Muse

What up, dog? Let the fun begin. That's a tuna, bro. This comes out to all the coffee lovers of the world. I just love hot Cheetos! That's my wife. Ooh la la! Go Browns. Jalapenya! Ba-ding! Uh-uh. Get off my call. Don't miss the sausage fest.

If we wanted to, we could have our own business. No, I agree. If we really wanted to, we could. It's just that, do we want to do that? Do we want to have a website and a blog and be like, this is what we did today? No. It's too much work. Yeah.

And too expensive. Wow, you're really good at puzzles.

I did them all the time as a kid. As my mom used to say, when you're doing a puzzle, it's like having a thousand friends.

You know, Johnny, I just don't know how you do it. Do what? A four-hour show every morning. Just talking to the mic and your voice goes out through the wires. Once a week, whether you need it or not, somebody comes in here and gives you a check for $38.

Have a good show, dummy. It's what you do is so important.

Alright, hello, good morning, and welcome everyone to a Tuesday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live that's a terrific title it jumps out at you like a rat in your underwear drawer my name is luke burbank i am your host coming to you from the madrona hill studio perched high above the mighty columbia where it is just an absolutely miserable day out there you know you like to get wet though it's the opposite of dry in fact let me get a look here you know during the winter games i tried to spruce the place up and uh i did a big project where i um like filled a wheelbarrow do we say wheelbarrow or barrel i think it's a barrel because you're barrowing things about anyway i filled a wheelbarrow with uh all this mulch this grinded up stump and i put it very lovingly around various uh kind of beds here planter beds and such and it's so rainy today that it's kind of erased most of the stuff that i did uh over the break but that's okay uh it's warm and dry here inside the studio and we are ready my friends for episode uh 4,015 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. Did the University of Washington Huskies win the national championship of football last night?

The answer, sadly, is not yes.

And yet, I don't feel that terrible about it. It was kind of, I don't know, I was in a zen place. Is this just low T? Or what's going on with me? That's the saddest thing I've ever heard. And I'm just sort of okay with that? Anyway, we might talk about that. Also, a woman in Virginia has been digging a giant hole underneath her house. She calls it her suburban mining project. Oh, my God.

That's so crazy. Why?

And I was following it on TikTok, as were other people. And then somebody decided to get involved and call the cops. And now they've told her to stop doing it.

I would say, can you please stop doing this stuff?

So we will update you on that as well. And I tried to spoof the customer service person I was talking to on the phone yesterday. I wish I hadn't done that. It didn't go super great, so we'll talk about that as well. Plus, we'll talk to this guy, longest-running co-bro 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.

Shh, they'll never know, Luke. That the music went away? Shh, shh, shh. I was so confused. I'll fix it in post.

We'll fix it all in post. Let me add to the complication. It's so cold here in the Madrona Hill studio that I'm wearing a ski cap, and my headphones are going over the ski cap, so I don't know if I'm actually hearing things properly or not. So when the music went away, I thought, well, it's probably the ski cap.

Yeah, the thing that you're forgetting here is the music didn't go away. Oh, gotcha, yes. We're going to fix it in post. So that's the one takeaway from today's show should be the music never went away.

I've already blown a fuse in this room trying to keep myself warm. So I apologize for delaying the broadcast today.

Yeah, no problem. Yeah, we were getting rolling before, and then I lost the connection. It turns out you'd lost power there briefly.

And then, yeah, and then nothing else notable happened in the intro.

Nothing else notable has happened.

So, anyway, how are you doing? How are you feeling? I'm okay. You're feeling sanguine, you say.

Yeah, oddly enough. And, again, I don't know if it's low T or just where I'm at in my life or how I feel about college football. But, you know, the Huskies lost to Michigan last night. I guess my take on the game would be Michigan played better than we did. Like, the Huskies did not outplay Michigan. I also think we got kind of unlucky in a few departments. There were some kind of game-modifying calls. I don't want to say that the game came down to one particular call, but I feel validated by the internet this morning, and not just like Husky Nation. I wasn't just trying to go find like-minded individuals, but none other than the New York Post, Andrew, said that the internet was very mad about... Well, basically, there was a big play for the Huskies that was called back because of a hold that seemed extremely minor based on what goes on, you know, in every play of football in college and NFL. There's always holding. It's just kind of like, when do you call it? And then there was a big play for the Wolverines where the Husky guy was very clearly held trying to get to the quarterback, and they didn't call that one.

I might be remembering this wrong I would trust you more but I think an interesting part of what you just said is those two things happen in the opposite order right so it's especially frustrating when the announcer says oh wow really just letting them play today and like you could see the jersey of the Husky being stretched across the field it's like oh we're just letting them play today we're not calling fouls like this and then to call a ticky tacky against the Huskies am I remembering

it right that that was the order that was a different hold that went uncalled um than the one that i saw posted in the new york post this morning but yes there was a couple of them i mean that's just what happens again i don't feel like the huskies were the superior team yesterday so that's why i'm not you know super mad it was a weird i i watched the game in kind of an odd fashion last night which was by myself in my house that's actually starting to kind of feel like a house but it doesn't have like a kitchen or a lot of furniture was sitting on an outdoor like uh like a patio chair in my mostly empty living room and then just pacing furiously and just kind of yelling into the void but not even committed to it if that makes any sense like i i was almost doing a pantomime i was doing a caricature of what i thought i should be doing during the game but at no point was i that emotionally like invested in it i wasn't rocked by the outcome in the way that maybe i should have been and don't say low t again but

what do you you attribute that to like just when like was it kind of the journey of the season and where you ended up or where you are in your life or where you are on a monday at 4 30 which is a weird time to be watching a high pressure game yeah i think it's kind of all of the above i think

part of it was that the the football team the University of Washington Huskies had almost lost the previous eight games yeah right yeah I thought you were gonna say the previous game

and I was gonna say a lot of them yeah no the previous most of the games this season were like

we're not gonna do this and then we just kind of pulled it out and just felt like our number kind of came up and we played you know what was listed as the number one team in the country and they looked like it in the first quarter also our quarterback michael pennix jr i think was playing a bit injured which wasn't helping his productivity so i don't know it was just kind of just one of those things where you know it's it's it my guess is it'll be a long time before my college alma mater is playing for the national championship of the thing of football that is and so i should have been more kind of i don't know i should have been more wound up about it and i kind of wasn't I didn't even watch the beginning of the game. I listened to it on Sirius Satellite Radio as I was picking up a Papa Murphy's pizza. Like that's that's where I was at with the game. I wasn't even watching the kickoff.

Well, I actually have some analysis here about why I think the Huskies lost yesterday. And it might be a little bit, I don't know, even more specific than yours. And that is that it's the media's fault. And here's what I mean by that. the the Huskies have been like sort of the underdogs and not expected to win and almost all of their matchups you know going in like I guess you know two games ago going into the Pac-12 championship they were they were you know I can't remember I think they were like seven point underdogs or something and everybody thought like oh it's just they've gotten lucky and the Ducks are just a better team and then after that going into the playoff game against texas people were like well now we see you know we like we like them we're glad that they're in the

um you know playoffs but uh i still just don't think they have what it takes to beat texas but we like the team now we finally respect the the huskies and then leading up to this final game it seemed like everybody was like that's it you know what we've counted them out for too long the huskies are going to win this and then as soon as you start hearing people be you know optimistic i feel like everything goes out the window so i blame optimism and i blame the national media

You were watching a different pregame seven hours than I was because the folks on like ESPN, ABC, whatever were seen. Well, for one thing, they had a Michigan Wolverine, Desmond Howard, as part of the pregame crew, which, you know, can we throw a Huard on there? Can we get it? Can anyone find a Huard?

