Muse

Wow! What's this? This is the North Pole. No, it's not. Yes, it is. No, it's not. Yes, it is. No, it isn't. Yes, it is. No, it isn't. Yes, it is.

No, it's not. Where's the snow?

Why are you smiling like that? I just like to smile. Smiling's my favorite. Make work your favorite. That's your favorite, okay? Okay. Work is your new favorite. Fine. It's time for an announcement. Okay. Okay, people, tomorrow morning, 10 a.m., Santa's coming to town. Santa! Oh, my God!

Santa here? I know him. I know him.

T-B-T-L. Guess what day it is. Guess what day it is.

It's Friday. Friday. Got to get down on Friday. Everybody's looking forward to the weekend.

There's a crazy rumor going around that you folks like milk and cookies.

Ah, fragili. That must be Italian.

Well, I think that's just fragile.

Listen, please, please, please. If anybody doesn't know the difference between a valance and a jabot, I really need you to leave. Where do you think you're going?

Nobody's leaving. Nobody's walking out on this fun, old-fashioned family Christmas. No, no, we're all in this together. This is a full-blown, four-alarm holiday emergency here.

Put my headphones on, and here we go. I'm so excited. All right, hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Friday edition of TBTL, a show that just might be too beautiful to live. A beautifully wrapped, glossy, sweet-smelling show. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. Here we are in the Madrona Hill studio perched high above the mighty Columbia, heading into the big Christmas weekend.

It's like Christmas, except happy.

I mean, I guess Monday is Christmas, technically, but I feel like we're getting into it now. It's really happening, my friends. Oh, la la. And it is a very, very, very not dry day up here. Didn't know you like to get wet, though. there is a there's a tug that is pulling a barge down the mighty columbia river and hold on i've got to get the binoculars out on this one my friends um people ask why is tbtl so popular and i always say it's because a lot of the show is me staring at boats through binoculars out my uh window there the reason i'm staring is because this boat is pulling a barge that has two huge piles of some sort of white material on it. I don't think it's cocaine. It's weird that it would be out in the open. Anyway, I'm going to try to focus here on the task at hand, which, of course, is episode 4,103 in A Collector's Series. Let the fun begin. As you may have heard, I have booked a very brief, very round-trip ticket on Germany's discount airline. wish i hadn't done that nobody told me condor is german for low quality i don't know if it is but i didn't realize that i had done this and i've we've received an email from a listener and it's got me really wondering about my plans for next week also because i am going to be doing a bit of traveling uh i've been trying to get everything here at the madrona hill studio and and the house kind of buttoned up, cleaned up, ready to go so that I come back to a nice scene. Clean as your mom spoke here. And I even did something you might say kind of odd. Something that maybe wasn't the highest of priorities that I did in the bathroom this morning. For me, a bathroom is just a library with a cold seat. By the way, get your minds out of the gutter when I say in the bathroom. I'm talking about something that I installed in the bathroom. Not something I like, my body did in the bathroom. That would be weird. And honestly, it would be pretty good content This is a less good story than if I had some sort of medical event in there But we're just going to have to go with the stories that we have And we're going to go with this guy, the longest-running Cobra of the show Maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships He is Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now Good morning, my friend

Good morning, Luke I know right now you are taking your celebratory sip of coffee after talking for the first four minutes. I know we have our routines. We do, sir, and I was mid-sip. Yeah, that's why I was trying to buy you some time. I was going to say, I'm going to talk slowly here. I'm going to toss it back to you.

It's like an athlete when they do a really good play on the field and then they run over and then someone is squirting a Gatorade water bottle into their mouth through the face mask of their helmet. That's basically me, but with coffee.

out of a Charles Schultz Peanuts branded travel coffee mug thing.

Well, you did it. I was going to say, I don't have anything to say here at the top of the show. I'm going to toss it back to you. I have some questions about what's going on in your life right now, but then you just reminded me of something I saw on TV the other night, and I need to talk to you about it. I've had conversations with my friends before about, like, if you could have some small job on, like, a football field on the sidelines, Like, what would it be? I think I've told you this before. My friend Nick says that he'd like to be the person who, when the little pylon, is it the pylon at the end zone gets knocked over? He'd be like the guy to set it back upright. You know what I'm talking about?

Do you think there's Velcro or something magnetic that keeps the, I mean, I know that thing's weighted, right? The base of the pylon is weighted. And it's also got cameras in there now, obviously. Now they got cameras. You know what they need?

A doggone laser. I've always said this. I wonder if that single pylon has more invested in technology than our entire setups combined. Oh, without question. One pylon. Anyway, what I was going to say was I've always thought about the job. I think I'd be terrible at this because I'm so thin-skinned of the person, the water boy or whatever you call them, where you take the squeeze bottle of water and you go up to a football player and they keep their helmet on and you just hold it up and you squeeze it for them. and you squeeze it right into their mouth from the water bottle, right? And one of the reasons I think I'm too thin-skinned to do that is sometimes the football player, it doesn't look like they say, no, thank you, or, ah, I really appreciate that, but I'm all good right now. But they just look at you and then turn away. And I'm like, as a water boy, I don't think I'd be able to handle that kind of rejection. But then I saw something the other night where some player did receive the stream of water from the water boy, and then the water boy went to turn away. this water boy is probably in his 30s but anyway the football player grabbed the guy's wrist as in i ain't done yet and pulled it back in front of his mouth while the guy was squeezing did you i feel like this was a monday night or a thursday night i did not actually even our seahawks you didn't see that i had never seen that before and i was like oh my god i would just crumple up and

die to be manhandled like that it sort of raises the question why is the actual squeezing part of procedure left to another person because just you would think okay yeah make sure that the thing is full of water or gatorade or sports drink or whatever it is they're giving those folks make sure it's full you bring it to the player the player then with their own hand because they've presumably done this many times in their life there was a time in their life they weren't an nfl player or even a college player there was a time when they probably operated their own water bottle and it's the kind of thing like honestly it would feel i would be nervous the first few times because am am i going to open my mouth at the moment that the stream of water is about to hit it right i don't think this should be a two person this is two brains trying to do the job

of one brain i wonder if it is um mostly for linemen or people who have their hands taped up oh that's i don't know that's a good point i love the idea though that once you leave the nfl like let's say like jason kelsey the rest of his life anytime he goes to take a drink he needs somebody around right someone squeeze this more wine sir yes please and he just opens his mouth and somebody

shoots it from one of those bags of wine he goes into the bathroom and then he's standing at the urinal somebody comes over and just kind of helps guide the whole situation into the urinal well that's well i'm going i guess yeah but you're okay that's a really good point sometimes they've got particularly if they're a line lineman they've got like so much tape on their hands they've basically got a club but I would say that's the exception and not the rule it's it just is weird to me that it's that the squeezing part is left to someone else because you think that could lead to more more miscommunication than just like here's your water bottle use it as long as you'd like you hand it back to me and then I make sure that it's full for the next person

kind of yeah exactly no and it just is like the most like sort of kingly action that exists in modern day culture i sort of feel like the the equivalent of dangling grapes i was gonna say

not not since caligula right had grapes you know placed lovingly into his mouth uh have we uh seen such kind of like treatment of another person i didn't see that but i i think my move if i the one you were talking about i think my move though if i was the water bottle handler if i was a water boy becoming a water man and the player was rude to me you're i'm also not designed for this because i'm very very easily offended my move would be if the guy waved me off rudely i would just spray the water right at his crotch and ideally he'd be a dallas cowboy he'd be a detroit lion he'd be somebody with a light colored pant and then for for the rest of the game it would

