Muse

You know, I peel my strawberries. What? Yeah. Go on. Did you ever have that? No. No. Oh my God. It's amazing. I love to peel the strawberries. It's nothing like when your lips content, a skinless strawberry. You understand that the strawberry was created to be loved by you, by all, because it almost fits perfectly to beautiful lips. A pillage strawberry, my friend, it's, it's, if, if, if you never had the pillage strawberry, you don't understand the strawberries. TBTL.

Get the, get out, are you going to get out there on, you're going to get out there? For, for, for what? Like just, yeah. Well, obviously I'm not a big guy. I'm not a Carl Weathers, per example. This cat is from upstate New York. He's not a downtown fancy cat. He's blue collar. He works at a lumber yard.

It's 10 o'clock in the morning. I'm in the Charleston Town Center Mall. And I think I'm the first one in this bathroom this morning. It's perfectly clean. So, power up.

Okay, are we done with the business part? I wanted to start the clown portion of the meeting.

Well, all right. Hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone. Welcome to a Monday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. Get out of here! You don't know Blink-182? My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. Hey, where's the freaking gabagoo? Coming to you from the Riverhouse studio first time above the mighty Columbia, where it is shaping up to be a real nice day. It was smoky this weekend. It appears to be dissipating a bit. the smoke whiffing down the columbia river gorge basin i had a pretty fabulous weekend i saw the barbie movie uh i went to costco how do we have this like nobody made it like i probably the fifth time in my life i've been in a costco and it is just a magical wonderland isn't it i know i'm late to this information i know many of you maybe are listening in a costco right now as you're shopping But, gosh, what a special, special place. This is a special, special episode of TBTL. It's episode 4014 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. The Netflix company. So who needs a movie? Is winding down its DVD mailing program after 25 years. First of all, did not realize they were still mailing DVDs out. Second of all, there's a lot of confusion amongst the people who are still getting the DVDs in the mail. This is so confusing, Ron. As to if they can keep the DVDs or not. We'll dig into that. Oh, and another thing I did this weekend, I went to the Street of Dreams.

Have you ever had a dream?

And I got some of my questions answered about how that whole situation works. So we will talk about that as well. Oh, and we'll talk to this guy, the longest-running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ship.

Where are you? And I'm so sorry.

He's Andrew Welsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

Good morning, Luke. Don't mind me. I'm just deleting emails out of my trash, because I just gotta... I was wondering why Google had been leaving me alone lately. I was like, did I really make that many changes in my email hygiene that it wasn't giving me any more warnings about storage space? But then I woke up this morning. It's like, hey, bro, we've got to talk about your storage space. I'm like, don't call me bro, Google. I'm not your bro.

My email has been bedeviling me for the last few months to the point where, I mean, I've said this before. The problem is karmically I did this to myself because I always use the excuse my email has been being super weird lately when I'm just being bad about responding to things. And then my email has actually been super weird and it has actually made it so that I am not – like there's something about the email program I use for like my personal email, how it wants to organize an email chain. and it i'm sure there's a setting that i could change that i just don't know how to do but it thinks it's being helpful by basically taking like if you and i and tbtl employee numero uno john sklaroff if if we were all emailing each other as we often do as the three employees of too beautiful to biz um it'll group those all together which it thinks is being helpful because instead of having like an email from you somewhere in my inbox an email from john somewhere it's Like it's clustering them, but it also then is not showing me it like compresses a bunch of them down. And I'm only seeing little like I'll see you your response to the I'll just see the latest email that's gone out.

You mean if they're all in a chain with the same.

subject line right not just a whole but yeah so i have a whole yeah i have a whole system of communicating with you that is based on the fact that i know that you don't know how to expand your emails like they if there's more than three i start a new one with a new subject line because

i just know that that's burned that's gone so you actually dealt with the same thing and your system

is to just work you work around it by just starting i know you and i know that like if you me and john are going back and forth on emails and then me and John, like let's say I send an email to you and John, right? And then maybe you reply. And then John replies. And then maybe I reply again and John replies. I'm like, okay, this is gone for Luke. He's not seeing this anymore because more than two emails have gone by since Luke's engaged. Everything else in the middle of this sandwich is gone for him. So I will start a new email chain with a new subject line so that you will see it again.

Well, first of all, thank you very much. that's kind of you and I'm sorry and I mean this genuinely I'm sorry that I'm so annoying to work with that you have to actually account for these things it's some a great deal of this is laziness on my part but it's also this flipping email system of mine that it again what I need to do is just sit down with it and figure out how to not have this be the case because like you you described it perfectly it's a sandwich I'll see the first piece of bread that'll be like an email or two and then all of the middle part of the sandwich is compressed down into it's all in one email chain and it's not readily visible if that makes any sense i have to go find this arrow like and click on it or like a little like a v and then when the v goes down then suddenly it's showing me more things but it's very common for me to not know that there have been more interactions in an email chain unless i go in and manually do this and a lot of times i'll think i'm up to date on the email and i'm really not that's not really an excuse but more more an apology than an excuse um but um anyway here's what i really want to find out uh from you on this monday morning how i thought about you all weekend because i just thought about how blissful you you probably were having serious andy times and doing a big project involving a chainsaw on a pole how did it all go

Oh, God, yeah, I got to send you photos of how I hacked. I mean, I hacked so far into my hedges in the back that you can see. Like, I took photos about halfway through so that you could see the kind of the progress. It made more sense than, like, just taking a picture at the end, right? And you can sort of see it almost looks like if I had just stopped there, it would have looked like I was doing some sort of topiary thing that would have been the beginning of the maze from The Shining. like it's just like the hedges were so thick that you were going andrew chainsaw hands well i did do a chainsaw dance a chainsaw a pole saw dance like uh the texas chainsaw massacre it's not the same when it's me and instead of a mask i'm wearing the bucket hat that listener bill gave me from

canada uh and i'm holding a tiny little white what do we what do we call those things oh yeah

something brim breeze brim or something well i was wearing my breeze brim hat which by the way ever since bill sent that to me so this is kind of a again we can't think of the proper name for it but it's like kind of the bucket style hat that isn't the small gilligan one but more of a rim all the way around it with a string that can go down but beneath her chin or i threw it behind my back um but uh i ever since bill sent that to me i at the p.o box which i would give that address out now if i ever could freaking remember it um but anyway i was like this is going to be perfect for a day of like yard work when like the sun is really beating down and i never had the perfect excuse to wear it but like i've been waiting to do this huge hedge trimming i mean it's not even huge hedge trimming it was hedge i don't even know man whatever it is when you need a a chainsaw to do it like it wasn't trimming it was like cutting way back on this thing i basically have in front of my house right now like like in whatever you would call like the the little yard outside of our fence like the neighbors can see two huge huge piles of wood and leaves that looks like i felled a tree i mean some of the stuff is really thick and like i don't know what to do with it i think i need to rent another truck from uh from u-haul your friends up there on aurora exactly the guy in the top hat is gonna have to hook me up because i don't know what i'm gonna do like we want to maybe try to keep some of the the the woodier stuff the thicker stuff for actual burning down the line so i might go out there and do a little sorting today but like there's so much fo i'm getting stuck on the word foliage yeah i grew up saying foliage so that's one of those words i really got to think about before i say there's so much foliage that like it would just take a hundred of those little yard bags i don't know what to do with this stuff so i think i need to to like rent a pickup truck or something and take or dump

you know you could call 1-800 junk home of the dancing lady oh i love those commercials have you

said we talked about this i mean you really could just call someone they'll come take it away the thing is like and this is maybe where it's like i i don't know i'm proud that i did this myself and probably saved us if we had hired somebody to do this project it would cost a lot of money and now i'm kind of like wow i did this all myself just by borrowing my friend's chainsaw sort of hate to um i sort of hate to give up my last mile on the other other hand though if i gotta rent a truck i gotta rent a truck i gotta say i met so many of my neighbors like because i was like sawing in the in the back alley like an area that i don't usually hang out and you'll be happy to hear um but like a bunch of neighbors were coming and going i got to know them and people just stopping by and commenting on on the project or whatever it was uh it was a really sad it was a very satisfying project i just don't know what to do with all this shit now would you say

that with getting this under control you've dominated your yard to the level where it could

be described as hegemony hegemony i'm sorry hedge hedge hegemony jeez i was trying to make a hegemony joke i was hegemony means like everything being one right like yeah i think in the political sense