I feel like if you're going to have a look under your cushions, there's got to be a Huard under there somewhere. a Huard or a Hasselback I guarantee you everybody's got a Huard or a Hasselback

I'm sure his name is like Trig or something

much love

can somebody get Trig Huard over here I feel like if you're having if the pregame team has somebody from one of the two like that is to say the broadcast team has one somebody from one of the schools i.e. Michigan they need to balance it out with somebody from the other school I'll take a Cam Cleland I'll take a uh i almost said joe jarzinka but he has passed away r.i.p i'll take a i'd take an emptman uh who i sent you a picture of by the way on the on the team chat the the sports chat the other day oh who is that he was a uh a husky who won the heisman trophy as a linebacker i believe which is pretty hard to do yeah and uh and was the number one overall pick by the indianapolis colts and then had some uh injury issues and and didn't really have the nfl career that that people had expected from him i remember knowing and i say this with peace and love knowing that steve emtman uh his his his fortunes had really changed when i was sitting next to him at the drift on in playing blackjack i'd say six years after he was the number one overall nfl pick

Is he the photo that you sent with a guy who looked like he had wires coming out of his head or maybe a laser baldness? Oh, no, no, no, no.

That's Kirk Cousins doing his—

Oh, that was Kirk Cousins.

That was—okay, this is—yesterday I said we weren't going to start the show with football, but today it's day two of the rest of our life and all bets are off. That was a text to the sports chain of me joking about how I was trying to send all of the good vibes I could to the Chicago Bears to beat the Green Bay Packers. And that is from the, I think it was the show on, was it a Netflix show called The Quarterback? Oh, yeah. Quarterbacks?

Yeah, yeah.

Which actually very much humanized Kirk Cousins to me. But one of the many things that he does to try to improve his game is wear some kind of brain stimulator while he's running through plays in his head. And I just think it's one of the funniest pictures of all time. Ah, okay. He's got this kind of skull cap on that's supposed to be zapping his brain. He still believes the earth is 7,000 years old, so it's not working yet.

Or it's working too well. Turn down the zaps. The zaps are either too strong or too weak. You're talking about a baseball collector's card image you sent of us of, okay, yeah, of a football player. He was kind of in that kneeling position. And there was a lot of U.S. flaggery, I believe. Yeah, which is weird.

I don't know why they decided to integrate that into his Indianapolis Colts football card.

Okay, gotcha.

But somebody did. And when I say that I was playing blackjack next to Steve Entman, that's not me saying that his fortunes, like he, I don't know what he did with his money. I don't think it was, he wasn't down on his luck. He just was playing blackjack at a shitty shoreline casino with me. And I didn't like the feeling because I was, you know, in 1991, when the huskies were co-national champions and he was our star player um i you know was very very intrigued by him and obsessed and excited that he won the heisman trophy and all that stuff um wait did he win the heisman am i or did he just go first in the draft and i'm conflating the two um somebody will correct me on that if i'm wrong but anyway it was weird to you know don't get too close to your heroes they have feet of clay don't get too close to your heroes sometimes they stay

on a 16 against a face car i think is the updated version of that saying do you miss the old drift

on in oh i do but you know what i miss is the black and blue burger oh okay they served that there they it was a burger with blue cheese on it that was pretty much it wasn't that wasn't actually that uh sort of groundbreaking but what was amazing was it was free

and that was an era of my life where free food was a really big deal even though I was gambling so you could have said Luke how about you spend the $15 on food it's a sure bet food it's a sure bet but I remember going there with uh our friend Jessica and this was I was friends with Camaro Kev but I don't know in the early days if he was hitting it was me the mummy and Jessica a lot at the drift on in and we realized that if we played there long enough they would give us a uh you know probably a three dollar burger for our trouble and we just thought that we had really cracked the code on life because we would sit there and play blackjack all night lose way more money than we could afford to lose at the time but get a free black and blue burger out of it and so to answer

your question yes i do miss the drift i'm picturing you saying all in and you're pushing a bunch of greasy burgers into the middle of the table.

They were like, sir, this is blackjack.

That's not even a thing we do here.

And I would pick it up with Rod Webb.

You're dressed like Wimpy from the Popeye comics, if I could keep things young and relatable here. I remember going in there.

Are we coming up on the 100-year anniversary of Popeye, by the way? Steamboat Popeye? Oh, man. I am so happy about that, by the way.

You are?

about that people can just go absolutely crazy on the mickey mouse well see okay can i okay let's

talk about that for a second um it you know people are making all kinds of memes of steamboat willie that early version of mickey mouse because the copyright has finally after a hundred and i think one years or maybe it's a hundred years has finally expired despite you know disney's attempts to keep copyright on everything in perpetuity but um everybody's gonna like hey let's have fun with this now and they're making all kinds of memes and stuff whereas i don't think disney was ever actually going after memes like the only like there's that i guess a horror movie that is sort of based on a early mickey mouse looking character that is now legal but aside from that isn't it more of just sort of a joke that is kind of like hey we can we can fuck around with mickey mouse online now like you could always do that disney wasn't coming after the dank memers was it uh no

I don't I don't think that was their goal but I just I'm you know this again it speaks to my deprived childhood which I got into at some length yesterday so I don't need to revisit that but like I didn't go to Disneyland as a kid and so it never it didn't imprint on me by the way Steve Emman wasn't even in the top three of Heisman voting in 1991 he lost to Desmond Howard of michigan guess where desmond howard of michigan was yesterday andrew calling the pregame full circle it went desmond howard casey weldon ty detmer one time cleveland brown ty detmer or was that coy detmer then that was that doesn't ring a bell to me at all he was on detmer was on that shirt you sent me in television chris hayes yesterday

that might have been was that like kind of early 2000s before i was paying attention i don't know Must have been, but there was a Detmer on your team.

But anyway, I couldn't have been more wrong about Steve Empman winning the Heisman. So I hope that people haven't wasted too much time sending me an email telling me I was wrong. In 1991, when the Huskies were co-national champions, I do believe he was the number one overall pick, but he wasn't even close for the Heisman. Well, it's okay.

All right. Thank you.

Take a break?

Yeah, he really cleared space for me and I had nothing. I was just trying to be there for you.

I'm telling you, I'm wearing a ski cap. I can't hear things. The music did not go out earlier. I'm all over the map today.

It was almost disconcerting how much of the music didn't go out during the intro.

Right. That's what threw me. That's usually a time when the music could go out or not go out. And in this case, it didn't go out. And I've been off the rest of the show.

But go on with your Disney thoughts, though. You were talking about it. You were kind of excited about this.

I didn't grow up in a Disney family. And so it's never really been a thing for me. and i would say also it's on some level i guess i kind of low-key resent disney for no good reason it's just like disney adults let's just say it's not a lifestyle for me and and and if i'm being honest and i don't like this about myself i think i'm kind of down on the idea of being too into disney so somehow the idea that you can make a porno with steamboat willie it feels like come comeuppance to the whole that's the name of it actually comeuppance with steamboat willy oh that's a very good wrap the show there yeah probably i

mean i was ready to wrap it two minutes ago when i just said that's okay well i completely lost my

train of thought because there's a spontaneous waterfall across the river from me right

now which tells you how much it's raining out here I guess there's just there are waterfalls now happening in Rainier Oregon that didn't previously exist oh yikes I hope there's no

spontaneous waterfalls in your house because I feel like that's what we came close to a few

months ago oh yeah you got that that's totally working again right you're that situation has

been rectified yeah you know the sump pump we still should get somebody out here to take a look at it because as some listeners pointed out like a sump pump shouldn't just stop working which

is what happened. How did I miss the opportunity to call that show The Sump of All Fears? Oh, but

you had a different pun that we went with that was also a movie. Oh, no, I think it was, I believe you were proud of this one as well. Let's give them something to talk about. I could have also gone with something about Mary. That's maybe my favorite. But, you know, it has not stopped working since. Like, we went out there, we saw that it was flooded. Genevieve while standing in two inches of water, unplugged it and plugged it back in. safety first safety last and um anyway and then it started working again and it has not gone out like it has worked continuously um since then and you know some folks have said like that shouldn't happen you probably want to look at a new one but it was during a time of you know excessive rain so we still don't know what caused that malfunction but we i think i told you all about it we had rented some you know industrial floor dryers these big fans that we had going for about 24 hours And since then, we've also invested in a dehumidifier, which I'm surprised that it's taken me this long to talk to you about my dehumidifying ways, Luke.

