs but in this case uh given all of the context i just thought that the argument was a was a pretty

big stretch yeah um uh and also by the way the sam smith tom petty thing i'm just seeing a rolling stone uh article about it tom petty on sam smith settlement no hard feelings that's like if bob dylan had a statement on the tom petty tom petty on sam smith settlement no hard feelings these things happen i always what i always said in this was i doubt that tom petty personally an rip you know i doubt that tom petty was losing a lot of sleep over if stay with me ripped him off i got In the sense, it was somebody else, maybe not even Jeff Lynne, who is credited with co-writing it, but somebody who owned the rights to it. Basically, some person who probably did the least amount to make this song happen, who had a financial stake in the publishing rights of that song, saw an opportunity to shake Sam Smith down and went for it.

Yeah, it seems more like the industry going after a very popular musician who's also bolstered by the industry. But, yeah, it didn't seem like and maybe you just said this and I didn't hear it. But I think the resolution of that one. I don't know if there's a financial payout, but Tom Petty now gets credited on that song in the official credits, which means whoever makes Tom Petty's money, whoever receives the money of Tom Petty's songs these days will get money whenever, you know, that song gets licensed.

How did I not come? How was my grant? How was Farnam Burbank not a more influential songwriter? Because that's that's where the money's at. somebody writes a song and then they pass away and then you get the publishing rights yeah like think about whoever the estate of tom petty is and jeff lynn now if i think jeff lynn might still be alive but if they're like that song stay with me is a huge hit sam smith continues to be a very influential and popular musician so for the rest of that song's existence you're gonna be getting

your beak wet god what a hookup well why don't we why don't we do your daughter a solid and write a song for Adelaide she's had it pretty good honestly like I feel like I've done enough for that kid can I ask you a question a while back and I love the name Adelaide so I like saying it but I remember a while back several years ago you mentioned because you always refer to your daughter as Addie which is like you know how I knew her and you said that she prefers to go by Adelaide so I always say that but you're still her dad so I I wonder if I always try to say Adelaide assuming that that is still her preference because do you remember when I went down to la and i met madeline brand who i you know started a show with but you always called her maddie and i said oh can i call you maddie and she was like no and she was very nice about it but she's like no i luke calls me that but nobody calls me that and so now i i'm not sure if you're maddie and adding adding me here um does adelaide still prefer adelaide you know i don't think i don't

think she would be upset with you if like we all go to an ems game this summer and you called her addie i i think in professional settings and with a lot of her friends uh you know her maybe friends that she made in her mid-20s i think she sort of decided she liked the the rhythm of the name adelaide versus addie the real thing with her is i just call her gracie which is because her middle name is grace and that's kind of our little like love language like i don't think anyone else calls her grace or gracie so um maybe don't call her grace and i would i mean i'm not trying you

know, it's important to me because I, you know, I was called Andy my whole life, you know, up until a certain age. And at a certain age, much, much younger, I was like, I remember in eighth grade, I really was, I was changing schools. I had been, you know, hopelessly bullied and everything. And just the idea of Andy, it just like everything about me was nerdy. And I attached the name Andy to that as well. I didn't want to be Andy anymore. And so I really made a concerted effort to introduce myself as Andrew to people. I don't know if I've told you this story before. And I, moved to a new school in eighth grade it's the very first day of school I tell my new homeroom teacher that my name is Andrew and whatever and then he introduces me to the class as Andy and I'm just like oh man son of a gun he probably I'm guessing that maybe he had had conversations with my parents who called me Andy I think it was a you know an innocent mistake but I eventually did get out of the Andy spiral and I'm glad to be an Andrew now so I want to make sure that I'm not like accidentally calling people by nicknames that i'm not supposed to be using i think fortunately

for for adelaide fortunately for gracie i don't think there's a the same kind of let's just say trauma connected to the the shortened version of her name so i don't think it would strike her that way but you know i will tell you very effectively achieved escape velocity from andy because i do

not think of you as an andy my dad my dad still calls me andy boy and i don't know how a lot of listeners know this but if you if you just respond to a tbtl newsletter like you know often i'll put a link to my email address in there and you can contact me that way but if you just respond to one of the newsletters i send out i don't get that response it goes to apm in fact it goes to our boss john sklaroff at american public media and he sees it direct forwards it to me the i would say um

direct manager i don't want to say boss no that's beth promo is our direct supervisor that's true Sklarov is our direct manager.

