Muse

We have to get our story out before Graham runs her version.

Now, I know it's a lot to ask. If we take down the woman who runs the network, we could potentially lose our jobs.

But why did we become journalists if not to uncover the truth and use it to change the world?

You know what? I'm in. You know what? I'm in, too. Graham is mean AF. That's a Twitter term, which I can only assume stands for mean as Frankenstein. There is another term, DTF. Don't touch Frankenstein. To which I usually just reply, WTF. Won't touch Frankenstein. Right, so we're all in. TBTL. Guess what day it is. Guess what day it is.

It's Friday, Friday. Gonna get down on Friday. Everybody's looking forward to the weekend. What are you guys doing? Is this a host job where you're hosting me down? Dude, you host yourself down. You hose yourself up and down, Charlie. Oh, no, I'll hose yourself. Come on, what do you want me to do? I don't care. Yeah, get a job. Oh, get a job? Yeah. Just get a job? Why don't I strap on my job helmet and squeeze down into a job cannon and fire off into job land, where jobs grow on jobbies?

That was really, really, really terrible, but everyone does that kind of stuff sometimes. It happens, like, once or twice or three times in every life. Or twice. Or twice. I mean one. Or once.

Let's get to the jokes.

Alright, hello, good morning, and welcome everyone to a Friday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. You are boring me to death, and I am already dead. You are boring me back to death. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. Definitely. For sharks. Coming to you from the Madrone Hill studio. perched high above the mighty Columbia.

Oh, Ma, Pa, it's just beautiful.

It is a beautiful Friday here on the... Is today the first day of fall or is it the last day of summer? I think I would know that. I think the equinox. I don't know. Somebody will look it up and email me about it. Anyway, whatever day it is, it's very beautiful out there on the mighty Columbia. Hope you're having a nice time wherever you're at. We are arrived at episode 4038 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. And we have a lot to talk about, including the fact that the new iPhone 15 is available as of today.

Isn't that for techno geeks with spreadsheets?

And they've added some features to it. I said yesterday that it seems like every one of these new versions of the iPhone is sort of less exciting. I might be wrong about that. I don't know. I saw one article today that said people are very excited about it. But I also saw an article about how Apple has suffered what's been called a spectacular failure. I've made a huge mistake. Throwing billions of dollars and thousands of people at an engineering problem they haven't been able to solve. So we'll look into that. Speaking of problems we can't seem to solve societally, new reporting in the Washington Post that over half of the dog owners they surveyed were suspicious of vaccinating their dog.

Just study it out and you'll see.

And they say that number, anecdotally they were noticing something, veterinarians were, but then they actually studied it out. They said that that vaccine hesitation is much increased since the pandemic.

So I'll say, I'll say, what's up, dog?

Bad news all around for this country. Here's good news for the listeners to this show. It's time to talk to the longest running co-bro of the program, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships.

I like turtles.

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

Good morning, Luke. You know what's exciting about these new days of TBTL since we relaunched the show and relaunched the website is people can comment, Luke, right on the website. Like it's like it's 2005. People can just TBTL bringing 2005 to 2023.

TBTL just got an Earthlink account.

Exactly. Exactly. We have a website set up now where we post the show every day, and then you can leave comments underneath the show, and you can have a conversation about what you heard in the show. It's wonderful. This thing called the Internet Man, I think it's going to take off. It's really a way for people to connect from all over the world. I feel like it's a way for people to connect. If there was some way to, I don't know, like kind of socialize online, I think that's the last big leap, right? Yes. We have, we're getting information.

It's mostly used right now for work and for spreadsheets.

But if there's a way that people could connect in a more social way, I think it'd really kick it to sort of another level.

Sort of develop friend groups, you know, maybe make, well, I'm talking like an idiot. I was going to say, like, maybe make fun content like videos and share them with other people.

This is the beginning of a social engineering attack.

It really is. I feel like I'm attacking the show right now. Okay, here's what I'm getting at here. So yesterday I was working out in the yard and I started getting ping, ping, pings on my phone. I was getting notifications that people were leaving stories under Wednesday's show. Now, Wednesday was the day that you told the pretty dramatic story of your cat Bubbles going kind of missing in the house, but going missing and giving you a real scare even after you found her in the walls and the ceiling and behind the tub.

cutting various holes in various walls, hoping to entice her to come out, and she still took her sweet-ass time.

That's right. In fact, you sent several photos of this adventure, and I posted them all to Wednesday's show page, and maybe that's why people are kind of gathering there to tell their stories of cats gone wild. But I thought some of these stories, I mean, Luke, my heart, well, it was in my chest where it belongs, But it was beating rapidly while reading some of these. Here's one similar to your situation the other day. Karen writes, I had a cat who went missing at the same time I was having my roof replaced. Oh, jeez. Yep, she'd crawled up into the partially opened roof and was trapped up there. I heard her meowing while watching TV one night. Sounded like this. Yeah. I tried to get her out of the attic, but I was too big to fit in the corner she was hiding in, and she was too big to climb out. I ended up taking out a vent from the outside of the house and enticing her with tuna. Once she got close, I just grabbed her and pulled her from the outside, threw her on the ground inside. That was enough of that. That cat sounds like became an indoor-only cat after that, Luke.

I wonder how long, I don't know if Karen mentions in the story, but how long the cat was inside the roof or the attic. Yeah, like I am assuming that— It sounds like Karen had just moved on, maybe not moved on with her life, But like watching TV when you hear a meow sounds like it's days later and you're just trying to distract yourself by watching some, you know, I don't know, whatever, whatever it is that Karen enjoys on television.

Yeah. Or in this case, maybe kind of not realizing that the cat was even, you know, maybe assuming that the cat was just sleeping on a bed somewhere, but then hearing a meow from above your head. So maybe that's when Karen found out. I'm not sure. We also heard from our friend Mellie out there in New York State, whose cat Roxy was gone for two weeks, Mellie posts. It was the worst feeling, especially wondering if she was hurt somewhere close by, but she doesn't have a very loud meow. I was already thinking about how to start a memorial for her, and then my mom suddenly got so excited. We think she may have been trapped in someone's garage while they went on vacation. She was very thin and hungry. I'm assuming when she says her mom was excited, I'm assuming the cat just walked in, as sometimes they do. I told you about my cat, Alex, when I was like 14 years old. Three days. I had seen, I left this out of the story, but when my cat went missing when I was a kid, I'll whisper it because it's a little sensitive. I really assumed he was gone because this is the saddest thing. I've said a lot of sad things on this show, but there were little bloody paw prints on the outside of the bathroom window. We knew how he got out. I think I had left the bathroom window open to air out and there was no screen in there the rule was close the window before you open the bathroom door just like God does and I think I had left the window open and Alex had gotten out and we waited we waited another day but he had recently and I hate to admit this I do not do this to my cats today but we had gotten him declawed it was the 90s and so chances are what happened was his paws were already very sensitive because of that somewhat recent procedure and then like i said on the like i think it was the second day he was gone i saw that he had been trying to get back up into the window which had since been closed and i saw the footprints yeah i was 14 man i i remember my girlfriend giving me a big hug and i was just like inconsolable and i was like at that age where maybe maybe we're sort of all still at that age or maybe i am i know i think i'm approaching that age but like i was just like no no i'm emotionally wrecked by by

this bubble situation that i think i would have been at age 14 no i was going to say i think i

was at that age where um crying was this it was really embarrassing for me in front of other people and adults and you're 14 and whatever and i just remember just feeling really embarrassed but not being able to control my emotions having seen what i had just seen um but then alex came back. And anyway, I don't remember how I got into the details of that story, but I'm assuming that Mellie's cat just came trotting back in like nothing was wrong the same way Bubbles did to you the other day.

Now, if I remember right, maybe this isn't Mellie's current location, but I know for a while Mellie was on Staten Island. Oh, okay. And I'm just imagining this cat coming back, a real Staten Island cat.

Yeah, exactly. Just like, hey, forget about it. I always picture him coming back with a cigarette addiction and a tattoo that says mom.

Leather jacket.

Yeah. But anyway, Mellie's cat came home. She was very thin and hungry, and everyone was relieved, and she was no longer allowed outside, it looks like here. Here's the story, though, that I think takes the cake. Not that it's a competition, everybody, but listener Brian says, long, long ago, I did an internship in San Francisco. I rode a motorcycle from Seattle to San Francisco, and then a friend visited by plane to bring my cat, Lily, into town for me. When she arrived, we went to a counter to pick up Lily in her cage. This is at the airport. The person there gave us a smashed cage with no cat in it and asked, was it like this when you gave it to us?

Yeah, I gave you a smashed cat container with no cat in it just for kicks.

Yeah. Yeah. I did not know what to do, writes Brian. I kept repeating, someone knows if my cat is alive and in Seattle or San Francisco, louder and louder and louder until they removed me from the airport by security. Whoa. It is a long story that includes me on the plane tarmac calling out for Lily. Holy moly. I tell this story because two weeks later, after I had a ceremony disposing of her bowls and stuff, the Humane Society called. An electrician heard her in a new wall at the San Francisco airport and cut her out. Oh, my God.

That's wild. Right. So poor Brian had to, like, fly back home to Seattle. sans cat and then i mean i i have to admit i don't know if disposing of the cat stuff would have happened as quickly for me i'm not saying that brian had moved on but i'm saying like that's that seems like that would be really painful i would be stalling on like getting rid of the you know the the food bowls and the things like that it's different when a cat goes

missing in in this especially in this dramatic of a fashion and you don't actually know yeah i

I mean, what are the chances that you're ever going to see that cat again? That actually, I guess that does kind of make sense.