I have a dehumidifier in my basement that I haven't set up yet. Where'd you get yours from?

It's satisfying. I think, Genevieve, got it directly from the manufacturer, and I'm trying to remember what. It's an appliance brand that is quite common. I just can't think of it off the top of my head, so I won't stop it. I don't think it's Maytag. It's almost like an electronics brand, I think, but it's not Sony. It's not Mitsubishi.

Does it feed into its own? Did you get an additional tub for the humidity that's turning back into water to be stored in? This is my big question because I'm deciding.

Oh, interesting. No, I'm interested in hearing more about that. So the choices that we were looking at was do we want one that has the option to like connect it to a hose that could drain continuously somewhere as opposed to just being collected in a bucket? We got one that can, I think, be set up to do either, but we are just collecting it in one basin right now and emptying it about daily. We got to a point where it was running constantly and pulling water out of the air. It's very satisfying to empty that big bucket and just think all of this was air.

And now you found yourself unbelievably thirsty after darts. Well, it is dehumidifying you for real.

like you can sort of set it like you can set it to like what level of humidity you kind of want right like there's a numbering system yeah and I just I'm like just put it on I put it on continuum like well this is a basement the whole point is we should like be you know drying it out as much as possible but after the first I don't know actually maybe couple of weeks or several weeks I started to notice like yeah hanging out down here my eyes were getting dry like in my hand it was working too well and I'm like do you notice that too she's like yeah we're like okay let's not run it constantly at full blast anymore so but it's really good we have it set up like kind of not uh far away from where i have a shower you know a bathroom down here so definitely when i get done taking a shower that thing is on and we have an exhaust fan it's not big at all it's like maybe up to my knees um and it's not a bad looking little device when i was a kid we had a dehumidifier in the basement and it looked like oh god right that'd be in like the grocery store or something it's just like but no this is a nice little sleek looking white rounded little guy that

sort of is unobtrusive okay i'm glad to hear it's not huge because i bought one on amazon.com because i am actively trying to make the world a worse place and when it showed up this was the one that had the best reviews and stuff it was shockingly small and i haven't actually i i think i was in my mind harking back to my childhood when we had like um you know what we really had going a lot was humidifiers we had both dehumidify things we had a lot of humidity we were trying to create when there was a cold going around the family which was often i remember my sister's bedroom and like poking my head in and when i say my sisters i am referring to the time when four of my sister's shared a bedroom and i remember the humidifier running just like humidifying the air with a big slathering of like vix vapo rub in there uh-huh did y'all do that on your chest

right the vix no in the humidifier oh uh if my mom did that i don't i don't remember but i do remember her pulling like a humidifier into my bedroom on the occasions of me being sick i don't know if she put anything special in there other than

like water. I don't feel like that's a thing people are doing. anymore like have you heard about humidify have you heard of someone humidifying a room because they or their child has a cough that seems like that was a very 80s thing I think so I don't know

if this is the disconnect between me not having children or or what I mean yeah but you are right like what I hear about are people having like air purifiers in their home or whatever but I don't

hear anybody talking about humidifiers well I'm glad to hear that your dehumidifier is a sleek little number because that's what i got in the mail and i was thinking it was going to be like a behemoth and somehow in my mind its size was also going to affect how you like sort of useful it was and so i haven't set it up yet but it does have a little hose that i can put because again it doesn't it's not a large item i feel like it's going to fill up pretty fast like it has some internal thing to collect the water but i i'm going to run the hose off the back and put it in some like you know bucket or something and i'm gonna just go my basement is so lousy though that i don't even care if it floods that's a weird feeling like there's a it's been really rainy around here as i've been mentioning and when the water trickles in and i'm downstairs doing something i just look over and i just i have no opinion on the matter which is really different than when i was living at the burbank springs place in bellingham where every time the basement flooded it literally ruined my week now i'm just like try me water you can't make this basement

shittier well you're living in sort of a you know uh what's the word you always use sort of an in between hovel that wasn't that wasn't the word i was looking for but i mean obviously you're sort of like in a in a construction zone right now right and like and it sounds like things are shaping up upstairs but it's a whole process so i think like you can only you can only worry and put your energy into um so many things at once and if you don't have like family photos on the floor down there or what have you i'm sure i'm sure there will be a time when you'll want to you know laser focus on that but that's not now but i'm interested in what do you honestly i don't

know i mean i had my dad literally put floor over what used to be the stairs to the basement i may never think of this basement again it is a it's a it's a dark place that i don't want to consider

Oh, because you only can access it from the outside now?

Yeah, you used to come into the house. What used to come into this weird porch area, which we just learned was actually definitely the outside of the house. My dad and I were cutting a door opening the other day, and as we were in an interior wall of the house, and we realized there was tar paper in the wall because it used to be the exterior of the house. Oh. but yeah used to walk in and then there would be some stairs that you could use to get down to the basement and over my dad's protests i said we're taking out this stairway we're making this usable floor space upstairs and we're never talking about the basement again and i was like once we move the washer and dryer upstairs which has now been the case uh we won't ever need to go downstairs and i will tell you this easily 150 times a day we have to go downstairs it was a terrible decision

by me i feel like our dehumidifier yeah luke i want to go back to the dehumidifier talk holds about four gallons of water i'm gonna say i could be wrong bigger than mine i don't know i should talk to genevieve about this but um can you send me a photo yeah i'm gonna send you i'm gonna take a photo i'm gonna make it the show pic today and i'll send you a photo later i don't have one on my phone right now you know you open up my phone it's not a picture of your pride and joy None of the cat photos and dehumidifier photos. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised with me. But, but my point is when we had continuously running for, you know, especially for the first few weeks, we were, it varied. I thought that was very interesting that it was varying degrees of humidity because sometimes we'd have to empty it after like 12 hours and sometimes it'd be like closer to 24. but that was once it settled in once it kind of got past the the initial phase like i think we're emptying it about once every 24 hours so you're you don't have a place where your hose can just drain continually like down oh like you you said a bucket before but more like a wash tub with a

drain so that you don't have to empty it at all oh no i think i will be having to empty whatever it's feeding into but i like i don't have there's not a drain in the corner of the basement i mean I mean, there is like one of those, you know, like a, what do you call those kind of sinks that you just, again, don't care what happens to? Yeah, like a washtub? Yeah, like a washtub. Maybe I'm using the wrong phrase. Kind of like a big, very burly kind of like washtub sink. The thing that I used to urinate into when I was a kid because there was no bathroom downstairs.

Because everybody was in the bathroom upstairs?

Yeah, exactly.

My four sisters had decided to take up residence in the one bathroom in our rental house. So I would sometimes just get up in the middle of the night and go pee in the washtub, which is kind of gross. But also, you know, you got to do what you got to do. Anyway, I have one of those downstairs. So I could I could probably just set the thing up and have it go right into that. I would do that.

If you're not going down there at all and you're not worried about space or what it looks like, I don't see a huge benefit of you, you know, having it in a hose going to a bucket. that's marginally bigger than the bucket that is automatically in the machine. And also the machine will kick off once its own tub is full. If you have it into a hose, into a bucket, if you don't remember to go check on it, you could have that bucket overflowing. You know what I'm saying? So I would use the one that is built into it. Or if you use that hose, yeah, if you could have it go into some sort of a drain. So am I already misunderstanding? You do have one of those wash tubs down there? I do, yes.

Oh, yeah, do it to it, my dude. And by the way, I've yet to pee in it. I just want to tell people I've reformed.

Thank you. Just name your little dehumidifier, and you guys can both pee in it at the same time.

Oh, speaking of anthropomorphizing things, I'm ready to move Randy the Roomba into the real house. It's very exciting because there's now a kind of regular floor, and it's covered in dust. So this will be a good use for Randy. He's been living out here in the studio kind of doing nothing. So that's another big development around it. Thank you. Thank you. We're very proud. Let's thank some donors. And then I would like to share not only the Huskies' failure yesterday, but my failure, Andrew, to make the lady at Senlar laugh.

Okay.