just looked like there'd been a situation except that isn't it true

that they often do or did have situations like don't there are stories about players i mean

yeah peeing their pants is apparently uh something that i'd look i don't know how common it is it's certainly been talked about the urination part because it is a production to get all of that clothing off um i don't i think number twos are generally frowned upon i think those are kind of even even in the nfl people try to avoid that which is why you'll see like last year who was who was running to the bathroom in a way that we knew was like pinching a loaf as it were yeah it

was um oh um it was a receiver i believe right oh that was last year but the a couple years before that it was the because it was a it was a browns ravens game um ravens oh lamar jackson lamar was because i remember being a browns fan and thinking like oh my god are we going to be able to come back because i think the browns were starting to surge right as he was right that was not the only brown surge happening on that field right exactly but i remember him either being carted off or

running off the field i think he was running in a way that you could tell he was really clenching his butt cheeks and it was and of course they've now got the cameras uh in the tunnel too i'm surprised they don't have one in the stall yeah right there's not a drone or something that comes down from the roof of the bathroom into the stall sponsored by progress i was about to say who

sponsors that too like somebody sponsors that of course but um okay mar jackson right now in the flow on our progressive flow cam oh wow hey nobody touched that check your price tool speaking of

turlets um i got i got a weird idea at about i don't know 6 30 this morning of basically that house that i wanted to come back to after my my little journeys and i'm going to be doing the show from germany next week and um and so but first i'm going to be going down to portland to spend some time with becca and then i'm going to be going up to seattle to do some christmasy stuff with addy so i've got like this multi-leg journey in front of me um i want to remind everyone we got new shows uh christmas day all next week and including me from germany including andrew and our friend p fletch so a lot to tune into next week but in the midst of all that i will be journeying around a bit and um i for some reason was like so i was starting to make my bed this morning and i was i remember i realized like it's uh it's been like a week since i changed these sheets i could i could i could do that i could roll this dice i could keep this going for a while but i was like you know what's gonna happen a week and a day from now i'm gonna come dragging back to my house after traveling literally to europe and back becca and i are doing some extended holiday stuff when i get back like in portland again i was like i am not going to want to come home to anything other than the cleanest and crispest of sheets so i was like just do it just rip the sheets off right now and get them going in the laundry i actually have two sets so what i really did was pulled the ones off and put the new ones on but then i the thing is the idea of that is that i could theoretically not wash the sheets i just pulled off but that feels necessary too like i i've told me about my fear is that if i don't wash the sheets and pillowcases immediately i will forget and then a week and a half from now when i pull the sheets off there

will be no clean sheets oh see i i don't really have a hamper so any dirty clothes or bedding that i have i throw directly into the washer so if i were to strip the bed the only place i'd put those dirty sheets would be right into the washer so there would be no concern about forgetting to wash them having said that i hate folding sheets so much especially fitted sheets that you know we have not to brag but we have a couple of sets of sheets too we can alternate but i usually don't because again i'm a huge putterer but if i'm at home and i'm going to run a load of bedding then i'm just going to wait it out wait for that stuff to get washed and dried and put it directly back on the bed so i don't even have to worry about folding it up i don't trust myself to put it back

on and i've had this happen a few times and we've all we've all done this maybe you haven't andrew but like there's not a worse feeling than being bone tired possibly bone drunk and going up to your bedroom yeah and opening the door and realizing oh right i was washing the sheets and the bed is just no no bedding on it it's like i that's the word that's such a bad experience that i like that i i go to great lengths to avoid it including just like immediately remaking the bed with the backup sheets and then i wash the other ones all that is to say i had this moment this morning was like i want to come home to clean sheets and then i was like and also you know what i want to come home to andrew a working bidet because i bought a while ago one of these um like a uh it's made by the toto company it's called a washlet and it's you know it's a bidet thing that

sits on top you put it on where your normal toilet seat would go uh and but this one it plugs into the wall it's got like um it's it's it's the seat is heated now and it like uh you know it sprays some water obviously and it's got a dryer it's pretty fancy the reason that i know about this one is because years and years ago we're talking like 15 years ago carrie was living um uh with a in like a house with roommates and they had one of these in their bathroom and i would just go over there just to use the bathroom it was so amazing i loved it so much so i felt confident buying this thing because i'd actually used one before but the reason i wanted to get one is one i just like to try to keep that area spick and span also i am on a septic tank and i i did not i did not want to flush wet wipes into the septic tank but that meant i was doing this whole other thing where I was putting them in like what's called a diaper genie um which if you have kids you're probably familiar with it's just basically like a very very kind of sealed up um thing that you can put stuff in that you know you don't want the smell to get out of so it's like the most hygienic way to have basically a bunch of used toilet paper or diapers around in

your house without it being super gross but let me ask you a question about that weirdly I was just thinking about those the other day because I'm not somebody who's um used those what they call flushable wipes and i think i was pondering the fact that like you know people say they're not actually flushable maybe i was reading a story either way that my my fight of fancy led me to picture the little diaper genies that you're talking about and i think our friend p fletch is a big advocate of those as well but i always think and this goes back to something you talk about with like the garbage cans at dog parks i always assume though when you flip the lid open i don't know if it's like toe activated or what but i always assume when you open up one of those diaper genies that you've been throwing your quote unquote flushable wipes into that like a cartoon ghoul or ghost spirit comes out a chud that just like goes from the movie chud right in your face like no that's the andrew that okay that's the science that's the different that's the diaper

genie difference okay it's got this uh look i don't want to be gross but there's a certain irony that you've wiped an area of your body that sort of has like an aperture like a lens and it tightly tightly closes that's not unlike how the diaper genie also works it's got it's it's basically permanently closed and there's a spring-loaded kind of mechanism that has this thing sealed up tight and then when you want to put your whatever your left what leftovers it's a Very weird way to describe it. Sure. Whatever you want to put in there, you have to kind of wedge it open so that the stuff goes down into this plastic garbage bag, and then it closes right back up.

Oh, interesting.

So there's no smell escapes. It's actually a pretty genius system. I think for diapers it's great because you can wrap a diaper up in such a way, a disposable diaper, where it's just kind of a little, you know, I don't know how to describe it, but the exterior of the diaper, there's nothing gross going on on the outside of the diaper. and you just tape it all up. It's just like a little ball and then you can push it through this thing. It doesn't work as well with wet wipes because they don't have any structural integrity, which has led me, Andrew, to have a stick for this.

Oh, yeah, sure, a stick.

I have a flat stick that I was keeping in my bathroom.

Yeah, don't use a tongue depressor because then you get confused with your regular tongue depressor. It was like a giant tongue depressor.

It was a piece of molding that I broke off of something, honestly. And the idea is, and I had a whole system, So I would nest the wet wipes business side down right over the area where they're going to go in now. And then I would take this very thin flat thing and I would push them down. So the thin flat thing never touched a used side of a wet wipe. Does that make sense?

It does. But I love the idea also of like once your house is fully renovated and it's going to be all fancy and everything, but you're still going to have the poo stick that brought you there. Like you're always going to have. God bless that broken stick that brought me home to you. you're okay also i would say the diaper genie sounds amazing the one thing i would add to maybe improve it is when you sell these things sell it with a diaper genie cannon so that when you're when it's full you just load the entire diaper genie and you shoot it to the moon and then you

just have a new one but just like uh the estate of hunter s thompson contacted us and they'd like to tag him along i've been trying to get the rest of his remains into space for a while so uh actually that's a whole other part of it not this i did not come to you today andrew on this the friday before christmas to explain the inner workings of the diaper genie but here we are um you know who didn't have a diaper genie andrew the baby jesus it's true away in a manger no crib for a bed not even a diaper genie what the fuck what the hell you might have slipped

from one second. Some of that was from memory and I don't know if I nailed all of it.