That's true. But I'll – and then he'll – I have no idea when and how that was set up. It was probably during a TBTL-a-thon. People wanted reaction to go to John, who handles the TBTL-a-thons. So anyway, it's just so funny. He forwarded me an email. It's like, is this coming from Pop? And I think it started with, Andy boy. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my God. I'm glad. I'm glad. I don't know who would be the most embarrassing person to see that at 8 p.m., but John is – I'm glad. John is a good friend, so I'm not super embarrassed about that, but I had to tell my dad.

It doesn't bother you when you're... It does not bother you when your dad says that, right? No, I don't even hear it.

And also, Andy boy is such a term of love. Right. Like, I don't know. It's fine, yeah. Nobody else called me that, not even as a joke. I don't want to hear it.

Okay, do not – I mean, seriously, I don't care how many beers people have at the next TBTL event. Please do not call a Mandy boy. I've said this before. I don't think you've punched anyone in 30 years, but when you do, they're going to literally go into space because that's how many pink ink notes and other microaggressions you've just absorbed, you've just eaten. And you do have those really large hands. When you get mad at someone, you're going to get really mad at them.

I'll answer to Smurfy boy. Smurfy boy is fine.

This is a pretty crazy story that a listener, Eliza, actually sent. So thank you, Eliza, for the news tip. Story from the New York Times. A New Jersey mystery. Who dumped hundreds of pounds of pasta and why? This takes us to Old Bridge, New Jersey, where a local—I'm still a little—I have to say, I was a little confused at the top of this piece about what Nina Joknowicz's job exactly is. But it says, ever since she met thousands of her neighbors while running for local office a few years ago, Nina Joknowit said she's been fielding complaints from fellow residents in Old Bridge, New Jersey, a suburban town about 30 miles northeast of Trenton. Typically, they call her hoping she can persuade the town to crack down on fireworks or ATVs or pick up trash left on their curbs. But but last week, the woman she met during that unsuccessful campaign. OK, this is why I have questions. So she didn't get the job.

hmm i didn't read this exact piece so yeah i'm i'm i'm confused too a woman she met during that

unsuccessful so in other words this poor nina i know this isn't really the point of the story but nina jocknewitz ran for local like dog catcher or something ran for office an old old bridge you know did that kind of thing where you're going around listening to her you're talking to people etc uh did not get the job but people are still calling her asking her to get the trash

picked up hmm yeah i don't know i'm a little confused by the way this is written anyway uh

she gets a call from someone she'd met during her unsuccessful campaign and she said the person reported there's a pile of pasta dumped on the side of the stream a scientist by training miss jognewitz said she jumped in her car to investigate what she found about 30 feet off the road and less than a mile from her house confirmed that this was more than an overturned bowl of bucatini God, now I'm hungry for pasta tonight

Well, look at these photos and then you'll stop being hungry for pasta

It's not the most appetizing thing I've ever seen No Someone had apparently dumped hundreds of pounds of spaghetti, macaroni, and alphabet shapes In large piles by the side of a stream in a wooded area Where, Ms. Jocknewitz said, people often dump construction material, bed frames, and furniture This is another line in the piece I don't mean to, I'm not trying to take Michael Levinson to task here at all But I would like more explanation on why she's getting the calls that she didn't for the position she didn't actually win. And then also, he says, the scene resembled something out of Strega Nona, the classic children's book by Tommy DePaola about a kindly grandma witch who magically overflowing pots in her little town in Italy. They're overflowing with pasta. Have you ever heard of the story Strega Nona? All right.

Who's flexing over here?

I mean, look.

All right.