Hey, I need to tell you about something very profound that happened in my life recently. I started listening to the new weekly podcast called Text Me Back. It's hosted by our friend Lindy West And someone who I hope will someday be my new friend Megan Hatcher Mays Guess what? Lindy and Megan were friends in high school They went to Garfield High in Seattle And they've maintained their friendship all these years later And now they have this podcast That I have to be honest with you When I first listened to it It made me want to be a better podcaster I feel like it hits all of the high notes That TBTL hits on its best days And then a lot of other high notes as well. Lindy and Megan are crazy smart, and they're serious people, but they also just like to crack each other up. They said something in one of the first episodes that really stuck with me. Lindy floated the question as to if she was just friends with Megan because she was afraid of her. And I had never felt like I resonated with a podcast more. Text Me Back is a production of KUOW in Seattle, one of our favorite radio stations, and also the NPR network. It's so good. I'm glad they're only doing one a week because we can't have five-day-a-week competition here on TBTL from something so incredible. Check out Text Me Back wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, let's thank some donors who are keeping TBTL in business. Folks like Emmy Kate Pickering Of Lakeland, Florida Emmy Kate It's our friend Emmy Kate In Lakeland

That's right, we met Emmy Kate at a Waffle House Yes, God

I'm so hungry right now I could really do some damage At a Waffle House And I don't mean that in the way that people Currently do damage at Waffle House Which is get very drunk and tear the place up I just mean I would order everything smothered And covered and eat a lot of it

I know that Waffle House is a place that people often will go when the bars close, like in states where you have Waffle Houses, but is that now some sort of a trend that you're referring to about people trashing places?

Well, I think it's just a crime of opportunity, or I should say it's a place where there are a lot of Waffle Houses in the South and they're open really late. And so if the Subway Sandwich place was open really late, that's where the fights would be. I don't think it's specific to Waffle House. It's specific to being open late

But you're seeing a lot of like brawls on TikTok It sounded like you were referring to someone There was a period

I actually think it seems to have lessened But there was a period of time where people were There was a particular I forget what It was like a Waffle House employee A young woman I believe Something was A chair was thrown at her And she just Knocked the chair away with one hand So unfazed That it was incredible to witness it became a whole meme it was just like she just like if somebody threw a chair at me i'd be done for the week uh-huh and she just was like just like just kind of like knocked it away with

her hand and just continued like doing whatever she was doing i think that yeah i think that even

crossed my transom at some point because i can i feel like i can picture that i don't know if you would have sent it along with something or if it just was so ubiquitous that even i saw that i can

sort of picture that just like i i you know what you know why i think it made it onto your radar because that was weirdly one of those internet things where somebody used footage of me to kind of like bolster their their internet clip they had made because i did a tv story about waffle house back when the super bowl was in atlanta and cbs wanted some kind of like i don't know story that seemed relevant to the south because that's where the so on super bowl sunday this tv piece aired of me at a waffle house where i like tried to learn how to you know cook at the Waffle House, which was actually very complicated because they have this amazing system of putting cheese on the plate, like a little speck of cheese and a little speck of uncooked hash brown that tells the folks cooking at the Waffle House what the order is. Like it's a visual language. And if the jam or the jelly is upside down, it means something. There's just a whole crazy thing that they do that's impossible to learn, as I found out. But because I did that TV story, somebody was trying to do some kind of meme-y thing about how Waffle Houses were becoming totally unhinged, and there's this TV story of me bouncing around where I'm in the bathroom of the Waffle House getting ready to go out and try to cook, and I'm putting the spatula in my belt like it's a pistol or something. Anyway, I made it somehow into this weird internet thing about Waffle House, and I wonder if a listener maybe sent it to us and you were on that list.

I have no I remember you doing that story but I've never seen any visuals from it so I did not see you connected to the thing I think maybe you're really missing out no nonsense woman just maybe me and again like I see things that were on tick tock a few months ago when they make their way over to Instagram more of a real guy yeah exactly I'm as real as the street so anyway that's I am sure it just was like I'm sure it was just probably you know whatever it just well Andrew as my as my colleague and co-owner of this business I would appreciate if you

would please look into uh the various memes involving me on the internet i feel like it's a professional courtesy that is long overdue okay sounds good i'll get i'll get right on that thank you thanks also to ryan stevenson who's in san francisco california i believe

still waffle house lists probably huh in washington state waffle house lists or was

I believe so I don't think that they're I again if you'd watch the story Andrew you would know or if I remembered the story I would know what the westernmost expansion I think maybe Colorado has a couple you know what they do have in San Francisco though and Ryan if you haven't been out there you're about to get some really unhelpful information from me because I can't remember the name of the place but there is a little diner that's perched above what used to be sutros baths which out far out in the is it the sunset neighborhood i'm very bad with san francisco geography but i think out on the water there was this huge at the time huge indoor pool and like you know hot tubs and whatever it was called sutros baths and it had some distinction at the time of being maybe the largest indoor pool in the world or something anyway it's fallen to disrepair it's just concrete kind of wreckage now but above that perched above that is this amazing little family-run diner that is a great if you can't find a waffle house ryan go to that place

that's above sutros baths i think i remember you may be talking about that i think i was doing a

It was a show from San Francisco at the time, and I was obsessed with that place. So much so that I don't remember the name.

I have a cute little map here that is making me hungry. Just the little cartoon images of waffles. And by the way, I love Waffle House when I've gone there. I've always enjoyed my meals. Of course, Genevieve is from...

You've also cooked there, sort of. You've stood in the area wherein the food is prepared.

I've stood next to the people who cook, certainly. But Genevieve also grew up in Georgia, so that was my kind of first introduction to Waffle House when we would go visit her family or whatever. And that's when I learned that was a whole it's a whole thing more than just like having an IHOP or a Denny's in these parts. But I'm looking at this map that shows how many Waffle Houses are in each state, at least as of 2022. Western most would be Arizona with 15 of them in Arizona. As far as north, it looks like Ohio is really starting to gain some ground. It looks like there's like between 50 and 80 in Ohio now. I do not remember if they were there when I was growing up, we were not like we were not familiar with the Waffle House culture. We you know, like I just remember going to places again like Denny. or friendlies or something along those lines but uh does look like kind of indiana ohio and pa or the northern most states with uh with the waffle houses in the nothing gold can stay department

andrew eater.com reporting that louis restaurant the place that i was just waxing on about

of course has now closed oh right what the heck now i think you even made a speaking of me following your me me's i think you might have even made a video from that little diner and we used it as

a hay dummies or some sort of thing i might have like did i try to like surreptitiously videotape the place i was like very obsessed with it and i've probably on this very program andrew realized before that louise is already closed like it's it's weird getting to be 47 because it's it's like the old nbc slogan uh if you haven't seen friends it's new to you so much stuff is new to me like this is feels like new information but i also think i probably the last time san francisco came up i probably talked about louis and i probably googled it and i probably found out it was closed but this all feels new and fresh to me i don't remember you mentioning

it by the way and i do remember the video so you know there's something i got a brain cell or two

clanging around in there you're welcome ryan now you know where not to go in san francisco i like

the way that we're now you're welcoming our daily donors right i know well what did we do yesterday

that was like let's try to do that as close to pass as possible to the thanking of the people giving us money people like james watt of oakland california are james and ryan friends maybe or could they be friends meet you guys meet up at sutro baths also i learned it's not sutros it's sutro baths uh thank you james i don't know if he's part of the watt football dynasty but with The name James, it's possible.

Potentially, which would make you a very scary person. They've already got a JJ and a TJ. And now we've got a J for James.

Nick Kennedy, the king of Ska, is checking in from Tacoma, Washington, home of Joe Coy.

Nick. Oh, that's right. Joe Coy. Hey, Nick. Nick's such a long – I love seeing Nick's name. One of the longest, long-time listeners of TBTL, way before my time. and just, I don't know, just stand-up person. Used to be on the show back in the radio days, right?