I was telling Vives yesterday, I have one of those slippery songs. You know how we've talked about this. You have one song in your head and then you realize you're singing another song. I'm that way with the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. They're listing all the deer and then somehow that morphs into these are a few of my favorite things. Oh, sure. And so I was like dancer and prancer and these are a few of my favorite kittens. I just found myself singing that around the house of the cats

yesterday yeah those have got some those have those have got some similarities yeah so uh the thing that's i have to say kind of fun about this this uh diaper genie concept and by the way i also have the i used to have the litter genie they make one for your cat's litter as well because why not why wouldn't they make more money but um so what you basically have to buy and this is why it's a very very great product for them to sell you because you pay for this little pail this diaper pail thing but then you got to keep buying this bizarre like o-ring that only they make and there's no fake in this there's no like doing your own version of this because it is a very specific piece of disposable technology it's like a plastic imagine like a plastic ring that the bottom side of it you pull this strip away this plastic strip rips off of it and now you can just pull out a bunch of garbage bags from it but they're like all one continuous bag and what you do is you tie a knot in the bottom of it and then when it fills up you pop this lid up and you still at this point have not had to deal with any exposed none of this stuff in there is hitting the air ever and then you you basically grab now above where this bulge of wet wipes or diapers or whatever is that's in there and you pull down more of this continuous colon of garbage bag material and there's a built-in little knife in there a little razor knife and you you flatten out the part of the bag that's now way above where the stuff is and you just run it along this razor and just cuts it really cleanly and then you tie that part off and now you have Andrew a giant size hard candy with both ends twisted with a beautiful little flourish on both ends. Imagine like a butterscotch or something that you would open, but the middle is not something you ever want to experience. And you take that out and you throw that in the garbage and you tie a new knot. There's something very satisfying about tying this knot and pulling it down and being like, we're starting over here. The idea that you never have to interact with the offending materials is, I have to say, pretty good design.

Yes, it's interesting engineering. It's also one of the rare times I would actually take the butterscotch instead. It's not usually the candy that I would choose.

No, but in this case, I'd definitely go with the butterscotch. But all of that is to say, I have wanted to do this bidet situation for a long time. I bought the thing. It's been in my house, but I've been nervous about installing it. It's not that hard. It is designed for an average American consumer to be able to put it together. but i get nervous about those things i don't like messing with plumbing a lot i don't you know it's just like you just never know so i was waiting for walt to be here um uh and so i thought this morning i was like well this is my last chance because i'm heading down to portland tonight and then he's heading back to their place and like if like basically like if i get into a situation where water is shooting in like up into the ceiling of the bathroom i would rather have walt around when that happened than not so I realized this was my only morning to do this and so I and by the way it was I love my dad to the moon and back but man does he ever tend to focus on the how half empty the glass is or maybe he was just in a bad mood this morning but like he's just like every single thing he's like well you know what could happen and I'm like yeah but that you know probably won't happen okay but you got to watch out for this but you got to like every and then i'm watching a youtube video on how to how to do it uh and there's a remote control for this thing and it takes batteries and my dad is out in the other room like having his coffee and getting ready for the day and the guy on youtube goes make sure you put the batteries in the room he goes oh great it uses batteries i'm like bro and then like he's just like giving me every i was like do you have a problem with are you anti-budet he's like no no i just just uh you know just there's a lot of things that can go wrong and i was like okay well that's why i have you here i have a couple

of questions for you i'm i am also surprised to hear it takes batteries um and i want to know what kind of batteries it takes but first i have something else to ask double in is that really oh okay so remote control oh the remote the remote the remote yeah my dad should form a club called

the not listening club oh jesus man i would join that club you two actually would probably get along great and then i'd be on the outside looking in um but i thought that for me Speaking of listening, I thought I was listening when you said the other day that one of your toilets, I can't remember which one, but you specifically had a sort of a project around the idea of installing a outlet near the toilet so that it could plug in. Is this that device or is this a different?

No, but good listening. You're totally right. That's the toilet that's here in the Madrona Hill studio. and that was a thing where you know my dad comes from a generation where it would make no sense to wire an outlet right at the base of the toilet because very little went on there that needed electrical but i'm from the bidet generation and so i was like i need to have power at the base so out here i do not have a bidet out here i just have a regular toilet it does have power though like there's an outlet so i could someday conceivably do that but i'm right now i'm my budget only allows for one bidet at my at this badaus and so I wanted to be in the bathroom that I'm actually using the most so that's why it's in this very like funky kind of crummy bathroom that I don't like at all like everything in it every finish like every little sconce every everything about it gives me a bad feeling what's that drop everything about them makes me nervous everything about this bathroom gives me a bad feeling except i just have so much more pressing projects to work on but here's the takeaway andrew i got in there with my tools and my youtube video and i set it all up and it took i'm gonna say 11 minutes and it totally works and it's exactly as i mean the one thing that's not great about it is it is not a nice looking toilet seat situation like it's very medical appearing like there's nothing about the design of this seat that says like good like good visual design it looks lousy but it works like a charm i've already used it and when i come home from all my gallivanting andrew i will probably have to go to the bathroom i will use the the bidet and then i will go upstairs and then i will put on my sweatpants and change into of my p-jams maybe i'll put on my um quantus air first class pajamas that you and i got when we were flying in coach on quantus air and i will get in my bed with my clean sheets and everything will be okay i just have to survive the next six days but the big question is do we name the show

i dream of diaper genie or remains of the day wait what was the second remains of the bidet

oh oh come on sure i mean no brainer i think door number two right hey let's thank some donors who are generously supporting our program making this a uh a thing that can be a show i got an email andrew from somebody that i don't think you know uh personally and i'll just for the moment i'll i'll um on air i will uh keep them somewhat anonymous but they are a producer for a radio show that is no longer going to be on the radio and they were reaching out to me to um i want to just because i'm not going to identify them i will tell you this one thing that was funny they said hey luke it's so and so uh and then laid out that the show is going to be not on the terrestrial radio anymore was wondering if you had time to talk soon about details when you left Terrestrial Radio and moved to digital podcasts, and I thought I think calling it Digital Podcast might be strike one. That's a tell. That's a tell! And also I don't even know if I know what's like, how long, like the time about when you left Terrestrial Radio, it's like, oh my goodness how long ago was that for this show? Like, I mean, what are we talking? 13 years or something?

I'm trying to, I'm wondering whatever, I have some questions about who I know I'm sorry this is not fair to you because I feel like I might know but oh okay text me and

I'll tell you I will start reading these donors and why don't you text me your guesses and I'll

tell you yes or no okay yeah I think this is a bad guess but I want to know so I'll text boy this is going to be I don't know if this is going to be amazing like almost next level digital podcasting or terrible digital podcasting but I'm going to keep on texting you motion to only call

at digital podcasting going forward, please. And that's seconded by Troy Tortorich of Lake Stevens, Washington. Good people from Lake Stevens. Yeah, we just had another Lake Stevens resident checking in recently. It made me very excited, of course. I feel culturally Lake Stevens because of all the stories I've heard from JD and Thunder about the days up there in Lake Stevens. Thanks, Troy. Thanks to Rick Manson of Seattle, Washington.

