Muse

My name is Kurt Fossil, marketing director, Van Gogh Energy Drinks. We saw the social media blitz you guys pulled off over the weekend, and it was gorgeous. We believe with our sponsorship, we can take your parties up a notch and get rich quick.

Oh, my God, cool. That's the best way to get rich. Yeah, that's my favorite way to get rich. Wait, you guys, we can quit TAC and just, like, get wasted all the time. I'm in, sir.

Thank you. Oh, my God, that's a dream come true. Yes, I'm gonna mogulize my lifestyle. I'm going to be like, like, like, I can't think of a mogul. William Randolph Hearst. Paul Abdul.

TBTL.

This is a show for dogs. About dogs. Starring one dog. And one dirty dog. This is genius. This is genius work.

I'd tell you to get this through your head, but you're a machine. So run this through your data processor. Get lost.

She's irrational. You should... You see what I'm talking about? Is it me? Am I wrong? Just let me talk. May I talk, please? I have something to say. May I say it? Yes, Mark. Okay, would you just let me finish?

Perhaps. Am I wrong? Life's a potty. Wipe your body. This is the best moment of TVTL.

All right, hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Monday edition of TVTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. It is our turn. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host, coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio perched high above the mighty Columbia.

A lot of people think I'm confident, but I'm actually just loud.

Speaking of things that are loud, we are once again in a construction zone, and for the last few days, I've started the program by saying there's a lot of work going on very close to me, and I'm going to be, on Monday, on this Monday, I'm going to level with you. I was, I was being a little, I was exaggerating slightly, maybe folks were working on a different part of the studio, they were a ways away, they were close enough we could all hear them, but they weren't literally in front of my face. At this point there are a couple of guys that are installing plywood sheeting on the specific five foot area of where I am doing this program, and so it's definitely going to be something that we notice, I'll try to ride the mute button a little bit. It's also very, very rainy out there today. Didn't know you like to get wet, though. The weather app I'm looking at said it's a 100% chance of rain. Raising the question, how could it be a 100% chance of anything ever? Right? Isn't that not a possibility statistically? 100% chance of something? That means there is no way that that thing could ever not happen, which is, I don't know, confusing to my small brain. But that's right. I have bigger things to focus on today, like episode 4050. or in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. On Friday, I think, I debuted a new segment called This House Old.

You've been living in the monkey house.

I've got another update on that. Well, really what it is is an update on my attempt to purchase a window this weekend and how my college football allegiance, I say this in all seriousness, almost led to them not selling me the window. They're a place that sells windows. They decided almost, they almost decided to not sell it to me. how dare you uh so we'll get into that and i'm sure a whole bunch of other fun stuff with this guy the longest running co-bro of the show maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships the thing about him though is he's a real kind of a swiss army knife right he can do everything including some of the stuff that i don't want to know how he does it but he does it he is andrew walsh and he's joining me right now as i mute my microphone good morning my friend

Good morning, Luke. If it helps at all, you can keep that microphone muted for just a second longer, not because I'm trying to neg you at all. Obviously, your participation in this program is much appreciated. But I read a quote in the newspaper this morning that I have been dying to share with you because it's one of those things where you're just reading an article. I'm going to ask you a rhetorical question here, Luke. And if you're worried about...

here by the way you can just nod if you want i don't want you to feel lost in space okay no

you can just nod if you want or you can give me a i don't need a verbal yes on this but you know the feeling when you're reading a newspaper article and it's just like about policy or you know local elections or whatever but then in the middle of it there's just a quote that floors you and it's just sitting there all by itself i have an example if you don't know what i'm talking about here. I was reading a piece in the Seattle Times today about bus usage. This is a topic that's close to my heart. It begins with a wonderful little anecdote about the E-line, the E-Express line that I take up and down Aurora.

You must take the E-line.

Is that a song?

There's a song called A-Train. Oh, that's the A-Train. You must take the A-Train to go to Murray Hill way up in Harlem. I don't think it's Murray Hill. It's something Hill.

Anyway, the Seattle Times looked at a bunch of bus routes here locally. I think throughout the county, actually, like 700 bus routes. And I'm going to go with routes and routes. I'm going to use that interchangeably. I got dinged on that once as a radio announcer. I said route, and they said it's route. Anyway. It's like the song, get your kicks on route 66. And that's what I sang right back at Scott McPherson, the program director at the time. Anyway, sorry, I didn't mean to make this such a big deal. But it was an interesting article, I thought. It was talking about bus usage in the county compared to pre-pandemic levels. Bottom line, TLDR, as they say, bus usage levels are almost back up to what they were pre-pandemic. But there's been some shift about where the most busy areas are. Still, the one thing that holds true is the less wealthy areas, the less white areas have the more, you know, the most bus usage. Anyway, so I'm reading about this. And then here's kind of a lengthy quote here. This is just from The Seattle Times. For many riders, metro service is worse than it was before the pandemic. Route or route cancellations and no-show buses have become commonplace. And on-time performance is worse than it's been since 2019. That's interesting to me. I didn't realize that because of probably the way I use the bus and because I'm not a daily commuter. Anyway, it goes on a little bit on that topic. Then it says, trips to work or the store or to see family that take 20 minutes in a car can take an extra hour on a bus, said a woman from Guadalajara, Mexico, who didn't want to use her full name because she doesn't have a current work visa. With each missed connection, she says, the trip slows. It's the worst thing here, she says, after loneliness. And when he said that, that shocked me. Wow. I'm just reading about bus routes and everything. And then this woman from Mexico says.

Can we get her name so we can send her an edible bouquet of some kind?

That's what I was going to say. Like, if anybody knows this woman, please. Like, I'm not a great chef. I'll have her over. I'll make some chili. Genevieve will make some cornbread. We can hang out like that. I want to find this person and give them a big hug. Although they might not want to in a post-COVID world.

It's actually really rare that somebody is kind of that honest in a story that is, like you said, Andrew, really just kind of a new story and sort of a process story. Not like a Taffy Brodesser-Akner deep dive on someone's deepest, deepest, most inner life where somebody is spending a week with someone and it's like that's the point of the story is let's get down to the core of who they are. When it's just like how much does it suck when the bus is late and the person just goes well I'd put it second to the paralyzing loneliness of the global economy That is very likely the reason that I have left everything that I've known and come to this other place So as to try to survive and probably provide for other people in my family in my life And I can't actually give you my full name because legally that could get me in a lot of trouble here I could get sent out and even though My day-to-day life is extremely difficult made more difficult by no-show buses I'd still put it in second place Lonely to just the deep deep loneliness and again that is what you what's what not to get? I don't know Madea Benjamin on it here at eight minutes into a Monday show on a rainy Monday, but like What that quote says to me or what that quote to me is is the end result of an entire globe where inequity is rife life yeah you know yeah like it leads to that woman not being able to uh get to her workplace because the buses aren't running and she can't give her name but she's here doing that living that life probably because of the vast difference in resources between different parts of the world

yes exactly and i mean you can romanticize it too you can put on the the the rose colored glasses or even the dave ross colored glasses god what a blast from the past remember i miss that guy i forgot about ross colored glasses i don't think he took that with him to the new show i think that was just a uh dave ross and luke burbank original anyway um and you know sort of like put it in the context of the great american um bootstrapping story right like how many people have come to this country before but it's just like but that is a very um glossy way of not actually looking at the the the modern issue of of the immigrant experience here absolutely well i sure hope

That somebody brightens that person's day Anonymous though they may be to us I'm hoping that somehow This week is a little less lonely for that person Again, I don't know how that will really unfold Because we don't know their name But if anyone knows that person if anyone has a buddy from the e-line that sounds like it might be this woman

let's find her please yes that's right you don't have to tell me your name you can have the chili and you know we can come up with a nickname we're big with nicknames on the show and curing loneliness at least we try j-dog is taken so you can't be j-dog yeah that is true

flash is sort of out yeah yeah what are the other nicknames japan you can't be japan's number one mixer is there i i feel like in our era gave me a bunch of nicknames except all of my nicknames

are somebody else's nicknames don't you call me boom boom because it was a nickname of a guy

i just i just play that i don't think of that i get you know no you know what you're right andrew because when i say uh he is andrew boom boom walsh that's what am i saying i'm saying that's your nickname and so um let's see i feel that's in print somewhere too which is why it's

on my mind i think i saw that recently somewhere i don't know if it's in a social media bio for me or on our website or something, but somebody somewhere has Andrew Boom Boom Walsh in a way that seems somewhat official, which makes me think it's so funny because now I'm blanking on the WMMS Boom Boom guy's real name. I can look that up, but, like, it's literally just—

You probably have the album somewhere.

It's just somebody else's name that we've just given me. Let's see here.

Oh, man, I wanted to play you something. I actually stayed at Becca's house last night because we were down in Salem on Sunday. It was really a lovely day. Her family has this big fall party that they've been doing for many years now. That's just been a family tradition, and lots of their folks, particularly her mom's friends, come out, and there's cider pressing and pumpkin carving. It's about as wholesome an afternoon as you can have, but there's also a lot of really good wine. I tried to make it a little unwholesome by drinking a fair amount of Bjornsson Vineyards wine, but we were driving back last night, so I ended up staying in Portland, And this morning I got up and I had already had, I'd had, I'd had enough morning edition in my life after about an hour and a half of it. So on the drive back up here, I switched over to Stern and he, there's a guy on that show named one of the producers name is John Blitt. And his role within the show is to just basically wind everyone up all the time. Like just do these interviews with people, like the other members of the staff and the cast. And he's just very good at kind of acting very interested But asking questions that just drive them crazy And then when someone finally gets really mad That's the payoff So they sent him to the, I think, the VMAs And he was doing a variety of bits With people at the VMAs And some of them were so funny I was like, can we just play this on TBTL? Can I just play someone else's content That they're paying their staffer to create That they're playing on their radio show Can we get away with playing it here? I decided no But there was a bit, Andrew, that I thought you would absolutely love He's interviewing people on, like, the red carpet And, you know, he says Like, basically the bit is he keeps having them start over the interview Because he keeps acting like he can't figure out how to work his gear

This is making me, like, uncomfortable I promise you this one was fun

I considered nexting it Because I get uncomfortable in those situations But it's just the way he's saying it so it's these two like pro wrestlers like wcw or whatever the whatever wrestling's called now and they're like a duo and he's like okay uh this is shout out he's like something like this is shout out radio first of all he's just making up what station he's at he's like all right we're going live and then they go like and then they're like i'm just so and so and so and so and we're just here at the vmas he goes hold on up sorry hold on i gotta start over on and going live and they go ah this is and he's like okay stop stop cut okay and going live and he just keeps going back and forth they do it probably 20 times they're totally unfazed and he goes this is the part that we think of you because no one like you me and p fletch are pretty much the people that would get this he goes yeah he goes when i tell people we're going live they get so amped up he goes and i'm just holding a task cam like it makes from a broadcasting standpoint which is why it's just you and me there's no he doesn't have a uh what what does he say he doesn't have a t1 he doesn't have any kind of an isdn box he doesn't there's nothing that would indicate he's going live he's holding a task cam and probably a shotgun microphone right but that speaks to how little most normal people understand anything about what like radio broadcasting looks like they're all assuming okay we're going live if i looked at i'd be like how are you going live with

that task cam well i remember in new hampshire on the rare occasion that i would go out in the field usually probably as a reporter's producer i don't think i did much reporting myself but there were you know getting like person on the street interviews that type of thing around the primary like people would i can't explain they would indicate that they were concerned about how they looked as i held a microphone in front of them and like i remember being astounded that somehow they and it sounds like i'm just being mean to people who aren't in the business like i guess your brain just kind of jumps to there and it's like you're not used to being recorded in any you know in any way i guess especially back then but

People would just be like, okay, so when is this going to be on? Can I show it to my parents or whatever? I'm just like, you understand this is not TV. This is a microphone.