But I will say this. When Theo died and there was no mystery about where he had gone, he had gone to heaven, Luke. That's where. Yes. Theo did. I don't think there's a heaven, but I definitely don't think Theo went to heaven. Oh, boy. But anyway, when Theo died, I don't know if I've ever even told anybody this or if even mentioned it to Genevieve or if she noticed. But, like, because we had some last days with him where we knew what was happening, the moment he literally died and the technician or whatever, you know, kind of took him away, I put all of his stuff away, like, for good, like, right away. Like, I didn't want it out. And it wasn't – it was weird. It was a very practical thing to do. And I'm sure I was just sort of dealing with my emotions in a certain way. But it had been like he had kind of stopped eating anyway and it was sitting there. And so I think like in the in the day and probably like the 24 hours that we had with him, it was a lot of just kind of sitting around and getting ready for the end. And so in my brain, I was probably already just making a plan. I'm a very tidy person, but, you know, maybe that was a way of me sort of dealing with things. But the moment he left, I remember being like, OK, this is going in a box now and kind of like that totally make it anymore.

Yeah. By the way, that person at the San Francisco airport who said, was it like this? They should work for Xfinity, Andrew, because I've spent a good amount of time this morning dealing with Xfinity, and that person would fit right in. Yeah, what's going on? It's just the classic. I mean, maybe the most angry I've seen you in life was when you were trying to get a human being at Comcast, which is the same company. It's pretty funny, actually, when you go online to try to find, like, you know, you put in the search term, find a human at Xfinity. And you just get people posting in various comment boards in all caps, find a fucking human being at Xfinity, and then like 35 exclamation points in like subreddits. But you can just see the sort of textual representation of the intense frustration that people arrive at when you call them, you know, you get the, well, first of all, the automated person says your name. I mean, it's like an, you know, it's an AI voice or something says your name weirdly. Like, first of all, they know it's my it's me because my cell phone number is associated with my account. But the person goes, hello, Luke. Like there's. just like a weird tonal thing that's i i know this because i heard it eight times today because i kept calling various phone numbers i found on the internet and still ending up back with this one robot lady hi luke and by the eighth time i expected her to say i thought you could get rid of me that easily right and it's like you get this you get this this robot voice and then they say like what can i help you with is you know it's like billing and then you put in you hit one for billing like they won't move forward no no they're like oh you want to know about billing here i'll

give you all of your balances you're like i can get my balances well i'm not calling for my balance anything that you say you need help with they're like oh well we can do that through automation

and you're just like screaming human human i mean literally that was my morning and exactly like they will they the system will not will not take you to let's say page two unless you tell them what your problem is but if you tell them what your problem is then they just try to send you the automation for that problem and it got so bad that they they then text you a link to the virtual assistant they're like we've texted you a link to the virtual assistant luke i've been there and and then they're like um hit one if you'd like to talk to the virtual assistant or this call will be disconnected the only option you have is to talk to the virtual assistant there's no like or

hit two if you would like to talk to a human so it's like art it's like a yoko ono art installation But it's like it's so like maddening that somebody must have created it as some sort of a social art piece, right? It is bananas.

That actually isn't a bad idea for a kind of an immersive piece of art. Or it's the worst idea.

It's either not a bad idea or the worst idea ever.

Much like the Plastic Ono Band, it's very polarizing, Andrew, as an idea. But like you walk into the gallery and you keep trying to find the art and it just keeps diverting you through various automated things that never let you get to the art. So but basically what happened was they were overbilling me. They just they were still charging me for my apartment, even though I had turned it off. But even on the bill, it said they were charging me to turn off my service at my apartment and they were charging me for the Internet at my apartment. And I was like, both of these can't be happening by your own thing. And so finally, but I was, so my bill was inflated by like, I don't know, $100 or more. And I was so mad this whole morning, but then they broke me down. Like maybe less of an art piece and more of a psychological terror piece, Andrew. Like by the end, I was like, maybe I just pay them too much money so that this can go away. Like, so I don't have to, I don't have to be in this world anymore of trying to get through and searching various subreddits. And so finally what I did was I actually broke down and clicked on the link for the virtual assistant they had sent me. And that had options, which was, do you want to chat with us or do you want us to call you back? And I hit one. I said, call me back immediately. And then, I don't know, like 10 minutes later, I get a call from a person who probably should have been a robot. They would have been better if they were a robot. They were just like it was a person for whom it didn't appear English was the first language. and they were just very much reading a script and just kind of like, hold on, I'm going to shut this door because I live in the country where my neighbor Brian has a very... Actually, I just want to hear what this truck sounds like when it drives by.

Yeah, right now it just sounds like wind. It doesn't sound like anything.

Oh, he's positioning it, sorry. He's got a big old dually diesel something. We can't hear it at all, by the way. Right, well, he started up his driveway, but then he stopped and backed up. Oh, I see. So it was kind of a false alarm. But he's got it all packed up for some kind of fishing trip. And when it goes by, you'll really know It sounds like a bus or something Anyway, the person I got on the phone was I honestly think the virtual assistant might have been more helpful I mean, they were trying It was one of those worst case scenario phone things Where the person is saying A lot of niceties that are clearly on a script But none of them are getting to the meat of the problem I was like, well, I'm being overcharged You can see on this day that the service was ended And that cost me $60 for some reason to end the service which i also got back by the way eventually um and then i was like but you see i got charged for part of that month when i was not even there and the person was just like going through the bill and reading me things yeah that i could see on the bill but like they had like like it was some um national treasure shit and they had like found some kind of illuminati information on a dollar bill like they were really unveiling some truths for me and i was just like but and i know i i try not to be rude to folks like that because they're doing their best and you know it's a job for them and whatever they're just following their rules but i was trying to speed it along because it was also at this point like five minutes before the show was supposed to start and eventually i was able to get them to recognize that this thing was erroneous and then they took it off the bill and gave me i have to say to their credit twenty dollars for my hassle and they gave me twenty

dollars on my next subscription to xfinity plus um it's a little bit like it's like it's like assembling an i a piece of ikea furniture and you call because you're missing a piece and they just read the instruction manual to you exactly that's not that's not what we need here but because

there are no words on an ikea instruction manual they just acted out they just acted out because i believe the whole idea with ikea installation is that you know it's not language dependent it's like anyone like you know if a if a caveman were to find the instructions they should be able to put together that shelving system or whatever right the other thing too and you know god bless this person that was that was helping me um but they had during some downtime where their computer was loading they had the temerity to try to sell me on xfinity wireless service i was like Like, you have some cojones, my friend.

Yes, I remember hearing, I think maybe while in some sort of, like, circle of hell of automation, when, you know, this is, yeah, I think you were talking about the time I was really mad. It was like, it was still pandemic times. And so they were using the excuse, well, you know, we don't have any phone operators because it's a pandemic.

Which is like, all of these people are at home anyway. Yeah, yeah. What are you talking about?

And again, I do feel for, you know, the people who did have work stoppages or whatever because of that. But I'm telling you, this was a time when people were working from home again. It was just a company making an excuse. I remember getting some flack online. They're like, give the workers a break. I'm like, dude, there were no workers. This was Amazon. I'm sorry. This was Xfinity saving money by not connecting me to workers. Trust me on this one. But, yeah, I remember then there was some like, I don't know, I'm on hold or something. And you hear a commercial or some sort of ad for another Xfinity service. And you're like, what part of this experience that I'm living through right now makes you think that I want to hand more of my life over to you? Are you off your rocker?

Yeah, the person was saying, like, Mr. Luke, as a valued customer of Xfinity, I am so pleased to tell you that I can offer you, you know, this service. Oh, and by the way, I'm sorry that this show has on some weeks devolved into me just complaining about customer service. But I've got another situation going on with Verizon, which is I have one of those Apple watches and I pay like whatever, $12 a month or something for it to be a cell phone as well. Meaning if I didn't have my phone with me, in a pinch, I could call somebody with this watch. Or more importantly, if I keel over on a jog, it's supposed to call 911 for me, which was the main reason that I got it in the first place. and there's some oddness with my account where I can never the watch doesn't realize it's a cell phone but it's on my Verizon bill and I went to the Apple store in Santa Barbara and they did all these diagnostics on the watch they literally hooked it up to all these machines um and it uh the watch was supposedly working fine so they said go to Verizon so I went to this Verizon store near me yesterday and they it was what the problem was it was a verizon authorized store you know what i mean like it's not it's called like you know cell phone mania or something that's like operating as cell phone mania it's a ver but they're allowed to have a verizon sign on the outside of the store yeah i will tell you this the people working there were incredibly nice including like a 20 year old guy who was who was helping me who looked at my tattoo and goes oh John Prine hell yeah and then took a picture of my tattoo and then when one of the other Verizon or whatever cell phone mania employees came in he said get a load of this and then the other guy took a picture with my tattoo I've never taken a picture I've never had anyone ask for a picture of this John Prine tattoo two people in the Verizon store wanted a picture of it do you think

they were having a manic episode because of it being cell phone madness cell phone mania right

they were dissociating yeah that's what was going on there yeah but but so and again it's the same thing where it's like i'm i'm so mad at verizon because i've been paying for easily the last year i've been paying this thing every month and it's never working as a cell phone and the people at the apple store the guy was really nice he's like you know this thing is still under warranty he's like if you want i can take it and for free mail it into apple hq and they can see if there's there's anything wrong with it and if there is they'll send you a new one and I was like why

don't they just send you a new one at this point anyway I know I was like so I was like this seems

like a good a good fix I don't have the watch for what three months and then I either get the same watch back or I get a different watch three months later like that's not a good solution to this whole problem I know I was like I mean how what is the street value of this two-year-old Apple watch at this point but I'm but again I I'm so dreading getting on the phone what they told me at the at cell phone madness what they told me at cell phone dissociative personality disorder was um you got to call verizon and then on the

phone with them you gotta they'll get them to re-hook it all up and try to get your money back for all the months of service that you've been paying on this thing and i don't know there's just something about sitting down like this whole xfinity conversation andrew when i tell you it was on my to-do list for the last 11 days so i do a to-do list every day and it's just an email draft and i you know everything i got through obviously take the day before i take off the list and then I just move things over for no exaggeration, two weeks. I've been moving over the words call Xfinity because I just knew it was going to suck. And finally today, I was like, this ends now. But now I have call Verizon. That's the new call Xfinity.