it's kind of like i mean it's a bad thing in the political sense it's like the domination of like one group in a place like the hegemony the hegemony in the united states has been white you know right yeah so um but you're also you've i just felt like there was some kind of opportunity for a hedge hedge right gemini kind of a joke there gemini didn't really it was too serious

of a word for the for the context was a hedging your bet joke was that too obvious no that's

better no that's that's way better much less dictatorial implications from hedging your bets

versus hegemony well yeah because hegemony is just like oh yeah it was really hegeminous it just means sort of all alike right everything is that's what i that's what i understand it to be

but anyway so i i need to see pictures also did you feel safe operating this chainsaw this pole saw i mean it sounds like it was a pretty burly piece of equipment uh it's not a very burly piece

of equipment it's a tiny little chain i mean it is a real chainsaw and i you know you should be careful with chainsaws obviously um the fact that it was on a pole means it was pretty far away from me you know there's a it was pretty cool like if i wanted to i could have removed the saw from the pole and then put it back on the power source and just use it like a little electric chainsaw like that i'd be holding in my hand and i was ready to do that if need be but honestly like by having it on the end of a pole it keeps it further away from you if you know like i don't want to concern people like i wasn't cutting anywhere really near the fence but there is a barbed wire not a barbed i'm sorry a um what do we call the the chain link how could i forget the word chain link when chain link addiction was my favorite story exactly it's one of your number one addiction that and nostalgia ironically those are both in the same camp now chain link addiction and nostalgia anyway like were i to be using a chainsaw near a chain link fence and you get too close to it or something i could imagine something really bad happening right um i wasn't getting that close to the fence for what it's worth but having it at the length at the end of a pole which was you know maybe like three feet in front of my nearest limb or whatever um it felt like that was a pretty safe distance because it was you know on my mind like i should be careful here i am home alone you know at genevieve's camping somewhere so like um i uh it felt good though to use it it really did the only time it felt a little bit nerve-wracking is when the hedge went all the way down to the ground and sometimes i had to like be chainsawing almost at ground level and i didn't want that chainsaw to sort of hit the dirt and kick back or something like right but um yeah but uh no very very satisfying great weekend um i did end up going to goldie's on friday to watch that like 5 p.m uh did anybody show up oh yeah uh no no no no no andrew fans showed up i wasn't worried about that but it was such a big difference you know i had gone to see or to watch a Mariners game there the previous Friday. I don't go to Goldie's all that often. It was a very rare occurrence for me to do this two Fridays ago. But I believe that was a 7 o'clock first pitch two weeks ago, and the bar area was really dead, and I got the catbird seat right in front of the one TV, I was telling you, on Friday. This time, the first pitch was two hours earlier. It was a 5 o'clock start game, and I showed up, and the place was packed. I couldn't figure out what was different one Friday to another. Usually you'd expect it to be even less crowded earlier in the day, you would think. Well, I have a theory about that. What is your theory? I'm interested.

A bunch of people trying to get their ya-ya's out before they go home to their significant others. Oh, interesting. Like, on their way home, like, hit Goldies, you know, knock off a little bit early, hit Goldies.

Gamble it up Maybe have one or two And then be home by seven for dinner Or be home by six And kind of act like nothing happened I could see that being Only because of that being exactly my sort of behavior I don't know why these marriages Haven't worked out for me historically But that's one theory I have Is that five o'clock might be the in-between time Work is over But nighttime activities haven't started And you might be able to sneak one in

Yeah, maybe Although then I was there Actually, you know what? I think you're right Because by the time I left, let's say it was – did you hear that they sped up the games now in baseball, Lou? Nobody is talking about this. But, yeah, there's a pitch clock now. But, anyway, you are right. Things did die down at probably around 8 o'clock or whenever I was getting out of there. Huh, that's interesting.

I know that we talk far too much about baseball on this show. No, we don't.

I'm not apologizing for talking about things we want to talk about anymore. I'm serious. Good, good. Some people don't like cat talk. Some people don't like other talk. All I know is the people who complain about baseball talk are the rudest to us. And I'm not apologizing for talking about the things we want to talk about anymore. Not everybody gets a list of their preferred topics on TV.

OK, but this is not a conversation about baseball. This is a conversation about greed. OK, good. I was so flipping angry yesterday morning when I was going to watch the Seattle Mariners baseball game play the Houston Astros. Oh, this is about greed. it is so so uh in portland it's actually kind of hard to find i was saying at becca's place it's kind of hard to find a place that plays the mariners games on tv because i don't think it comes with the standard cable package this has to do with root sports i think if you have a bar or establishment you have to pay some kind of extra because um they just like to try to get you for every cent and so it's not like you can just walk into any bar in portland that has a tv and go can you put the game on um and so it turns out that there is a bar near becca's place that's literally mentioned the chain of i don't want to give the specifics because it's really like across the street from her house but it's literally one of those bars that when the radio goes one of our what do they call it the mariners bar league or something where they actually promote places that play the game yeah so um so it's like i don't know 11 let's say it's like the game is about halfway over it's a wild game that's going on yesterday i'm listening i'm sitting there blasting it on my phone sitting in becca's living room as she's um kind of puttering around the house and i realized that across the street from her place is a bar that should theoretically have the games actually what happened was she said i think that they have it across the street i was like well i was like let me just explain to you something um a lot of bars in portland don't have the mariners game she goes yeah but i think they have a sign i go well we'll see and then literally a minute later on the radio it said mariners bar league and it mentioned the bar so i was like okay um we'll give one point becca so i was like uh let's watch the let's watch the end of the game before we go run some errands before we go to costco andrew and so um uh so i get i'm all excited i go downstairs i go across street to the bar i'm the first customer in the bar uh and the guy's super nice they've got a million tvs and i go do you have the mariners he goes yeah absolutely he goes to put root sports on and it's just showing something called endless golf and i'm like huh and then he's like uh yeah that's weird okay let me go to the mlb network they've got every game happening in the world right now in major league baseball listed on the mlb channel and they're playing all of them guess what game is missing seattle mariners houston astros and i'm like this is so bizarre what is happening and i go sit outside at the picnic table in front of this place and i scroll on my phone and to my horror i realized i also asked our text chain about this and they filled me in yesterday was one of those days where major league baseball decides they're not making enough money so they're gonna force you to sign up for peacock premium to watch the baseball game that i am paying cable i'm paying root sports i'm paying whoever it is xfinity two hundred dollars a month for my cable out here cable and internet so i can

The big reason you bought that was because of the baseball thing. The big reason. Yes.

So had I been sitting here, because I don't have Peacock Premium, had I been sitting here in my little house with this television, again, you're right, its primary existence, its primary reason for existing is to watch Mariners games. And I would have turned on Root Sports, and it would have been showing me endless golf. I would have flown through the roof. Luckily, Becca, being the kind-hearted person she is, was like, I'll just sign up for Peacock Premium, and then I'll just cancel it. it's fine it's five bucks that's what we did and i got to watch the last three innings at her house

well let me ask you this though i think and i'm trying to verify this now anyway like when i was a cable subscriber which wasn't all that long ago just like a year and a half ago before we cut the cord um if we're using that phrase which you bring up a good point i still have cords coming into my house but anyway um you

Thank you.

You can access usually Peacock by, you know, by signing in using your cable subscription. I'm sorry I'm having trouble talking today. Is that important for this job? But usually, like, if I wanted one of those apps that went along with, like, some sort of network or whatever, like Peacock, I would go into Peacock. I'd go to log in, and it would say, what is your cable subscriber? Then you choose Xfinity, and then you use your Xfinity login. That was not an option?