Thank you, Rick. Now, Luke's going to check his phone here and see if I have the guess. I'm guessing I'm wrong there, but somebody reached out to me recently, not with the same question. Oh, no, no, no. Okay.

No, not that person.

I didn't think so. That didn't make sense. I don't think that person would say digital podcast.

I said, no, no, no. And then I just texted you, not them. Okay. I don't know why I needed to confirm that both in the message format and the talking to you. No. This is not a show that was big in our life when we were doing radio shows together around. It's a more old school program, let's say, of a more conservative bent. Okay. That kind of knows it down. All right. Yeah. Summer Martinez in Lakewood, Washington is like, all right, enough. enough uh sub tweeting other radio shows let's get to honoring the donors of the day and i'm one of them my name is summer martinez is summer is summer the dj is summer the radio personality is there a radio personality names oh no no no this is no summer is summer's uh radio djing career is going robustly okay great summer is one of the few winners in the radio landscape wake up lakewood i believe is the name of summer that is yeah absolutely uh katherine palacios

is in houston texas i got some friends in houston a friend hey one one young cool friend

one time one young cool palacios yep thank you very much catherine appreciate you uh also appreciate todd thorsgaard of saint paul minnesota that is a very saint paul name it really is i mean honestly it only maybe north dakota could there's only two states really that could handle a name like Todd Thorsgaard, and I'm going to say it's Minnesota and North Dakota, and that's it. Thank you, Todd. Thanks also to Sally Jenkins, who's out there in Redmond, Washington. Beautiful Redmond, Washington where I like to spend some time every year being a minor celebrity at A Software Concern. Thank you, Sally. Thank you to all of our donors. Thanks for making TV Chill possible, for real. I was thinking about what I'm going to say to this other radio professional about how to try to do this as a digital podcast and honestly my advice would be get down on your knees and pray that some small but very loyal group of people find whatever you're doing interesting for some reason and will support it that's all we got that's all I've got that's all my advice for navigating this fraught digital podcasting landscape is hope you get lucky the way we have with folks like these donors exactly

And don't ever get stuck in the details on a story. Just broad stroke something.

Exactly. Keep it moving. Do not ever describe in painful detail each step of a Toto washlet installation.

And get yourself a poo stick.

I mean, that's just good life advice. That's life advice. In and out of the podcasting game. Andrew, I took that stick out of the bathroom this morning. I took the diaper genie out. I took the stick out, and I was kind of like, hey, old friend. I almost wanted to like give it some kind of a formal burial like you know what you did great work you were exactly the perfect tool for this job and you served me well over the last seven months but your time is done now my friend your watch has ended your watch has ended that's exactly that's exactly the words I was looking for

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

Now I know this is usually where we play the top story sounders, Andrew But We've got some A couple of, I think, pressing emails That I wanted to talk about Particularly before I do Some journeying next week And also some kind of nice Holiday vibe email So I just figured today, here on this Friday As we're sliding into this weekend Big holiday weekend and doings i would uh i'd share some of these emails with you the first one comes from a listener cassidy um and i will be totally honest with you andrew it wasn't great news for me uh dear mr burbank usually when an email starts dear mr burbank it's some kind of a legal entanglement that i find myself in so of course it got my attention i'm writing you to warn you about flying on condor air i wish somebody would have warned me oh no yeah this is the airline that i'm taking to frankfurt germany on christmas night in september i took my partner of 10 years on a trip to germany and france and uh most of the major airlines were over two thousand dollars each but i found this new airline called condor for 1000 each what an amazing deal i thought and me being so smart i took part of my savings and i upgraded us to their premium class so we get to the airport to check in and there is a major crisis and the check-in line was out the door lots of angry germans yelling at each other why you ask because condor decided to send over their 1970s east german plane instead of the brand new plane they sold me on and guess what this plane held half the number of seats now andrew when i tell you that just last night i was printing out all of my paperwork from this airline all of my boarding information and oh you'll be proud of me i actually went in and entered all my passport data uh last night which was good because when i went to the website they said this needs to be entered like 75 hours before or 45 hours before your your flight like it's amazing i didn't show up at the airport going huh what is the actual day

i know that you're going to be joining us from germany on wednesday okay so christmas day is monday that's when you're actually boarding well that actually christmas that could work in to your advantage certainly flying on the holiday itself um yes well that's part of why this ticket was

also relatively cheap for what i'm for what i'm getting and um but also when i was looking at the paperwork last night i was kind of chuffed to see that it said you're on one of our new planes in fact i believe it says you're on our newest plane and i just thought everything's coming up millhouse like this is great i'm putting my passport information in uh at an at a at a at a timely uh point so that i'm not going to be at sea tech airport on christmas weeping openly when they tell me i can't board the flight i'm getting their newest plane i was like everything's great except cassidy says he was also promised their newest plane and then instead got a 1970s east german plane that sounds rough that sounds like before scorpions brought down the berlin wall whatever the east germans were flying on i'm assuming it was you know some sort of aeroflot

kind of nightmare situation we have ways of making you fly mr um so also the problem was

this flight that cassidy was on this plane uh held half the number of seats so that's not good either like in other words a bunch of people just got booted because there were no seats for them i won't go into detail about this flight because it was not the worst part of the trip but i will mention that if you get the old plane there are no premium seats there is no wi-fi there is no at your seat entertainment and the temperature in the cabin was uncomfortable well that doesn't sound good i thought well cassidy sounds like you got a kind of a unfortunate deal and then i read on the flight home was so much worse we got into their new plane we got our premium seats with our gift bag the wi-fi never worked but the worst thing was the temperature now this seems like a brand new plane but i guess somebody forgot the air conditioner 10 hours and the temperature on the plane was definitely over 100 degrees many of the older passengers were passing out people were begging for the captain to do something and the german flight attendants just smiled and said there was nothing they could do i felt bad for them because their shirts were soaked with sweat But this raises a question, Andrew, does the outside air temperature matter for the inside? Is there something about the outside of an air temperature that's good or bad for the inside of a plane's air temperature?

Well, I guess it depends on, I mean, I'm just saying this, I don't know.

Yeah, no, that's what the show is based on.

But, you know, they have you pull down the shades with the direct sunlight, obviously, that heats up the plane.