Oh, God, it just keeps happening.

Oh, one little update on the subject of customer service. Yesterday, right as the show was ending, I was telling you about how I was having a couch delivered.

Oh, yeah.

Through one of these newfangled gig economy type situations called Dolly.

And my advice to you was to say, hello, Dolly, when they got out of their truck. This is Louis Dolly.

If you want to know how Louis Armstrong pronounced his name, listen to how he says this is Louis in the song Hello, Dolly.

Yeah, that is true. I think I've always said Louis.

I have too. but um uh the um cynthia doyan rest in power the one-time host of the swing years and beyond who was an expert on all things music from that era would always call him lewis armstrong and uh it was like the madrone tree of jazz performers i thought she was wrong the whole time and then uh one day i learned he did he did describe himself as lewis but the um what i was kind of sort of struggling with yesterday was the realization that I wasn't going to just have like a person in a like a professional mover in I don't know what a uniform a professional mover like someone was not going to pull up in a semi truck and then just like let out the air brakes or whatever that is and then open the the gate in the back and like pull this couch out and be like here's your couch that would be a transaction that I would feel like I could get away with without tipping when i realized oh no this is like a ride share this is a guy named gabriel who has who has picked up this fare and is going to drive this couch out here now it's a whole thing and i'm and now probably going to have to tip and i was a little bit like annoyed by that and just kind of like why why does everything have to be complicated well i will tell you this i'm kind of glad that it wasn't just the guy dropping the couch off you know from the back of the of the semi truck because it's pretty heavy and there was two dudes gabriel and his helper i think that's the technical term for it in dolly yeah and they were two you know young strapping fellers and it was it was work for them to get this because it's a sleeper sofa it was work for them to get this thing in here and then it was all boxed up and like wrapped in this stuff so we had to kind of like lift it up so that we could disentangle everything so you know and they were helpful with that as well so it actually would have been a it would have been a bad thing if a guy if a person just dropped it off in my driveway i would have had no way to get it in here it's definitely not something one person could handle it was a little more complicated than i expected um i also realized at the last minute i had no cash in my wallet um luckily i have like 20 bucks i keep in the center console of my car so i grabbed that and i tipped them but speaking of annoying customer service interactions i have received no less than five emails from dolly reminding me to tip my dolly driver and rate them through the app oh they want you to do it through

the app that because i was going to say like in this in this day and age um they don't expect people to carry cash i was like i'm surprised they don't have like a square or something or whatever that card processing thing is you can put on your phone but of course yeah i guess i guess they would encourage you to tip through the app although i do wonder is that bad is it better to tip in cash I feel like it's always always better to tip in cash yeah exactly yeah Uncle

Sam doesn't need to know about this yeah and by that I mean my brother Sam who to Maddie and Mary

is an Uncle Sam it gets confusing but I appreciate the clarification

all right let's thank some of our daily donors who are making TBTL possible I'm nervous, Andrew, that I'm going to screw something up. Not here with the donors specifically, but just with the show in general with today's episode. So last night, I made some salmon burgers here. I got a whole system that Becca coached me through. It's so uncomplicated. I can't believe that I consider this cooking. But basically like whipping up kind of a sort of mayo and fresh dill. I know you're not a big mayo person, but a little some chopped red onions and then grill up the burgers and the patties and do a whole thing. Sounds good.

but there was like half of one of them left and it was sitting on a plate in the kitchen, it was like wrapped in cellophane. And I don't usually eat a lot of food, certainly in the morning I don't usually start the day with half of a salmon burger. But I just like, it was, what was the commercial when we were kids? Was it parquet? There was some butter-like thing that was in the fridge talking to people.

Yeah, parquet. Oh yeah, I think somebody would compliment the butter And then the little tub of parquet would say, it's not butter parquet.

It's like the sandwich, this half of a salmon burger was talking to me all morning. Like I'd go into the kitchen and I would do something. Then I'd go back out to harangue the people at Xfinity. And then I'd come back into the kitchen and it's like, I always knew it was going to end with me scarfing down this leftover half of a salmon burger.

And you didn't put it on bread, right? You just like kind of took it off the plate.

It was on a bun, on a hamburger bun.

Oh, it was already saved on the bun.

Yeah, I didn't finish it last night. and I had just wrapped it up. I don't know what my plan was, but it was sitting there. And also, the other thing that I've been doing is you put a little kind of quick pickling of a cabbage together, a little vinegar and that sort of thing, and you got that on top and a big fresh slice of like an heirloom tomato. It is so perky. I love that.

It is interesting. So I'm a big fan of leftovers of my own food. You know, if I've cooked the night before, Or sometimes I'll sit down and eat, but sometimes I just nibble after I've made a meal. And then really the feasting comes later that night or the next day.

Standing over the sink typically.

Often listening to AM radio like a young, healthy person. But I don't usually have, this is such a small thing to bring up. But actually, let me just hit this.

Here, this should impress my girl, Darlene. Butter. Oh, no. Butter. You're parquet margarine. Butter. Hold it. My tuna surprise, bologna roll-ups, candles, flowers, parquet. Butter. Oh, she's here. All right, I'll taste you. Hey, you're really light. Creamy. You're butter. Parquet. Oh.

Let me do the talking. Taste parquet, Mark. Okay, I'm more confused than I was before I watched the camera.

Why is it saying butter? Is it saying better or is it saying butter? I don't know.

So I think maybe the point is Parquet tastes so much like butter that it's pretending to be butter the whole time. Then finally he gives in, like you giving in on the Xfinity call. You're just like, fine, I'll talk to a robot online. He just gives in, and he finally calls it butter, and then it corrects him and says Parquet, which seems like kind of a, if you'll excuse my French, dick move. Also, did this guy really make a bologna roll for his date? Now, that was supposed to be funny, right? Like, it looks like this is a bachelory guy in kind of a crummy apartment. Oh, okay.

Okay, so that was being played for comedic effect? I think so.

I mean, a baloney role, even in the 70s. Oh, that was 1982, apparently. Yeah, I think the baloney role is always played for laughs. Put it on the poll, Luke. His baloney role always played for laughs.

I see a lot of women online and on TikTok talking about getting, quote-unquote, the ick. It's like they're on a date with someone Or they're maybe even dating someone And they do something And it gives them quote unquote the ick I feel like if you show up for the date And he's made you a bologna roll

That should give you the ick Don't even take your coat off

But my point in all that is Going back to that That special kind of quasi tartar sauce If you will that I made for this It's delicious But I have a lot of kind of um glottal issues after i have like if i eat at taco time and they have that they call it ranch dressing but it's basically like kind of a sour cream type of thing they put on everything and i'm particularly sensitive to that and so and of course why did i ate half of a salmon burger that was drenched in something just like that like literally one minute before in fact during the sound check i was finishing it i'm going to be honest with you and um that was a bad idea because i am now constantly needing to clear my throat but i'm also trying to mute my microphone so as to not um have everyone hear it and i know at some point i'm going to like think i'm muting my microphone and i'm just going to go i reckon i ain't got no reason to kill nobody yes you do oprah um so i want to apologize to today's donors if i start sling blading in the middle of thanking

them is what I'm trying to say in the middle of all of this which is already overly complicated I wanted to finish a thought I had that doesn't need finishing but when I am uh when I do have leftovers never do I have it like a pre and I think I saw this when we were staying in an Airbnb uh in Polsbo not all that long ago together and I saw that yeah you had like a burger that was left over, but it was like fully made and waiting for.

you as a leftover burger whereas me i would have like a pat you know that half a patty would be just like in the refrigerator by itself and there'd be half a bun somewhere and i would still have to assemble it if i wanted to eat it that way but more likely especially if i see it in the morning and it looks at me and says butter or parquet uh i probably i'm probably just i'm just probably housing that thing as is in two bites you know without without the bun right see then that's

probably well i guess if you're not adding the bun it doesn't matter but i was gonna say that's probably a better way to do it so all the elements are separate until they're right up until you're about to eat them as opposed to sitting together and getting kind of soggy i was surprised at how good this salmon burger was though because i toasted the bun and i thought it was going to be kind of like a soggy mess but it had retained its sort of i don't know its crisp and its structural integrity it was really really good that sounds good a weird breakfast to have and again a bad breakfast to have considering i'm trying to broadcast professionally here but um you know i did it and i make no apologies let's thank these donors starting with krista gilbert hey who's in seattle washington i saw krista recently ran into her

at the um sports bar that i am not paid to promote yet i ran into three different tens there yeah

Isn't that it's called Rough and Tumble? Thank you. God, sometimes I wish I had your brain. Sometimes. Andrew, emphasis on the sometimes, my good friend.