I don't know. Also, I don't know. Would that get me premium? because there's just the regular peacock which becca had she was like i have peacock we're like cool and then there's the game go into it and then it's like you click on it it's like sign up for premium to watch this yeah yeah so so i don't know if my what i'm paying for cable is technically

the premium version of peacock or whatever i think so because i think peacock the regular peacock is free to everybody so i could be wrong but the next time like you should have and again i know i realize this might be asking a lot but you should have a login for your xfinity account as well just setting up your internet and everything and that should give you access to those i could be wrong about this one because think it's a you know everything's shifting under our feet as we tried to do this but essentially your point is not lost though the fact that like you you and these bars these bars that are relying on customers to come in to watch the games they're they're they're saying hey come on we are the official bar so you can watch baseball on tv because you can't afford it in your house anymore now they're getting screwed because people can't go to watch it because they're like oh it might be on apple tv well we don't have apple tv or it might be on peacock they're just like putting all this shit behind a million different paywalls so they have to pay every single paywall that is why i have no compunction at all about stealing yes you know illegally streaming these games like there is no moral obligation to pay these super rich franchises especially when the mariners don't put it back in

the team i remember being in i think a bar in like tennessee on a thursday night and this is like i don't know during football season and the the owner of the bar was just trying to put thursday night football on for all these you know folks and this was one of those nights where it's on amazon and so he was trying to log into his amazon account to try to get it on the bar tvs and it was taking like all this time and eventually it became the case that in order to show the games he had to have his amazon account open to where he literally just said to whoever had the remote don't buy anything please on my amazon account right his entire amazon life was laid bare yeah on the bar tvs just so we could watch the stinking game which again it's just like it's all a money grab from these various leagues and and um it was but you know the mariners won so that was actually pretty that was pretty dope i was trying to explain to becca who's uh um you know not like following the games day in and day out just what a remarkable thing it is to win three games in houston and also for us to like for for like our pitching to hold up and just like everything that was happening on that sunday with that game felt like it was going to go off the rails at any minute and it somehow stayed on the rails and it just put me on it just put me on cloud nine the whole day i mean i was just i was i we got back in the elevator later in her building and someone had a mariner's hat on and i just like talked that person's ear off for 15 floors until you realize they don't speak english right exactly i was like we're coming for texas and the woman was like yeah we are we're just like bonding over the marriage like i was just i was psyched yesterday plus i got to go to costco which yeah let's talk about that a little bit because i don't

want to i don't want to fight with you i'm just really surprised that you and i are on on opposite sides of costco in the costco experience especially given the sides we appear to be at so you're you're in you're in love you're in lust with costco i'm in love with the costco how is that so perfect

um i i do i have to admit i do i love that temple of consumerism i don't know though i mean somehow it feels less bad to me than ordering from amazon oh i'm not it's not a consumerism

sorry i had to pay it off thank you uh nice needle drop too just oh i actually i have a couple of these things saved on my computer soda i got bacon soda um i uh no no just so you know i'm not coming at it from like an over consumption kind of thing just the experience for me is just like i don't well whatever i i should let you talk but just so you know i'm i'm not i don't have a moral i'm not bringing up moral considerations here i kind of it goes through my

mind like you know does anybody need two sonicare toothbrushes like i guess a family might but it just feels like the scale of everything is just so huge there it feels like i'm consuming i'm i'm sort of grabbing more than i need because i'm getting it for cheaper uh and so it feels like i'm gorging on on products or something a little bit but that being said i still i mean i remember will We never had a Costco card, which is insanity to think about. This is where my parents, who I love dearly, may have been a little on the, as they say, Pennywise, pound foolish side of things. You got seven kids and you don't have a Costco membership? Like, you know, they probably were blanching at the $100 a year or whatever it costs for one of those things. But we never had that. I didn't grow up in a Costco household. And so I still think of it as a place where you go to get a big giant thing of blueberry muffins like you know that like flat of blueberry muffins which is like on a cardboard thing and then there's like saran wrap over it i just feel like being at like school like i don't know like a end of your basketball team party where someone's brought a couple of those things muffins like that's what i think of with costco and then you walk in there and it's like they sell everything man like electronics um everything you can think of they have it and like i like these crack these particular kind of crackers that are um i could go in the other room and get them but they're the kind that are sort of thin there's not it's not penzanella but it starts it's got like an italian name it's like la something with a p and what they are is the kind that if you go where the fancier cheese is in the grocery store they're there it's a kind of a rectangular i am rectangular like um kind of um clear plastic and there have they have uh like roasted garlic ones they have cracked pepper they have original anyway i don't know if people can visualize the crackers i'm talking about they're very thin and i they're the ones that i enjoy well they have like now i'm the proud owner of like i don't know 10 packages of those things because they sell them they just sell everything you can imagine and everything i buy in at other stores in my life they have it and it's way cheaper and it's very hard to not just like i now own i'm not exaggerating andrew 90 disposable razors because the kind of disposable razor that i use this kind of gillette which is i mean i'm not just trying to do an ad for one of these like harry's razor companies it legitimately is kind of expensive like a disposable razor um and uh and it's you know it's just a fractional price of of what it normally costs so i was like well i might as well buy three 34 packs of this stuff so anyway i just yeah there's just something about about walking through that place because i don't do it on the regular where it just feels like a kind of a magical experience um and uh i do i do really enjoy it also i i my understanding is that

costco is a place that's very good to its employees it's a local company so i do feel kind of good about that um so yeah i mean i just i'm i guess my point on this i'm considering

getting a costco card you disgusting capitalistic greedy i don't have a noun to end that joke um yeah no i listen i think that if if i were somebody i want to make this very clear you mentioned like people with families or whatever even a one kid or two or more like yeah it would make a lot of sense for people to have a costco membership for me personally and since you and i are kind of similar yes you have a kid who's now an adult so but i'm thinking about having other

kids well that's true just to justify costco sure you're thinking about just going to costco to get a six-pack of kids if i understand it correctly oh my god dude it's like and if you get two six

packs it knocks the price per kid down to like 10 bucks but okay so here are the things that i don't

like about costco like okay well going there for starters like i just like it is it is a it is a

bit of a shit show yeah and it's just like so big and overwhelming and like again not to paint myself as some sort of like frenchman no i don't know but like what what do i like i used to talk about this all the time when i lived in capitol hill like i it was the first time i lived in the city that a grocery store was like you know five six blocks from me or something and i used to love i would walk to the grocery store every single day and come back i joke about i say french because like you know and then i come back with my baguette and i you know yes it's it's what i have

You make a little, like, you make yourself a little kind of lunch. You have a little, like, a glass of wine, but, like, an appropriate amount. Right. And it's, like, and you, yeah, it's just very, like, it's very, you just get what you need for that day. And then the next day, you get what you need for that day.

In fact, speaking of, shout out to listener Frank. I don't know if you saw that email. We have a listener. I believe he lives in Paris. He definitely lives in France somewhere. He was attended a week a while back, and he emailed us this weekend because he was just passing through. I believe just passing through the SeaTac airport and was just thinking of it. So shout out to Frank. But anyway, I just loved going to the grocery store and just making a meal and then going back the next day and just keeping things small. I mean, I know that that's extreme as well. And like, again, I live a life where I don't have tons of responsibilities. I don't have kids who need me to take them to a million different places and have a bunch of responsibility. So I do have this life where if I want to go to a market or a store once a day. Like, I can conceivably do that. So Costco just isn't a necessity for me. But also, not only do I not kind of like the overwhelming feeling of being there, even on a not super crowded day, it's just, like, overwhelming. I don't like the feel of it. But also, like, and this is where I'm going to talk. I don't usually, like, kind of talk shit about Genevieve on this show. I do that on my other shows. But she knows how I feel about this. Like, I just, that tantalizing feeling you have of just being like, well, if I'm going to buy this, I might as well buy the whole thing. and like go really big on this and the thing that really bothers me and again i think everybody does this i'm not trying to be mean to genevieve here but like if you i think there should be a rule this whole conversation bothers me if you haven't purchased something on the regular from a grocery store in smaller packets recently you shouldn't be just taking a flyer on things at costco and like our freezer is filled with two bags of just like these frozen the like two bags of frozen strawberries and frozen blueberries that genevieve brought home in april and she said i'm going to be making smoothies i'm like are you like could we start i could i'll go to the grocery store put berries on the list i'll go to the grocery store if i go to the grocery store and berries are on the list two times in a row then maybe we can justify you know going to costco and just like saying from now on i'm somebody who makes smoothies because guess what it's late august and guess

what's still taking up the majority of our freezer nothing like when your lips content a skinless strawberry i've heard that somewhere before okay you know you have zeroed in it drives

me bananas we have so many cupboards and stuff that are just filled with shit it's like i'm not against having this but we did not need to buy a truckload of it three years ago i'd rather just