We all get it. You went to Tufts. thank you like that's a very you know what the tufts was uh our friend dan passion from the sporkful who andrew who andrew invented a pasta oh wow full circle it all comes i need to get some of those wagon wheels that guy yeah anyway uh the estimate is that 300 to 500 pounds of pasta had been left to congeal in the woods before long the town was consumed with theories about who might have dumped the pasta and why especially in a state known for its love of italian food was it a caterer with a last minute cancellation for a wedding a restaurant cooking for a football team that never showed up in old bridge that's all they're talking about said denise bloom an administrator of a local facebook group who called it the great pasta gate of 2023 oh this is the one from 2023 oh right don't confuse it with the one from 2021 see the town

is not as small as i thought because um i was thinking i was still just trying to piece together like this woman's role in the town i thought it was just like one of those really tiny towns where she was canvassing like you said she got to know people and it's just like people sometimes in a small town they might not be an elected official but they just get things done right they know everybody and so it sounds like people are calling her saying hey can you get the town to do something about this or that um but the town looks like it's like 65 000 people like that's not nothing like so this isn't like valley city ohio anyway i'll i'll drop that line of of thought one thing that does this new york times article aside from the photos does it ever mention that this is cooked pasta because some of our listeners might be wondering about that it is i at the top

of the show identified it as cooked pasta because that's what it looks like in the photos but andrew there's actually a story here uh Apparently, according to somebody else working with the city, with the public works department, it was actually uncooked pasta that had been removed from its packaging and had softened amid several days of rain. Thank you.

Well, then NJ.com has a correction because their headline is 500 pounds of cooked pasta was dumped along. So, OK, but it is soggy pasta. It's good to know. Exactly.

But, you know, that right there is a key piece of information, right?

Yeah. Hey, CBS News. As far as trying to solve the mystery. Let me know if you get an email about this since you're a CBS National Pasta Cookers of America would like to respond CBS News headline hundreds of pounds of cooked pasta. Come on, CBS. Come on, NJ.com.

But that see, that's even more strange to me. Because you could see a universe in which somebody for some reason cooks 500 pounds of pasta and then whatever the event was is canceled. it's just and you know 500 pounds is a significant listen you're a person who knows from garbage situations it's a significant weight of material and so to throw that away at the dump what do we learn that the the what's it 300 pounds is the limit at the dump you'd like to go to illegally it's not illegal um like 500 pounds of something is is a significant weight so if you were going to throw it away you might you know one of the other things they mentioned is that old bridge does not have a good service for large like throwing away large amounts of something like and that's been some point of contention in the city but i actually i disagree with you though

i because i feel like if you had the capacity first of all i'm also wondering where they get this 500 pounds like did they scoop this all up and actually put it on a scale i just sort of feel like sometimes like officials often police but just officials will just sort of guesstimate on this stuff and how do they know this officials say the pasta was acting aggressively trying to collect it up funny not funny right um but anyway scary yeah but um i actually think the opposite because like if you were in some sort of situation where you've cooked this i mean imagine the drums that you would need to cook this amount right or or maybe you just your huge huge stock pots and in a commercial setting but you've then transferred it to something else and then something is canceled then you got to load all the slippery pasta onto trucks like that makes less sense to me than somebody who just over purchased on some raw ingredients and then realized they just didn't have it you know something went out of business something went spoiled i mean i don't know how

pasta goes bad that's the thing pasta has such a shelf life that's why yeah if this was 500 pounds of cottage cheese first of all we've just described your personal health yeah exactly

And me, like Scrooge McDuck, has to jump into it into eternity.