Yeah, you don't even see it. There's not even a camera here.

If this was a camera, we'd be looking up your nose. That's how this works.

Yeah, that was one of the – you and I have talked about this extensively on this program, but I really dreaded going out and interviewing people, so-called Vox Pop or Man on the Street or whatever. I just, it made me feel so embarrassed, but it was, and also part of the problem was the people that probably had something good to say, like, I'm battling crippling loneliness, were not the ones running up to talk to you. It was the person who was going, I want to be on TV, and you're just, like, standing there with a shotgun microphone, like, what part of this looks like a TV camera to you, sir? Please leave me alone.

Did you mute that because of the pounding or because you had to clear your throat? Pounding. Oh, okay. Don't worry. I think it's probably better just to let it be.

i would probably say i was proud of that mute game is there a delay here's the question is there a

delay there was i don't know there was something it was like kind of a half a pound and then it went mute it was like more distracting that the pound went away mid-pound never leave mid-pound luke no we've gone over this you don't want to go to pound town today or actually you seem like you're fine with going to but i'm also just saying that like it for your benefit and now i feel like i'm i'm lecturing you but i just mean for your benefit just like don't worry about it like it we're in the water now you know i want to first get in the water it's cold or whatever you get

used to it we're in there now don't worry about it i want to take you on my little journey this morning along with considering pirating howard stern copyrighted materials i was like well maybe i'll do because it was it's actually it's stabilizing a bit but it was quite quite rainy this morning and windy and i just figured probably this isn't a day that uh they're going to be putting up these big sheets of plywood which are kind of you know hazardous in the wind and it's just unpleasant out so i thought well today will be a um a quiet day here and then i you know at about nine looked out and nope there were trucks here people were going to work which is cool but then i thought well maybe i'll go in the house house and do some stuff do the show from in there but there was two problems one walt is in there doing his thing and then also i don't think the wi-fi is very strong in there now because that's that's all centered out here in the studio so i've never done the show from in there under this new configuration of things and I didn't want us to have one of those annoying days where it's the line is dropping left and right so I basically then I was thinking of seeing if you wanted to do the show later and then I just thought let's just let's just do the show at the normal time in here with me kind of doing my voice like in a way annoying or distracting for you or for the listeners that's you know that's so much better

than the pounding. I also love that you did that during a quiet time.

Hey, don't you have any more Drakkar, Noir

you want to play or whatever today? I do have something I want to play for you. Okay, good. Is that okay? Can I? Please. Because I feel a little bit bad doing this because I feel like this is a horse that I've already fed, and I'm feeding a fed horse here. But speaking of, and this popped in my head because you mentioned playing somebody else's radio program wholesale and how that might blur some lines between what is our content and what is somebody else's and it reminded me how um bad i have felt about my description of yours truly johnny dollar one of the old um radio shows that i've been listening to and i actually um used to catch it

on kicksy radio he's the insurance investigator exactly and i tried to explain to you that he's

always like filing his receipts and that's like kind of the the conceit of how he tells his investigation story but um this weekend or maybe late last week I actually found a podcast of it so it's got every episode starting with number one and I've listened to episode number one and as I was walking listening to this yesterday I wished I had just played this for you because I was stumbling and bumbling and trying to explain how cool I think this sort of conceit is So if you'll give me, like, I think I need at least 90 seconds here, but just to hear how this unfolds, because I really think you're going to like this as old-timey radio.

I'm very excited about this. It also is a great opportunity for me to mute my microphone.

Yes. Now, one thing I'm going to do is I'm going to mute my microphone on and off as I play this, okay? Okay, good. Thank you. Let me see if I can get this to work just from my phone.

The Columbia Broadcasting System presents Yours truly, Johnny Dollar

You can hear this okay, right? It's so good, and also I realized that's a colleague of mine, effectively because I also work for the Columbia Broadcasting System

That is a good point

That guy probably has to file his expenses through Chrome River

Yeah, this show would be so much different these days

What if he was just doing Chrome? What if it was a radio drama where the guys thing is just fighting with Chrome River

Well, that's the thing that I find so interesting

interesting about this is that is what this is and it's kind of interesting i'm gonna let it play

like i'm trying to itemize this the parking at the hotel why is there not a box for this so you're

gonna hear the intro of the show as you would probably hear it every week but then also just like the beginning of episode number one and you'll you'll hear he's filling out his ledger and he's explaining why he had to take certain flights i mean in a certain way this is very

The next half hour has its baggage packed to take a trip with America's fabulous freelance insurance investigator, Johnny Dollar. At insurance investigations, he's just an expert. At making out his expense account, he is an absolute genius.

It's literally about expense accounts.

It is. Expense account. Submitted by investigator Johnny Dollar. Two, home office, East Coast Underwriters, Terminal Building, Hartford, Connecticut. The following is an accounting of my expenditures and the investigation regarding the Paracorp policy for your company. Expense account, item one. Plane fare to Benton, Ohio, $40.04. Item two, plane fare Benton back to Hartford, $40.04. Explanation, purchase two one-way tickets. Because of the type of case I'm usually assigned, I never press my luck by buying round trips.

I don't either, Andrew. I'm sorry. Hold on. Pause this. And by the way.

No, that's as much as I wanted to play for you. Yours truly, Johnny Dollar. You hear how it actually is part. I mean, it's a great conceit. Somebody needs to reboot this for Netflix, but you concur.

Starring me. I never book a round-trip ticket because sometimes we can't get a crew in Belleville, Ohio, and then I have to move my flight back. Like, that's actually very good advice. I always book all of my flights are just one-way flights so that if something happens to flight number one, it doesn't affect flight number two.

Well, for him, I was a little confused when he says that. Does it mean that he might go on another leg of his journey, or does he mean that he may not be coming back because he puts himself on the plane?

danger that's a great question too also what kind of per diem is he working well that i'm sure it

comes up are you kidding i'm sure they address it what about the receipts like is it oh is a

photograph of the receipt sufficient or does it have to be the original thing it's gonna be the

original keep in mind these receipts are like the ones you found in your wall last week luke these

are from the mercantile yeah exactly oh this i need to send this to larry alardo the guy that does all the travel oh yeah at cbs you're like hey larry you have no idea how fascinating this world of expenses at cbs can be the columbia broadcasting system by the way you know what's ironic maybe ironic is the wrong word but interesting i'm perched high above the columbia river i'm doing my own version of the columbia broadcast system right here yeah right here on the madrona hill in the madrona hill studios the columbia podcast system from the cps um that's That's great, Andrew. That's actually, that's quality content. I kind of, listen, I'm loving having my dad here because we have such a fun time. And we're getting a lot done. He's getting a lot done, let's be honest. Although I am also getting a lot done, Andrew. This weekend, I'll tell you about it maybe after we thank our donors, but like I was very, I was in the midst of it all with him and it is hard work. I don't know how he does it. but that being said when my dad returns to silverdale at some point this week to hang out with susie b i will be excited to listen to some dreamland because like i don't do that when my dad's here like i'm not like he and i are watching uh bbc content together and uh eating nutty buddies that's the nighttime ritual so i don't come out here and like listen to my dreamland but i can't wait like wednesday night i've already this is just i'm just really starting to channel kind of of your behaviors in this way that I just I'm looking forward to Wednesday night when I'm here by myself and I'm listening to an Art Bell episode from 20 years ago at 11 o'clock at night as I just stand and ponder things in this studio that need to be finished do you think what do you think your

dad would think of coast to coast is there any chance that he would sort of get into it no no

No, he believes only in Christian space aliens. He doesn't have time for any of this nonsense. I don't want to be mean, but like you don't really. He doesn't have time for any of this conspiratorial nonsense. Only his conspiratorial nonsense.

But you don't believe in what a lot of the people on Coast to Coast believe either, but you can still enjoy it. So you don't think there's any of that in him, in old Walt, as you say?