buy a moderate amount every now and then no you are absolutely right and this is what i was grappling with yesterday was do i roll the dice there's no small amount of anything there so i was like do i roll the dice with something that looks appealing but i've maybe never even had it before and do i want to own a significant do i want to own a significant share of this company now who makes dried mangoes i am currently the owner andrew of i don't know 11 pounds of dried mangoes now but two different huge bags because dried mangoes are not cheap at like a lot of other stores and it's a lot cheaper at costco the thing that helped me was i had becca with me and she grew up in a costco family in fact i believe the card we're using um was as belongs to her mom by way of her late father and um and so i was able to say have you had these and she's like yeah we used to eat those they're good so i had somebody to kind of let me know um a little bit of of like i got these um spinach and um like spinach and cheese raviolis and she's like oh those are actually really good also becca's like an amazing cook so like i trust her opinion on these things but i am with you i tried to keep it i i tried to sort of not commit on something that i haven't actually had in real life and that i'm not consuming a lot of right now i don't want to be the the things i the things i kind of i do eat a lot of dried mangoes legitimately so that didn't feel like a total reach the biggest thing i rolled the dice on was probably salmon burgers you know i kind of eat fish now again and something about having like on a hot day like grilling up a salmon burger and making a nice little sandwich that kind of sounded good to me so those i have not tried i guess we'll find out those may by the way i also got frozen blueberries uh which are we'll see how long those live in my freezer i could have given you but i know exactly what you mean like if if you're not consuming it already just because it's more affordable at costco it doesn't mean you need to buy a ton or i was trying to not buy a bunch of something that i don't know if i actually am going to use in my real life now there are other things like i use those floss kind of what do you call those floss picks or something it's the kind of like pre-done if you let me just throw this out a little psa if you are somebody who um has a hard time motivating yourself to floss um i highly recommend getting those and they make ones that are environmentally not the worst like they make ones that are made out of like compostable materials um get those little pre pre-done floss picks that it's just like you take one out and you can floss your whole mouth and then you can throw it away um because part of the whole thing with flossing that i think a lot of people find frustrating is you pull the floss out of the device you wrap around your fingers you're trying to wedge it back in the back parts of your mouth just eliminating that hassle has made i am like the world's number one flaw i probably floss like two to three times a day now with those little

picks but also they're not super cheap and i now have probably a lifetime supply of them so that seemed but i use those you know what i mean so that seemed like a good use of the of the costco uh time i bought 5 000 sheets of printer paper oh very way heavier than you would think by the way to carry around it was functional strength yesterday that i had to demonstrate to pick that box up because i'm always running out of printer paper at the exact worst time like i'm running late for something i'm trying to print something and it's like you're out of paper why because i never think to go to the store and buy printer paper well i now have probably enough printer paper to last me for the next 10 years so some things like that i felt like were good uses of the sort of costco system but i'm with you i think that there's there are pitfalls uh there that one can fall into

mostly in the frozen berry department yeah like for me i will admit or i don't not admit i'll say that i um would buy these big tubs of like mixed nuts right but i i already had a very proven track record with mixed nuts i mean not to brag but i always keep a thing of mixed nuts usually deluxe mixed nuts in my no that is nice that is bragging by the way in uh the glove compartment of of the car I'm driving I actually stopped doing that during the summer because they started to feel like roasted nuts and when roasted nuts aren't actually roasted it's just kind of gross um but uh so you know I would buy a big thing of that and then refill the canister that I would take out to the car and it's like okay you know and then I would go through those somewhat quickly but like I had a proven track record on that right and I'm not saying I'm against everything that Genevieve buys but like and well again now I'm just really airing these but like I remember it was april the the weather was just turning nice and genevieve went to costco and so because i mean costco is this is another thing it's not that far away from us it's not like in the old days oh i'm jealous believe me where you had to drive out to like uh um what's the what's the furniture ikea you know it'd be like oh well it's an ikea day so you have to drive to the outskirts of the city or whatever make like a costco is not that far from us it's not the most convenient place to go but it doesn't have to be like well well ma i'm going into town to the costco gonna load up the wagon like you don't have to come back with enough supplies to get you through like a hard winter on the oregon trail like we can go back tomorrow and get more nuts if we need to and so this idea like what i was gonna say was now i'm just being cruel but like i remember it was april the summer was just beginning it's starting to get nice out and genevieve went to costco and just because it is her want she brought back a bunch of those small like kind of one serving chicken pot pies um i can't remember the brand but everybody seems to love these things i want to say it starts with a c i have no issues with these genevieve definitely eats the the pot pies they go by relatively quickly but we already had i believe five in the freezer five and it's the beginning of summer i'm like even if you're gonna have i'm like even if i get you like into Even if you're eating two pot pies or one pot pie every two weeks in the summertime, which I don't think you are, you didn't need to bring home 12 more because now we're getting near the 20s range of pot pies in the freezer at the beginning of summer. and again it's just this mentality and i'm being hard on genevieve but i think anybody who goes to costco kind of has that but if you don't have like a house full of athletes and kids who are growing and all this stuff like you just when you're down to five pot pies that's not the time to bring in 12 more like five to me is still a considerable amount of pot pies to have in storage

well see here's the thing though i now live in the middle of nowhere to where this has actually been i would say an improvement in my life probably an improvement in my diet which is i have found myself in the like two weeks or whatever this has been my primary place now i have found myself eating whatever food i have in the house so much more than i did when i was living like right in the heart of everything oh i believe that sure like i i brought with me so from the apartment up here i brought like a massive amount of canned goods like that is just say cans of soup and and like you know veg whatever a bunch of stuff that i had picked up at various times in portland put in you know cupboards and then never consumed and now i find myself going like all right what can i make out of this okay there's a little bit of penne left i have half a jar of rayos you know like i'm actually this is i i know that i'm 47 years old i shouldn't be bragging about this like i should have been doing this my whole life but there is something about being up here And it being like, you know, it's a it's a 20 minute journey into town if I want to go to like a full size grocery store. And it's been good for me because it's causing me to just work with what I have up here. And so on that level, the idea of having like stocking this place with lots of like the things that I know I'm going to need, like Cottonelle wet wipes, which I do not flush down the toilet. and Andrew will be happy to know because that is bad for the septic system, I put in a diaper genie, a trick I learned from our friend P. Fletch.

Yeah, I was going to say, yeah, it comes out of authority.

But, like, so anyway, here's what my dream life is. I want to have this house that's just fully stocked from floor to ceiling with Costco goods so that I never have to come down. off the hill and then i want to have a p de terre in the city where i ride my little bike down to the boulangerie and get my loaf of bread and then cycle back to my little flat and i'm going to call it a flat by the way that's how you know you're really a parisian yes i'm going to cycle back to my flat and i'm going to make that exact lunch you're talking about with like some fresh tomatoes that i'm growing on like a fire escape outside of my flat and a little like uh you know a little fresh cheese that i got from the cheesemonger who knows me by name you know like i want to have both lifestyles i would have the i you know i've got all the frozen blueberries that a man could ever want and then also i'm getting everything directly from the purveyor of this thing yeah you've gone

to the you've gone to the farm where they've freshly picked the blueberries exactly did i

use boulangerie right is that yes i did dude bakery come on now i need i feel like i need some points on that i mean i have my french is not good how did i pull out how did i pull out hello and welcome to top story you know how i pulled out boulangerie andrews because i'm a fancy lad now because i've been to the street of dreams oh that's right and it man it was really interesting actually so on friday's show i i said we were going to go to this thing becca got some tickets i guess it's like 30 bucks a ticket if you go pay like i i can't quite imagine actually paying 30 to go look at some houses that you're not going to be able to buy but um we had the free ticket so it was like all right let's go check this out and my big question going in was do people live in the houses are they just building a neighborhood and then you walk through it and you could buy one of the houses if you wanted to are they houses that have been identified as nice but they're spread out throughout the city like i don't know what the deal was well it is a street it's literally like a little cul-de-sac or something of these like way over the top fancy houses in like sherwood oregon which we probably got listeners that live in sherwood sherwood is a perfectly nice place what i will say about this place is it is in the uh what would i call the large um the large warehouse district of sherwood like one of those neighborhoods that's just huge processing facilities for like who knows what some kind of i don't i don't even know what it's just tons and tons of huge warehouses where trucks pull up and something gets put in the truck and then a truck leaves and another truck pulls up and offloads into the warehouse like it's in a very kind of not walkable not particularly inviting part of the world and you get to it and it has strong the area where they built these houses andrew strong sudden valley that is to say the neighborhood where the bluths are living very strong in the rest of development strong sudden valley vibrations because what they've done is just taken some kind of hill somewhere in a kind of exurban part of portland and then just like completely graded it out like cut the top of it off flattened it all out drove a bunch of bulldozers uh and then built some giant homes on it and then when you park you're parking on the part of the hill that has it that's just like dust like the parking lot is just the it's just a big shelf that they've cut out of the hill so people can park on it to walk up and gawk at the street of dreams but like if you're not literally on this street where there's like four houses it's just completely undeveloped and is and and not undeveloped like it's wild land it's like a