Yeah, when you're sitting on the tarmac or whatever, when they're parking it. So that's one thing. i wonder if you're up if you're up you know at 30 000 feet it seems like it's cold up there that's where superman's ice palace is right i don't know like i wonder if the air temperature at up up at 30 000 feet if like it matters is like it always cold up there is it warm during the summer time i don't i like i get the sense that cassidy was flying not during like on christmas day but but if their air conditioning if their climate control doesn't work could it be 100 degrees on a flight that's just you know flying like in the middle of the winter i don't know the answer to this um this is the part though that i thought was really this was an insight into cassidy's life and i hope everything's going really great for cassidy my girlfriend told me mid-flight that this was all my fault because my ego insisted that i take her on this lifetime dream trip even though i obviously could not afford to fly us on a quote normal airline i'm i'm i'm wishing the best for cassidy's relationship yeah but it sounds like still

present tense though i didn't hear the word x in there so that's a that's a good point maybe this

is just their love languages cassidy's partner saying your ego is writing checks that your bank account cannot back up therefore we're flying on germany's like we're flying on the spirit airlines of germany cassie says it was hot sweaty and smelly luke i really hope you're status is worth uh flying this airline twice in 24 hours it sounds like hell to me best of luck

well we'll see i mean that sounds like a terrible experience and i'm not trying to dismiss that but i think if everybody's experience was like that we would have heard right like it sounds like cassie had a intensely bad experience i would be shocked i just but you know what this

Stirred for me was a sort of repressed memory that I think I had heard about Condor when they first when I feel like they're a relatively recent entrant into the airline international airline game and that they did have really cheap tickets because they were trying to kind of gin up business and and sort of familiarize people with their product. and it would just never like you know i'm pretty familiar with the the domestic airlines that i would generally try to put them lower on my list and like you know spirit is on that list for me i'm not a big southwest person although i know there's people that love southwest and swear by it i'm sure if i flew southwest a ton and i got it all worked out i'd be fine with it but like frontier is one that i've had some less than awesome experiences on but it never occurred to me that there's also international versions of that i just figured i don't know they got a big plane it's flying over the ocean it's all going to be pretty nice because when i've flown internationally before i've always actually been kind of like you know i know it's been tolerable you and i flew to australia on an old plane and i don't think it was great but it wasn't the worst i'll tell you what was nicer flying back on the new plane it's so we've talked about this recently

My memory of flying back on the new plane is very, very fuzzy. I do remember the flight out there better, though, and I remember it seemed like a very old plane. It had, like, whatever video technology it had was very old. I think yours was on the fritz, and you couldn't choose your programming, or you could, but it was just, like, kind of on a loop. It wasn't, like, an on-demand situation. Yeah, there was some AV problems. And they might have had—did they have the old phones, like, in the back of the seat, like those planes from the 90s would have? I don't know if they had that.

I'll almost take the older plane if this thing has phones on it. I was just talking about those with Becca the other day. Like, wasn't that a time to be alive?

Yeah. I don't think. I was just going to say I typed in Condor air flying conditions. Oh, no. I assume it's good.

I assume people take time out of their life to go on and say it's spectacular.

Well, honestly, well, the funny thing is the very first question is people also ask, is it safe to fly with Condor? But good news. The answer is Condor has been providing safe and reliable flights to your holiday destinations for over 65 years is continuing to do so now. But now that comes from Condor, though, like what I noticed is like I'm actually not seeing horror stories or anything popping up to the top of this bubbling up to the top. That's like like, you know, beware of Condor. Having said that, almost like the first 25 results all come from Condor's own website. So I also don't know if they're just like really good at SEO and getting right things.

Also Beware of Condor sounds like a movie Robert Redford was in In the late 70s Yeah a little bit past his prime at that point But still like rocking a turtleneck For most of the film

Actually that wouldn't be past his prime either

I got that wrong So I well you know what Andrew You know what's so fun about this program About this life blog that you and I do This audio life blog Digital podcast is I guess on Wednesday we'll find out How it went And, you know, what my They're promising that They're saying that I'm on one of the newer planes But also it sounds like that's what they said to Cassidy So, and also Christmas is like The other thing people are telling me Is Christmas is a huge flippin' deal In Germany

Right, which means everybody's going to be preoccupied Not flying places

That could go either way, I'm hoping that's what it means I'm hoping that because I'm flying on Christmas Day Like, everybody Is already, you know snuggled up wherever they're going to be in Germany and they've got their glockenspiels going. I believe those are the things where you light the candles and it kind of spins it around and stuff. Everybody is just like already doing their thing. So there's no competition for the one good plane in the Condor fleet. I'm hoping that it'll just get on over to SeaTac just fine and then I'll get on it and get on over to

Frankfurt. I find that I would be surprised if you had a whole bunch of stories about your flying experience though anyway things usually go pretty smoothly sure nine hours

on a german airline sure yeah there's absolutely no way that that will be content for the show on wednesday um this was an email that i got too from listener emily and this one is um doesn't indicate the possible uh breakdown of a relationship the way cassidy's did this one is very sweet and kind of of a whole christmasy vibe um emily says hey hermanos so i'm driving home from a concert in fastoria ohio i play in the toledo symphony and we do christmas concerts all over the region and tonight i was driving our old 2007 honda accord which knock on wood has been an amazing car for us But the radio went out many years ago, and let's see, when it first went out, it would occasionally come back on for a drive here or there, but it hasn't turned on for me in the last four years. So I'm listening to the pod cart. I'm assuming that's us, right, Andrew?

Yeah, I'm guessing. I would hope so.

Driving on a very dark two-lane road surrounded by farm fields when I start to hear the sound of a choir. uh what the hell i look around me uh like is it coming from outside the car or is it coming from my own brain and it turns out it was the accords radio back from the dead i turn off my phone and i start scanning the stations interested to see what's on terrestrial radio in the middle of nowhere nowadays by the way this very much indicates that emily is our kind of person andrew emily says i found gold on eagle 99 which is 99.1 fm out of fremont ohio a scene better days town where i've also played many a christmas concert there is a local broadcast of a high school basketball game between the fremont ross high school little giants and the Anthony Wayne High School. And it was almost the end of the game. Fremont had let their lead slip, and it was riveting. It was a game that I didn't know existed minutes prior. I listened until I got home, and just because I'm a TBTL weirdo, I also recorded some of it for my imaginary friendos. By the way, this is the real game from Emily's card.

This line here, Makai Lee to trigger. Nice dish right inside. Heard. Oh, that's goaltending. Oh, no, they should have called goaltending. He hit the backboard, 42-40. Robeson at the other end. Hands off to Bender. Now Ross is going to have to foul here. 43 seconds.

This, Emily writes, checked so many boxes. Rural Ohio, radio, squeaky basketball shoe sounds. Anyway, I'm including it here because maybe it'll make you happy, too. I love the show and power out. And then Emily says, yes, this happened while I was driving the car. I just listened through the phone speaker. This is an audiophile's nightmare. I would say, absolutely not, Emily. This is an audiophile's dream.

Now, getting back to what should have been a goaltending. The ball hit the backboard, and I believe Griffin Pike went up and slapped the backboard. I think it was Griffin Pike. I believe so. That's goaltending.

So there you go, a little dispatch from the greater Fostoria, Ohio area, slash Fremont, Ohio area from listener Emily. I identify so much with that email and that story. I don't know why, that just feels like a perfect Christmas experience to me.

Don't tell me if the Little Giants won or not. I'm taping that game. I mean, I tape that game, and I have it on my DVR. I got a DVR for that game. I like that, the Little Giants, by the way.

I know. By the way, I think the Anthony Wayne High School They're the Generals I think I left that out I don't think I would ever name my team the Generals Because that's the team that plays the Globetrotters Yeah, that's a good point Unless your coach is named Red Klotz Who I believe Was Red Klotz The manager Of the Generals Of the Washington Generals I wouldn't know that Did you ever see the Globetrotters When you were a kid?

no just no not in real life i don't think just you know i knew of them obviously by the way i don't know why this is important but i think what emily is saying at the end of her email is like until her radio started miraculously working again she was just listening to podcasts on her phone like probably in the passenger seat next to her and that's the audiophiles nightmare which i mean i kind of i know that i've never had to do that but i remember driving around a true in a work truck for my dad i'd drive to michigan i'd take some like metal to michigan or something which is also a great record um but i had to take this truck that didn't have a radio so i just brought my boom box with me and buckled it into the passenger seat of this truck did you literally seat belt it i think i i think i had to yeah and i remember that that happened a couple of times there little one once with my friend sean as well so we do what we have to do but um yeah no that's

One of the things, and I think people obviously were hoping we'd get to.

car radio technology today on the show and we are but like it was the commonly the case that like the radio would either be busted or would have just the worst sound like radios in cars unless you had like an aftermarket system put in i feel like radios and cars were real bunk and now they're good like it would never occur to me to replace the radio or the the sound system that's in my car currently because it's just like the speakers are pretty nice and i don't i'm also not an audiophile when it comes to that stuff like i was never the guy that had a bazooka tube in the back of my dodge daytona or whatever like josh badger newton did but like i just think it just seems like it used to like like a ford ranger i used to drive a ford ranger sometimes when i worked for the plumbing company and like i mean you just can't imagine a shittier radio setup and now it's It's like, I think if you buy a typical car, like the radio to me and the whatever, the stereo in there and the speakers is going to be fine.