No, because my dad is just not into the same. like i think you and i and like camaro kev and maybe it's generational maybe it's you know just the era we grew up in or maybe it's our personality and this is how we were all sort of drawn to each other but like there's a

kind of there's just something about the kookiness of art bell and the seriousness of art bell and also the complete non-seriousness of most of the topics that i just kind of love and it that's not that just doesn't speak to my dad i think very much as a listening experience like he would he'd be kind of literally going like are they trying to say time travel is real yeah it's interesting

because for me the topic doesn't interest me if you told me hey there's this tv show about this like i don't know what you'd call it like modern aliens or something actually that i messed that

joke up what is the t ancient aliens you were close i was the opposite direction oh i was so

close what's a synonym for ancient modern modern right brand new aliens nailed it um my 600 pound alien uh is a show that i love um but uh yeah i was gonna say like i'm not interested in the topic either i'm interested more in the format of it i love radio and the in the live crackly sound of that in the same way that i love johnny dollar even though i'm not super in love with expense

reports well that's the thing i'm i i also don't i don't really care about the content i like to hear the people um be very committed to their reality that they've created and it's weird because i don't care about astrology i have no time for astrology i'm not interested in astrology but and i also wouldn't listen to a show where people were talking about like leo is rising or mercury mercury is in retrograde or whatever but but i will for some reason listen to them talk about remote viewing i will listen to linda moulton howe talk about remote viewing where you can actually astrally project yourself somewhere else but would you um and maybe you

would but would you sit down to watch that no it's a different experience right like you're not

going to waste your screen time on that absolutely not no no it's it's it's something to be listened to late at night that's why i said we were talking to our friend j dog during the weekend review video this week thanks by the way to hauser for for helping us out and he was saying that he had been listening to a little i don't know if this ended up in the final edit but he said that he had been listening to the um a dreamland in the morning and i would that was that was that was truly bizarre to me i don't feel like it's the kind of content that should be appreciated in the light of day you need to do it at night when when not even god knows you're listening to it

well just so you know i was really late on getting the newsletter and everything done uh this friday so by the time uh i made by the time i uploaded that video to youtube everything made the cut Luke like everything made the cut I did not go in and make any cuts on that video once it gets to be like 6.30 on a Friday it's staying in there that's my rules that's fascinating that's editing 101

do you think this is how Martin Scorsese movies get filmed and why they end up being

seven hours and why they end up just being one long shot with no edits people are like so arty I'm like so

lazy what is her name something Schoonmaker who's famously his editor Thelma Schoonmaker or something and uh i feel like killers of the flower moon is what's this like that's five and a half hours i just wonder if if whatever her name is schoonmaker is like it's friday it's six i don't i don't feel like cutting the rest of this let's just make it let's just make it all

one shot where the yes people walk into the club like it would be such a pain to have to chop this up just like one shot cameraman you can do it um so luke point is everything made the weekend review video yes everything made the week in review video i had one other thing i sort of was thinking about telling you over the weekend but i don't want to hog the microphone here did you have

other we needed there's ever a day for you to hog felma schoonmaker god damn andrew where where does how does he do it how does he do it i think i said her name was velma schoonmaker but still i'm i got like enough i got it i got enough of that right that i'm she also has won i believe maybe three oscars so it should be a memorable name so that's his editor they they're like i love relation i love thelma colbert schoonmaker is a french-born american film editor who has won several awards in her illustrious career including three academy awards and i believe is largely associated with uh her collaboration over the course of five decades with martin scorsese i

love collaborations like that i love when you hear about a long-term yes working relationship like that that is super cool like ours yeah actually not not completely like ours 4,054 episodes into

it although i don't take credit for all of those of course and also when it's six on friday

and you're done it's six on friday come on actually i think it was like seven it's six o'clock somewhere and that somewhere's here right we're going to the eagles no i don't think there was much to edit in that video but anyway i was going to say this has nothing to do with editing this has nothing to do with tbtl just something that was sort of on my mind this weekend because I don't know if this is a reflection on me as a human being and how I'm changing as I continue to age. If this is a reflection of the cat that we adopted one year ago. Bingo is his name. Uh-huh. Sure. But yesterday.

Meow.

It kind of sounds like me making a meow.

sound that's just one of your sound effects from the new program i love that so much it's ridiculous how much i love that one of these days we're gonna forget that that's not me and we're gonna it's gonna be a real chris hayes scatting type situation exactly but what i was gonna tell you was i am not somebody who goes in for well i don't go in for anniversaries and of any kind or birthdays or anything that sort of marks an occasion. I low-key all of that stuff when it comes to my own life. You know, if somebody in my life wants to celebrate their anniversary or their birthday, of course, I'll oblige. But for me, that stuff doesn't really mean a heck of a lot. I had October 15th circled on my calendar for weeks leading up to, the 15th was yesterday, and it was also what I'm calling Bingo's birthday. Now, it wasn't technically his birthday. Oh, I saw it on Instagram. It was the day that I know people have special names for it, like Coming Home Day or Gotcha Day or something. I don't like Gotcha Day. Gotcha Day. Is that a thing?

Yeah. I think that's what people call it, like, when you celebrate the, yeah. You caught your pet pleasuring themselves. Gotcha Day.

Meow.

Let me see. I'm going to gotchaday.com. Oh, nope. Don't go there. Let's see here. Gotcha Day is a term for the anniversary of the day in which a person or a pet joins a family by adoption. I don't prefer that terminology. That's cute, I guess. I guess. I don't like it. I don't even. And I'll say this quietly because I don't want to offend. I don't like the word gotcha. I don't like spelling gotcha. I don't like spelling gunner.

Gotcha was a clothing brand that I was very, very envious of as a kid. Yeah, it was kind of like, I don't know if it was regional to the, specifically to the Northwest, but it was a big thing. It was kind of surfy, and it was always like the cool kids had gotcha. I didn't.

I don't think you, I think you can go back in my entire life's work of letters, Luke and you could never find an example of me writing out the word gotcha or gonna like G-O-N-N-A I don't like those constructions

I want to tell you something though Andrew I saw on Instagram yesterday that you posted a cute picture of Bingo and I think you said something to the effect of one year with this one or whatever I think you said I think you wrote hogging down pig slop with this pig and he's the biggest pig of all I believe I wrote quite plainly it's his birthday But it's very funny you bring this up because my thought was my boy Andrew has gone soft and I love it.

I never, I mean, a pet birthday. And again, just go with me here. I'm calling it birthday. And here's the third factor that might play into this. Because now I've looked up like. Well, this is not going to translate. But now in our house, you know how like jokes just become the inside language in a couple. During an episode of After These Messages, I said something about having low tea to Genevieve, and she just stared at me. She's not hearing all of the AM commercials, the AM radio commercials I am about guys, low tea, and you and I joke about low tea all the time. And I said something about low tea, and she just looked at me, and I said, Estosterone? And now in this house, we call it low tea, Estosterone. But anyway, yeah, maybe that's part of it. That's the sound for high tea, by the way. You have high testosterone on the show. Honestly, I almost... Elephants for men. I almost guarantee you there is some sort of a men's health doctor that uses that exact sound in their ads. That is the level of subtlety we are talking about here in advertising.

But sorry, I interrupted you. You were saying the other reason you think that you were compelled to... And I want to be very clear with you, my friend. I love this. Like, first of all, I love your cat. Bingo. I love how much you love your cat. Bingo. I love that you posted this. But I really did note in my mind, like, this is a little out of character for Andrew based on, you know, me knowing you for a lot of years now.

Yeah. And I'm looking because I went back and looked up what Professor Bananas, like, quote unquote, birthday would be here. It is January 11th, 2011. But we just looked that up recently because of this. One of the reasons Bingo's Day might stick in my head, especially is because it happened on a big sports day. It happened on the day that the Mariners were eliminated from the playoffs after 18 scoreless innings on a Saturday. So it was such a, I mean, such a memorable day.

If I remember right, it was kind of really good timing because your sadness about that game was definitely kind of helped by your happiness about this kitten.

Exactly. I had a little kitten on my lap. He was sleeping the whole time. Turns out we think he got a cold. We didn't realize when we adopted him that he had a cold and that's why he was especially docile.

He was riddled with COVID.

He was wearing a mask.

But he didn't have his nose covered.

Yeah, it was like a chin strap.

It was kind of like, I have to have this on, but I'm not going to really take it seriously.

Because he was smoking. But no, I mean, I think that it was a day to be remembered anyway. Like something specific happened. So all this year when I started to think to myself, well, what day do we bring home?

bingo. All I had to do was look up what was the day that the Mariners were eliminated by the Astros after an 18 inning game, you know? So like, it was like kind of an easy thing to constantly look up. And now I've gone back and I've put bananas day on the calendar as well. But also I think because I can't get over, I don't know if I'll feel the same way a year from now, but I can't get over that. It's been a year. It's just one of those things where certain, certain, there are certain times when you're looking at time and it just doesn't seem to add up to you. sometimes you're like oh a year just flew by but with bingo it's like i don't know man and this again is me just maybe being soft and really loving my little guy but like i literally can't imagine life without him and like it's just been like i can't believe it's only been a year like i just i'm like what like i you mean especially leading up to sunday i was like it's been less than a year that bingo wasn't in my life like i couldn't like kind of grasp that i think that's

part of it oh andrew that's really sweet i love that guy i have the i don't want to say opposite experience with bubbles but i had a i've been having a weird experience because since she had her freak out here she's been staying down with becca until this place is a little more finished off which we're getting pretty close and i'm i miss her greatly even though she's annoying but i you know i'm i really like having her around and i'm looking forward to having her be here full time but i was watching some old video that i had made of this house um by sometimes what i'll do when I'm feeling kind of a little bit like overwhelmed by the scale of what still or the scope of what still needs to happen here and also how much money it's costing me and also how slow it feels sometimes it's going I will watch old videos I made of the house and this room that I'm in the studio before anything happened to it and that kind of somehow kind of it's like a calming thing I'm like well this is really different I'm sitting in here talking to Andrew I went on a run in the on the treadmill here in this room today none of that was happening when This was just a funky-ass wood garage that was falling down because of powder post beetles. So anyway, I was looking at a video where the inside of the house was completely unchanged from when I bought it, meaning all the walls were where they were when I bought it, the huge fireplace that I had taken out. Everything was the same. And what I was shocked by was as I opened the door, I was making this little video with my phone, who runs up to me, a little bubbles. Oh, yeah. And I grab her with one hand, and I'm like, got you, and I'm going on this.