Podcaster found guilty of witchcraft lowered into 500 pounds of cottage cheese. He'd be like, burn me at the stake first, bro. Upside down, hanging from my feet. But I feel like the shelf life of pasta is so, it's just, it sort of lasts forever. I'm trying to, I have a harder time figuring out a scenario where you needed to throw away 500 pounds. I'm just going to go with that number, even though you're right. That's questionable. let's say i'm trying to understand the world in which you had to throw away a massive amount of uncooked pasta that you could have sold or given away or waited months to use that's so strange to me compared to we cooked it we haven't we can't nobody wants it or the people that wanted it aren't they don't want it anymore this isn't going to last let's just throw it out that's why the cooked thing that was a more reasonable scenario in my mind i see what you're saying but honestly

getting rid of 500 getting rid of mass quantities of even dry unused goods like this is a lot harder than you think like if you had this right now I said Luke go get rid of this I'm telling you you'd be in a bind and I know this from the most I mean this is a

from disposing of bodies

this is the most like ridiculous micro example and it's also just a reminder that I'm such a good person that I volunteer on the weekends but like you know I volunteer and we serve food to people so then people see us out there um you know under the bridge giving away food they're like oh good i have all of these um i have some old crocs and maybe even they're new crocs or whatever crocs is a bad example we could find a home for them pretty easily but people will just drop off like here are some random cans of lima beans that we found and various this this or this and often i'm just kind of like no i'm sorry we cannot do that we don't distribute those kinds of things some people i just because i want to be nice i take it but then i'm driving around town looking for pantries and whatever to put this stuff in and it's like you can't just i mean if this even if it pasta stays good forever there's still probably an expiration date on it even if it's dry pasta in the box and if this is a commercial operation you can't just donate things that are beyond the expiration date to to

Thank you.

um some sort of a kitchen necessarily and this amount of it a lot of people be like i don't know that that will just bog our operation down so honestly getting rid of huge amounts of even unused food i could see being a problem now there is one more update in the story and i don't know

if the other news outlets have it but but the new york times does miss jokowitz said she eventually learned who had dumped the pasta oh and it was not a restaurant i only know that it was not a business she said it was a private residence and i'm in conversation with the family via an individual who knows the family she declined to reveal more saying she did not want the source of the pasta to be subjected to unwanted attention well what the shit give us well fine don't name

names but tell us why get can we get her on the phone i believe she would be locatable i mean it's a unique name in a very specific town like should we interview her on july 3rd for our return i'm not joking like i mean fine you don't want to name names because you don't want heat coming on that person fine but can you come on the show and at least tell us like why did they have this pasta why did they dump it here why didn't they go to the transfer station

why didn't they compost it i also have a question which is is it bad to throw out pasta in the woods considering it will biodegrade i think it is i i think really because i think

it would take a really really long time and i don't think it's going to biodegrade in that like right now like we have we have our own little home compost thing but if it was like if we overloaded our compost container where we're just making our you know our garden plans uh with pasta like that's too much of that type of thing in there it's not just going to biodegrade into something usable and then out in the woods like that like it would take a very long time to break down into something that is no longer affecting the environment i mean even just to walk by it as a hiker or something this is disgusting i guess you're right i will admit

though that i have a sort of you know like if i were driving down the road i would never ever throw a excuse me a styrofoam cup out the window but i would consider throwing an apple core into the woods like i don't think of that as being the worst thing you can do because it just and i think we've actually talked about this on the show and i think that there's actually i think i'm on the wrong side of this but it's sort of like i don't know i just think it's made out of it's like there might be an apple tree just growing naturally there in that you know stand of trees and it's dropping apples on the ground and i throw an apple core out there it gets in the blackberry brambles whatever that's sort of my mentality i'm sure people will email in and explain why that mentality