Yeah. Oh, certainly. Yeah.

Like you and Veeves have not like swapped out anything in your car, right?

No, God. And also like, you know, the cars I drove before this one, we do drive a car that we bought new off the lot. But that was back in 2018, I think. But this is the only new car we've ever owned, quote unquote new. I mean, I drove a Toyota Tercel that I would have to punch the door to get the speaker to stop buzzing, like literally driving around Concord. I paid two hundred dollars for this car. Thanks, John Greenberg. Money well spent. I loved it. It was like a little go cart. It was a manual transmission. But I would the speaker on the driver's side door until you just like punched it. And then you could finally hear your, you know, your iron and wine or whatever you're trying to listen to in the early 2000s. But can I tell you a little story about audio? I was going to mention this at the top of the show because it was something I was sort of got obsessed with last night. But tonally, I did not like bringing this up at the top of the show. But I think Emily's email leads leads here pretty nicely. It's about like kind of appreciating audio and quirky audio. Now, this is a little bit dark, but I was working on some sort of AV project a few nights ago and I was looking for some audio to add to it. And so I went to the Internet Archive. And, like, you can find all kinds of stuff in the Internet Archive, but it's not like, you know, featured stuff. You know, it's not like a website that's like, hey, check out this thing. And so you kind of got to go digging into the stacks a little bit, which is something that I really like. And so, of course, you know, the radio station that I listened to growing up was WMMS, The Buzzard, 100.7, right? And they were like a huge rock and roll powerhouse, I think. Up your chicken. That's right. And I was like, hey, I wonder if there's any old, like, just fun archive WMMS that I could use for this project. I wanted some sort of, like, 70s sounding DJ. That was what I was looking for. And I ended up finding a whole, like, there was one person who uploaded tons of stuff, recorded off of WMMS back in the day on cassette tapes. And what I was listening to last night, I probably listened to, like, 90 minutes of what WMMS was doing the day John Lennon was killed. and it was bizarre because i mean not bizarre but it was like a real kind of emotional journey obviously i'm a beatles fan um but i don't really know much about that day or what happened i know that it happened in 1980 and what i was listening to was like a nighttime dj i don't know when the news actually broke or when it actually happened but i was listening to this dj in 1980 um and she was doing sort of the overnights i think she gave the time check a couple of times it was like one o'clock in the morning her shift was maybe ending at two or something like that and the news she was like playing just like you know probably on turntables a bunch of Beatles songs and John Lennon solo stuff and then you know giving updates by tossing it to the network and just sort of saying like we're going to play the same update we had about 20 minutes ago this is all we have so it sort of felt like news was still very much trickling in and I sort of heard the story

develop and then eventually they're tossing it to like a larger network piece that was clearly like heavily produced so maybe a couple of hours had gone by at this point almost like oh it was like kind of an update and a retrospective on john lennon at the same time and like a lot of tape of very teary um you know just fans and all kinds of people and like it was it and also mixed up in that was just like a kind of a really good beatles john lennon mix right because they were just playing this music they were just like this is what we do on this day we play this music we figure it out we try to give the audience as much information as possible and it just heralded back to a very different day of just like local kind of rock and roll radio and then i finally turned it off as it was getting kind of even more interesting because it sounded like they were handing it off to the morning crew and i heard and did you mention this but was this on youtube this is in the internet archive it's okay you and your dad just don't listen um It's amazing. the internet archive which is that's why i sort of said that you kind of got to go digging in the crates for this stuff like you um it's not like hey check out this thing that was like bouncing around social media i was just sort of like late one night looking for audio of an old dj and i thought well maybe if i type in this term wms and i stumbled on all kinds of stuff and it looks like there's some other like kind of notable days and this was just somebody who you could hear the squeaky sound they were sort of like kind of avoiding the um they were kind of avoiding the commercials which i am bummed about because i love old local commercials but like you could you could hear that telltale squeak of somebody pausing a um a recording on a cassette tape you know what i mean like it kind of like it chirps out for a second but it was a real heady

trip man yeah i bet and that just kind of also like the way that i heard that kurt cobain had died was i was driving to my shift at bumpy's fruit and yogurt in my parents car which i don't why i was driving there it was four blocks from my house but i was listening to i think it was either kzok or kisw one of the rock stations in seattle and it was my memory of it is it was like a saturday and so it wasn't even like you know it wasn't like one of their it wasn't like their morning show or their afternoon like it was just a random dj who was like we have some really bad news now like Kurt Cobain has died and I who would I get that information from now I guess I would get it from TMZ I would you know what I would I would get a notification on my watch get a pop-up yeah I would get my watch would haptic me and I would look down and it would be like a breaking news thing from some news outlet that I forgot to turn off the notifications to my watch from it would be whichever news organization I still have push notifications coming from and it would just be like kirk cobain dead at 27 i don't and that would be i don't know why but that would seem to me to be a less i don't want to say i don't know why ranking this really matters that would be i would rather get the information from the wmms dj at the time than from my watch telling me it just the text and i don't know why that is i don't know if it's because in times of tragedy we want a sort of human connection but i'm glad that i got the kurt cobain news the way i did and and i'm never going to get the news that way again for the rest of my

natural life yeah and it was interesting to hear and she was playing it you know pretty straight but um and not being overly emotional the dj the late night dj i was listening to at first but um just sort of a just a real public um sort of coming to grips with processing is the word i'm looking for you know just like she's just kind of like i am here on the air on wms and like everybody is just processing this and people are turning here to process and it was just like it was really interesting to sort of just kind of i wouldn't even say relive that because i was too young at the time i didn't have any recollection of it but it was a trip but it was definitely a

very somber trip too all right how about a little music for your weekend before i go down and stress

test that the day i'm gonna make sure it's working for when i get back brand new when you get back

Oh, no, gently used, but just by a grandmother who only drove it to church on Sundays.