Yeah, was a guest talking about his job at the time of driving a drug van. And I always have to clarify, not for a cartel. Well, I don't know, big pharma? I mean, arguably, who does more harm to the world? But it was a legal conveyance where Nick would bring medicine to people, I believe, living in elder care and stuff like that and other places and i think we used to do a segment uh about like what what is your like what are the what's the thing you're doing while you listen to tbtl and nick checked in and it was a fascinating segment and all these years later look at nick's name right here on the list thank you nick appreciate you thanks also to elizabeth maxwell of houston texas hey elizabeth home of

nrg stadium nrg kind of a clever name for i assume nrg not for the stadium but the company itself is an energy company of some yeah i think that's not bad i will say that yesterday with all the

ballyhoo leading up because that's where the national championship game was nrg stadium and is that the thing that used to be that's not where the astros play that's different

currently i don't think the astros play there like right right i'm i'm that must be where the

texans play i guess right i'm dead i'm not sure about but uh but they were doing all the you know like the pregame for the national championship starts you know 12 hours before the game and my dad and i were working in the house and i had it on and at some point my dad just goes what the hell are they talking about i had to mute it because the ballyhoo was so it was it was so ridiculous and i can tolerate it because i love sports but like my dad was like that whatever this is we need less of it just the sound of it yeah the sound of it and again just the it's like five people who in my opinion are not overly talented broadcasters they're good at sports broadcasting but that's sort of different than filling time um like we do expertly here andrew yeah right folks like elizabeth maxwell and also sean miller who's in seattle washington thank you sean um they're you know they're just like they just run out of stuff to say pretty quickly and so they were cutting to one of the like i think maybe this person was not a sideline reporter it was almost like the pre-game show had a sideline reporter but it wasn't holly rowe who was one of the sideline actual sideline reporters and i forget the name of the other person it might have been like a person who was literally just there to run around and do stuff during the like 12 hours of pre-gaming but she was like i've got the championship trophy in my hands and it's shaped like nrg stadium and i thought has there ever been a less valuable thing than the champ

The championship trophy shaped like NRG Stadium. It's like the Stanley Cup is a thing. Yeah, they just change it all. The Lombardi Trophy in the NFL is a thing. Like, you made the national championship. Why don't you just make it look like a freaking Cheez-It? Or a Pop-Tart.

That was actually kind of fun.

What a non-important thing. The shape of NRG Stadium.

So it just changes? Because it's not always there, right?

Next year it'll be, it'll be, it's the shape of the gallery furniture.com arena.

No, I thought for sure. I mean, I guess the, well, whatever. We don't have to get more into sports talk. Is this championship, it's kind of newish, right? I know the structure leading up to this big game changed in the past 10 years or so. So I just would have thought there would be a more august trophy going back years. But maybe because everything is so new and can be bought and sold, it's just like, yeah, we'll just slap energy.

Who will hoist the Cool Ranch Dorito Cup? Yeah, I mean, it used to be that if you won the, like, Rose Bowl, well, I mean, there wasn't an— this is why noted Heisman Trophy fourth-place finisher Steve Empman, Andrew, was on a team that was considered the co-national champions. I noticed you mentioned that. Because back in the day, you just—they just kind of said, like, if the two teams never played each other, they just kind of tried to go with, oh, maybe this team is better. and and so uh that changed some years ago so that there's now a playoff system and then there's like you know supposedly the two best teams play each other and hence this new trophy but there was just something about her going and you know one team will possess this trophy that's shaped like nr or it has the nrg stadium logo something where it's like don't bring nrg stadium into this conversation that is far too nouveau uh for uh for something like the national championship of of college sports so anyway thank you to our donors uh who are supporting tbtl and making all this college football talk and cool ranch doritos talk possible today we would not be here without you hello and welcome to top story uh yesterday i was on the phone andrew with my um um beloved uh home equity line of credit servicer senlar and these are warm like every time you say

senlar it just reminds me of just like a fire burning in a hearth that i'm drinking who will hoist the senlar trophy next year i am senlar what is your joke your wife's new name is senlar senlar so i'm just dying to hear how you're i'm dying to hear how you're how your jokiness goes

over with senlar well this is the same company that charged me a mysterious 50 late fee that still has never been exactly explained to me um and then put it on my credit report absolutely torpedoing my personal credit meaning i can't get right now until my credit goes back up a different home equity line of credit i want to it's it's such a toxic relationship with this place because they destroyed my credit so that i can't go find someone else to take over this loan which is desperately what i want to do because every time i call them i get a different story it's always somebody who and there's nothing against you know working from home or being somebody who does customer service over the phone but this place doesn't seem to have it's it's deeply ironic that it's called the central something loan something that there is no centralized place that i can find that's called senlar like you can't call a building and then get escalated up to like a manager who knows what they're talking about you're constantly talking to somebody who is at their home with a small dog barking in the background who is probably for the first time trying to navigate the software of this company it's just a total disaster but i um was trying to find something out about this nightmare business relationship i have and i called yesterday morning i try to schedule this when i'm in my car because i'm less mad because it just feels like hey if anything useful happens while i'm driving like like for instance i tried to call them on saturday only to find out they weren't open but i was driving so i was like well what else was i going to do with that 20 minutes of my life so this is my new strategy i just call them when i'm in the car because then whatever the outcome is it's like well i was going to be driving anyway and i get somebody on the phone and she says hi i'm apollonia uh what can i do to help you and immediately my brain goes to purple rain because that's the name of the character in purple rain that prince says you've got to purify yourself in the waters of lake minnetonka why don't

you purify yourself in the waters of lake minnetonka i love that that's canon i know

it's the chapelle show andrew this is a journey i went on this morning remember how i said everything is new to me this morning i looked

up Prince saying purify yourselves in the waters of Lake Minnetonka and I found the clip from Purple Rain and it's way underwhelming compared to Dave Chappelle pretending to be Prince playing basketball against Charlie Murphy

saying why don't you purify yourself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka

that's not even what he says in the movie

it is what he says he just says it like he just sort of mumbles it and it's outside and it's not as punchy of tape right he says it

slightly differently because I only realized this this morning why don't you purify yourself in the waters of lake minnetonka is dave chapelle telling charlie murphy to clean himself after getting sweaty at basketball and it's ever so slightly different in purple rain again because i went this morning to try to find it and found prince kind of whispering it un uncharismatically and then i had to go back to dave chapelle joking about it but as soon as i hear that the person at senlar is named apollonia i'm like don't don't say it don't say it don't say it don't bring up the waters of lake minnetonka do not like this is this person has heard this too many times it's not going to add anything to their life so i wait the at this point i don't even care what's going on i don't care about my interest rate i don't care about the late fees nothing about this call is interesting to me other than my attempts to stifle saying and i by the way i wouldn't say to this was a woman i wouldn't say to a woman over the phone ever the word purify like if i don't know them you know what i mean like it almost sounds like beyond just being an obvious reference like your name is like the person in in purple rain um it's also just like a weirdly i don't know it's somehow kind of gendered or charged in a way that like i wouldn't it isn't like um you're killing me smalls you know or something like that that there's something about i would just wouldn't say to a person i don't know who anyone really purify yourself you know so i'm sitting on it sitting on it finally the call is coming to an end and i can't hold off anymore i say well apollonia i'm hoping to get at least a little bit of credit for not um saying you know purify yourself in the waters of lake minnetonka and she goes what's that from she had no idea there's a character In the movie Purple Rain Named Apollonia

Or she's just so over it That she just pretends she doesn't know

I feel like she said Oh, I know that there's a character In The Godfather named Apollonia Oh, really? News to me, by the way She goes, yeah, I've heard that there's somebody in The Godfather I'm like, how do you, what? That's not A super common name Like, how do you get that far Into your life without anyone saying to you or not registering that your name is the name of a person in the movie Purple Rain I mean this person is much younger than me I mean it was a name before it was the characters actually that's not even a character I believe that's the person's real name her real name is Apollonia

right? I'm sorry the actor in Purple Rain

I don't think the character is named Apollonia I think she's a performer I believe she might be Greek or something

my knowledge of that stuff is like I'm not a big Grinch person

Oh, you and Apollonia would get along great.