How is it the bar that I've been to twice and you remember the name of it? And as I'm saying the sentence, I'm like, oh, all I know is it has an ampersand in the middle of the name. There must be a bar called Ampersand, right? Or Ampersand and Ampersand?

There's a pizza place that is called that just is an ampersand.

Oh, interesting.

And I know about it because, you know, Carrie worked for Mod Pizza and it was Ampersand and another one that that I'm forgetting the name of now is is a similar approach that Mod Pizza does, which is kind of like pizza on demand. You know, you kind of tell them the different toppings you want and then they just cook it up really fast right there.

That was so good when we did that in Portland. I've only been to Mod Pizza once and I think about it all the time. I've been surrounded by Mod Pizzas. Dare to dream.

I mean, there's probably 10 of them within a 10-mile radius.

They're building one in my garage as I speak. Someday. But I've always seen them, and they never really held any appeal to me. I don't know why. I think of it as like a – I think I've said this to you before. I think of it as like a lunch pizza place, and I'm not usually getting pizza at lunchtime, if that makes sense. It seems like a business person on the go, fast, casual, quick, I'm going to stop in and get a pizza. And that was kind of like the pizza that you and I got with John when we were having meetings in Portland. And like I usually like at nighttime is when I'm going to get order a pizza. And it doesn't seem like mod pizza is a nighttime pizza. Do I have am I standing on anything that is truthful here or recognizable that you wouldn't order a mod pizza? Probably if you're just like watching Thursday night football, you're getting mod pizza. If you're on your way to a meeting, I can tell you this.

the one time i did order mod pizza and have it delivered i had somehow in the ordering process because again it's one of those very like you can add this you can subtract that it's very customizable somehow in the app it didn't make it clear that i had ordered two pizzas with no cheese on them oh geez so they show up i think i was in a hotel room somewhere i was hungry it was probably late at night it couldn't have been that late because i think they close at like 10 but basically These two, like, two pizza crusts show up with, like, black olives on them and, you know, greens and sauce and no cheese. And, I mean, I know that's probably a thing people do. There's people that are, you know, lactose intolerant. There's some people who are just have weird taste. But I just feel like the person putting that pizza together, didn't any alarm bells go off? Didn't any red flags happen? And like, really, this guy is ordering the crust, the sauce, black olives and green peppers. And that's what that's what he's doing. Two of them.

And the reason is you have to opt into every ingredient, including the cheese.

I think so. I wonder if they fixed that. But at the time, yeah, it was like opt in on the cheese. I was like, cheese needs to be opt out. Yes. Most certainly.

As as does the crust. Right.

That's actually a bit that they do on the Stern show where they'll call a pizza place. and they'll basically order like a jumbo supreme pizza with everything but then they'll hold everything okay but hold the um hold the meatballs hold the salami uh hold the cheese okay and then and hold the sauce and as this is happening this new york pizza guy is getting more furious and they just keep calling it back there is no one quicker to anger than a New York pizzeria guy, it turns out. I think that's a bit in either, I think it's 30 Rock, right? Don't they have to face down an angry pizza maker, a pizza man in New York? Does he say, no pizza for you?

No, he doesn't. The pizza Nazi? No. You know who agrees with me that cheese should be an opt-out situation when eating a pizza? Sierra Barsati. Hey! Who's down there in Chico, California. Yeah, boy. Doesn't Chico mean boy?

Oh, it does. I didn't know why you were doing that. I was just giving you space to say your truth.

Just letting me be me. Thank you for that. Also, thanks to Wolfgang Weber in San Francisco, California.

Or Weber, or as we often say at this point of the thank yous, right?

But I feel like if he's going Weber, then we've got to go Wolfgang.

Yep, I think.

I wasn't willing to commit to both Ws.

No, I know. I think we do this every time. But we've covered our bases. The important thing is that we thank Wolfgang.

It's all or nothing with that kind of conversation, Andrew. Thanks to Susan Goodwin in Seattle, Washington. I've been there.

I was telling Veeves that if we got a horse just this morning for some reason, we were talking about getting a horse and putting it in our backyard and making this neighborhood a one-horse town, then Seattle would be a one-horse town.

I saw a cow yesterday when I was driving. Oh, by the way, Andrew, update. They did not pick up my garbage yesterday or my neighbor's garbage.

I was supposed to ask you that Oh my gosh

I had to call them this morning Well actually I pulled Well I don't want to say that I don't Every time I do something That's a little bit Sort of extra careful Extra belt and suspenders I don't want to say That's pulling an Andrew I don't want to put that on you But I did call them yesterday At like four And go Are they picking up The garbage today?

Can I guess what they said? They said you have to wait Until after six And then it's officially The end of the day And then you can file Your complaint

They basically said, they were very nice, but they basically said, we don't know what's going on with that. And they asked me for my name. And they said, this is Luke Burbank. I said, yes. And they said, well, what's going on? I said, well, my garbage hasn't been picked up. It's like four, and usually that's done early in the morning. And also my neighbor's garbage. The thing that gives me great comfort is my neighbor has garbage in their garbage can.

Especially because you were doing something different with your garbage yesterday. It was kind of overflowing with this foam material in there.

yeah this is yeah this is anxiety creating so then i basically they said uh yeah we don't have any info on that and i thought that's interesting to me you feel like in this day and age with the iphone 15 hitting the market andrew and technology being what it is you'd think that they would there'd be some sort of record of every single garbage can that gets picked up or not picked up considering you're driving these trucks that probably have camera systems on now and stuff Like, you think that would be a pretty knowable thing.

And here in the city, I mean, they were keeping track, but then they were lying about it, too. So I don't know what's better. You know, when I would call, they would say, oh, let me look into that. And then they would say, oh, it says here that the company specifically says that they took care of your garbage. You're like, well, they didn't. And they're like, well, it wasn't out on time. You're like, it was out on time. Check my Twitter feed where it's time stamped.

Things seem much more, let's just say, laissez-faire out here. Yeah, sure. like uh dominique at waste control was like when i called last night she was like yeah i don't really i don't have information on that i said well i'll give it till the end of the day i said i'll give it till tomorrow morning and then i'll check back in and sure enough this morning garbage is still there so i called her got the same person and i said hey yeah the garbage wasn't picked up and she said okay we'll try to send somebody out for that uh today or monday at the latest and i was fine with that but i'm i'm i'm worried i don't need the garbage to be empty but i'm worried that you know whenever they have to send an additional trip I feel like they become suspicious yeah and there's a tendency to want to charge you for making a you know and I just kept saying to her my neighbor's garbage can also has garbage in it I was trying to really get in front of the person coming at her and going oh yeah here's why they didn't pick it up he's got 200 pounds of acoustic

paneling in this thing it's not paneling I think you're gonna be I think you're gonna be fine But what I'm impressed with is you had interactions with Dominique and Gabrielle yesterday. Was Gabrielle your Gabriel? Okay, either way. Yes, some pretty fancy names. Some pretty fancy names, yeah.

Here's another fancy name for you, Lloyd Inouye. Hey, Lloyd. Of Seattle, Washington. Do some delivery. So nice to see Lloyd's name on this list for so many years. Thanks, Lloyd. We really appreciate you. And then another friend of the show, David Zakaris. in burlington vermont he is a smitten correct he most certainly is he's often

hipping me to new music and new music to me but old music to the world to listen to telling me about

The zombies recently.

And the artist behind our Instagram. That's right. Whatever visual.

Logo. Yeah. And if you go to the website, tbtail.net, where you can leave comments on the shows, like, Andrew, you sounded handsome today, you'll see some of his art there, a little sketch of me and Luke and our respective studios. It's one of my favorite images of us.

Thanks, David, for doing that, and thanks for supporting the show and being such a pal all these years. What was he telling you about the zombies? The band The Zombies. He wasn't telling you my zombie story that I told on the air.

He did. And in fact, he stole every last detail.

Stop stealing my moves.

No, what's yours? He was just recommending an album to me that I don't recall. I don't know if it was their self-titled. It's been a while. But what's your zombies story?

Well, it's just something I read at one point. In fact, I think immediately reported back to the listeners. But the story with The Zombies is that that first album that they made in the UK was kind of a big flop. and it was such a flop that they just disbanded they just went back to whatever their day jobs had been and they were like i guess no more zombies but the album started to pick up some traction in the states and in fact got really popular and there was a record label i want to say maybe i forget where the record label was located but they were kind of a little on the shady side it turned out and as the zombies album was getting more popular they realized we need some zombies we need a band to start touring around and playing and i think they had maybe even two different bands touring as the zombies who were not the zombies and the zombies in were in england and they hadn't heard about this and for a period of time and in fact two of the people that were touring as the pretend zombies were the guys that eventually were in zz top oh

Oh, you have told me that. Yeah. They were literally like zombie zombies.

Yes, precisely. And I can't remember how it was all resolved, but somehow the ZZ Top connection is the thing that really blew my mind. Yeah, no kidding. All right, thanks to all of our donors for making TBTL possible. We absolutely would not be here doing this without y'all.

Hello and welcome to Top Story.