is flawed yeah i'll back you up on that i do the same here's one thing i do like i take this kind of regular walk to the train station especially in the in the summertime and then in the fall or maybe late summer when the apples start uh growing on trees around the neighborhood i love neighbors apple trees and so like i always walk this path where i know i'm gonna uh pass an apple tree i grab one of the apples i eat it for the next whatever four or five minutes of my walk and then usually right around then i'm getting to that kind of marshy area that i described by North Seattle College where the footbridge is and there's kind of a wooded area there. I didn't see the scooter. The map told me there was a scooter in them thar woods somewhere that I did not track down. But I'll often take that apple core, which I just grabbed from a tree down the street. That apple, had I not intervened, would have fallen to the sidewalk, right? Or they would have picked it, but usually there's tons of them scattered on the ground. And I take it and I throw the tiny little core into the woods, but I always am cautious that nobody is watching me because it looks like I'm just throwing shit into the woods. But I don't like those woods. I think it's fine for me to throw an apple core back there if I give it a good if I give it some lift and it gets back far enough and nobody's going to step on it. What about gum? Yeah, you and I have talked about that ever since you and I talked about it. I think about it all the time because I think you and I have similar or at least had similar react or kind of behaviors around that. Like if I'm in my car, certainly driving down the highway. Yeah, you throw you spit your gum out the window. it'll hit somebody's maybe even my own tire and then it'll become part of the tire until it wears off like as long as you're not spitting it in a place where people are walking I always figured my whole life you're fine but then you told me that somebody in your life kind of said you know even if you're spitting that back into those bushes outside the outside the bank or whatever that's still gross for somebody down the line and that's not going to decompose and I've thought

about that ever since you mentioned that I still do it though I'm a bad person but I my thing is i find i would never throw my gum onto the sidewalk or even into the street i instead wait till there's like a baby bird and then i just feed it into their mouth like a mom no from your own mouth yes obviously no i look for i look for foliage of some kind and like hopefully a lot of it so like a bunch of bushes or something where i think it is just going to no one's ever going to see this again like i that's my logic now i'm sorry if i'm ticking the listeners off here on a friday but that is kind of what goes through my mind

yeah i mean that's definitely how it was i will say that ever since you brought it up though i have stopped doing that um and maybe it's because you know also like i'm often digging way back in my hedges and i see all kinds of debris that is blown back there or whatever and if i was like you might look at my hedges and be like well nobody's going back there but the truth is actually i am going back there to try to kill the blackberry brambles and if i'm stepping on gum or something or if i saw that's a good point you know like if i were your neighbor let's say i'm just

thinking about myself like yeah i'm chewing some gum i'm walking in somewhere i'm a big gum chewer because i'm very concerned about having bad breath and so i commonly find myself hold like with gum in my mouth that i'm now wanting to spit out because i don't want to like go you know talk to some person we're having a meeting with and i'm chomping on gum but then there's often not a good place to throw your gum like it's just not it's not built into the environment like a gum receptacle so therefore i usually will find some a hedge or some bushes as i'm entering a building and i'll try to dispose of it there but you're right if i were like walking into your neighbor's house and i wanted to toss my gum into the hedge you might be in there i might literally be in You might be filming a Hey Dummies.

Oh, yeah. It might bonk right off your forehead. Yeah, exactly. God dang it.

All right, let's do a little music for your weekend as we wrap things up. Do you have big weekend plans?

Nothing huge. I've got some friends in this week. I'm going to go to a nice dinner tonight. It's been on the calendar quite some time.

Well, you've been active this week. You went out to dinner already once this week.

Oh, yeah, I did. Yeah, I did. Did I do more than that? No, I guess I just had one. So two dinners in one week. look at me mama um so let's do some music for your weekend here you know this is maybe a little on the nose but um you know we didn't mention on the show that gordon lightfoot died earlier this

week um and i thought you were gonna say we didn't mention it's cinco de mayo oh yes and so i'm gonna

play gordon lightfoot's uh cinco de mayo influenced cover of felice navadá exactly the number one song of Cinco de Mayo. Absolutely. It's seasonal, you know? Tequila. But, you know, I don't want to claim to be somebody who really knows Gordon Lightfoot's catalog all that well. I saw a lot of people... You don't want to wear your Gordon Lightfoot hat somewhere and somebody

start up a conversation.