Yeah, no, it's true. Like, I've never seen that movie. I mean, only, like, I pulled clips from it for our, you know, Prince tribute and what have you. But, like, I just didn't grow up steeped in that. But, yeah, because doesn't he, he mentions Apollonia in a song as well, right? Well, Kanye does. Oh, yeah, that's probably what I'm thinking of. Yeah, now I can hear it. He goes, that's how long I've been on you. Since Prince was on Apollonia or something? Yeah, I think maybe that's what I'm thinking. I'm also blown away. So Apollonia is the name. I think this was Godfather Part Two, I think. But maybe I'm wrong. But when Corleone goes over, young Corleone goes over to Italy, that's his first wife over in Sicily or whatever. Michael. Michael is his name.

Well, that must be who this Apollonia at Senlar was named for because this person had not heard of. and Andrew this is when a smarter person would just kind of uh you know just say thank you very much for your help and um and hang up I had to double down I said well if you're ever in Minnesota you should really check out Paisley Park now let me just reiterate for everyone this is a person in Phoenix who's never heard of the movie Purple Rain I don't see them making a trip to Chanhassen minnesota on the outskirts of minneapolis to visit paisley park but again i just i just went into some sort of a fugue state where i really needed to try to redeem this i was like uh you should really check out paisley park and she goes well i'm in phoenix i haven't really been very many places in my life but i guess i'll put that on my list and i thought zero percent chance you're gonna go to paisley park considering you didn't know that that was the person in the movie purple ring. Okay.

I'm going to say something here. Now I'm going to say something. I like Apollonia. I mean, she sounds like a good hang on the phone. Absolutely.

This is not, I want to be clear. This is not on Apollonia, the person helping me with this. And by the way, Apollonia was kind of great in the actual service call was helpful. The issue was, why is so much of this show about my home equity line of credit, Andrew? I don't know. But the weird thing about this is the way that you draw on the funds of this thing. So basically what it is, like a credit card that is attached to the equity in your home. That's what a HELOC is, not to be confused with a HEDOG, which comes up every time we talk about this. But the way that you actually draw the funds, and this is the most ridiculous thing, is they send you a checkbook that's attached to the account and you write yourself a check, which is so silly. How in 2024 are we? Is it not just digitally transferable? I don't know. But they also changed all the checks Because everything this company Senlar does Is the absolute most annoying way to do it So not only do you have to have these checks These weird checks Which at the bank they look at you like you have two heads Like, hi, I'm writing myself a check Into my account from this other thing Just please process this for me But they've also changed all the checks So they then have to send out new checks But the new checks never came to me And I called, that's what I was calling Apollonia about And she said, well, it was the holiday And she looked in my account and she goes The sending of the new checks was approved like four days ago So when I called them a month ago and said Can you send me these new checks? And the person said, we'll send them out today That person was not being accurate, it turns out It was not going to happen for like two and a half more weeks Or something when some division of the company Had to approve sending me the checks But that's exactly what happens all the time with this place You talk to one person and you're like Okay, we're sending them today, Mr. Burbank Great, thank you very much And then you call Apollonia in a month And she goes, oh yeah, that wasn't sent until three days ago

But she sounds like a straight shooter She sounds helpful Yes, I very much appreciate her

But if the checks don't come in three days That's when I have to call Vanity That's another member of Prince's entourage That's when I have to call Vanity at Senlar And find out what's really going on And she'll say, well, Apollonia lied to you

Uh-huh, uh-huh.

That's kind of how it goes.

Little Stevie does all my baking for me.

Have you watched Lillehammer?

Is it even Little Stevie, or do I have that wrong? Is it Little Steven? Who is it?

You mean Stevie Van Sant of the E Street Band?

I was trying to make an E Street joke, but that's another culture that I am not familiar with, the culture of Bruce Willis. The fact that I call him Bruce Willis probably means I'm not ready for this conversation.

Who can forget one of Bruce Springsteen's biggest hit,

seagram golden wine coolers on the porch with little steve wait is it little it's little steven though right i got that i got everything about that wrong no i think i would go with i think

little stevie sounds okay i think no i don't think you're wrong and he has a whole radio show and i actually saw a clip of him online the other day talking about how i think it was maybe i don't know if it was david chase or david milch one of the ones from the sopranos one of the like creators of the Sopranos came to him and said we want you to be in the Sopranos and he said no I don't know how to act I love that I do too like what I mean I thought he was great on the show I loved him in the Sopranos and I think it's so interesting that clearly one of the creators was like must have been at an Easter like a Bruce a Bruce Willis and the East Street Band concert and just like looked up there and saw Lil Stevie playing his guitar and thought that guy could be one of tony's henchmen like what a weird thought to have and it worked out great and the guy turned

him down the first time i do think it's little steven for for whatever it's worth but i have but that that doesn't really matter oh it does i mean there is no little stevie but i have come across something else that is just it's made my day and i don't know why but when you typed in a little stevie and it did take me to steven van zandt's wikipedia page that's the first result also known as little steven or miami steve um but then under people also ask the first question is who is bruce springsteen's best friend i love that so much and i'll bet you also what's the answer when you click on it it looks it sounds like it's complicated uh there been uh it looks like they are talking about little steven uh steven van zant uh the concile how do you say the word the conciliary conciliary of the east street band Springsteen says so I'm thinking that maybe they're best friends also I feel like you're

not I think the reason that came into your mind is it because in the song

kiss by prince he says little wendy's parade oh no maybe that kind of was in the back of your

brain no i think that no because i i have again i don't know any i don't i wouldn't have even known that actually it's just that i don't know anything about prince's crew and i know almost as little about about bruce willis's crew and so like i was just trying to make a joke and i just

got like a lot i just got a lot of things wrong there luke well the but did apollonia win a heisman in 91 the reason that i know that line from that song kiss by prince is because that was a song i used to do at karaoke but i never knew how to i never knew what was supposed to be going on in the little wendy's parade part of the song so that's not a misheard lyric that's the proper i believe it's the real thing because it would show up on like the little screen but it's not it's not it's sort of not really sung it's kind of sung but it's not you know it's not the main part and i just i would just kind of usually do some sort of awkward dance on stage and cover for that part because i didn't really know the little wendy's parade part so that i'm willing to say that that was why you thought that steven van sant was uh part of uh prince's crew okay uh here's my question to you my friend should we i stopped my clock at 33 minutes are we 33

minutes and 17 seconds into the show no we're a little bit further in than that should we talk

about suburban mining tomorrow or should we get into it right now this is i'll i'll maybe give you i don't i don't want to oversell it i'm not saying it's like the biggest topic ever for us

um but i don't have i don't have tons of voicemails or anything and you just mentioned i don't know i saw this in the show sheet today but i didn't read up on it because it sounded like something you'd been following and i was like this is one where luke will just tell me the story so i'll i need to leave it up to you but um so i don't take the wheel exactly so if you just want to fill me in on this mining situation whether it's now or later but it doesn't sound like it's something

that's going to be a huge conversation it's weird with tiktok how i mean the for you page is an algorithm and it is often delivering me things that are getting a lot of views and yet somehow when i see something kind of quirky whether it's like somebody fixing the the hoof on a cow uh or or this woman calla who's been digging under her house i feel like i discovered something like i feel like i'm the only one who knows about her and it's like no it showed up on my tick tock feed like other people know about her i feel weirdly possessive of the story of this woman in herndon virginia who i guess i'm surprised to hear it only started in 2022 because uh it feels to me like she's always been in my life but she is a um i'm gonna guess maybe a woman in her 30s who i think is a software engineer who um popped up on my tiktok feed because she's been started out she said she wanted to make a storm shelter in her basement um and then has just been digging and digging and digging and uh sort of confronting all these engineering challenges of this project under her house so she has excavated so much and like she i mean tons and tons and tons of rock and in in doing this she had to like buy a mining cart like a powered mining cart that is basically like a you know it's it's a like a kind of a wheelbarrow a lot of wheelbarrow talk on the program today for some reason i was right about that right it's wheelbarrow yeah yeah

but you really got in my head about that during the intro because i think as a kid i would always

say wheelbarrow right don't you think most kids i would say 80 of kids are saying wheelbarrow because we've never heard barrow we're not in england yeah no that that makes sense although