I don't think this really works anymore to say this, but, like, without me having... What I was going to set up at the top of the show is, like, how you have this note on the show sheet that I found super intriguing because it didn't mean anything to me. Usually when you have notes on the show sheet, it's pretty clear what you want to talk about, but this kind of happened the other day, too. I can't remember what it was. You used an acronym or something, and I asked you what it meant. It was in case we don't get to it or something like that. And this one, again, listeners, pretend like, I hope it's okay to read directly from the show sheet on the show, Luke, but pretend you don't know what Luke's story was at the top. These are the notes. Luke's post Germany for coming home, Toto and Xmas times and clean sheets. And I was like, Toto. So I'm not thinking Toto bidet or toilet. I'm thinking Toto the dog. We're not in Kansas anymore. Xmas times. I'm like, is Xmas times some sort of a newspaper that you found or what? for coming and also you're you're you're already smoking broken you haven't even left for germany

yet and you've come back speaking broken english oh how do i say it andrew i've been in germany for so long i don't how do i say when a pleasure in the misfortune of others i can't i just want to say you know one quick thing though the xmas times we didn't get to which is i'm leaving my christmas tree up oh yeah of course because well but see i'm very i i have a lot of like rituals around that like I don't do any Christmassy stuff until after Thanksgiving and then I try to be pretty quick with with with taking that all down but like to me it's like I did me and my dad I put the Christmas tree up two nights ago and I haven't there hasn't been a floor in the house so like I didn't really have the like right environment to sit and like look at the tree and have some eggnog and kind of enjoy it and I'm really not even getting to enjoy it now because i'm hustling out of here after this so i'm leaving all of i'm basically going to do like a kind of delayed personal christmas solo mission here where i sit in my chair and i look at the tree and i listen to my charlie brown music i'm going to do all that when i get back like a week

and a day from now which is unusual for me well the you wouldn't usually take your tree down before

january 1st would you sometimes oh really oh i mean that's not a strict rule i understand that that some people say you've got until new year's again i'm not into policing what people do with their christmas decorations leave them up all you're on i don't care but um i depending on how i was feeling sometimes maybe three or four days after christmas would get it down like if it was a natural tree where it was starting to really dump a lot of uh you know needles and i just was ready to like and i'd been staring at it for like a month maybe i'd be ready to like let's just get this all cleaned up and like we're entering the new year kind of thing but that's not the case this time around i've got this my weirdo aluminum christmas tree in there and i'm i i basically have not gotten to interact with it enough but when i get home there's going to be i'll have a full floor in my house i'll have a bidet i'll have clean sheets i'll have a christmas tree i mean i'm telling you my life really starts six days from now i'm sorry eight days from now my life

starts i think we usually i don't even i mean i don't have strong feelings about this i'm honestly well maybe this isn't true anymore but for a long time if it weren't for vives we wouldn't have a christmas tree like when i was living by myself i didn't have a christmas tree i kind of didn't care too much now i'm well like what i would do probably if i were by myself is i'd buy some small little tree that could maybe sit on a shelf somewhere or something like that maybe even a live one you know um but um but genevieve is really into trees i'm glad she is like it's a fun little thing i enjoy going to the tree farm with her every year we go to that one in wedgwood i don't know if you know that luke um but uh oh yeah sure yeah it's a nice little experience every year nice little tradition so i like doing it but i think you know genevieve loves having a tree in the house so much and it does add that you know that smell and it just gives you that such a vibe that i don't think we'd ever take it down before new year's day maybe like after new year's day then the clock starts feeling like it's ticking a little bit oh my goodness i'm just remembering how i used to get rid of christmas trees in the old house i tell you about this i would i would trim the tree down in the old apartment down like i would take clippers and come into the house and strip the tree down until it was nothing but a like a a trunk in the middle of our living

room because i was so you cut each branch off at the trunk i would yes and cut it up so that it

would all fit into our green um compost bin thing so anyway do you want to talk about you are

definitely the person i know who likes to take large amounts of foliage and reduce it down to small more compact versions with the hand what do you call those yeah like yeah shears like shears but the ones that have a small head on them so you can get a good yeah you can get a real good

clean snip yeah that is a lane for me man i spent all summer doing that just trying to fit this

debris into bins i i you i have to say i it kind of brought me around i think i found myself doing versions of that here on things because i took a tree down like a very small tree here and then i like i watching you slowly this is a weird way to put it watching you slowly dismember the leftover parts of your hedge into your solo fire i kind of got the zen quality of the whole thing

yeah no it definitely was especially as and then while we're having beers and if i'm out there by myself listening to a mariners game or if there's people over like there was when you were doing that and we're again having beers it seems like beers is really the common denominator there actually now that i think about the common beer nominator you're waking up and you're having beers or you're having lunch and you're having beers my music for your weekend this weekend is a i'm i have a feeling i tried to do some research on this i couldn't confirm it my guess is i play this around christmas time every year for music for your weekend but since it is the um you know this is as as as close to christmas as you can get uh with music for your weekend i wanted to make sure it was kind of on theme so um this is the band low just like christmas i don't think we have to discuss it it's kind of a modern classic at this point and i love to hear it every year so take a listen to this just like christmas by low

On our way from Stockholm It started to snow And you said it was like Christmas But you were wrong Was it like Christmas at all?

By the time we got to our store Snow was gone And we got lost The beds were small, but we felt so young, it was just like Christmas.

Ah, just as good as the first time.

That's nice. I like that. Me too. I recently got hipped to a Christmas playlist from my daughter, Addie, of course. There's something called the Numero Group or the Numero Group. Are you familiar with what that is? Are they your new landlords? It does sound like the people that were running my old apartment. Numero Group. You'd think I would take two minutes and internet this, Andrew, before. It's an archival record label that creates compilations of previously released music. So I see. So it's probably a little bit like we talk about Light in the Attic sometimes, right?

Yeah, that's what it sounds like to me.

And so they put together a Christmas playlist that Addy hipped me to that's really pretty interesting. Would recommend if you feel like you've kind of listened to the 20 Christmas songs you know or the 50 Christmas songs you know. Like if you're like a Christmas music fan like I am and you feel like you've kind of really burned yourself out on most of the music, it's always really fun to get some kind of new infusion of music. And this Numero group or Numero group, I don't know which one they're going with, has some really amazing songs on it, this Christmas list. They're just a bunch of things that were like never released. And let me see. Actually, let me, can I play one for you from here, Andrew, that's not good, but it's funny to me. The first time that I heard this song, I was like, this is really terrible. And now it's kind of been growing on me. Let me see. It's called Shopping by Joseph Washington Jr. And it's exactly what you think it's going to be.

Every time Christmas comes around It's time for shopping Traffic jams

It's time for shopping

And I've got a Christmas list together I'm gonna buy presents For all my love For my friends For my family For everyone that's been so good to me I'm going shopping

Like, I promise you, if you listen to that song three times, you will be obsessed with it. Yeah, I believe it. Like, the first time I heard it, I was like, well, there's a few clunkers on this Numero group playlist. But now, that might be my favorite song. But another song that I really like, that I was hoping we can play, and maybe from your end, Andrew, so all the audiophile-ness is not a nightmare, is by a singer named Margot Gurian. And the song is I don't intend to spend Christmas without you Which I then went on a little journey trying to figure out who Margot Gurian was And she was just a singer who was born in New York And had like kind of a couple of not even hits But just songs that bounced around the furthest ends of the charts I guess she wrote a song called Sunday which was popularized by a band called Spanky and the Gang, which was not from the Little Rascals. It was like a kind of a folk group called Spanky and Our Gang.

And Our Gang, I mean, that's so funny because Our Gang was Little Rascals, and was Spanky the name of their dog? Or am I just feeling, maybe my brain is mistakenly feeling in gaps here. No, no, you're pretty close.

So the lead singer of Spanky and Our Gang was Elaine McFarlane, and they thought that her name sounded like George McFarland who played Spanky in Little Rascals. So her nickname became Elaine Spanky McFarlane, and then the band was called Spanky and Our Gang, but it's not the kids from the TV show. It's adults who are singing. They're from Chicago. But what I thought was interesting about Spanky and Our Gang, so the song...