And I'm like, I was like— Got you or gotcha?

i'm gonna gotcha gotcha the rhythm is gonna gotcha um i was like wait hold on because i feel to me like i've had bubbles for six months and maybe it's because i have actually had her for six months out of the year and a half i've had her because she's been bouncing around from home to home so much but like i was like i was like holy shit i had this cat when this house was as as un back when this house was in its natural state like wow okay that made me feel better because it made me feel like okay you know this has been about a year and a half that we've been like hardcore doing stuff to this house and that's actually less depressing than i thought like a year and a half is a long time but when you're doing projects that are as ambitious as i'm doing that's kind of like it takes time so that made me feel good and also i was like damn i've had that cat for kind of a long time and then also she was so little in the video and then i always felt sad that she wasn't that little anymore yeah do you get that with bingo at all do you get that that of kind of like you know not that you don't love bingo at every age but like when you see a picture of bingo when he was like a little kid you're just like oh my god that was so cute yeah definitely

i mean with both cats although we have more of bingo i think um but he's an interesting case because he really grew his looks changed so much over the course of a year it shifted a few times when he was a little cat like his whole head was kind of you know the the white color with just a almost a perfect circle of brown covering his eyes nose and mouth like and we even said like when we first brought him home and we you know we called him bubbles but after a while we started nicknaming him bubbles bingo we started calling him bingo but then after a while we started nicknaming him um uh space ball because i was like your face is a perfect little space ball but then over time that all that hair kind of blended together and i'm so glad we didn't stick with space ball because he's not a space ball anymore so like and not only that we thought he was a short-haired cat when we brought him home but then he kind of became a long-haired cat and he we now realize kind of went through an awkward phase i was kind of rude to him on this show kind of saying like he's not about his tail about his tail about his looks in like him becoming a long haired cat he really has kind of settled into being a medium haired cat now and i actually really like the way he looks now i think he just kind of went through some some weird some weird phases but anyway um so uh yeah seeing old photos of him it kind of blows me away but he's always been pretty cute and i and i do love that about him i was gonna say your story about bubbles though um is interesting to me because i truly believe i don't know if we've ever talked about this but one of the things i believe most

in this life is the most interesting thing about photos and home movies are what you especially movies are what you capture accidentally yes absolutely and I remember the time I learned this specifically and the funny thing is I was so young then but I was probably like 13 maybe 14 but I'm thinking I'm like 13 years old and I'm going through my VHS tapes this is around the time that I'm starting to get into AV stuff kind of as a hobby and I find this tape and you know back then you're just like should I tape over this what's on this is it something we taped off of TV and uh I said TV like that um and I popped it in the VCR and it was a random video that I only vaguely remember taking where I had years earlier years earlier as a littler kid I had taken the family's home video camera and just sort of walked around the basement area and the basement area is where we had like kind of a play area and like a big marker board that we would draw on and my sister had this giant dollhouse and we kind of grew up in this in this home so it had a lot of relics from us being little kids and then like you know probably up until 12 years old 13 we finally moved and whenever I watched this video I would I know I was already living in a different house I'm quite sure of that. And so just to see all of these details, like, oh, my God, that was like the poster that I would shoot at with my EnerTech squirt gun. Like, just like in the spin around the – this video was probably, I'm going to say, 90 seconds, maybe two minutes long or something. But it captured so many accidental details about my life as a kid. And then, again, I'm just looking back, like, probably four or five years of being just overcome by nostalgia. Nostalgia, sorry. Um, it is a hard G, right? Really in my head, nostalgia, nostalgia, nostalgia, nostalgia, nostalgia, that's what it is. That's what meow. Right. Exactly. Meow. Stalgia. Anyway, I am done talking for the day, but yeah. So that, that story about having bubbles walk into the frame like that. I know exactly what you mean. It's like, you weren't watching it because of that. You weren't like, oh, I'm going to dial up these these photos of my kitten when she was even younger. It was like a little surprise that blew you away.

I freaking love that. I was we were doing Livewire in Eugene recently. I wanted to show we were talking about clothing that meant something to us because we were interviewing them. Avery Treffelman, who does this podcast, Articles of Interest. And I was talking about this starter jacket that I got when I was a kid that I've talked about on TV, TL plenty. It was on layaway at the pro image. my mom paid off the layaway which was very out of character for her but I thought oh it'll be more entertaining for the live crowd if they can see a picture of the jacket of me in the jacket and so I like asked my dad who was the kind of family photo archivist hey do you have any pictures of that and he was like like within two I basically put the thing out on Hawk Squad anyone have a picture of that starter jacket and my my dad was here by the way working and I don't know how like 15 minutes later he's like how about this and it's just like a picture of me in the jacket when I'm 14 years old but what I was obsessed with was not me or the jacket it was the kitchen behind me yeah because that was the kitchen that you know on 77th street in Seattle that I grew up you know that was the kitchen we had and also what was in that kitchen was this little nook this little kind of breakfast nook that had a table and a couple of benches and I just remember that was i just remember having really fun late at night conversations like with my mom or like we would we would do what we called vinyl weeding so my dad would do these signs for taco time and they would be the letters you know whatever kind of casita burrito meal would be made out of this very sticky vinyl that this computer plotter he had would cut but then you had to take out all of the like the middle of the a the middle of the o the middle of the e because eventually what you end up with was this big sheet of kind of wax paper with just the letters and then you would put on you would use transfer tape like masking tape and you'd pull them off and then you would put that on the sign it was this whole elaborate process but we kids would get hired to weed vinyl and i just remember sitting at that table for hours at night just weeding and we got paid it wasn't like this was not unpaid labor but we would just be like sitting there anyway i just have a we used to eat pomegranates on that table which my mom would call chinese apples which i don't know if that's racist or not i mean that's what she grew up calling them in philadelphia i don't think these were probably even from china but like because we'd spread out all these news all this newspaper on that table because pomegranates are so messy and we anyway something about looking at that table i was just like i didn't want to do the radio show i was like i just want to sit here and think about eating pomegranates on that table right now like it was so and that was the background of the photo it was not the point of the photo just yeah to what you're saying i think I think we might have talked about some family photos that I came into possession of a few years back that included some photos of me and my older cousins playing with my brand new Nintendo, the original NES system that we plugged into the kitchen television. That came with Duck Hunt and Mario Brothers.

Yes, and I remember it's like me, and I think my cousin Frankie is playing, and my cousin Mike is looking on, and the thing is we're all in the kitchen, though, and my dad, who I assume took the photo, was taking a photo of us playing this game, but I just got obsessed, obsessed with everything in the kitchen, because I feel like I have a good grasp on my childhood home, but there were so many details I'd forgotten about. i'd forgotten that we had a trash compactor doesn't that seem just like a was that a trend for a while like doesn't that seem like such a an extra thing to put in your kitchen that just doesn't what do we do we well we make our we make our garbage smaller although i

will tell you this andrew your whole obsession around what's going on with your garbage makes a lot more sense yeah i guess generational this is waltz this is multi-generational walsh accounting for what is going on with their with their garbage and probably because it sounds like i mean i don't know which house you're talking about in this case but like was this when you were living way out in the country yeah i wonder i wonder maybe pickup was irregular or maybe your dad had to take the stuff to the dump i'm guessing there was no i don't think there was pickup because

we did not take yeah that's a really good point how did i never know what happened to the garbage

in our house when i took you were you were a young man that's a father's game andrew you were not yet a father well just a boy and you spake as a boy but we were a big chore family like us kids

like we took care of the chores so when we took out the garbage we took it out to the garage or I guess this room that was off of the garage um and then you're right that was the end of the line for me but we must have loaded it into my dad's truck and I'm guessing he took it into work you know where he and his brother ran a company in Cleveland and probably just threw it in the dumpsters i don't even know it's weird that i can't remember that but i guess maybe a compactor makes sense in the did star wars make that did star wars make trash compactors more popular in

the 80s sure because that thing they get trapped in yeah you'd think it would make it less popular now is it possible he was compacting the trash into those cubes that they used on both transformers and gi joe those energy cubes i felt like that was really phoning it in for the animators like did they already have the cubes drawn up for one of the cartoons um did you watch this i know this has come up on the show many times but did you watch gi joe or transformers like after school

as a kid i watched them both i was way more into gi joe um i had toys for both but i was way more into gi joe so i remember that one much better i did not remember the energy cubes until i saw like the first, like, live-action Transformers movie as an adult. So that makes it in. Yeah, I think so, because I just remember, the only thing I remember about that movie is at one point, Optimus Prime is saying, put it in my chest, and he was talking about a big blue cube, and I thought that was hilarious.

Was that The Matrix, though?

I thought it was a big blue cube, but he wanted his chest.

Because The Matrix is the thing that makes Optimus Prime Optimus Prime, and the reason I know this is because at some point when he died and they wanted to sell more toys, they had him give The Matrix, which I know now we think of The Matrix as being like the Keanu Reeves movies but like back in the day the first time I ever heard the term Matrix was the thing that resides in Optimus Prime and he gives it to Rodimus Prime who's a hot rod semi-truck of course I was the idiot who got Rodimus Prime Rodimus Prime was the poochie the dog of Transformers he existed for 15 seconds but I remember Optimus Prime taking the Matrix out of his body and giving it to Rodimus Prime

I don't – I feel they might have been playing fast and loose. I'm going through an action scene right now, which is not going to be good. I just wanted to see if I could get him just to say, put it in my chest. But maybe it is.

Don't Google put it in my chest, please. The Matrix of Leadership.

I'm putitinmychest.com. But wait a second here. Hold on. Hold on, though. Things are slipping away too quickly here. I'm sorry. Andrew, put it in my chest. GI Joe had an energy cube. I don't remember that at all.

so cobra was trying to build so i think the tr and i forgive me listeners who are much more dialed into the sort of lore of these two cartoon programs from 40 years ago but i think the thing with the thing with with um transformers was uh megatron was trying to build this some kind of a giant either gun or time portal or something with these energy cubes and um and i remember that they were these glowing things and they were always stacking them up and it was like the transformers were trying to make sure that he wasn't getting too many of them and then in gi joe cobra was doing something with them and i don't remember what he was building but there was a definitely a plot at some point where cobra was like also getting energy cubes and even as a kid i was like how are these energy cubes crossing over between these two cartoons? This is very strange to me. Are all the bad guys, we have no other new ideas except the bad guys are trying to get these energy cubes to do something?

And as far as you know, this wasn't a direct crossover. I don't know if the same company owns these two or not.

I think the same company animated the same, I think the animation was sort of similar. I don't know if that, maybe it was a crossover episode. In other words, maybe it was the Transformers, you know, were somehow G.I. Joe and Transformers were coexisting or vice versa. Maybe that was what was going on. Somebody will figure this out in email us. I can stop with my casting about for. I'm trying as I'm talking to find three cubes to darkness. I'm watching this right now.

I'm watching this full episode.

The Joe team struggles to stop Cobra from installing the control cubes. maybe what it was was just the animation of these control cubes was so similar to the cubes from G.I. Joe that I just kind of blended them all together but maybe I overstated it by saying Cobra's whole raison d'etre was trying to get these cubes maybe it was one episode where he wanted these cubes

I guess this is official too it's on Hasbro's YouTube channel Three Cubes to Darkness full episode season one episode three

that's a Francis McDormand film right?