i don't think i'd had to like think about it for a long time but then then you said that during the intro like is it wheelbarrow or barrel and then suddenly like i couldn't tell up from down left from right i was just like so in my head about that but yes we'll so she she bought this like

powered kind of wheelbarrow sort of thing and then she also built this whole series of like like getting all of this rock out of her basement turns out to be the biggest challenge so she had to build like an out like a sort of an elevator of sorts to get she had to get the rock up out of the basement and then onto this kind of slide going out her window that then dropped first it dropped into the back of a truck and then she would drive the truck over to a big dumpster is

this hand-powered like this elevator thing that you're talking about is this like pulleys and

she's like pulling it down no it's motorized but she builds everything it's crazy so she's i mean this is what's so intriguing about the whole thing is that she like will encounter an obstacle And then she'll just learn about it. So she's like over the process of doing this has learned how to weld Learned how to pour concrete learned how to build concrete form

and uh she's just been doing this under her house and i i the whole time i was watching it i was

like how is this not being shut down and it's going deeper and deeper it's not deeper and

deeper like it's flooding then she has to build this series of like she has to uh get all these pump systems going uh to get like forget what you and v has been dealing with she's gonna need a dehumidifier she didn't need a we're gonna need a bigger dehumidifier like she's gotten so far down in the water table that it's flooding constantly so she has this like series of pumps running she has this whole series of air purifiers going that she built like an hvac system because she's having to work with these various things down there that are toxic and so to make sure that the air is circulating like it is it turns out this is why a mine is a very expensive thing to do because there's a million things you would never think about and the whole time that i've been watching it i've been thinking like how is this not getting shut down well it got shut down

it did get shut down how far down did she get though this is i haven't gotten the depth that

i know of but i mean it's just it's really wild what she's been up to and uh somebody dropped a dime on her now when people internet this one of the first things you're going to see is some story about how there is pushback on her because this she is a white woman but according to one of the stories maybe she happens to live in a community that tends to be more non-white people or something because one of the narratives that's now emerged is she's digging a big hole under her house that's endangering minority communities and i don't i mean i don't know if that's the case or not but that's what if you internet her that's one of the things you'll see i mean that was certainly not on anyone on anyone watching her's radar i mean she just is living in a fairly i don't know typical suburban home and digging underneath it that was the extent of the story um but she thinks supposedly that she's it's all going to be fine and that she's stayed within the footprint of her home and she's done everything according to code so she seems to think that once they come out and and and inspect it she'll get her permits and she'll be allowed to go back to

her mining project i doubt that based on everything you've told me just seems like a long shot yeah officious these things can be um but i i hope that's true i mean there is just i mean we've talked about this on the show before and i know that there was sort of a sort of a viral or or meme-y thing that was going around um a few years ago i think it was even there's a there's a wikipedia page about this that is um on the depths of wikipedia uh that that uh you know instagram account that looks up interesting things on wikipedia but the masculine urge to dig i think do i have that right is this something that crossed your radar i'm not familiar with that

but i mean i'm familiar with it in my personal life but i'm not familiar with that on as an

internet thing yeah and like and i don't know like where that started or why it's necessarily masculine but like it was just sort of a thing for a while and now I think that's become other things too like the masculine urge to meme or whatever but I think the original version of that was just like that some people once you start digging you're like well why I think about this all the time too especially now that I have this little you know we have a little postage stamp plot of land here but it's like it's my land why can't I just go out there with a shovel and dig like when I was a kid when I was a kid digging was an activity just like digging with no specific purpose in mind was an activity and you know what it's awesome and i'm an adult now and i have a bigger shovel and it's ridiculous that i'm not just digging for fun because there's cool things down there and then you start thinking about it you're like why don't i just keep digging further and further and further down and i'm not i'm not exaggerating here like just thinking about that it's like yeah why don't i just go outside right now and just start digging and seeing what's down there i mean i think there are probably some pretty good answers to that question

in the negative yeah but but my desire to do so is is real my problem was i had a shitty shovel as a kid which was you know those army shovels the kind that you could that folded i had one of

those but mine wasn't it was yours kind of old and i gotta say yeah mine was like from the like

army surplus store it was green you know it was military green and it was like a cool thing a cool object because it folded I guess the idea was they probably didn't want people falling on it and killing themselves because it didn't really make it that much smaller that's a really good

point and they were a little sharp they were spades and so they were sharp at the tip but it

wasn't it's I mean if you're in NAMM it's probably the best you can do but if you're in your backyard on 77th Street as I was it's not the best shovel you could have but it was the one I had and so I I would, about once a year, I would have. a plan to dig a massive sprawling underground fort which uh in my minds i was going to have a couch in it and lighting and i would start digging this would probably be i'd say around august you know i just fully run out of things to do over the summer and i would start digging my underground fort and i'd probably get maybe three feet down and the hole would i didn't understand that when you're digging a hole you need to really be mindful of digging the sides out i bet you were a good hole digger you probably got this i didn't so the hole would just get smaller and smaller and smaller to where it was just this like tiny little you know thing and then i would just get bored and leave and then my dad would yell at me because he was like someone's going to break their ankle in that and i think he was especially sensitive because he was going to run in the montana state cross country championship and he broke his foot in a gopher hole so he's really been on the lookout for that the rest of his life yeah okay I got so many things to say

first of all I gotta admit that some of the holes I was digging was like this idea of just like oh I'm digging traps and I don't know who I was trapping but a lot of my childhood was like so we had like I grew up kind of in the country and so I could go way back into the way way like recesses of the yard and like these weedy areas or even like kind of quasi wooded areas and so we you know the idea was always to build a fort and there was always the idea of well you got to build a fort to you know protect yourself from your enemies now I don't know who my enemies were but that's just sort of that was just sort of the idea and so therefore you would also dig holes and then you would fantasize with your friend Don like well ideally we'd have pointy sticks at the bottom of this but that that's a little bit too far even for us but you know and of course we're not actually trapping anybody or anything but it was just like sort of like that was to be the idea

of covering that with leaves and someone falling into it yeah that was just that's everything when

you're a young kid like and I think my dad successfully did that um and got into a lot of trouble when he was a kid I think him and my uncle Steve his cousin sticks I don't think there are pointy sticks but I do think that they made a little trap like that and I think my aunt Mary his sister um did like kind of fall I don't know if she fell into it tripped over it or whatever was it but hurt herself a little bit and got into some trouble for that so I don't know if I had to keep my whole digging a secret from my dad or not although I think he would understand the desire now all of that so that's one thing I wanted to say nextly I have something I wanted to ask you if you remember and I think I might have tape related to it I'm going to play this tape and ask you if I'm right about what this is I'm going to ask you if you remember this nope do you remember that how about this

it is simply two guys who just wanted to dig a

And what was the purpose?

Yeah, what did they want to do with that? They just wanted to dig a cave to hang out.

Do you remember that story? And do you remember what show? This is a lot to ask, but do you know what episode of TBTL we talked about that on?

Absolutely not. But I do know I have a file called Toronto Cave Press Tape. So at some point, was it a notable episode?

It was. It was. So that was that was a story from Canada about these two guys who just made like a little cave for themselves so they could hang out, which was just so awesome. And I probably told all the same stories and anecdotes that I just told now. But the reason that story sticks in my head, like just certain certain things we talk about. Sometimes I can really remember where we were. And I remember that was our very first episode as employees in a podcast of American Public Media. I had come up, I think, from Seattle at the time, right, to record a whole week of shows with you as sort of to make the show kind of special instead of being in in different neighborhoods or different cities or whatever. I came up and spent a week with you in Port Townsend and we did the show in person in your post office studio. And, you know, there we there's a lot of energy. You know, we're very excited to be part of a network. And, you know, we knew that we were going to be super famous and successful once that network put all of its, you know, its marketing power behind us. And which ended up becoming very true, of course, which is why we're so rich and famous right now. But anyway, I just remember there was a lot of energy. We were very excited. And I remember that was the top story that day.