The new iPhone is out today. I guess the big news on it probably is that the port, they're changing it finally to USB-C instead of whatever that proprietary Apple thing was. I guess this does not have a big impact on your life, Andrew. But for me, it's sort of like, I guess I'm glad that that's standardized, but I also wish I could get back the thousands of dollars I've spent on untold number of, like, lightning. I forget even what the stupid name Apple has. I think it's called lightning something. Lightning.

Lightning cord, lightning something.

Like, I have so many of those that I've had to purchase over the years. It could have just been, this could have been an email. It just could have been USB-C all along.

No, that's why it does, it affects everybody. Like, I'm an Android user. why would having USB-C on an iPhone affect me? Because it's better for everybody when everything is interchangeable because it means if I'm in, I mean, it's so rare that I leave my house with my phone anywhere under 85%, as you might guess. I'm obsessed with that. But if I am somewhere and I need a charge, I can say, hey, can I use your cable? Oh, sorry, you know, it's all this lightning stuff. It's all iPhone or even like for some iPhone, I mean, it probably goes back too far now but like there was a time where you couldn't charge based on which iphone you had because they had switched up the charging mechanism you know the proprietary it's just such bullshit and the reason they're finally doing this is because of a of a um you know to follow the the laws of europe which mandated this essentially go big government amen i say i wake up and i wake up every morning and i say that and i say it at night yeah um i

I'd still have a lot of, I mean, the current phone that I have still needs that lightning port. So I guess I'll hang on to these for a while. The other thing, and also like the AirPods and basically every Apple product I have currently, except for the computer, uses the lightning port. So I don't know at what point I'll have replaced all of those with things that are USB-C. I don't think I realized that USB-C also, it conveys video as well. I think there was a whole piece on Sunday morning that I clearly didn't watch about what an incredible breakthrough usbc technology actually is like it allows for a whole range of things that were like literally not possible before the invention of the usbc

i'm not read up on it but i just as a user i know that i have this dell laptop here and it has no oh dude i'm gonna dell it has no old school uh usb ports it just has three usbc ports as a lot of computers do now, and I can use any of them. as a charging port and the other two is data ports and then i have one that like you know i have a cable that goes from usbc to hdmi so and i carry it with me so if i'm in a hotel room i can just plug my computer into the hotel room's tv so that's the video that you're talking about there

it does everything and that's tmi as far as i'm concerned the other thing that i saw in the san francisco wait i'm calling it the wrong thing i was calling it the chronicle but i guess it's not It's SFGate.

I guess so. Somebody corrected me on that? Yeah, they said that they actually are two different entities. I thought one just sort of was a catch-all for the other.

I saw an article at sfgate.com talking about this huge failure on the part of Apple or inability to do something, which was invent their own modem chip, which is a critical device for their iPhones. They've been getting these modem chips for years from Qualcomm. you know like the stadium that was everything i knew about qualcomm was that that was where the chargers played for many years um but uh apparently there's this very acrimonious very antagonistic relationship between apple and qualcomm except for the fact that apple is totally relying on qualcomm for this particular chip but they hate they openly hate each other but qualcomm needs to sell these modem chips and apple cannot figure out how to make their own and so they just have this like very like toxic loveless business marriage i guess what apple is mad about buddy is that qualcomm charges them both for the actual chip but also some sort of like intellectual property like licensing fee basically like apple feels like they're getting double billed for these qualcomm chips so they decided i think back in like 2018 they were like we're gonna do a moon shot tim apple was like we're doing a moon shot uh we're going to hire the best they like poached all these qualcomm people and they it just sounds like they just like set up like a a building full of people uh and just threw billions of dollars at it and at the end they couldn't build a modem chip that wasn't a gigantic and b prone to overheating oh my god

Didn't they build a town in the desert? Exactly. Just for this project?

They got together a rag tank group of misfits, Andrew.

Yeah.

It was Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, and Billy Bob Thornton. Wait, no, that's the cast of Armageddon. Sorry. I just find that fascinating because you just think it's Apple. It's a hardware thing. If they decide we are going to build one of these things and we're going to spend all the money we need to you rarely hear about a company like apple being defeated by something like a modem chip yeah you and i should get into the modem chip honestly what do you know about opportunity tips can you build me one uh i know that i read one article in the san francisco chronicle about it it's a start yeah um the other story that i saw today that was honestly fairly dispiriting was this story in the washington post about how much dog vaccine skepticism there is more than half of us dog owners are skeptical of canine vaccines this was lindsey beaver writing in the washington post and i'd actually heard howard stern make a reference to this the other day but i gotta be honest i don't really think of howard stern as my most trusted news source oh really okay um but that's um man cow man cow muller in chicago that's my most trusted news source i don't know what that is you never had a man cow phase i didn't either but he was a big radio guy in chicago no never even heard of it no yeah man cow muller i'm sure some of our chicago listeners are well familiar he was sort of i wouldn't say he was the stern of chicago but he was a hugely popular morning jock there oh okay and i think that he and stern have a to this day unresolved blood feud because i think what used to happen is when stern would move into a market he would like kind of viciously attack the other djs in

town yeah i mean it was great publicity right here comes stern that he did that in cleveland like they unplugged like something it's something like well i'm just gonna mess up the story and i think our friend p fletch fletcher can tell it better but um i think there was he came into town and at some other radio stations big event like his employees like unplugged the main stage or something. I thought you were going to say they

unplugged the radio station. That would be

incredible. Honestly, that would be the stunt of the year. Let me see if I can get any information on what the hell I just said.

It wasn't WMMS. It wasn't the Buzzard Morning Zoo, was it? Your beloved?

I don't think he was on the Buzzard Morning Zoo. You know what I mean? Is that who he was taking?

on it might have been mms that they went after let me let me take a look here it's time to blow your chickens what do they say yeah blow up your chicken but anyway i heard him reference this but

i thought i mean he probably half read some article in you know the the guard not the guardian but what's the really the really salacious uh the telegraph uk or something which i know he loves and then i saw this was in the washington post it was actually a fairly rigorous uh study published in the journal vaccine they surveyed 2200 americans 900 of whom identified themselves as dog owners uh and a majority of the dog owners 53 held negative views of canine vaccines

uh what is the negative view stemming from like what did 37 percent question the safety

22 questioned the efficacy and 30 questioned the importance of vaccines administered to dogs hmm also that seems like that adds up to more than 53 percent sorry i believe that would if i'm doing the math right that looks like that's more like 89 but anyway far too many people uh now at least according to this study are suspicious about giving their dog a vaccine and they were reporting in this article the researchers knew anecdotal evidence suggesting that many pet parents may be wary of canine vaccines believing that it may result or at least in part from negative sentiment towards the safety and efficacy of human vaccines so basically the vaccine skepticism that now pervades far too many people in this country has literally filtered down to the level of people not wanting to vaccinate

their pets jeez louise that i mean that is upsetting we i mean we we had this we had this

conversation too many times during the pandemic and i my guess would be that the vast vast majority of our listeners are on the same page as we are with this but like i just don't understand a universe in which you look around and you think huh no one has polio anymore that seemed to happen pretty close to when they introduced a polio vaccine these things are for the birds like it's just such obvious and easy science i guess they cite one person this is kind of a sad story but they cite somebody in the article who had their dog vaccinated for parvo and then the dog ended up dying of parvo um and so they were pretty upset as you might imagine and they were attributing it to the fact that they thought there was parvo in the parvo vaccine which this veterinary was this vet was specifying is not the case i don't know how that works but they're not giving your dog parvo when they give your dog the parvo vaccine but some incidents like that i just thought like wow like listen if you if somebody doesn't want to get vaxxed and then they suffer the consequences it's like you know i i don't feel super bad for that person but let the damn golden retriever take the shot don't don't put your bad politics on your dog they're called

politics p-a-w um yeah for me the upsetting part is less about i mean this sounds awful but like Less about the micro issue of the health of these particular dogs, but just what it says about our society and what we believe and what we don't.

Well, exactly. And that we've moved into such a sort of post-factual sort of world. I'm actually surprised that there's been any pushback on, like, Lauren Boebert. Like, she's had a couple of, like, invitations withdrawn from other, like, wackadoo organizations where she was supposed to, like, speak and stuff. because you and I were talking the other day about how she got in this whole thing at a Colorado staging of Beetlejuice the musical and I think some of this was off air because basically the way the story was evolving, I had heard that she was kicked out for being rude and also for vaping, but then her spokesperson had said she wasn't vaping, it just had to do with the pyrotechnics of the show. And that was as far as I was in the story. I was like, well, maybe she wasn't vaping. She still should have been kicked out and I mean from Congress. but also from beetlejuice the musical um but i was like but i could also see a world in which you know there's a smoke machine and someone got confused and you were like oh no i'm looking at a video right now of her actively vaping and i don't know why i felt so hurt by lauren bobert spokesperson lying that openly because like of course they're going to do that they're lauren bobert spokesperson but somehow just the fact that you could just say up is down and and down is up and and even though it's provably false and then i saw the video and then this is where my brain went andrew because i'm so cynical now and sad i was like someone's gonna say that that's just an ai generation like that's just somebody's gonna say that's a deep fake somebody out there who watched a video of lauren bobert vaping at beetlejuice the musical will will not trust their lion eyes they will say nope that didn't happen i don't care that i'm literally staring at it happening because they so don't want to believe that lauren bobert is a liar and is a bad

And so they would go to oh, it's the internet. They can make anything happen on the internet And it's like at that moment. I felt all is lost now by the way I don't even know if any of this happened I don't know if there was a person out there who's saying that's definitely a deep fake But just the fact that it could be said I was like then what I mean at long lat like at the end of the day What can you do to convince somebody who doesn't want to believe in the objective facts of the world that the facts exist? If they don't want to believe it, they're just not going to believe it. And no amount of scientific research around vaccines and no amount of actual caught on tape.