big dust pit like it's so unappealing when you roll up and and and then when you get and then

of course the other thing too is and the model houses are model houses or they are people are living in them you might have said that they are model house they are model yeah i don't think i

clarified yeah they are they are um uh yeah they're not being lived in you have to like they're very intense about you have to wear booties when you go into them the most fun thing about going through a street of dreams is hearing all of the four-year-old kids laugh about booties about the word booty about the word booty every house you go to there's some kid going i'm taking off my booty um which was kind of fun i enjoyed that um but this was i thought this was the greatest part of the whole thing well one one thing is the vertical integration of this whole thing is just wild so in other words you've got all these houses or not all these you got these like four houses or whatever that they've built which don't get me wrong they're nice like if somebody gave me one of them i would be very stoked it isn't how i would spend two million dollars if i had it on a house but um everything in the house is also like it's not for sale per se but the people who made the thing are there trying to sell you the tile that's in the kitchen Like, oh, this waterfall, marble, whatever you want to call it. guess who's standing next to it a person from the place that makes that so it's not only these houses that are for sale but every single building product every piece of material that's in any of the houses is being represented by the person who sells that kind of building material so it's just like so many layers of commerce going on with this whole thing but this is what i thought was hilarious when i went out to the back like deck area of like one of the houses i noticed some people were talking and i heard one of them say gun club and i was like i wonder what they're talking about and then i got a little closer and i realized what they're talking about which is across the valley from this two million flipping dollar house and the other four around it is obviously a shooting range and the entire time i was there walking around these multi-million dollar houses all i was hearing was people shooting guns off oh my gosh i am and it's and it's where three of the houses in particular they're like the area you're supposed to go and recreate with your family right where you're supposed to sit on some elaborate covered porch area that has a tv and a built-in grill and all this stuff you will be treated to the sounds of rednecks in sherwood oregon blasting off their guns all day and night and i just think that's so awesome for everyone like i mean did nobody at any point when they were surveying the land when they're looking at anybody go hey you know what's happening right near us people are firing weapons off how did that escape their radar it's so hilarious to me i have a question for you about

your time on the street of dreams did you by any chance this is a serious question have you ever had a dream did you by any chance see a little girl in a pink wu-tang clan t-shirt on any of

tours um i didn't but i'm very intrigued uh by that question why do you ask i don't know i just

thought there might be one there no um we got it we got a text message from listener mike and um he said i was on the uh street of dreams tour i didn't see luke but i did see that wu-tang is for the children and sent me a photo of a little girl in a wu-tang oh i love it wu-tang clan shirt and so i wasn't sure it would have been funny if you did not run into listener mike but you did both spy the same kid wearing that shirt that would be amazing oh you you made a big deal of deleting

that on the air it even made you're talking to a person who can't man who can't manage an email account you think i know how to delete audio officially you are not trustworthy this is a different computer by the way i'm not just messing with you the one that i did the whole elaborate like destruction of that audio was an actual different computer um but uh uh yeah so i guess just to sort of wrap it up with the with the tree to dreams it was interesting to go see just to solve the questions in my mind of like how what's what are the logistics of the whole thing but yeah again what it appears to be is they build some very fancy again beautiful homes in their own way um but uh and then i guess you can buy them although of course when i got got back to becca's place i obsessively was trying to figure out what the price of the houses were and you cannot locate that information it would seem i don't think they want you to know i don't think they want a starting bid i think they want you just to take a guess like if you're somebody who might be able to buy one of these they don't want to set the floor for the negotiation by going it's two million i think they want to go what would you pay hoping that you'll go like three million and they're like okay would you would you go for three and a half million i think that i think it's proprietary information how much the houses are actually what they're asking for them this you might have

explain this and i'm just being super thick about this my apologies but um so if you were to go to this street of dreams and say you know what i am really into this model house and i'm really into these counters or whatever and i'm gonna strike up some deals is the arrangement that you are going to build in this area with the gun range across the way or is it just no i think you get the house Oh you can just buy the model houses

Yeah yeah I think model house Is

It's not like going in and saying yes I do want this And now I'm building I have a little piece of property That I'm purchasing in southern Washington And I want to hire the people Who made this house to build a house for me out there That's not the point of the street of dreams I don't think It is although I do think you could

But let me say this I think you could do that Like I think you could if you wanted to Recreate one of these you could But I think it's less about like my sister Sarah and her husband Josh they live in this really adorable mid-century home in Portland and they live in a developed like their neighborhood which was built in the 1950s their house was the model house like before any of the other houses existed it was their house and that's what people would go walk through and then say yes I'll take this house and then they would build another one next door and around you know the corner or whatever I feel like this is more like the point of this is for someone to just buy the house literally and then you know eventually the neighborhood will fill in but i mean i could be i could be wrong about that but i mean there were real estate agents poised positioned at every home welcoming people in so i mean i think that the idea was you like if you you know if you got a lot of dough you could literally buy one of these places you know and and like live in it or something because um i think i think that was sort of the point but um here's what i would say my one piece of unsolicited advice for whoever's running the street of dreams in whatever town you're in we went beck and i went on the um second to last day of this thing so it was yeah it was had been on for i don't know a couple of weeks and we were there on the saturday it was ending on sunday if you are trying to sell people multi-million dollar homes if you were trying to sell them true luxury really make sure you're managing the port-a-potty game because nothing puts you out of the mood of buying a luxury property like having to stare into the leftovers the the the human waste of two weeks of people who've been drinking chardonnay and pretending like they could buy an expensive house like i i just had to pee and i went into one of the porta potties and it was so so upsetting and true that i just thought if i were somebody who had the money to buy one of these houses and i went into this porta potty it would change my entire mood for the day like it could that porta potty could have cost them millions in sales because I was like it really we were on our way out anyway but it changed the trajectory of my feelings like if I had been just getting there I've been like okay we're going home now I need to go home and I need to lie down as a result of this port-a-potty like if you are trying to sell luxury to people you need to you need to literally just have someone sitting there with that truck behind the port-a-potty so that it sucks so like every time a person uses it you clean the entire port-a-potty that needs to be the white glove service yeah around this multi-million dollar

fanciness and i'm sure a lot of families just i mean it sounds like it might have been a bigger event than i was picturing as well like you just people just kind of filing through like a whole bunch of people who have no intention like yourself of actually buying a house but just

sort of like it's an event yes and that's like i said that's where the kind of vertical integration of it is amazing because you charge people i might be using that term wrong i just mean the layers of how they're making money because you're charging people 30 bucks a ticket to come look at these houses that you are going to eventually sell to someone yeah and then i assume you're probably charging all of the vendors to be there because there's all these tents hey do you like uh that uh you know whatever do you like the the sink in the bathroom we sell these sinks so and i assume all of those vendors and all of those you know manufacturers are paying money to be there on the street of dreams when they're little tents so and then you've got the you know food and beverage people are then going over and getting a overpriced hot dog and an overpriced glass of wine cup of wine so it's just like all all the way through they're just making money off of people and and i think mostly people go just because it's fun to look at these houses again i was i was the the houses were very nice very very nice but i thought that they a the porta potties i needed to get that under control and b they needed to somehow it just felt i just felt so sudden valley to me i can't overstate that like it let me put it this way andrew between costco and the street of dreams you would not have liked my weekend it would have been it it couldn't have veered further

from andy times well i mean i enjoyed it speaking of andy times have you let's do that thing on the show where i ask you to look at photos that i've sent you that the listeners can't see although i am on the show page can you so impressed like okay so you don't think i was exaggerating i I hope that these photos captured the degree to which I cut into this hedge, because it is significant, right? Oh, my gosh, dude.