I think so Three Cubes outside of Ebbing, Missouri Here's something that I think you're going to agree with, and it gets to these energy cubes. This is what I'm going to dub the Game of Thrones problem. What you and I liked about Game of Thrones was the palace intrigue, the more humanistic struggles therein, not all the magic and the dragons and the force fields and the fires from the deep or what have you. And I feel the same with G.I. Joe and especially Transformers. Here's what a lazy viewer of Transformers I was as a kid. As an adult, people were telling me, oh, yeah, remember, like, there was some connection to alien life or whatever. I'm like, no, I have no recollection of that at all. You don't need that for both of these. Like, for G.I. Joe, you do not need any kind of magic cubes. Right. You have soldiers, and they're locked in a battle against terror. It was before. Bazooka. Think about that. Yeah, like, you have Marines out there. Yeah. Like, you just, you do not need. You have ninjas. Storm shadow. You have ninjas. You don't need magic. And with the Transformers, it's like you have awesome trucks and cars that turn into awesome robots. Like, why would you introduce this idea of a germ of a seed of alien life? Like alien just should just be somebody made these things here on Earth. Can we be humanistic in our cartoons?

Well, except for here's what I will say about the Transformer thing. You need them to have at least some sort of personality. Like, you need to know that, like, you know, Bumblebee is kind of a cool-ass little, like, you know, V-Dub bug that turns into things I was always really into those tapes that would jump out of Soundwave

Oh, yeah, I had Soundwave, I had Soundwave

I think Soundwave was, which is funny because the Transformer I was the most into is not even a vehicle He's a boombox Yeah, right But, like, I guess the personalities of the Transformers if somebody just built them if some geppetto somewhere just made these like transformer things and just turned them loose you wouldn't have like this moment where optimus prime is dying and he's giving the matrix of control to rodimus prime like they need to have a little bit of personality so i guess the question is where does the personality come from how do you build that into the narrative if they're just machines aren't there plenty of 80s robot movies

johnny five alive yeah like he has a personality he was i would have died for him short circuit right like he's short circuit is he does he have alien or no he was just created software nice software um i was thinking the same thing you and i who were boys we just remember the one part where isn't there a there's a woman in a bathtub or something right and that's when he's is it

i only know that drop because you play it on the show i don't remember it i i want to say was it leah thompson oh yeah who was in short circuit i believe i believe fisher stevens was in it as the kind of science person who builds Johnny Five. And then I don't know what's going on. I don't know anything about the plot of that movie other than I was in love with Lea Thompson. I was very into the song Who's Johnny by DeBarge or L. DeBarge, which was from the Short Circuit soundtrack. I was in love with everything about that movie except I don't know if I ever actually saw the movie.

Nice software. Oh, so gross. Oh, right, because that's him leering. I believe, yeah, he's leering. I believe she's saying, here's the deal.

At what point will women no longer have to operate and dress themselves for the robot gaze?

I could be confusing this with Howard the Duck, who ironically, I believe, was an alien. But either way, the relationship between Howard the Duck and the young woman in that movie and Johnny Fox. and the young woman in that movie, I think both reflected a bit of ickiness of the times.

Uh-huh, sure. Thank you, baby. Hey, thank you to our donors today for making TBTL possible. Folks like Rachel Langen-Lundmark of Olympia, Washington. Ah, where the laws are made That's true Where the gridlock happens, Andrew Those clowns in Olympia I just want to remind everyone This is, in fact, listener-supported Podcasting We are only here because of folks like Rachel And also folks like Dorothy Crutcher Who's in beautiful Culver City, California A place so near and dear to my heart

And a place I've actually lived Do you ever live in Culver City? No, I didn't have Culver City Bucks. Are you kidding me? I wonder if Dorothy is a French actress and model, and if I actually lived with her for a little bit in Culver City. Remember, that's who I lived with in Culver City for a few months. I do remember.

I don't think I knew the actress and model part. In the words of Cisco, ooh la la. Oh la. Doesn't he say oh la la? Let's find out. Keep talking. I'll find it.

Okay. That's where I live when I moved to L.A. I lived in Culver City. I air beat and beat it.

Okay, hold on. Let's see if he says oh or ooh. I always say ooh in my mind, but I bet you I'm wrong. Let's listen here. Let's see. Hold on. We're turning it up now. Here we go. Ooh la la. It's kind of right in between, right? It's definitely not ooh, like I was saying. It's not ooh la la, but I feel like it's not quite ooh la la. It's right... Hold on. Ooh la la. Ooh la la. How does he say nostalgia? Let me see.

I think like it's one of those days that I already know it's going to be a rough afternoon as I look back on today's show. That's OK.

Thank you so much, Dorothy. Thanks also to Clea Stiebel in Denver, Colorado. Hey, Clea, what up?

I never lived with a French model and actress in Denver, Colorado, I got to say.

OK, we got to go back to this. Like, I mean, I feel I don't know what I don't. I know this isn't how we really talk about things and people and, you know. whatever i know that i know i know we keep things pretty non non weird and non lechy on this program but i will say that if you were john cusack if it was a movie about andrew walsh and he was played by john cusack and he moves to la and he has to find somewhere to live he's definitely living

with a french model and actress well she was i mean yeah i rented a you know what i mean she

she had a i assume it turns out she's running from some kind of organized crime thing right He has to help kind of like fight the bad guys. One day he comes home and then she's just like missing and there's like a note. And then that's how the movie, you know, that's the sort of end of the first act, the beginning of the second act of the film. Right. Cusack looking for the played by Kelly LeBrock. And now he's got to go find her.

Yeah. And that's basic. That's basically what happened. It did.

You did find someone's wallet.

I was about to say the closest thing that happened was I found somebody's wallet outside the door. she was often traveling so i have the place mostly to myself but i never felt comfortable there even when she was traveling like it never felt like a place that i could just relax you know the i i could relax in my room which was in the back i stayed there for maybe two months it wasn't like the best it wasn't the best time for me it did not feel like it i always felt like a guest in somebody else's house a guest who didn't who we you know i'm an awkward person she didn't speak english as a first language not that she can't communicate i don't mean to put that on her she's

Take the language of love. Ooh, la, la. I don't really like that. Okay. I know what you mean, though. I could never, at this point, live in a roommate-type situation. I just have lost that ability to not feel, you know, awkward in someone else's space, kind of wanting to just—I have just over the—I mean, you know, like, I guess, obviously, in a romantic setting, I could cohabitate, and I have for many years of my life. But as far as like living with somebody who I'm not in a relationship with, who I'm just kind of trying to coexist with peacefully, that would be really hard for me. Not because I'd be there'd be arguments or anything, but because I wouldn't I don't think I would ever feel fully relaxed.

Yeah, I've been that way my entire life. I've had very few roommates. I had one for like one semester, I believe, in in college in a dorm situation. But generally speaking, I mean, for me, it's so extreme that that's why I don't like going over. I really do not like sleeping over at people's places. I'd waking up the next morning and like making chit chat while you're bleary eyed over breakfast is one of my least favorite things.

Is this why you did not have as many one night.

as otherwise you would have because of that whole morning-after sitch. That's exactly why.

I only had roommates two times after I was in the dorms. And I have to say, my first set of roommates, Dan and I forget the name of the other guy, but God bless them because here is what happened. And as I tell you this story, I want to let you know that it's all brought to you by Michael Barney in Sacramento, California, which ironically is where Dan was from. My roommate, Dan Gatian, who had the same exact birthday as me and was born May 8th, 1976 in a Northern California hospital, as I was born May 8th, 1976 in a Northern California hospital. But like, we all lived together in the dorms. So there was this kind of cluster of, you'd have a roommate, my roommate was Arun Narayanan, who I went to high school with, but then we had a shared living room with these other dudes. So he kind of made little friends and stuff, two of the guys uh Brian was his name Brian and Dan were like hey we're getting an apartment do you want to get an apartment with us this was at the end of our freshman year and I said sure and we signed a lease on this apartment it was only then that I mentioned to them that I was also the father of a uh at that point would have been like one year old kid and that I'd be bringing her by on the weekend and amazingly they were like sure sounds fine like it is I luckily I was a gigantic nerd as were they could you imagine any other like three dudes living in their college first college apartment on the ave and the u-dub and then one guy's like oh and by the way i'll be bringing a small baby here most weekends i hope that's i hope that's not going to cramp anyone's style and sure enough these two guys were like yeah sounds fine whatever um so that was very very lucky for me because they could have been like get your ass out of here dude how do you

I think Lynn Coppell would have handled that situation. Poorly. Or Coppell.

Poorly. See? See? It's not as easy reading these names, Andrew. Yeah, because I'm always so hard on you.

You are. I'm right back. You are, and I know it.

Uh-huh. I know what happens when you and Dartbot talk about that. Oh, my God.

Would you and Dartbot debrief? Yeah, Dartbot is more critical of you than I am. I'll say that.

Yeah, I know. But that's kind of just because Dartbot is young and hasn't been through a lot yet.

Oh, that was a really pleasant sound. Every day, and then DartBot says, put it in my chest.

Yeah, what is the matrix of leadership that keeps DartBot alive? Thanks, Lynn. Also, thanks to Jason Shelley in Brooklyn, New York. It's our pal, Jason. Thank you so much to all of our donors.

Can I just say, because I feel like we gave Lynn a little bit short shrift there, because I said it, but I did not complete it by saying that Lynn is joining us and supporting us from St. Paul, Minnesota.

Right. Lynn, thank you so much. Does Lynn go to Dinette? All I know about St. Paul, Minnesota, even though I've been there 50 times, is I just know, is it called Dinette? No, what's it called? There's some place that our friend, the Stewbot, is always posting. I think it's called...

Does it sound like that musical Stewbot? Is it the little train car that we had lunch in with him?

No, no, it's not. It's just... Oh, that's St. Paul. I think it's called St. Dinette, and it's beloved there. I think it's like everybody's favorite place to get lunch or get a Juicy Lucy or some breakfast, And I see it on Instagram a lot, but I obviously have not committed it to memory. And so I apologize to everybody involved for taking us down that road. Anyway, thank you to our donors for making today's edition of TBTL possible. We couldn't do this without you.

Hello and welcome to Top Story.