Well, it's funny. I was... I didn't really consider Gordon Lightfoot for most of my life until that exact day, Luke, that I was in that bar in Los Angeles and now I'm blanking on the name of it but it was a bar that I really loved that was the dive bar next to the theater. The Folly Room? the the yeah the folly room wait is that what it's the frolic room sorry frolic room frolic room yeah um and uh it was literally luke the day that i was in there by myself reading a book on a sunny saturday afternoon but it was pitch black in there and i knew it was one of like old i think it was like one of bukowski's old haunts or something and i was maybe relatively new to la at the time and just sort of vibing in there and the jukebox was absolutely perfect for the mood i didn't know who was putting songs in and there was just like this this great mood and some of the songs they were playing were by gordon lightfoot and i was like oh that was just perfect dive bar and a sunny sunny afternoon music and then of course i ruined everything by putting on a crazy tom wait song from 1972 where he just growled the whole time and uh people started screaming who put this song on it wasn't my best moment but it was a moment that i think of gordon lightfoot because that's what i was trying to accomplish that sort of era of easy sort of easy listening carefree highway carefree highway i think was the song that was on that day i could be wrong about it but no no i think it was this song that i'm going to play for you um if you could change i'm sorry if you could read my mind is this song and you'll know this pretty well and i actually it's funny i don't know if these lyrics will stand up to scrutiny for you because they're a little they're a little esoteric i if i remember correctly but um i just love this song so much do you know the song sundown by the way a lot of people were saying you know r.i.p gordon lightfoot and and and posting sundown but i never hit play on it do you know that song it seems like maybe i think i know it but i don't

know i but i don't know it by the name sundown does that make sense yeah like if i heard it i might know it yeah that's kind of my sense with that because gordon lightfoot is one of those people who of course you know it was like the wreck of the edmund fitzgerald was like yeah i guess maybe his biggest hit which yeah you know when that song is not super for me but carefree highway slaps and i think sunday i mean i guess my point is gordon layford is one of those people that i would say i don't know that many of his songs but i probably know like five of his songs from them just being played a lot on the radio and i think sundown is on that list i'll bet you

if i heard it i would know but i'm not going to play it now because i'm going to play if you could change my

mind i love this song so much r.i.p gordon lightfoot

now that i did not see coming and i love it rolls i am the one who rolls you're welcome lisa

lisa i wanted to get it in the show if possible since today was your dazzling day okay sorry but also apologies to gordon lightfoot here is a beautiful song sounds the exact opposite of that If You Could Read My Mind.

With chains upon my feet You know that ghost is me And I will never be set free As long as I'm a ghost You can't see If I could read your mind, love What a tale your thoughts could tell Just like a paperback novel The kind the drugstore sells

Okay, there you go. You Could Read My Mind by Gordon Lightfoot. You know, I think I want to... I'm going to call an audible here. Omaha. Omaha. Why don't we play the Gordon Lightfoot song, Sundown, for my suggestion. And I'll play... The thing I was going to play, I'll play it next week.

Did you just preview it? So now do you know this?

I just looked at the lyrics, and I think you're going to recognize it.

Oh, okay. I'll be interested to know.

I think Sundown appears to be the name of a woman.

Okay, gotcha. I believe. And it's also the name of the record this comes off of, for whatever that's worth. This is 1974.

But this is, yeah, it's a Rock Block Friday here. Nice. You're going to hear two, you're going to hear back-to-back Gordon Lightfoot songs. So can we play Sundown by Gordon Lightfoot? Mostly I want to hear if you recognize it.

Yeah, I'm interested, too. I'm very interested, too. So in fact, this really looking at this album, it makes me want to explore more of this catalog. So this is good. Here you go. Hell yeah. Right. I don't think I know it, but it's great.