Lauren Boebert vaping is going to convince them. People have been saying for a long time that technology is going to allow deep fakes that are going to be more and more realistic. And it's going to be a huge problem for society. I never got worked up about that. I'm just kind of like, well, we'll see. We have a tendency to adapt to these things. I mean, also, we do have a huge truth issue and, you know, fact issue in this country. I'm not blind to that, obviously. But I'm like, well, let's just see what happens here. But I was listening to the Levitard show earlier this week, and I can't even remember who the coaches were. But they played three very entertaining examples of college coaches saying some pretty ridiculous things. And it turns out that these were all AI generated deep fakes that were going around the Internet. Now, I think they had video attached to them. So I don't know if I had seen the video, if I would have known it was a fake. I think that's, you know, sometimes where the when you have both the video clues and the audio clues, you can start to see how things like, oh, that's a little there's a smoothness sort of sometimes like where people are just trying to match up the motion of the mouth with the words and be like, well, something's off here. But hearing the audio only, unless they had, you know, if Lebitard had said this is real tape, I would have believed it. You know what I mean? It sounded like a Southern coach saying, well, well, maybe saying some rude things that I won't repeat here. But it sounded real to me. And I got to say that I heard that earlier this week and I did kind of ponder that for a while thinking like, yeah, like how many presidential cycles before it's like, no, I didn't say that. Or or or look what my opponent said. And it's like, no, your opponent didn't say that. But it doesn't matter because people just want to. I mean, half of the people who voted for Trump are just trolls anyway. I mean, I think some are I think some are actually well-meaning people who didn't know what to do because they have conservative values and that they saw it as the only way out. I don't I don't see it that way I think there's a lot of hypocrisy but I do think there are some well-meaning people who felt like they were in a bind and voted for that guy but a whole bunch of others I would say the majority of his fan base to me from my perspective just seem like trolls and they don't give a shit they don't give a shit like whether or not it's truthful or not just

like own the libs I'll tell you though I mean when they start deep faking Andy Rooney oh they wouldn't do that that's that's that's when I think we've lost our way as a society well let's talk

about if you don't mind i know we got to get to music for your weekend but let's talk about misinformation for a moment because man was i spreading it about 10 minutes ago it turns out it was an employee of w mms that pulled the plug on a howard stern broadcast that was um being broadcast from the city of cleveland so i think um and i'm trying to catch up on all of this news here it happened in 1994 that's a pretty good bit it is right and apparently it was like mms had already been sort of past its heyday at this point of being kind of like you know kind of the bad boys and wacky and stunt based radio in Cleveland in the 1970s I think by 94 you know you started I think you started to have radio consolidation at that time and it just wasn't the same kind of like I don't know renegade vibe coming out of MMS but I'm going to read to you directly here from Deseret News Luke from 19 July 11th 1994 my favorite places to keep my 401 Well, how about this? This is the headline. Cut cable takes Stern off the air in Cleveland. And the first line, let's see, there's no byline here other than Deseret News. Somebody finally pulled the plug on Radio Big Mouth Howard Stern. How many radio stations do you think Deseret had at this time? Because Deseret, of course, we worked for Cairo, which was owned by Deseret. But this is their newspaper. Police arrested an employee of Rival Station in Cleveland Friday After Stern's broadcast was briefly interrupted by a cut cable, Stern's New York City-based show is syndicated to stations in several other cities, including Cleveland, WNCXFM in Cleveland. He came to Cleveland, Stern did, to promote his recent ratings victory over morning programs on WMJI, that's 105.7 oldies, and WMMS. So he came to Cleveland to dunk on the fact that his syndicated show was now getting better ratings than these locally produced morning shows. And that would be the Buzzard Morning Zoo MMS and Lanigan and Web.

stern the morning on wmji they really were powerhouses as far as morning radio programming is concerned so stern comes to town to dunk on them because he's beating them in the ratings now and it says police arrested a wmms employee who's accused of cutting a main cable feed used to broadcast the live show said detective denise reeves the suspect's name was withheld because he wasn't immediately charged i don't know what happened to that guy but i'm looking at a retrospective on WMMS here says he was um it was Jake the prize guy wasn't it who is that I promise

you I don't know that's just every morning show has someone named Jake the prize guy who's always just doing like a flash Friday at like a car dealership and you're supposed to stop by and

see super gen and Jake the prize guy apparently it's a felony though so this guy who cut the cable committed a felony let's see it was an engineer WMMS I'm now on a different I'm on the god bless him magazine william alford w mms engineer william alford from the william alford

studio high above the mighty columbia it's pronounced el forda uh-huh thanks sarah um that's amazing like i finally we've gotten to something interesting on this show like i wonder how they figured out it was him because it seems like and did he when they say cut the

cable did he physically cut a cable so this is i mean you heard me try to tell this story from my memory before and i got let me hold do the math oh every fact wrong every fact wrong so i should shut up here without googling it but i feel like stern was doing this broadcast which was a live broadcast of his syndicated show around the country but from cleveland i feel like he was doing it in a public space i feel like it was a space where people could come and watch him do that like maybe in the flats or something like that and that a cord was physically unplugged so you know it wasn't like digital trickery it wasn't like i hacked the mainframe but that there was some physical unplugging of something but i'll do some more research well it looks like

during the now infamous broadcast wmms engineer and american hero andrew william alford snipped a broadcast wire used for the stern show's satellite feed stern continued on with the program over a phone line as engineers worked to quickly patch together the severed broadcast wire so what it sounds like to me is that the uh is that that maybe uh howard wasn't physically there he was you know they were doing some kind of unlike not isdn link but this is really what i'm excited to play for you andrew um let's see here uh i'm i'm i'm seeing a youtube video howard stern uh wio 11 p.m news on the cleveland cord cutter should we see that's channel 19 yeah

That would eventually become the Fox channel there, but it was like a UHF channel where I'd watch a lot of my Andy Griffith. Okay, let's just, I'm going to kind of needle drop in.

...he said for longtime powerhouse WMMS and WMJI. I am the king of all media. Then, in a snip, the king was dethroned. 45 seconds of silence in the middle of what's dubbed the biggest radio promotion ever.

The other stations want to keep this broadcast from you. It's Radio D-Day. It's Radio D-Day. We are under attack. I repeat, I am under attack.

Stern came into our town, tried to take over our airwaves. Now, we had been number one for years and years. We had to retaliate.

Bill Alford, then a WMMS engineer, saw Stern's security had left the juggler exposed.

I walked in here and I said, oh, God, this is just way too easy for me. This is just way too easy.

By the way, they have a chyron for Bill Alford. Bill, and this is a Cleveland newscast. Bill, quote, snippy Alford.

Nice. SO ALFORD WENT IN FOR THE KILL WITH HIS WIRE CUTTERS.

CAUGHT HIM AND SPLIT, THAT WAS IT.

IT WAS A SNIP HEARD OR NOT HEARD AROUND THE STERN LISTENING WORLD.

PEOPLE STARTED CALLING ME SNIPPY.

BUT WHEN SNIPPY WALKED BACK JUST TO MAKE SURE THE INFAMOUS DEED WAS DONE, AN NCX PRODUCER CAUGHT HIM RED-HANDED.

NOT ONLY DID WE CATCH THE CULPRIT, BUT THEY'RE GOING TO JAIL.

COPS WEREN'T MESSING AROUND. They took me off on a Coast Guard boat or a sheriff's boat because they were afraid the crowd was going to riot.

Alford spent 10 days in jail when he pled guilt. Holy shit.

I was looking at that and paid a grand and a fine.

10 days in jail?

FCC, man. You can't mess with FCC-regulated stuff.

Wow. If he wouldn't have gone back. So I'm really glad that we stumbled upon this because that answers my question. If he wouldn't have gone back to check his handiwork, it sounds like they would have never been able to prove who exactly did this. but you know the crime criminal often returns to the scene of the crime golly 10 days in jail is i mean i look i guess if you want to be like super strict about it it's like you know there's advertising money on the line there's like a lot going on with this so you know you're not We're not just kind of messing with, I don't know.

somebody doing an open mic night or something at the local comedy club it's like this is there's a lot of money on the line so i guess it's you know sort of not cool although i think snippy is a true american hero from the snippy studios high above the mighty columbia by the

way i guess who's linkedin page i'm on right now snippy bill snippy elford broadcast engineer photographer slash consultant he works in the greater cleveland area and used to work for wmms

do you think he puts this high up in his resume or bio and should he like it's kind of an awesome claim to fame but it also raises the question if you're going to hire him to consult is he going to be the most professional person

I think it's kind of awesome yeah I'm looking at his LinkedIn so he's got various entries for his work at WMMS as like a broadcast engineer and a promotions person looks like at some point because you know it's commercial radio you do everything but for some reason from october 1988 to july 1992 which is three years and 10 months by the way he was owner buzzard rock and roll machine oh freelance dj so he was like kind of parlaying his wmms stuff threads and this is before he became snippy because that would be a couple of years after he stopped doing this it looks like but he was a freelance dj but he was um running his company buzzard rock and roll machine which i guess is just like it's everybody knows what the buzzard means in cleveland right if you want to bring that buzzard energy to the next bat mitzvah technically though it's not a maybe it's not a copyright issue because what buzzard it's a thing it's a buzzard rock and

roll machine i have a story uh we do need to get to music for your weekend but i have a tv story that i've been working on about the hollywood sign and i don't know if i mentioned this back when i was down in la filming it but on the subject of like what you can and can't trademark do you know that the reason that they're able to trademark the Hollywood sign and its image is because it undulates on the hillside it's not like just a straight line if it was it would just be the word Hollywood and they wouldn't be able to trademark it

oh interesting

so the specific variation in like where the H is where the O is because of just building it on this hillside what they sort of had to do that is what makes it something that like the city of Hollywood California can trademark and then control the image of Otherwise, they would be trying to just trademark the word Hollywood. That makes sense. All right. Let's get into a little music for your weekend before we slide down that dinosaurs. I like to. Do you have any big plans this weekend, Andrew?