That's huge. And, I mean, you know me. This is going to sound quasi-sexual. I've always loved the thickness of your hedges, Andrew. No, I've always thought that was one of the coolest elements of your and Vives' house is this hedge thing. So I get nervous when I hear you talking about trimming it back, because I'm like, this is one of the things that's very cool about your place. But, no, you're right. it's it's um you did you made the right decision and uh and it's an incredible like you're i i also thought maybe you were overstating how much foliage you'd created but now i don't think you're

look at the front of it in front of my house i basically have like kind of like two felled trees almost um in front of my house i don't know what i'm gonna do about this did you talk to

anyone um in the topiary community about like or did you do any googling about hedge trimming like how long does it take to grow back is it bad for the hedge is it good for the hedge like did you

conventional wisdom of everybody i know and i talked to some neighbors who walked by and had um who have similar stuff and it's like this stuff just grows like a weed i mean it is and actually um uh yes our friend karen who worked she she wrote i'm i'm Thank you. What is the name of Karen's book? It's a very clever name about plants. Oh, yes. We're talking about it, and I'm really sorry, Karen. I'll look it up and plug it by the end of the show. But, yeah, like I was emailing Karen about it as well. Like these things just want to grow. They want to be trees is something that Karen said, not not hedges. So anyway, like I have some photos. I'm not going to send them to you now because I've sent you enough photos and I'm already too distracted on the show today. But I had our friend Katie take a photo of me standing in front of the hedge before I trimmed it back this far, holding my arms out as far as I can hold them. And I think my wingspan is about six feet, right? Your wingspan is usually about how tall you are, depending on your limbs.

Unless you're LeBron James on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

Then the proportions get a little different. Right, exactly. But anyway, so I took some before pictures. And it's just like this hedge was out of control. Like it was so wide that even with my long extendo arm trimmer, I've said this a million times, and standing on a very tall ladder, trimming from one side and then moving the ladder to the other side and trimming from that side, I still had a lot of trouble reaching the middle, trimming the middle top of these things. It was just out of control. So now by cutting in like three or four feet and maybe three feet, it should just already make that easier. The thing is, my original plan was to do this to the side of the hedges as you see, which is the side facing the back alley. So when we're in our yard, we won't really notice this much, except you can see a little bit more daylight through it. I wanted to do it to our yard side as well because we would end up reclaiming kind of a big chunk of our yard and still have good hedges. But I think we need to let this get green. I think we're going to wait a season, let the alley side grow in. And I think it will grow in pretty quickly, probably by, you know, by the beginning of mid-summer next year. I'll bet you that'll all be green again. And I'm just going to maybe trim the yard side. But eventually, maybe next year or the year after, I really want to do the same deal to the yard side of this. And we'll reclaim so much more, like, horseshoe space for Genevieve's next party. Or pickleball area.

Sorry. Yeah, absolutely. Did you see this Netflix story? I actually think it's kind of an interesting story

I saw it I'll let you set it out And it's maddening in its own way But it's also especially maddening to me In a way that I will explain after you explain the story It's driving me It's seriously causing me some anguish this morning

I heard this on NPR this morning Chloe Veltman did a great story About the confusion Around if people have to return Their Netflix DVDs or not Chloe profiles. Longtime Netflix DVD customer Mo Long was excited to receive a recent email in his inbox from Netflix. It included a link inviting customers to potentially receive up to 10 extra discs on September 29th when Netflix's 25-year-old delivery service goes dark. Let's have some fun for our finale, the email said. You won't know if any extra envelopes are headed your way until they arrive in your mailbox. By the way, this guy, Mo, has a queue in Netflix of 500 movies, which is a truly shocking number. Like, there's 500 movies on Netflix that Mo hasn't watched yet, that he's waiting for. Now, and so Mo is actually not one of the people in the article or in the piece on NPR who was thinking he didn't have to send the DVDs back, but Chloe Veltman was able to make contact with a number of other people through reddit and other places where they're sort of assuming they get to keep the dvds because why well because netflix has no use for them netflix is not mailing them out after that after um the uh september 29th uh netflix is going to have to throw them in a landfill probably they're apparently a hassle to um to destroy wouldn't it be better if people had the dvds and were playing them then mailing them back to netflix which by the way is the official rule from netflix is you have to send them back to us um for netflix you just have a millions of dvds that then they're going to go throw in a landfill somewhere well it turns out it has to do with hollyweird andrew uh they talked to an attorney named lindsey spiller of the san francisco entertainment and business law firm spiller law who says that netflix is actually not allowed to give the dvds away even if they wanted to the filmmakers and property rights owners give netflix a license and then they can sub license it to their subscribers but they can't give anybody ownership they don't have it themselves netflix is actually technically not allowed to give you that copy of midnight run starring charles groden and robert de niro because they don't even own it they're leasing it from whoever owns that movie and then i guess technically Peace. subleasing it to you while you have it at your house and you're watching it that sort of makes

sense to me i mean it's sort of infuriating and you would think that if it was a priority for them they could figure out a way to strike a deal with the um with the studios and maybe even like at least donate them to libraries across the country right like that would be ideal the licensing thing doesn't surprise me the way licensing has kind of seeped into our everyday life the way that like Like, I mean, I'll still probably, I'll never probably get over the idea that I have to license my audio editing software and my video editing software and Photoshop, all of that. Like, that I don't just buy it and own it on my computer now. I got to pay a monthly fee for this stuff, right? Like, that is, and we're getting a good deal on it thanks to my friend who works at Adobe, Catherine. I promise you an associate producer credit. There it is. Don't spend it all in one place. But it's just like everything is about licensing now. so that doesn't shock me what really shocks me about this and i did a little bit of googling before the show to try to put my mind at ease and it came up with nothing but i swear i swear to god like two and a half three years ago we already did a story about netflix ending its dvd service like i remember it i i have a memory of that conversation as well i remember i I usually when I remember talking about something on the show, I can usually remember like where I was when I was talking about it. I have a vague sense of that, whether or not it was the old Wallingford apartment or what have you. And I feel like when I was living in my old Roosevelt apartment, this story came up. I can picture talking about it in the studio because I remember then telling you the story of how I found out about a year before that, that my dad finally canceled his DVD mail subscription, which is like you know it's just so shocking that people were still using this i mean it makes sense there's parts of the country that don't have high-speed internet even to this day like i'm not trying to dvd shame anybody but i was just shocked that my dad who has like this home little theater thing in this basement um in his own little rumpus room right and he's got all these streaming services and he's like yeah well i decided to stop getting the dvds i was like dad you're still getting the dvds what the heck i remember telling that story the last time this came up in the news I mean, maybe the news three years ago was Netflix makes the announcement that it's going to sunset the DVD delivery service, and it took them three years to do it. That doesn't seem right to me, but it's the only way I'll be able to sleep tonight. This is like one of those, you know, what's the word for it? The Berenstain Bears versus Berenstain Bears. Mandela Effect. Yeah, which Mandela Effect really has more to do with, like, a collective misremembering of something where this is just me. But, like, it's just maddening.

I have a vague memory of that. I'm sure one of the listeners will fill us in on this, I'm sure. But yeah, I wonder what happened. I wonder if it just took longer to wind it down than they planned or if they're just trying to get as much earned media as they can by just announcing every few years that they're getting rid of the DVDs. But I will tell you this much, Andrew. Ya boy, if I had Netflix DVDs, I would not be sending them back. I would be like, get at me, Netflix. I really – I have a very, very low level of confidence that Netflix is going to throw a lot of money at trying to get its DVDs back. That's probably true. I feel like it's going to be the lowest law enforcement priority at Netflix is getting their hands back on all of those Frozen 2 DVDs or whatever else are out in circulation. Like I can't officially give people this advice. I cannot legally advise them to not send their DVDs back. But if it were me, I would definitely roll the dice on that one.

Who do you think are the people quoted in this story? Do you think they're people who don't have access to good quality internet? Are they people who just sort of like that old school feel of getting things in the mail?