I had a real adventure on Saturday, Andrew. Now, of course, there was a big college football game that day. it was the university of washington against university of oregon and both teams were very highly rated and i'm here kind of right on the oregon washington border as i mentioned becca and all of her family went to oregon it's big you know big thing for them and i when on friday when i was talking to you about it i said i kind of have a i have a sort of a not great feeling about how this is going to turn out and so as to so as to kind of protect my heart a little bit i was like i'm a i'm preparing for them to lose and b i'm not going to like make this game the centerpiece of my day in that i'm gonna like you know sit there for four hours staring right at the screen partially because my dad and i are working on the house and he doesn't really care very much about these kinds of things so i couldn't really have him just like working away all day and i'm in there watching the game and again i also just thought you probably know this from some of your sports stuff too sometimes it helps if you just kind of are doing your normal thing and monitoring the game helps keep me from getting totally devastated by the outcome if it's not good which kind of happened to me yesterday for the seahawk game by the way i was going down to portland uh on my way eventually to salem i was meeting becca's family because we're going to carpool i had like there was like the last eight minutes of the seahawk game i popped into this place called growler guys watched it they didn't win obviously but i was i didn't it didn't hit me like a freight train because i hadn't been sitting there obsessing over it the whole time so saturday the game is on television and i'm working doing this the most probably the most tedious task i've done in a long time around here andrew which was i took we took out this whole entryway that used to be like the mud room where the refrigerator was and so that involved taking down all the drywall which was nailed in a million places one of the things i'm learning is when people are installing something in 1981 no part of their brain is thinking how hard will this be to uninstall in 2023 nobody is thinking that because the amount of nails the sheer number of nails they use to secure things is ridiculous like just trying to pull out all the nails and then also like you take the drywall down all you could take out was like a three inch by three inch piece of if you're lucky because every three inches there was another nail so you couldn't get like a big satisfying section of drywall off where you like you know you're getting half of the wall and you're walking it outside it was all just like very very time consuming and then the floor there was tile which we had to take up like kind of whatever you want to call it porcelain tile or something then under that was a layer of this thing called hardy panel that had been glued and screwed down to the subfloor so that even if you could find the screws which you couldn't because there was this stuff called mastic all over it this kind of like weird other glue even if you could find the screws and unscrew them the floor was still glued to the

thing we needed to get down to so i was sitting there with a flat bar and a hammer banging banging banging banging for all day while listening to the game and at some point we took a break and we realized we need this wind where there had been this crummy window that was all kind of cloudy and broken and stuff and we took that out and the plan was going to be just just frame that wall in we don't need a window there it's kind of in a weird spot whatever but when my dad actually took the old window out and there was this big opening and i was looking at this japanese maple i was like we gotta get a window this is this actually is nice now let's get a nice window and put it in and my dad said to me my dad's new catchphrase is someone's gotta take away your toys which i don't even know what that means but that's what as i'm constantly changing the script on what we're doing i'm like is this load bearing or can we take this out or dad what if we did this he'll always go Someone's got to take away your toys And I go, what does that mean? He goes, I don't really know But I'm like, is this your new catchphrase?

Hmm, it means like you just keep on Because you have access to tools now You can keep changing things

I don't, he's my toy maybe? Like, it's not Like with a lot of my dad's catchphrases It doesn't fully Pass the light of day, if you will But like, anyway So it was decided We're going to put the new window in But that means I got to go get a window And the thing about windows is they're not dissimilar to doors, Andrew. No one has them. You can go into a place that sells doors and windows, and you can go, I'll take one window, please. And they'll go, that'll be three months. You don't have the windows here? No, of course not. We have a book that has pictures of windows in it. Really? Well, that's great. I could have that book at my house. What exactly do you do? What exactly is the purpose of this place?

You should get a book of windows, though. That would be a nice thing when everything is settled. Like a coffee table book.

sure so there is a window place called discount window in portland but it's in north portland it is like it is like 10 feet on the oregon side of the border and i have bought a i've purchased a lot of windows there and a lot of sliding glass doors because what they have going for them is they actually physically have a ton of stuff and so maybe this is maybe this is why they know they don't have to be overly solicitous to the customers i mean they're not they're not rude per se but i had called earlier on saturday to find out if they had a particular size of window and the guy had said ah let me i'll check on that and then an hour later he had not called me back so i called them again and i said hey i was having someone check on a window a different guy answered and he goes yeah it's pretty busy today so i don't know what to tell you i thought all right okay so i finally was able to ascertain because i've this particular kind of window i bought so 36 by 36 casement meaning it's that's the dimensions and casement means you you kind of turn that hand crank and it opens that's called a casement window for folks that don't know so i know they have this casement window because they have hundreds of them and i've also purchased two of them already i drive down there i'm listening to the game this is huskies oregon it's a very tense game i walk into the store and there the game is on a tv but it's kind of in their work area it's the kind of place where there's like five desks that different dudes are sitting at at different times with a computer looking up kinds of windows you can buy and stuff like that and if you happen to get one of these sales people you go and you sit by his little particular sales desk and then talk about the thing so i go in and uh i know exactly what i want i could

actually walk to the area and pick it up but i need to pay for it and there's two people working and they're both working with like families which you know a window purchase is a whole thing you're probably buying a few of them they're not cheap there's all there's just like a lot that goes into it it's like it's not quite buying a car but it's not just like picking up a bucket of paint or something so i'm looking at this and i'm like this is gonna suck because these both of these families are like 10 of the way into this process of buying this series of windows but i'm like but the good news is the football game is on so i guess i'll just watch the fourth quarter here while i wait for someone and i'm standing but i'm also standing in the area where everybody works or where if they had more than two people working there uh then there would be people there but it's just me i'm standing there and at some point the huskies do something kind of good and i go yes but i'm being kind of subtle because i'm in oregon andrew and the guy who's like helping someone looks up and goes and he's not even joking and he goes uh only oregon fans allowed today to which i say well if you can get someone to sell me a window i'll be right on my way which is a little snarky but a that was when the huskies were like really kind of in free fall like when when they were they had gone from leading to trailing and they were having problems so i was probably a little bit emotionally kind of in a fragile place because of that also everyone in this store the customers the two guys actually working they're all oregon fans it's a big deal in the state of oregon because they don't have a pro football team washington is is is interesting because i don't think that husky dumb if you get outside of seattle people in washington state aren't crazy about the huskies the way people in oregon are crazy about the ducks and i think it's because in washington if you didn't go to the university of washington and you have the seahawks to root for that's kind of where your your your energy goes in oregon my my experience is unless you're talking about somebody who's an oregon state fan the default setting is oregon duck obsession because the team has been really good for a long time i don't know if any of the the people even in the store were alums i just know they're all oregon people yeah i'm trying

to think i didn't i guess growing up in cleveland ohio state was that but i was just so like i didn't think about sports at all when i was a kid so i didn't experience that and then on the east coast the places i lived like i i've never lived in a city that is sort of obsessed so to me seattleites are obsessed with right u-dub football because with the exception of growing up in ohio I don't have anything else to compare it to. So it seems like there's that the Huskies fandom here is pretty is pretty strong.

And you're in the hotbed of it. And you're also your partner literally worked for that university. So you're definitely going to be getting a huge dose of people being obsessed. What I've noticed about like if you go into a random a random window store in somewhere in Tacoma, Washington, they may or there may or may not be eight people in there that identify as University of Washington Husky fans. that would say husky fans only right now and only be like half joking you dub tacoma they'd be like yes there you go exactly so you dub tacoma campus only get out of here exactly so long story short i'm kind of in this weird world because i really want to get helped i want to get out of this place like i want to get the stupid window and i just want to get back on the road and get back to the project but i also am like well i guess i can watch the end of the game but i'm so i guess if it takes forever i guess if there's not enough people working at a window place on a saturday i guess the upside is i can watch the end of the football game on television that's kind of a bonus but then the downside is nobody here wants to hear me be excited about the huskies if things are going well and you know so what like i i felt i was i was sort of i was a little torn so finally a guy walks out now this is going to be where i lose you andrew if i haven't already because this is the kind of stuff that i'll say on the show sometimes that you usually don't kind of go with me on potentially but this store this window store closes at five o'clock right i am standing there it's about four it's a little after 4 p.m i'm not worried that i'm not going to be able to purchase the window like at some point they're going to say we're closing do we need to sell any more windows and i would be like yes 36 by 36 casement please left opening i'm just kind of like annoyed because i know exactly what i want and i don't need a consultation i just need someone to ring me up for this window so i'm standing around i'm kind of watching the game the guy's kind of annoyed because i'm pro huskies even though i'm being very low-key about it i'm not like fist pumping or anything but like finally i go um he says something like i forget how this goes down but a dude emerges a third person emerges from the back of the store a guy i forget his name and he's like oh the the one guy goes oh you know so and so will help you and i'm like okay so now Now we're at about a minute, 40 seconds left in the game, Andrew, which if you remember, did you even, did you watch this game actually, by the way?

Yeah, actually, it's the most, it's the most football I've watched all year.

Not that I had a, like a real rooting interest, but Genevieve. was having a group of people over here for some activities on Saturday. So I could have stuck around. She just assumed I didn't want to. So she was saying, you know, don't forget everybody's coming over. And like, oh, you know what? Well, you guys, you're having people over around 1230. The game starts at 1230. So I sort of took it as an excuse to have just like a somewhat like day drinky afternoon. I have not had that on Sundays at all. So I went over. I was looking after our friend's cat anyway. So I'm like, well, when the game's over, I'm going to have to go feed a cat. So I went to a pub in my friend's neighborhood and just sat there with a Huskies fan and watched the game start to finish. It was a great Saturday.

I would have loved that shit. I would have loved to have been at the Duchess just, like, going crazy because, of course, the ultimate outcome was at the University of Washington 1, which for us Husky fans was a pretty fun thing. But I'm now, like, in this store, and it's, like, the critical end of the game. And what has basically happened is the UW was like very close to losing the game and then miraculously gets the stop they need and then gets a couple of like, it's just a crazy pressure packed last minute and 20 seconds of this game. And I'm standing in the middle of these desk area and the guy comes out and he's like, oh, I'll help you. And he goes just right over here. But first of all, he goes, I was at lunch and this is the part where I'm going to lose you, Andrew. I don't understand why if a place closes at five, you're taking lunch from three to four. That's a weird time to be taking lunch. I feel like maybe he was busy, like should have taken it earlier. I don't know. It was weird to me that somebody was coming back from lunch an hour before the store closed. I don't know the hour. I don't know what goes on. Maybe they do a bunch of stuff when the door, when the store is locked. Maybe he's midway through his day, whatever. But all I know is I want to.