So today looks like is going to be the last sunny day maybe for a while. I don't know. All I know is it's going to rain tomorrow. And you were here watching me trim down this huge pile of. And burn it. and burn it just very satisfying let their hedge clippings but they're not just like soft hedge clippings that you can put in the bags there i cut so far into my hedge that it's like kind of like tree trunky in areas and so i'm just trying to like trim the leaves off of these tree trunks and then kind of and i say trunks but i'm talking about like maybe two or three inches wide at the most um but kind of separate out all this wood and anyway i've been doing that slowly listening to podcasts or listening to the ball game meeting a lot of neighbors i had a great neighbor day yesterday people walking by saying hello introducing themselves uh and catching up with some neighbors no one hollering at you about your fire no although the see this is something that we took from the we have not talked about a neighbor who asked me to stop burning things a few weeks ago and it rankled me and i told you off air that uh i'm only because it was the corner of her house well yeah but she shouldn't have left the oily rags there no um i don't want to get into the whole story right now but a neighbor basically came by and i was burning things in my little solo stove this is weeks ago and she came by and she's like um do you know that there's a fire ban going on and this was like a this was she lives like two doors down from me and i'd never met her before or whatever and it was like i i was like fine and i stopped burning stuff but i was pretty like cold towards her and pretty rude i just turned my back to her and now when i see her I do that like I everybody who walks by stops and chats with me I think I have a pretty good reputation to the degree that I have one as a neighbor in this neighborhood and it like I gotta say the last few days have been so much fun but when I see her I just like turn my back on her and give her the cold shoulder literally and I've started feeling kind of bad about that like how long can I keep this cold war going but I got the best news from my next door neighbor yesterday Luke okay which is she has a reputation apparently when our neighbors who are renters moved in next store dust their landlord warned them about her that she's really she's a bit persnickety so i'm like there it is it's not just me not confirmation my friend i did stop burning by the way when she asked me to stop burning because technically there was a burn ban going on and it was mostly i think because of air quality so whatever but again i don't have a huge fire pit i have a i have a little what they call a solo solo stove yes i just want the record to reflect that i was deeply on your side that night probably because of the espelon that i was consuming but i was ready to go over there with torches and pitchforks and um luckily it didn't

come to that yeah no cold shoulder is where it's at these days and i felt justified because it's hard for me to hold a grudge it's hold it's hard for me to like outwardly be somewhat i'm talking Luke it's hard for me to be sort of like outwardly like I don't like you but that's sort of what I decided the story of her telling me to stop burning is a little bit more complicated too because it's like this I had my whole weekend set out Genevieve was at the lake I had my whole like project of cutting down this stuff and then like slowly burning it and listen to the ball I was having such a moment I was having like what you would call a coat hook moment where like I'm listening to the ball game the Mariners were like beating up on a good team I don't remember who it was but they were beating up on a good team it was just a beautiful evening to start like burning this stuff and then somebody came by and just said in the most kind of Seattle passive aggressive way um do you know that um you're not supposed to be doing that and so since then I've just been like my whole thing is I don't like her and I openly don't like her and it's not right again like I was do I was the one who was doing something wrong I know that but I didn't like her telling me what to do I didn't like her having such an impact on the rest of my evening and so therefore I'm like okay i'm just going to be openly cold i don't i don't go through life that way usually it's very uncomfortable for me but i'm trying to stick to it not be rude not be antagonistic not do any but just like no you don't you have not earned my warmth is how i look at it i think that's great i

think that's some good agency on your part but your plan sounds like is to burn hella more sticks

this weekend maybe what i've been doing now is i don't have to burn it i just need to get it i need to get all the leaves off of it get the leaves bagged up and get like the burnable wood separated That's what I need to do. Whether or not I burn it now or next year or bring it in to our indoor fireplace later is is fine. But I just need to this pile was so huge. I cannot overstate how long it's taken me to whittle this thing down. And I think it's going to rain tomorrow. And then once the rains come, I feel like I don't know, this area just has a way of like the season just sort of slips away really quickly. And so I just if it's going to be nice today, I'm going to do that. And then Genevieve's doing a big karaoke thing at the Eagles. So I'm going to go do that.

I did not appreciate, you know, I get updates from the Seattle Times. Yeah. And just, you know, it's their way of highlighting what they're writing about in the paper on a given day. But I feel like the one this morning was like, rain, enjoy the sunshine because the big dark is on the way and it's going to rain. I was like, come on, calm down. Do we have to talk about the big dark already? Like, it'll happen all on its own. And if you live in the Pacific Northwest, you know just how brutal the winter is. Not from a temperature perspective so much as just from a, there's not very much daylight. There aren't many daylight hours. I don't need, like, as I'm staring out at the mighty Columbia right now, it is just a blue sky. It is just picture perfect right now. And I don't need the Seattle Times reminding me that something called the big dark is on the way. Like, are you letting Matt Calkins write your weather column now?

Oh, and you saw, is it, Larry Stone is retiring. He's retiring, I know. I really like Larry Stone. You're going to start getting so much more Calkins.

I know. And, of course, what do you think Matt Calkins' column was this week? Despite thrilling victory in Detroit, Seahawks' defense still has holes. It's like, no shit, Sherlock. But, like, let's enjoy the fact that, like, we went into Detroit and beat a good team in overtime and showed moxie.

I should know this, but who's up against the Seahawks this week? It's another divisional rival?

It's Carolina Panthers.

Oh, rawr, rawr, rawr. Right, not a divisional rival, right. And so what do we know about that? How are you feeling about that? I don't know what the Panthers are up to.

Well, we know that Ked Woodley is of the opinion that they will dominate the foe. Well, that's what they say, yes. I don't know. It's hard. I mean, watch, famous last words. I think probably, I don't want to jinx it for the Seahawks, but I haven't heard a ton about Carolina. I don't have the feeling that they're a super imposing team, but also, you know, we lose to lousy teams all the time. So I don't know much about Carolina.

But it looks like they've lost their first two games.

I do know that my parents are going to come watch the game at my house on Sunday because we're all meeting up at my sister Liz's tomorrow for a little double up on birthdays. My nephews, Abe and little Lukey, they both had birthdays, and so we're doing a get-together. My folks are coming down for that, but then on their way back north, they're stopping here to watch the game, which is always an adventure to watch the game with my mom and dad because my dad couldn't care less and my mom cares way too much.

And speaking of cold shoulders, Pete Carroll is on the outs to her.

Not a Pete Carroll fan, although it'll be interesting now that they won in Detroit. If she's come around on him, but I promise you midway through the first quarter, my dad will be on the deck, smoking a cigar, oblivious to the football game. And my mom will be pacing behind the couch, taking every dropped pass as the end of the season.

Well, that's interesting, though. I mean, in a certain I mean, I know that you're not somebody who likes people who are calling the game over before before kickoff. But I mean, your mom is way into it. You must have an appreciation for that kind of nervous energy.

No, I like that she takes it seriously, but she also sort of doesn't know a lot about football. Well, that's not true. I mean, she's now in the last few years really invested some time. Her move for the longest time in my adulthood when I'd be visiting their house and have the game on, my mom's move would be to just walk through the room and then just say something very extreme about the game and then just walk out of the room. So she would have no like context, which is be like, oh, give me a break, Russell. And then just like continue on her way, Just kind of like a swoop and poop. I think she's, I think now she'll, well, you know what? I'll have a full report on Monday on how it went.

Okay. Yeah, that sounds good. All right. Music for your weekend. Yeah. So here's what I'm going to do. I think I've been bouncing back and forth since we've been talking. But a while back, a couple of weeks ago, I was looking for a file or something. and I came across some cover art that I made for a CD mixtape that I made for my friend Cary Grenz back in 2005, I believe the year was. And I actually was quite proud of the art that I had made. It was based on a photo I had taken of some little toy of a little boy, and I believe you pull his shorts down and he pees. You ever see those little plastic toys? Yes, absolutely. Anyhow, it was just of his head.

Did you ever see the thing you could, it was the little guy that you could suction cup to your car window and then you squeeze something and he mooned people? Oh, yeah. That from the 80s, that was a whole thing that we had going on. Can we please make America great again? If that's what they meant, my MAGA, I'd be fully for it.