Well, our friend Mo Long with the 500 movie Q is described – well, he's a self-described film buff in North Carolina. And my guess would be he – not everything is streaming. Yeah, that's a really good point. The real estate on Netflix is actually kind of, I wouldn't say pricey, but it's like they're constantly deciding what are they going to stream and not stream based on what they think people will want to watch. So I think there's a lot of stuff that is just not available. And in fact, you know what I'm going to do probably tonight is, remember, I bought a DVD Blu-ray player just so that I could watch this one documentary streetwise, which I had to buy from the Criterion collection. I'm actually going to set it up tonight And probably watch that movie Because I've been waiting to watch it And again I'm the king of I'm the king of making big plans around Things that I've acquired And how I'll become a different person But I do think there might be something kind of interesting About trying to find more content That isn't streaming Or at least if I encounter content That I can't stream I don't know. being able to get a physical copy of it like i know that makes kind of no sense like why would i want to have dvds when practically everything is streaming and all i'm doing is collecting more stuff that then i have to deal with at some point like it just seems like a better system to just tell your tv play midnight run starring charles groden and robert de niro um by the way great film i just wanted to mention uh which clearly see it recently i must have because why would that be the top of mind um like that feels like a movie that's not streaming probably i guess is my thought but i kind of have i kind of am into this idea i mean i'm a person who at this point owns like one dvd and it's the documentary street wise like i think i've i think i've throughout moves divorces and the like i think i've i've i've ended up losing my dvd collection which is kind of a bummer because i used to have boogie nights which i loved and uh caddyshack with the director's commentary on it i wonder what happened to all that stuff But I do kind of like the idea of having some physical media that I can actually watch and enjoy. I don't know why that's appealing to me in this streaming age, but it kind of is.

Yeah, I mean, what were Genevieve and I? Oh, Genevieve had on a Star Trek yesterday, and she's watching the Voyager series now. I don't know if you're familiar with Voyager. I don't know what era that is.

Is that like probably probably try to guess, though, because I feel like it's I feel like it's very unlikely that people have strong feelings about which Star Trek iteration we're discussing.

Yeah, I was actually right. It was late 90s, early 2000. So 1995 to 2001 was in Voyager. I don't know anything about Star Trek, but I usually when Genevieve puts on a Star Trek, I, you know, find something else to do. But we were sitting there. I hadn't seen her all weekend. Right. So we're just chilling out. She's watching Star Trek. And I couldn't, I don't have any idea what's going on in that show. And there's some, and I'm like popping in the middle of an episode. And there's some character who is watching a very old timey TV. It would be like an old timey TV for us. And we don't live in the space age future. You know what I'm saying? He's watching like an old black and white TV with like a really clunky old remote control. The kind of with like flips and switches, flips and switches on it. You know what I'm talking about? And and Genevieve said, oh, yeah, this character has got an obsession with like old timey kind of technology or whatever. I'm just like, oh, man, who could who could relate to that? I say as I slink downstairs and try to adapt like a crappy vinyl record player to a YouTube to a Bluetooth device so that I can still listen to my old crackly media. But through modern speakers for some reason I'm just like yeah of course There are going to be people in the space age future Who are still obsessed with like the media options Of the past right So I definitely get that physicality kind of thing I think I know we talked about this Not all that long ago When you discovered some of the DVD commentary From what's the What's the bro-y movie The bro-y comedy Swingers I can't remember what it was A story on the show maybe six months ago Or something where somebody didn't I know all these guys faces I can't think of their name somebody didn't want them swearing

in front of their daughter sure sure it was the Judd Apatow and Jonah Hill and those guys so it was probably it would have been oh that's interesting that you think of that as a bro-y comedy I think of it as a coming of age film a coming of age comedy because that was super bad

but isn't that literally where the word bromance came from like the super bad era like these close male relationships like these anyway well whatever um that i remember we were talking about the the dvd commentary and playing some of it and like that is something that i really do feel like is lost in the digital age aside from what you brought up which is a really good point like they make it seem like everything is available to us on streaming and it's like we pay for so many streaming services and i could not find shit that fit my mood a couple of fridays ago which is why i ended up re-watching moonlight and openly crying while folding clothes on a friday night but um but it's just like there's like this things that are available on streaming are just the tip of the cinematic iceberg right and that is like this idea that everything is at our fingertips right now is we're being sold such a bill of goods on that but then also the fact that like we don't have dvd commentaries that was such a cultural phenomenon that just sort of like came and is now gone and like i just feel like dvd commentaries were really important to people who liked them like Genevieve probably watched the commentary of the Mr. Show discs that we have more times than she watched it without commentary I used to we didn't have cable way back in like the very early 2000s in New Hampshire and she would just be watching the DVD commentary of Mr. Show with Bob and Dave again I'd be like you hanging out with your friends and she's like yeah hanging out with the friends because that was maybe podcasting

kind of cuts into that a little bit i was gonna say that's proto podcasting in a way don't you

think yeah maybe here i go once again with the email every week i hope that it's from a few Female. Oh, man, it's not from a female.

Emails and V-mails. Oh, I have an email today too, Andrew. Oh, okay. It's a rare time where I'm actually helping contribute to this segment, but what would you like to start with?

Well, I have a little email, or I'm sorry, a voicemail story that I'd like to play for you, but I also was going to mention that we've gotten a lot of emails and V-mails on a particular topic. It's a small point, but an important one. I'm interested to know if this is what your email is addressing too. So why don't you go first? It's regarding my plaque at the Baranoff. Oh, no, this is very interesting to me, though. OK, we have three topics. You go first.

This is from listener Justin. So at some point, I guess last week, we were talking about, well, I think what I was saying was I no longer have it as my life's dream to have a photo, a framed photo of me at a bar when I'm no longer on this planet. And then we started talking about What are the sort of What am I leaving behind in the bars of America And what often comes up is this little plaque That I paid to have Which is also, just as I say it out loud It's kind of sad for me, honestly, that I had to pay Like you should just be such a cool, fun customer At a bar, they want to honor you By putting a plaque down on the bar That just says your name Because you're so cool It's like buying your friends It's like paying people to come to your birthday party

I always assumed that they were just, like, in honor of regulars, but I'll bet you— They probably were. No, I'll bet you not. I'll bet you there was always a way of just buying a little—you know, getting a little extra income for the bar.

I am guessing that the beginning of it was you could pay to have a plaque put down that would make it your seat. Ah, yeah, sure. Like, literally, like— You could come in and be like, out of my seat. Yeah, that's Tom's seat or whatever. And then, like, you know, little sort of neophytes like myself came in and were like, can I buy one? even though there's already like three plaques on a particular spot or whatever. So what I said, I had heard a rumor that the Baranoff had redone their bar because I had this little plaque at this place called the Baranoff in Greenwood. And it said, Luke Burbank Professional Drinker. And then it said, www.tvtl.net, which I always kind of regretted. It just felt like the weirdest, although it is still our website. So I guess at least that part, you know, at least it wasn't like some website that I only was owning the URL for like a month or something. At least it's not demonspit.com or something, which I did own.

Oh, was that a fake energy drink that you guys came up with?

Yeah, it just seemed like it should be an energy drink. And we were talking one day about, and the name demonspit came up. And then it turns out that demonspit, the URL was not, nobody owned it. So I bought it and then pointed it towards the Seagram's Golden Wine Cooler commercial where Bruce Willis is on a porch singing. So for, like, I don't know, about a year, if you went to demonspit.com, you just were redirected to a Seagram's Golden Wine Cooler ad. All of that is to say, I was wondering what had happened to my plaque, and listener Justin is here to help. Justin says, I meant to email you about this a couple of months ago, but I forgot. This is why, Justin, we bring the same topics up over and over again on the program. It's a reminder to people to check in with us. We popped into the Knopf one June evening, by the way. I didn't know people called the Knopf, but I'm into that. The Baranoff, the Knopf. We popped into the Knopf one June evening after its reopening and grabbed seats at the brand new bar. It's made out of one huge slab of wood with a live edge, which I guess is nice, except for the fact that this is supposed to be the Baranoff and not like some generic rural brewery. Nice joke, Justin.

For a second, I thought you were jumping in there. No, this is still Justin saying that, like— Still Justin, but my exact thoughts. Yeah, me too.