It's weird that he volunteered anything there that like why he could have been in the back counting windows. You know what I mean? why that's what I find out about well because he could tell that I because he came out at the same

time that the guy was like Oregon fans only and I said well if you can sell me a window I'll get out of your hair and then he was like Gary will because Gary was now emerging I'm just making up names and then Gary was like I was at lunch and then I was just kind of thinking like okay well this is I'm like whatever I'm gonna get the window but the game is now like really critical so I'm standing and Gary goes into his desk which is not within eyesight of the television and he literally says to me like okay what do you need and i go and i'm standing but i go i need a 36 by 36 casement um left opening window and he goes okay so i'm standing looking at the game i'm kind of pacing again i'm very cognizant of not being like i'm not going to do a victory dance if the huskies win i'm not going to like i don't want to be a jerk about it but i'm very keyed into the game and he goes he goes i need you to stand over here at my desk literally guys i need you to stand over here at my desk and i'm like excuse me excuse me i need like i need you to stay is this the dmv are we are you gonna like what you need me to stand over at your desk while this football game is on i'm two feet away from you i'm telling you what i need you to do you were just at lunch or counting windows gary like i could tell that gary was and i think it was because gary was pissed about how it was going with the football game i need you to stand over here and i was like can you do the i go i go well the game is almost over and i go and i'm telling you the information this is like we're having words now in the window place and he i go the game is ending i'm giving you the information do you need to be standing do you need to be looking at you while i give you this information he goes well i need your card and i hand him my card i go well problem solved and there was a moment where i could tell this guy was really doing the math on can i get away with denying service to somebody because i'm annoyed with them and i don't know if his annoyance was that i was antsy about getting my window i don't know if his annoyance was because i'm a husky fan i don't know if my annoy i don't know why he was annoyed with me but i could tell

very much this guy did not like me well it might have been the original remark too just like you know you saying well how long were you there when you said if somebody would sell me a window were

you there for like 15 minutes 20 minutes i probably had been there 15 minutes waiting and again like i everybody was just doing their job like it wasn't that anybody was was the people that were engaged with the customers were doing exactly what you do which is telling them about all the different kinds of windows they can have you know it's like i don't begrudge anyone that it just was like there should be more people working here on a day when a lot of people come in to buy windows also the fact that i knew exactly what i wanted that i like i said i could have walked to the part of the store got in the window and just rung myself up but then i don't think gary heard me say Well, if you can find someone to sell me a window, like I think what was happening was that the staff there was annoyed that I was kind of slightly in their area kind of but watching this game and then that the game was going in a direction that they were generally displeased with.

I wonder if Gary, the only thing that I'm, my brain is sort of hitching on is if Gary cares that much about the rivalry or a UW fan watching this game, you'd think that he would have more interest in watching the last. himself. He'd be like, why don't we both stand

and watch the game? That's what he did. if you're ribbing each other or something that's why i just wonder if he just didn't like your

tood i think he just didn't like my tood yeah i don't think it was football related because you're right he was also not looking at the screen but i have to be honest with you i it went to a very agitated part for me a very agitated part of my of my um let's say it was very triggering to me to have somebody who is a person i'm purchasing something from say i need you to stand in front of my desk it was like am i in fifth grade right now am i like in trouble with you gary who i'm

trying to buy a window from hey could you come here for a second i need your card exactly all

i had to say is okay can i get your card and i would have just given it to him it was very weird it was like and and then i said what i just paraphrased which was basically like i'm watching the game i'm telling you what i need do you need me to literally be standing in front of you to tell you this information which is when he said well i need i could tell he then was like well shit well i need your card and then i reached over two feet and handed him my credit card it was like well now you have that like it was like he just didn't like i just think he didn't like me or was annoyed at me but then what was kind of funny was so then the huskies win this game you see you see

the win you see the missed field goal yeah while you're still in there okay and the response is

muted because what's what's also unfolding in there is everyone's kind of like the other employee the the guy who I had told, if you can get someone to sell me a window, I'll get out of your hair. He was kind of watching with one eye, but not like living and dying by it. But I could tell, you know, was like kind of interested, but also trying to sell someone windows. There was a family, like a husband, wife and their kids and the guy selling them windows. And they were clearly Oregon people. And they were kind of keeping, everyone was kind of keeping an eye on it. But like when the critical moment happened, which was Oregon didn't get this field goal and the Huskies won, everyone just kind of went quiet and went back to what they were doing. And I kind of just was a little bit like to myself, like, holy crap. but like i wasn't gonna you know rub it in anyone's face or be a jerk about it so it was kind of a weirdly muted moment when this crazy thing happened in the world of college football which was this big rivalry game that everybody was watching that really did kind of live up to the hype for being a really amazing ending so but but then what was funny was it was clear that i think i don't know what happened but somehow gary then did a little bit of an about face which was i think his annoyance at me passed or he started to get nervous about like what kind of a yelp review of a lifetime i was going to leave him i don't he started doing those kinds of things that people do when they realize they were being kind of not great and now they're trying to walk it back a little bit so it was like i i basically give him my card and he goes okay i just got to meet you over there at the printer to sign a couple of silly things and then we'll we'll get going like he starts doing stuff like that so like now we meet at the printer and i'm like signing this stuff he's like yeah i don't know it's we got a lot of these forms i don't know why we have to do this he's starting to like kind of like i don't know bro down with me or be like you know he just it's so weird his personality a hundred percent changed from i need you to be standing over here to like all right let's just see what's going on okay we've got oh good we got a lot of these windows over here and you pick your poison buddy whichever one you want i can carry it for for you like it was very strange maybe he was undercover Husky fan I don't know maybe he was secretly maybe he had bet a lot of money on the Huskies and something changed between when he almost didn't sell me the window and when I was

walking out of there with the thing yeah I mean I think I've maybe been on both sides of that before there are times when I'm a little bit short with somebody and then I like try to I try to soften up the end of the conversation sometimes you wonder if it's around tip time. I told you I had a barber the other day who seemed like he didn't want to be cutting my hair, but I also really was, I was really checking myself on that one. I'm just like, this might just be his personality, and that's the other thing, too. You and I also take things kind of personally, or at least I can speak for myself on that one, I guess. And so sometimes I really need to investigate my own self coming into it, and like, what is this interaction? Is this a person who just, you know, isn't like a glowing person, but it's just kind of nice in their own quiet way. That's something that I think I kind of struggle with a lot. But it's also, I wonder how many people there are also just pissed that they're not like with me at a sports bar somewhere in the middle of the afternoon having beers where they want to be watching this game.

That's true as well. And then I think that was also part of my, like where I was at and why I was being kind of snippy because like this was this amazing thing that happened. It was almost like I was, I wasn't hoping they would lose, but if they would have lost it would have made all the decisions i made on saturday pay off if that makes any sense like when you know there there are those games where like you you block out your whole day and you make all the food and you have people over and drinking alcohol and it's and then it it they win and you're just like on cloud nine it's perfect there are also those days when you do all that and they lose and you're just bummed the whole day you just dedicated your life you're like i wish i would have just been doing things that were useful and then because at least you let you lost less of your life to the fame and that's kind of where i was like when i walked into that window storm i thought was because that was right when we had started what you know huskies had given the lead up and how we're just kind of and like penix jr is like hurt and stuff i'm just like well this was the right call to drive to portland and get this window because this is just going to be and then it's like fourth and two i think fourth and two and a half for the ducks and it's like i'm like they're just gonna run it for two yards and then the game's over and i'm gonna be so glad that i wasn't my whole saturday didn't get wasted for this you know and then they do this incredible thing and i'm experiencing all of it in a windows store where gary hates me

yeah well you and gary have some work to do but you're you're turning the corner

yeah i'm gonna see him down there next saturday for the next game that was my actually my next

question not are you gonna go down there to watch any more games but like this is a place where you might find yourself again in the not too distant future well that was the other thing too i don't

want to be a kind of I definitely don't want to be one of those people who is sort of like a you know do you know how much money I spend here because I think everything is pretty expensive you know when you're putting new windows in a house etc it's always going to be pricey I don't think I'm a particularly big customer of theirs but I will say that I have bought you know in the tens of thousands of dollars of product from them now do you oh okay so you're already a regular

face around there like did you recognize any of these people and do you think they recognize you

they didn't recognize me but the guy who said the guy who said uh ducks fans only is the one who sold me the sliding glass doors for this house which were about seven thousand dollars like now that guy you know sells windows all day so i don't expect him to remember the kind of portly white guy that came in and bought some sliders from him but it's funny because i remember him i know exactly who he is um and and like you know so it's weird but here's the thing too in the words of ving rames andrew they have the windows so i will be back there because it's a place that has the thing that i need and i don't have to like order it and then wait six months for them to bring it i mean that's this place that down in in in town that i mentioned that like is advertised as being a building supply store and their emphasis on doors and windows and i went in there the other day i told this story on the show to ask about some doors and the guy just handed me a catalog of things i would be allowed to order and i thought well okay i mean i feel like this is something i could have also done and then my dad and i swang through there swung through there uh the other day to see if they had any windows in stock and i walked down do you have any windows in stock no we don't keep any windows here and i just thought why do you exist what exactly do you do here like that's another thing that i've run into with a lot of this building stuff is you have the manufacturers of things a windows hardy panel you name it and then it's often difficult to buy from those manufacturers you have to find an authorized dealer but then the authorized dealer they don't have the stuff they're just like they're like the talent agent for the window they just represent the window company and like you can leaf through a catalog and pick something and then they will enter something in their computer and And then three months later, you get something. It's the weirdest system. I don't understand how it evolved this way, but it is sort of the case. So that's why I know I will find myself at good old discount windows down there in Delta Park again. Because what they have going for them is maybe not the best customer service, but definitely the most windows.

And a decent sized television.

Not a bad TV.