Anyway, so I'm looking at this mixtape and boy, was this a blast for the past for me. This is a few weeks ago. And what I did was I recreated the mixtape in my Spotify as a playlist. So and I'm trying to figure out what I want to play off of this, but I'm going to read to you some of these songs. So it starts with maybe the song I'll play for you now, which I think I've played before, which is a song by Swearing at Motorists, which is an Ohio duo, I believe. And then Box Elder by Pavement, Old Flame by Arcade Fire, Chicago, Sufjan Stevens, Dismemberment Plan, Sentimental Man. I don't know how well you know these.

A dismemberment plan.

Maybe we should do that. Sentimental Man. I haven't thought about those folks. They were out of Washington, D.C., I believe. They were, yes. A good D.C. band. Some very early Spoon on here. Some rogue wave salesman at the day of the parade. Wow. Then a little bit of like Passing Me By by The Far Side and Memory Lane by Nas. And what I like about this mixtape, if I can pat 2005 me on the back, is even though it does sort of span various genres here, It does have, I mean, it all has this sort of, well, sort of a fall vibe to it, sort of a, sort of a, all these songs tend to be kind of a little bit thoughtful, you know, hopefully not too melancholy, but I feel like there's a vibe going on here. And I was going to play Flying Pizza by Swearing It Motorist, but I heard you react to Dismemberment Plan. So let's do this. Let's play Sentimental Man. Let's all, okay, everybody, close your eyes. Pretend it's 2005. You're hanging out in my barn in New Hampshire. Cary Grant is there, and we're listening to this.

There is no heaven and there is no hell

No limbo in between, I think it's all a lie Just a white light out to velvet black Back to neutral gray That's all when we die When we die When we die When we die

When we die When we die

There is no fate that divides our day

Probably about as much of that as I'm allowed to play Takes me back Right it's a real place in time man this is a great do you have spot you have spotify right i do will

you share that with me i loved everything i was hearing you list on there by the way i didn't know this dismemberment i always thought the name dismemberment plan was a little bit macabre for a band whose music i really liked but it's a ned ryerson reference oh really according to wikipedia the name it's a i think that ned ryerson ned needlenose ryerson has been brought up a

lot on the show lately for some reason that's why i was pausing i was trying to figure out wait you didn't you don't mean a tobolowski reference literally literally the character ned ryerson

ryerson i think probably offers bill murray's character some because he's an insurance guy some sort of death and dismemberment plan oh that's presumably that's funny so it's it goes from being like dismemberment plan i was always kind of like i don't you know that's kind of again a little gory to being like oh they're just they just think the groundhog day is funny

you know it's just like ned ryerson and i i think i never i don't think i ever really thought about it at the forefront of my brain but in the back of my brain i think i always took that as almost a self-fulfilling prophecy like too beautiful to live i'm not even joking like dismemberment plan like we have this band but we're we're all getting ready to to you know let the band fall apart too

or take the band apart at some point too um speaking of names that i was always a little on i do not like at all the name of the song that i'm recommending this week almost to the degree almost to the point that i was considering not suggesting it but i've been i've been vibing to this mf doom record a bunch that's just called food um it's got a it's got a song on there called rap snitches that i just i've played on the show before that i've been really obsessed with for like the last couple of years um but every track on the album is pretty much some sort of food reference one of them is hoe cakes but you know um it's so each track has some kind of at least tangential relationship to the idea of food in fact rap snitches uh he says he rhymes it with canishes so that's i guess where the food aspect of rap snitches is but this song is called vomit spit again i don't like that name but the the track itself is so good can we play a little mf doom here from food

Ha ha ha ha! But a softy, leather, flossy, fatty, juggy Always threw me off when she told me, Daddy, funk me I'm like any who's Seeds walking all out in the street without any shoes I guess it's better than some funky socks You need to get her some skips before she catches the monkey pox Instead she want to hit a beatbox Take pills and make fake krills That sheet rock, sing it Bring it back to your laboratory While he's in his oratory glory It's like a horror story

Should I have done a trigger warning That he was going to say, Daddy, funk me? i was if you'd like to hear if you'd like to hear a version that doesn't have daddy funk me it's available at our website this american life.org uh i just liked whatever that sample is in the background and uh yeah that whole record food would recommend worth

that's a really good i don't know anything about mf doom and as i'm listening to that and thinking like this is again one of those things i'm listening to it and i really enjoy it mf doom has been around for a long time right i don't know why it's yeah rest in peace cultural oh really so it's so i didn't well he yeah he passed away uh a couple years ago oh and he was not very old rings a bell um but i i somehow categorize him and the reason i'm stalling here is i can't think of their names and i don't know that this is a fair comparison but there's also So who is the the rap? I want to say duo that seems to be very popular among white rap listeners. It's like I believe it's two people and they made they made an album and then they remade the album with cat meows or something, which I was always like, oh, yeah, it seems like it's not really for me. It's going to be a little bit goofier, but everybody seems to love them. Does this ring any bells to you at all?

i gotta i'll look it up when i say it that this is a rap duo that did they redid their album

in cat meows i'm it was like very of an era where and it's like they are respected laser cats yeah they are respected but because of stuff like that i never really gave them um much of a chance but then people will play something i'm like oh no this is legitimate

good but just based on the their fan base sort of i never got into them i'm gonna look uh this up

um yeah mf doom by the way uh was actually born in the uk but then i think moved over to um to the states at some point obviously and his thing was he almost always um performed with this kind of mask on that was really a kind of made him a sort of a mythical figure i don't know if he was like so obsessed that like no one ever saw his face or not but like i don't think i'd ever seen a clip of him performing where he wasn't wearing this this particular mask it's like very kind of a cool look and i just i'm by no means the expert on him but i don't think i've heard anything of his that i haven't liked it's just like a really kind of a vibe 90s it's like lyrics are really good have i bought you enough time to figure out yeah yeah yeah i'm actually i'm gonna pause here

for a second because i'm wondering if i'm driving people crazy because they know exactly what i'm talking about and they hate my description of it or if it was so is it macklemore ridiculous that nobody has any idea what the hell i'm talking about and they're going to be mad when i reveal that i was talking about run the jewels oh right yes and then there was some sort of internet challenge or something i can't remember if somebody else did it or but there was something called meow the jewels like i don't know if enough people signed a petition or clicked on a link or whatever but they ended up like remixing it with cat sounds or something but like that's one of those bands it seems like everybody sort of loved npr's favorite hip-hop is that true yeah i mean

pretty much it's like look and killer mike i think actually has some pretty cool songs and his the guy he collaborates with lp i mean i think that i think they're sort of talented folks and i'm sure that they are a beloved group in the minds of many of our listeners so I want to tread lightly here but it it's definitely your friend who doesn't listen to a lot of hip-hop's favorite hip-hop

group yeah I have a friend who you know as well and I'm not going to say it on the air but I'm going to tell you after the show because it's going to click for you immediately when I tell you there's somebody who loves this group so much and it's somebody that I like by the way I don't

know why i'm like and by the way their music is pretty catchy and good if you like run the jewels like run the jewels please i've i've heard songs by them and been like oh who is this so yeah i'm not trying to be totally dismissive but i i know exactly what you're talking about uh is i'm not surprised to hear that and i don't even know if it was them but that somebody who's a big fan of theirs there was a crossover between cat appreciation says the guy by the way he's talked about his cat for roughly seven hours this week uh i'm not surprised to hear there was a little laser overcatting going on there related to run the jewels yeah and there's a i was going to say

there's a friend of ours um who they like this record so much that somehow i internalize that as this is not for me which is such an unfair way to treat music but i'm going to tell you who it

was you're gonna be like oh yeah of course of course oh god this is this is i'm not usually jealous of myself but i'm jealous of myself that i get to hear who this is after the show Like the listeners are like dying Because they will never get to know The name you're going to tell me when the show's over

It's Lini Ramadan No, that's not who it is I don't know how she feels about this group

Anyway, that was MF Doom And this is a suggestion from our friend Listener Elizabeth Who says they would like us to play Grab Your Mop Grab Your Mop By Mark Rudin Featuring Tolliver Elizabeth says I'm a fan of Tolliver And a song about a mop Made me think of Andrew And Tolliver's music makes me want to dance So this is what we're going to play We're going to play Grab Your Mop By Mark Rudin Featuring Tolliver

Did we play some Tolliver? Did you

It sounds familiar to me I don't have any like Conscious memory of myself I wonder if we played a different Listener suggestion that involved Tolliver

Maybe Okay, gotcha I wasn't sure if it was somebody That you were into Because that name rings about

No, that name is really Yeah, no, you know what? No, I think, Andrew, I think we had Tolliver on Livewire. Oh. But during the pandemic, and so it was one of those things. We were just filming, or whatever you call it, you know, we were just recording so much Zoom stuff that it all kind of blurred together. Oh, there it was.

It says April 2023, although that might have been a rerun. Probably. Yeah, okay, yeah. But yeah, you had Tolliver on it.

So there you go. I have conversed with Tolliver before and heard their music. Anyway, that's what we're going to hear. Grab Your Mop by Mark Rudin featuring Tolliver. That's how we're wrapping this week up. Thank you, everyone, for listening. Thanks for being part of TBTL. We're going to be back here on Monday with more Imaginary Radio. In the meantime, have a great weekend. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

Time start for me

Walking through the room Got a buzz like we learned it on the moon Turn my ears in these $20 shoes Call me pretty cause I'm breaking all the rules You can stay mad if you want Ain't gonna stop I got too much sauce to stay in this spot

The clothes come off It's getting too hot The seed is dripping to grab your mouth

The audience's suggestion is Sling Blade and Oprah on a date

I sure do like them french fried potatoes no you don't Oprah power out