Like, the Baranoff is not a live-edge— Yeah, agreed. —like, live-edge wood bar type of thing. Like, know your lane, Baranoff. You're a place where people are ordering Jell-O shots. People, me—I'm the people in this story—are ordering Jell-O shots at, like, 145. Like, you know, it's not—I'm upset to even hear this news, that it's got this live-edge thing going on. um justin says uh it's super wide and the little old bartender had to stand on tippy toes to slide drinks across also sounds like an osha violation sounds like sounds like they're trying to make the place nice and i don't i mean i haven't been in there yet but rarely when like a dive bar tries to make itself nicer to appeal to a different clientele usually you don't get the new clientele and you also alienate the old clientele it's kind of my experience yeah we'll

see i guess that neighborhood is kind of changing right like you're i don't know isn't it sort of like what was the i loved the crosswalk which was a real dive bar across the street but now it's coindexter is a place where you can play really ball which i mean i say it that way like i love little pinball bars as well and i think a lot of people i think it serves more people than some scary somewhat stat dive bar across the street which everybody was pretty stabby on certain people said that i never saw anybody get stabbed anyway um it seemed nice to me i like their big floor uh and the bartenders were always nice they had a floor that was like that uh that checkered black and white big tiles

loved it anyway we definitely had a bartender one night who was very friendly to the degree that i wondered if they were helping augment their mood with something i believe that was right when the pandemic was lifting a little bit and you and vives were so nice so as to get the

round get to to get the the drinks for the night oh no you're thinking of bleachers my friend i know that bartender because she's all i'm always like this i can't be because i saw her again like a year later i don't know if she's still working there i haven't been to bleachers in a while but

are they next to each other they are right on that same strip yeah next to each other bleachers used to be hilarious that you know the bartender i'm talking i know exactly who you're talking about

because she's great and i she i've actually you know been served by her many times in my life and um she's really great i don't know her name i'm not a regular or anything but yeah the energy is always kind of like i don't i always think about the crash with her and again whether it's whether or not it's being supplemented or not like somebody who's got that much energy all the time i can't help but to wonder like what happens when that energy goes away anyway yeah weird thing exactly uh but no crash coindexters is near that i think maybe literally

next door justin is well it's it's not uh it's not a a surprise to me that justin is a tbtl listener because i think justin thinks very much uh the way that you and i do andrew on these matters um also justin says there's no more padding for your elbows a rude design choice all around in my opinion this just sounds like i was wondering about that are getting manifestly worse over there for the uh the ux um anyway i noticed that all the old placards were gone specifically yours so i asked what the plan was she told me that there's no plan to reattach them i'm sure that they you know they got their fancy new bar uh there's no way they want to besmirch it with luke burbank professional drinker tbtl.net um but uh they are thinking of putting them on display in a frame on the wall oh interesting a little professional drinker yeah so there is a Well, no, not at all. He said they're thinking of putting them on display. Now, normally I would say that means there's probably no chance that they'll ever get around to it. But, I mean, this is the same place that actually acted upon my request and also my money to make the plaque and put it on the bar in the first place, you know, way back when. So that actually gives me some hope that they might do the framed thing. They might actually follow through with that. And I'm sure that, I don't know. I mean, my sense is I had to be one of the youngest people to have that particular thing. Yeah, because you got that a while back. I got that, like, probably 15 years ago. And all of the other placards on there looked much older. And much, you know, like they maybe were from the 80s or something. So I'm curious how many people who have placards that are still around and are still, like, mentally around enough to go check on their plaque. Like, I wonder what the I wonder if anyone's going in and going, hey, what happened to my plaque? Could you put it up somewhere? And then they're going to do the framing. I wonder if there's going to be any pressure on them or if it'll actually happen.

It's also just a nice nod to the past anyway. I mean, like totally kind of a friend of a friend, a guy I used to work with over at Cairo Radio. I think he's at KUOW now and I'm blanking on his name, but he owned that Streamline Tavern. Oh, yeah. Mike Lewis. Mike Lewis. Thank you. You know, he had to move his bar and he literally like he and a bunch of people literally moved the bar like for the old bar from the old place to the new place. And they like replaced like a lot of the the wood where there was original graffiti and stuff. They brought it into the new bar as kind of a way of like as a way of sort of kind of, I guess, like kind of paying tribute, if that's not too strong of a word for a bunch of alcoholics, you know, for the people who'd been like, you know, kind of going to that bar for a long, long time. whether or not they were still alive or dead tribute still you scare me strong of a word um all right let's move on here to another topic if you don't mind i just wanted to say i'm not going to play this voicemail but we got a lot of emails and voicemails and various messages from people who um wanted to weigh in on the can recycling for deposit situation yes i have been

saving my cans since we had that i don't have a can crusher yet andrew but i well that's saving

save your money on the can crusher because here's the point so here's what we've established Washington State, where you currently now live, does not have a coin deposit. Therefore, you cannot turn those in in Washington State. You could pull a grift, which is buy your cans in Washington, not have to pay that deposit, but then take it across the border to Oregon and then recycle them there.

Which I don't plan to do, believe it or not. Sketchball that I am.

Okay, well, then you can stop saving your cans anyway because I don't think there's anything. you can do with them in Washington but the point here is that a lot of people wanted to let you know is if you have any intention of getting those cans into Oregon and turning them in for a deposit do not crush them a lot of a lot of people saying no no we've made this mistake that you need the barcodes on them like if you crush them you're donezo whoa that's different from what I grew up with yeah we used to crush them as kids and turn them in I remember doing that in Boston too when we were like broke right out of college or whatever um but i i remember i thought we were crushing him and then it was done by weight back in the day so i don't know what organs got going on but we got a voicemail from i believe um jesse in cincinnati who it was either in ohio or michigan they can't crush him anymore either because uh you got to read the barcodes can you

believe that i don't have my oh my god we are crushing it drop on this computer what a missed opportunity that is well that's okay you have whoop and baby they rule the world yes i do um that okay that's really good information um and i haven't crushed any of them yet because i don't and they were purchased in oregon this is the thing this is i don't know if i'll follow through with this or not but my thought would be if i buy because again i'm i go to oregon constantly in fact all the stuff that's that i was unloading yesterday from costco was purchased the costco in like tiger to oregon right so if i were to be in portland and i were to buy a bunch of um or some amount although listener jamie checked in from mississippi and said believe it or not soda water does actually kind of lose it's it's fizzy yeah because you know jamie runs sunhouse studios that very cool thing from her house and so she's always got lots of refreshments around and she said that she learned the hard way that um if you have like you know boxes and boxes of cans of seltzer some of them will actually sort of like lose their verve a little bit so my point is i would never try to like return washington cans to oregon um but if i did buy them in oregon and i was going back down there and i had a bag of them and it was gonna make me 20 bucks i it seems like it wouldn't be you know the dumbest idea but um but yeah i was definitely i was mostly into it for the crushing though so maybe what i'll do is i'll just buy my cans in washington crush them save them and then take them to the recycling because they don't do active recycling out here where you don't get you don't get a special bin uh for it so maybe what i can do is just try to if i can try to treat mother earth a little bit nicer and just like make a run every every month of like all of the crushed cans and take them to the recycler yeah i will say this just as somebody

who recycles and we have curbside recycling here it is nicer oh we've heard about it it is it is nice to be able to crush them do you know that i also have a little secret a little secret weapon in my garbage bin arsenal these days. No. When we bought this house, because I think somebody was renting, I think maybe two different families were renting here or something, there are two recycle bins. Now, we rarely need the second recycle bin, and they're the big blue boys, you know, come up to my chest or something like that, but I always just keep one in the garage, and it just sits there. It's just like in the cut, ready. And then after a big party, and recycling pickup is every two weeks so genevieve had her big party obviously a lot of beer cans etc uh that thing filled up pretty quickly like then i could open up the garage and a big glow came out and i and the angels sang as i pulled the blue bin out and so this last uh this last garbage day all gone my friend and then i got to put the reserve one back in the garage so

i can sleep for another year you are truly living your best life well it was great because genevieve

Genevieve, as we were talking about last week, had this big cabin weekend with a bunch of our friends, and she came back last night, and, you know, everybody kind of has to, like, volunteer for various things. You can't leave a bunch of garbage up at our friend's cabin. So Genevieve did this last year as well. She volunteered to take the recycling from a whole weekend of, like, ten people drinking or whatever back to our place where there's this big-ass black garbage bag. And, you know, you could imagine a situation where Andrew would start, like, kind of thinking, oh, like, how much room do I have in my bins for all these people? But it was perfect. I was like, yes, sirree, we will take it because we are the family with the reserved extra blue recycle bin. I'm happy to be a good neighbor. Hey, this other voicemail I have for you here is a little bit of a stem winder that I think we might want to talk about a little bit. So I'm going to save it for tomorrow. OK, it's about something that happened to a listener of ours at a baseball game recently.

Nice. OK, well, I think we will get to that tomorrow. But for today, we're going to be all done with TBTL. So thank you for listening, everyone. We'll be back here with more imaginary radio for you tomorrow. Please join us for that. In the meantime, have a great Monday. Take care of yourselves. Go M's. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

Ah!

he hates these cans stay away from the cans power out