Here I go once again with the email. Every week, I hope that it's from a female. No, man, it's not from a female.

all right mr walsh any emails or v-mails that we should discuss here on this monday yeah this

email just came in on saturday oh it looks like right after that game from gary at discount windows around 4 23 p.m so i think the game was maybe just wrapping up around then maybe it ended around four anyway i got this email from angie that says um now now luke this is in reference to something that i uh glanced on glanced on very briefly earlier in the show um you said that as you were like kind of doing some construction at your house you found some old receipts like handwritten receipts from the 1930s in the wall it was very interesting and you shared 1939 on the show and so i got this email from angie who says every year my uncle a west seattle native drove up the coast from his home in San Diego to visit my family in Seattle. On the way, he'd take a detour through the old Elk Eye neighborhood to drive past places he knew and to grab some fish and chips at Spud, where he worked as a kid. I love that place. Anyway, about ten years ago, on his annual visit, as he drove past his grandparents' old house, he noticed that new owners had added a second story. He pulled over to get a better look. There were kids playing in the yard, and a woman came out the front door, and not wanting to appear creepy, He got out of his car and told the woman that his grandparents used to live in. her house many years ago shared some history about the place and told her that he liked the changes that she'd made then the lady said she had something to show him evidently when construction began they'd uncovered an old photograph in the wall of the attic and had been holding on to it maybe you'll know who it is she said her husband retrieved the photo and showed it to my uncle that's my dad my uncle said holy it was a professionally shot and framed photo of my grandpa at 10 years old and by the way angie includes a photo here i had it uh queued up to send to you luke so you can take a look at this photo i just sent to your text messages um so let's see a professionally shot and framed photo of my grandpa at about 10 years old see photo attached he was born in 1907 so the photo probably dated no later than 1920 the frame is solid oak my great-grandparents moved out of the house in the 1950s and it had been hidden in the wall since then the nice homeowners gave the photograph to my uncle and he gave it to me i sent them a christmas card and my sincere thanks it's the nicest photo i have of my grandfather look at

that thing that is unreal i mean that's almost better than a receipt for 10 pounds of flour

that is really amazing it's a young boy uh it looks like in in like shorts with his one hand in the pocket wearing a very short tie yeah like knickers yes oh my god that is an amazing now do you think that what I'm looking at here is the original frame I guess so it looks like an oak frame but it's yeah very well restored that is so cool that is so I love I love the idea of do you want me to put a picture of us in the

you know all the walls are open at this house Andrew yeah should I take some TBTL ephemera and put it in the wall so when it gets all insulated now part of the problem is the kind of insulation I'm having put in is spray foam oh yeah that's not gonna it's not like that owens corning kind of uh you know stuff that you can um put in and take out easily but there's got to be a way maybe after the insulation's in after the foam's in i can just like put a couple like a tbtl coin and a couple of other things in there those are

those are legit rare luke those those coins like be careful with where they go i don't have a tbtl coin so like okay all right here's what i think you should put in the wall is the postcards the A link to the TBTL donation page.

Can you imagine in 50 years? I was saying this to my dad. I already kind of mentioned this earlier, but as I've been doing some of these very, very physically laborious projects here of undoing work that someone else did, I mean, why would you? If you were just someone hired, or even if you were living here and you were just putting in the sheetrock, why would you put it in with the thought of like how hard is this going to be to take out or if you're gluing down the hardy panel on the sub floor that you're then going to tile over you of course you're not thinking like is this going to be a nightmare to take apart later because you're not going to be the person doing it no and i was saying to my dad like hey i wonder what those people would think if they could see us just undoing all of their work here and is someone going to come in 50 years and undo all of our work

well yeah i mean hope hopefully i you know i think about this a lot i think i've mentioned this before and it's so weird how i'm weirdly protective of this little house that we live in which you know is just like a very it's a it's a modest home here in in north seattle i love your house i i like it too um but sometimes i think about i i've mentioned this on the show before but i think about the fact that when this house was listed like the first photos of it were aerial shots and the description was like this would be a great like tear down and you could build like some you know commercial real estate here really or not commercial i'm sorry not commercial real estate but multi-family how you know housing which is good like i support that um but you know i think about how much i love this weird little house and how how it's part of me and genevieve's life and in some way a reflection of our weird little life and how i just feel these protective feelings for it i was just passing it the other day like kind of seeing our house at a different angle and just thinking like and again like intellectually we need more i feel a little guilty we need more housing in in this city of course it's a real issue but i also just sometimes i look at my dumb little house i'm just like i'm so glad they didn't tear you down because you're our little

house now i love that for you too because i feel like this is a pretty big much like me and gary um and the whole uh will he or won't he sell me the window thing i feel like you know 10 years ago in talking to you you were it my memory is very very committed to probably not owning another house oh yeah because you liked the not being tied down and and you just and i've always been pretty obsessed about like where do i live and am i fixing it up etc it's all that's probably far too big a part of my sense of okayness in the world and it was at that time very low on your list

That seemed important. And then you and Veeves kind of decided, yeah, this is where we're going to live, Seattle. This is our place and we're going to get a home. And like, it's, this sounds almost like patronizing, but it's really fun for me to see you and Veeves and particularly you get like really into like getting your stuff kind of dialed in the way you like it and making this, you guys have such a lovely home. You always kind of downplay it, but it's such a great place. It's so warm and welcoming and now has a bitch in new porch or at least part of a bitch in new porch.

Part of a portrait.

The new wood that that guy used, I saw some pictures, looks really good.

Yeah, it looks really nice, and I think I told you on the show last week that he even went out of his way to do a couple of small little design things that he's not recreating the way it was originally, and he even said, like, oh, I wish I could fix this thing, but I can't, and then he just fixed it anyway and said we're not charging. It's just like this pride in his workmanship that I really appreciate. But Genevieve gets all the credit for like kind of the major whatever renovations or whatever in the house. I'm the type of person who just like kind of gets cozy. But like one thing we're going to do, like one thing that I am like kind of like self-conscious of is the is like the carpeting down here in the basement. I love our little rumpus room, but it's like wall to wall carpeting. And what I'm realizing is, even though it wasn't super nice when we moved in, because whoever renovated this place before we moved in also just put just paint droplets in various places of the carpet is the carpet was brand new because already one and a half years in. Let's see. Bingo was brought home on over. Yeah. OK. Yeah. One and a half years. You can already see all of the major traffic areas on this carpet and it's starting to look a little bit dingy. And I'm like, man, this is a year and a half. So I think our next big project will be to probably pull up most of the carpeting and put down some sort of a, I don't think we can do real wood floors, but some sort of a laminate that not.

You know, they have some very good, very good engineered, as they say, products that are quite convincing and so much easier to put down and also very forgiving as to like your floor and the potential kind of undulations. Like, because you never know how level everything is going to be. And if you go with, like, the quote-unquote traditional hardwood, you've got to do a lot of maybe leveling beforehand. But the engineered—I'm going to do probably engineered stuff, which would have been heresy years ago. But a lot of it looks really good, and it is really, like, so much easier to install and so much more forgiving.

Yeah, and this is a basement, too. You know what I mean? If we ever did have any kind of water issues or something, like having, like, unforgiving real wood would just be a disaster and an economic catastrophe potentially.

You will never recover from.

We had some stuff in a very small little foyer area in New Hampshire that Genevieve put in that was very realistic looking and, you know, nice to the touch or whatever. So anyway, that's the next thing. Yeah, I guess I'm a little self-conscious about this. You know, you always talk about this palace, not palace, but you're building this place that is going to be, you know, every little detail is going to be accounted for. Well, not really. I've got like cat puke stains on my gray carpet.

No, no, no, no, no. I'm actually this is this is something that I actually am very kind of concerned about because this show is really us just kind of sort of recounting our day-to-day activities and because my day-to-day activities are very caught up with this project and have been for over a year now I've been talking about it so much and so incessantly that like I was talking to some of my live wire colleagues know like we can't wait to see the place and I was like um actually please please understand that the amount of talking I've done about it is not indicating necessarily what the outcome is going to be if i would have just quietly gone about this and somebody came over to this house when it's done they probably would have been like well this is a pretty cool place and that's quite a view that would be the extent of it but i'm very worried about having built this thing up into being something that is now going to be slightly underwhelming because of the amount of the amount of talking about it that i've done so don't don't don't and believe me i got plenty of cat puke around here too and that's from me yeah which

is weird you got to stop eating so much cat food um well if they ever miss bubbles if they ever put the e line if they ever put a stop on the e line well you know what they do have andrew and i'll go

get you baby they've got that amtrak and i'm telling you dude the like the the train station down there in kelso washington it's like um it's like something out of it's it's anne of green gables meets something from harry potter it's a little brick building it's adorable it's a practically a straight shot from your house if you get down to king street so i guess not a straight shot but if you take the e-line down to the stadium and you go over to king street and jump on that train i'll go pick you up i'll pick you up this afternoon i'm a dumbledorf there's a great sure i think it's door but i'm not i never figured you for a door fan what a weird show title

it's gonna be today wait a second i had a good one that you said earlier we should talk about the show pick too oh i i think i want the show title to be the rhythm

is going to gotcha, which is something that you said. But, you know, you sent me this photo of these two. No, don't use that picture. Don't use the photo of the fellas installing the window. I need to get permission from them. Okay, never mind then. What if I use the, and I'm sure this is okay with Angie because she sent it in. What if I use the photo of Angie's grandfather that we were just talking about? Yes, that's an amazing photo.

That's a much better photo. I just wanted you to understand visually how in my biz, although ironically now they're gone. Like I don't understand. Now it's actually nice out. It stopped raining, and everybody's gone. I don't know. I don't understand how construction works, but that's how it works. We're here for the show, and we're going to nail everything up, and then literally the second it's over, we're out.

Well, yeah, who knows what people got going on. I was going to share with you here really quickly one last thing in Angie's note. She was talking to her husband, who's a contractor, I think. I'm reading this as quickly as possible, asking him, like, well, what cool stuff have you found in walls? And apparently he said not too much, some rodents and stuff that's a little gory. but then it says here that uh angie's husband finds a lot of razor blades yeah he said the old over-the-sink metal bathroom cabinets often had a little slot built into them that you'd slip your razor blade through and they would drop down into the wall and collect between the studs and the wall and angie's like forever and her husband's like i guess so that is yeah you talk about really

not thinking about the next people who own the house i mean but how could a bunch of jagged bloody razor blades in a wall lead to any sort of haunting. Right, exactly. I just can't even imagine that being the plot of a movie. Anyway. All right, thanks for listening, everybody. We are going to be back here tomorrow with more Imaginary Radio for you. Until then, have a great Monday. Take care of yourselves. And please remember, no mountain too tall.

And good luck to all.

hey there it's october 14th and i just heard the episode from june that explains why there's over a thousand new downloads in my podcast catcher uh that was actually really helpful and it inspired me to finish going through and deleting them all one by one, which I did, and I feel happy of myself. Power out.