Those I feel like the Canadian government was much more chill about this than the government of Herndon, Virginia's being. Although this is the thing. i'm i'm sort of rooting for this woman because she's just doing this odd thing and i i will be honest with you the the person who i think kind of busted her is somebody who might be themselves a geologist and this other woman on tip tiktok is was kind of basically saying like this is a terrible idea and and describing this woman as having something called the dunning kruger effect which is basically the idea that when you don't know something you don't know what you I don't know.

don't know and so you overestimate your ability and i i will be honest with you like my first thought was like why are you player hating like i was kind of like why are you ruining this for all of us and then i thought you know if my neighbor bob was digging a giant hole under his house i would probably not love it like just wondering what the kind of like uh erosion implications would be the sinkhole possibilities you know kind of like just it's the kind of thing that i'm in I've enjoyed watching her process, but also I kind of get the idea that maybe her neighbors wouldn't be jazzed about it. And if I put myself in their place, I would also not be jazzed about it. So I kind of have a lot of different mixed feelings on the topic.

I'm trying to honestly survey my feelings and what I think they would be about this. Like, depending on how much kind of distraction outside, like if these contraptions that she's making are creating noise or disturbance or even just, you know, an eyesore, I could see myself maybe being concerned about that. Like, I do think that my main concern is for her and would be for my imaginary neighbor in this scenario, safety. Just like I don't like this sounds really awesome, but I really don't want your house to fall down on you.

By the way, the tunnel has caught on fire at one point.

See, yeah, I would be concerned about that. But I don't know if I'd be concerned about my, like, impact on my own home. I'll tell you what, if I knew my neighbor was doing this and I was friendly with them, I'd want to see it. Like, I'd want to probably go down there. Like, wouldn't you? Or would you be too scared?

I mean, I'm doing it vicariously through her TikTok videos.

Yeah. Well, I'm not a very brave person, so I'm wondering, like, would I just, like, look down there? Because I have my height thing But it just seems so

Do you also have a depth thing?

Well, they're kind of the same I'm afraid of both heights and depths Well, they're kind of the same If you're standing on the edge of something that is very, very deep

I think I'm more afraid of depths, honestly Really? Yeah, like I went down a literal and figurative rabbit hole, you might say Of basically, this was some months ago Of people, of terrible stories about people basically losing their lives While spelunking or caving because this is a whole other corner of the internet and particularly tiktok people filming themselves going in caves but what they love are these caves that the only way you can get into them is to squeeze through an opening that is so small you literally have to exhale the breath from your body and reduce the size of your sort of torso and it's like that is my idea that is literally my idea of hell like that is terrifying to me you know who had to do that jack reacher i believe in the first or second book of jack who by the way the actor who played jack reacher hated his time as a ninja turtle i learned that recently is that true true story yes see this is why we do the show because eventually we'll get to the guy who plays jack reacher on amazon talking about his time as a ninja turtle what he was mad about because this was the live action ninja turtles but i think it was a ton of like green screen and uh i think that they were it was the kind of thing where maybe the turtles were like it was that andy circus thing where they're covered in ping pong balls you know what i mean like chroma keyed like like i don't think it was a um a costume it was more like they're playing the turtles but they're doing it on a green screen and then they're somehow being cgi'd later and the guy was so mad the guy who now plays jack reacher on amazon because and i don't know which turtle he was i don't know why that matters but it'd be interesting if he was donatello but um i i saw an interview with him and he was mad because they didn't invite the turtles to the premiere they didn't invite the people who play the ninja turtles to the premiere of the ninja turtles movie because nobody would recognize them well that was the thing he said everyone told us that we were going to be part of the movie that this was like an acting gig where it was as if we were in any other kind of you know film like this was pitched to us as you are central to the movie and then as soon as the movie was done they just the studio completely forgot about us like we were just pieces of meat who'd been wearing a bunch of ping pong balls like he was very mad that he was not invited to promote the semi-live action version of the Ninja Turtles movie that he was in.

Do you know that Donatello does all of his own stunts?

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, my friend. Emails or V-mails?

Yeah, I'll play a quick voicemail for you here.

By my count, we're 33 minutes into the show.

Oh, okay, good. Then I'll take my time with the setup for this one, as I usually do. My favorite thing close observers of TBT will notice is to give a really, really long setup for a voicemail, only to have the...

listener set it up succinctly as soon as i hit play on it but in this case echo exactly i do think that this needs some context here also this goes a while back um several weeks ago on the show you were talking about you were just a little frustrated you were jogging somewhere and there were some people on the sidewalk who were just like jawing and like totally not paying any attention to what was happening around them and sort of blocking the sidewalk right can i can i

clarify that a little bit because i'm not just i swear i'm not just saying this to try to um i don't know be defensive or something really what struck me about it was the level of comfort in their bodies to be standing in space and not hyper vigilant about everyone else around them that was what was it was almost i almost had sort of a begrudging respect for it it wasn't even like can you get out of the way i was like what would that feel like i've just never been that comfortable in my own body for one second to be standing somewhere talking totally unaware of the rest

of the world around me and i'm envious yeah i know i don't know if i'm envious but i know that i mean i'm definitely frustrated by people who i feel like don't have situational awareness a lot um maggie though coming in with a different kind of energy seems pretty chill about the whole

thing okay it's maggie middle shelf i'm about one maybe two minutes into the podcast and i'm already hot i am hot and i am bothered oh my god

luke jogging towards people and they don't move is she saying my address why are you bleeping it

Look over, you hear somebody breathing, look over, say hi, attempt to move, pretend you're moving, do something, don't just stand there like he doesn't f***ing exist. I'm so f***ing pissed. Okay, I love you guys.

Power out. True story. That was part one of two voicemails that came in. I literally ran out of beep tape. So we'll just play the first one there. But yeah, that really got under Maggie's skin a little bit.

I love that Maggie was mad enough for both of us, for both me and her. You know what I mean? Find yourself a better ride or die. Hey, what's going on? Sorry about that, Andrew. Hold on, hold on. I just thought we needed a little bit of that music to really set the mood. No, I was trying to play the Buster swearing audio from Arrested Development, But, of course, I still have the email music playing. No, I appreciate that. You know what? That's actually kind of a relief because I don't have to be mad at those people at all because Maggie's doing all of the heavy lifting. Like that woman under her house in Herndon, Virginia. Maggie is doing a lot of hard work on my behalf, and I appreciate that.

I was pausing for a break there, but I don't think we need to do a break there. I think it's probably time to say goodbye. I think the listeners have had enough. I'm starting this show with the same, the power out that matches the power in. Wait, it's my job to do awkward breaks on the program. I was just like, yeah, perfect time for a break. Oh, wait, hold on. What happened there?

Where is the westernmost Waffle House? You said Arizona? I believe Arizona, yes. How soon can I be there? I really need to start eating before the show because once a food-type place is mentioned, it's really all I can think about for the rest of the program.

Yeah, do you want me to plant some Boston Market seeds in your imagination?

Where's the westernmost Boston Market still? All right, thanks for listening, everybody. We are going to be back here tomorrow with more Imaginary Radio for you, so please do join us for that. In the meantime, have a great Tuesday. Take care of yourselves, and please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

hi dummies uh it's listener rachel here from pittsburgh uh and i'm calling i don't know i need i need to know what to do i um it's midnight wearing that right now and i got frantic because i'm a girl scout leader and um it's cookie season and there are some things that I need to hand out to the girls but I can't find them so I was looking to the back of my car I'm feeling frantic I can't find anything I think maybe I put in my husband's car for some reason he's fast asleep I take his keys I go to my husband's hatchback I lift up look in the back seat it's not there but I have found some disturbing paraphernalia there's a poster here that says an american tradition dq hot dogs and it is a full-size laminate poster with a grungy baseball and a chili hot dog. Underneath that, I have a cotton candy blizzard poster, also from Dairy Queen. They look like what they have in common is Dairy Queen. I have an Independence Day poster. These all look like they're from the 90s. Keebler fudge, striped cookies, fudge shop blizzard. And now we have, we return to the classic, another hot dog poster, a different one though. I don't, what do I do with this, guys? My husband teaches STEAM at a local school. There is no reason. Power out. Power out.