Well, you do what you don't confess Sundown, you better take care If I find you been creeping around my back stairs Sundown, you better take care If I find you been creeping around my back stairs

Now, is he singing? Is the person named Sundown or is he saying nighttime? like like like nighttime better beware if you're creeping around my back stairs or is the is sundown

the name of the woman who's in the room maybe both maybe both man it's art i totally know this song

that sundown lyric that part is very memorable right it's so good i think i know what you're

going to be listening to yes this is truly music for your weekend especially if it's going to be a bit of a rainy weekend i could see me using this to get through it oh thanks for picking that yeah

yeah yeah i love that song all right our listener suggestion sorry i have to just put a cat down real fast she wants to jump up on my lap so usually i stand during the show but for the last 10 minutes i was like yeah you know i'm gonna take a load off but if i'm sitting during the show she's obsessed with trying to get on my lap but which is fine but then she doesn't if she would just sit there dr e like mr bigglesworth style from dr evil and i could just pet her that would be fine but she jumps up on my lap she's sitting there everything's cool and then she just starts biting my hand or something like she doesn't want to just like chill she wants to be on my lap but then be physically assaulting me so yeah it's a fun dance anyway uh today's listener suggestion comes from our friend lindsey aka pale ale which is i think her hiking name yes indeed indeed yeah

i think was listening to a lot of tbtl while hiking the appellation trail i think several

of years ago a while back now and lindsey says um it keeps it short but sweet please treat your ears to this bop and it's by a musical act which i know i'm I'm going to mess up so many parts of this. I actually am looking at an article, Andrew, from Pitchfork to try to help me keep everything straight. This is a musical duo that play under the name Ketramine or Ketra-Amane. Could it be Ketramine or is the accent on the E? Well, it's a guy named Ketranada and a guy named either Amine or Amine. I see. Okay. And they have combined their names into something that, for me, is truly unpronounceable. Ketramine. Maybe. Okay. Right. So maybe Ketramine. This – so, by the way, the guy Amine or Amine is from Portland. Oh, interesting. the main guy rapping in this actually grew up in northeast Portland and now lives in LA and has put out music under Amine or Amine, has put out solo stuff but now he's combining with this other guy Kaytranada and now they're making music under Kaytramini

Gotcha, well, putting that aside I am also noticing that this is so new this was just released last month right i'm looking at it as features pharrell williams as well along with yes i think it's

produced by pharrell interesting um and probably features him uh i know it says featuring um uh now the other thing i'll say is uh i don't know how much of the song we can play or it might need a few bleeps here and there it's you know it's i'll take care of it it's a it's a one of those bops that the young people love but you know they don't conform necessarily to our to our our standards for certain word usage etc so i just want to give you and the listeners a heads up There are a couple of references in here That probably you and I wouldn't make on the show But the song really does It does bop as our friend Pale Ale says So we're going to go out with And apologize to Kate Tromone Or however it is you say the name of this duo Can they just get on Tiny Desk Concert So we can hear somebody say it

Are they being introduced on Tiny Desk Oh that's a good point Are people actually introduced Or they at least would say their name I just mean like we just got to we just got to hear somebody say the name.

Well, I'll just call a Tim Hortons in their town and ask how you pronounce it. That's a great idea. That's my go to for cities often. But anyway, so that's what we're going to go out with. Criticity of listener Lindsay. That's going to bring us to the end of our broadcast week. Thank you so much, everyone, for spending the time with us. We'll be back here on Monday with more imaginary radio. In the meantime, have a great Friday. Have a great weekend. Stay safe. Go Mariners. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all. That means forever

That means forever Yeah Walk up in this shit black sap I say She over here talking about Naboulé I'm so west this should be my last name I'm looking for a cutie someone who won't betray Yeah And my love goes deep If I say I love you then this shit is what I mean I see you getting wetter through your Joc Mousse jeans My forever is forever can't let nothing go between Diamonds in my ear, put your wifey in the trance After we kick it, I'ma turn it to a fan Can't respect a nigga, and that's on me the man I'm loyal to my nigga, and I'm loyal to my fam Y'all switch your sides like Stacey Dash Pride is the cause, it's a good price to tag But for 45 minutes, I'ma get the bag Finna be there for my sons, like my name's Steven Nash Old Booker, this a light cooker My brother, she's fine, yes sir, she'll look up This K-Tramine, we don't need no DJ Not a place for a face, we done seen like C-S

do you hear him say it what do you say katramine he said it in the song i love that of all the ways i tried to say it none of them were the correct way katramine katrime power out