Sunday by Margot Gurian was sort of popularized by this band Spanky and Our Gang. That was sort of like Margot's big thing was someone else did one of her songs and it got kind of popular. But I thought, this is really amazing. The big hits for Spanky and Our Gang were Sunday Will Never Be The Same, Lazy Day, Sunday Morning, and then the song Sunday, written by Margot Gurian. They really had an area of emphasis as a band

Yeah, they love being cozy

They were all about that Not having to do anything on a Sunday Imagine having a song called Sunday Morning A song called Lazy Day And a song called Sunday

They have a song called The Scaries They have a song called

They have a song called Pop Up

They have a song called Making Chicken Stock All the things we love to do on Sundays

So With all that explanation going on Can we hear a little bit of this Margot Gurian song called I Don't Intend to Spend Christmas Without You? I think it's kind of a nice little song. I like I'm adding it to the playlist.

You went away, you told me, you weren't coming back, you told me, but now it's cold and Christmas is coming too. And I don't intend to spend Christmas without you We had a fight, what all that you weren't even right, what all that I'm all alone when Christmas is coming too La la la la la la la la la And I don't intend to spend Christmas without you You ought to know when you're alone It's a lonely time to get through

All right, so that's a little Margot Gurian. That's amazing. I love it.

It's cool, right?

The reason I was a little bit slow on pulling the music down when you started talking was I was texting you the cover photo of this particular album that I took this song off of called 27 Demos that I'm playing from off of Spotify, and she just looks so cool. I want to listen to all 27 of these demos. I love this song.

What's kind of amazing about this list, because these were all, you know, these are basically artists, and mostly anyway, it's artists and releases from artists that maybe didn't really make, you know, the charts back in the day, is that there are just so many folks in here who the one thing that they made, I'm talking about this Numero group list now, the one thing they made that got any attention was a christmas song like there are people you probably haven't heard of um like because i was listening to somebody on the radio the other day talk about this who was used to be a record executive and he said anytime we had our bands in the studio we would have them cut christmas songs regardless of what time of year it was or even if they were a christmas band because a lot of stations that go all christmas music they got a lot of time to fill So you might be like a Eugene Viscione Who is the guy behind this song That's also on the list called Christmas Feelings And Andrew, when I send you a picture of Eugene Viscione You will think this is exactly the guy who sings this song

It's Christmas time again and you are here My heart is filled with happiness this year My love for you has grown so many ways On this a very special Christmas day And I love you It's snowing and the weather

There's a little Christmas, by the way, number one song that comes up on Spotify for Eugene Viscione.

So what do I think he looks like? He's got a sweater. I've sent you the photo. Oh, I haven't looked yet. Does he have a sweater on? Not in this photo. I just picture like a big cornball. Well, I don't want to make judgments. I don't want to be. Oh, okay. Okay, so it's a headshot of him, so it's hard to see what he's, but he looks more like sort of like late 70s country influence, but not doing country.

Oh, that's a good point.

You know, like kind of big bouffant-y hair with really long sideburns that go all the way down.

Maybe even mutton chops. They may have entered mutton chops territory.

And wearing what looks like could be even a denim sport coat. Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely. Good point. Something like that, yeah.

So if you're burned out on your holiday music, your Christmas music in particular, maybe check out this Numero group on Old...

Spotify try to throw a little more money in Joe Rogan's pocket if you possibly can but not Jonathan

Goldstein's you know that reminded me of something interesting that Vives and I were listening to as an alternative it is an alternative to maybe the same Christmas records over and over is and I'm pretty sure like my TV down here has really gotten to know me like big time like because I don't have cable so I don't watch any cable everything is on demand and like including youtube i don't know if i've told you this it's very interesting like the other day my tv suggested i watch your latest hay dummies or the one where you're in the yellow um when you're in the yellow rain slicker and like it's funny to see and so jenny's like i want to watch that and i'm like huh you don't want to watch mine um but anyway so we watch it and it's like really interesting to see us on the tv yeah and actually especially when we're shooting outside where with the nice light and everything like it looks good but it's interesting how we think we're making these things just so people can watch them on their phones or whatever on these on the tiniest of screens but also if you have a setup like mine and you have youtube just like you know like kind of installed on your tv you're probably being served up tbtl content on your television the

way i am which i think is interesting but we've been thinking about this dumb thing as an audio

product all these years but really we're television stars well i i am i use the word star knowingly Certainly. But anyway, what is suggested to me, sorry to go on so long, is a just a still shot of an old Kmart parking lot, like in a snowy parking lot with some like digital snow coming down. And it was like two hours of Kmart holiday music that you would have heard in store in the 70s and 80s.

I could get really down with that.

again like everything on everything my tv suggests to me is a vibe and when i say a vibe i don't mean a modern vibe i mean very much like a mid 1980s you can just put this on and and just pretend you're a kid again and everything is okay uh which is weird because things were less okay when i was a kid but yeah um as part of i'm part of my midlife crisis this like two hours or whatever it was of in-store kmart holiday music it hit right for what we were we're just hanging out chatting maybe throwing some darts and stuff and it was just great to have on in the background

that does so did you where did you feel like some kind of weird primal urge to find out what the

blue light special was well you know well we have to get out of here let's when in the new year let's have a conversation about the history of Kmart because Genevieve and I have a different theory about Kmart's um place in in in culture I think it's very regional oh okay that would be this is

preview andrew for when we get to this conversation because i grew up in the era when kmart was

something you made fun of me too and that's why yeah okay yeah we're getting close to what the conversation we're getting close to seeing the shape of this conversation okay good i'm you're like listen i could do this all day all i have to do is write the newsletter and some video stuff you're the one who's trying to start your holidays and so i'm trying to test the bidet let's be honest yeah you're trying to shoot some water up your hoo-ha um so i'm trying to be respectful of your

time but i'm trying to i'm trying to i'm trying to i'm trying to give listener jonna a voice here um as the listener who is going to suggest a song for us here as we get out of here and wrap up this music for your weekend and wrap up this week of broadcasting jonna says hey dummies i've been feeling this jam by steady holiday lately as i navigate a lot of big changes in my life it's got a twinge of melancholy laced into the mostly uplifting sound i hope you like it it and thanks for the show uh so this song i believe is called newfound jam by steady holiday we didn't you play steady holiday you didn't play this song did you i did not play this song but um

let's see here um a steady holiday was i always remember them as a musician that advertising on instagram apparently works because it was a rare like i believe instagram ad for a musician i was like what is this and i really liked it i think that song might have been called oranges or something uh i had not you know there's a song called newfound oxygen i'm wondering oh that's probably the one okay good i bet yeah i was trying to figure that out while i was talking why did i

go with newfound jam maybe i'm maybe i'm well no it says it on the that's what it says on my show

sheet too so i hope i'm playing the right song here i think i wrote that part though oh did you

like i think the words newfound jam came out of my brain and oh okay john is i don't want to okay good i don't want to paint her with that with that brush so great all right thanks everyone for listening this week hey we're gonna be back here on monday with a brand new show for you please do join us for that and like i said lots of fun next week i'll be checking in from germany and p fletch will stop by so stick with us will yous in the meantime have a great weekend take care of yourselves and please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all

Drifting way apart

See how we organize Out here things begin With newfound oxygen Newfound oxygen So long breathing in So long that I now hold my own I'm ready for a heart blending if it gets me home

You know that little ice rink across from Santa's Village?

The Ranky Dink. Know it. I named it. I named it after my dink. It's very rinky. Power out.