Muse

You swear that the testimony you are about to give this committee is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God. I do. Please take a seat. Senator Evis, it's your time. Gregory Hirsch, executive assistant to Tom Wamsgans, correct?

Yes. Yes, if it is to be said.

I'm sorry?

If it is to be said, so it is.

Are you all right?

Yes. I merely wish to answer in the affirmative fashion. You can speak to us normally. Okay. No, thank you, sir. So I shall. TBTL!

Can't you say anything in a normal way?

The answer, sadly, is not yes.

What I like to do is first lay down a kind of syncopated beat that isn't so much about what it is altogether. It's more about the modulation and what it is once it starts. It's a little bit of a groove.

You have no reflexes, your blood tastes like root beer, and some of your bones appear to have vanished. He's a hot tomato. I don't know what a hot tomato is.

Whatever happened to that wonderful man who was in here last week wearing that funny-looking turtleneck, seeing that dumb song, wearing that smelly aftershave lotion? What ever happened to him? It was too beautiful to live

Alright, hello, good morning and welcome everyone to a Monday edition of TBTL The show that just might be too beautiful to live Here we go again My name is Luke Burbank, I am your host

I like turtles

Coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio perched high above the mighty Columbia If only we were trapped in a castle in the middle of winter with nowhere to go I am definitely trapped in a snowy cottage here looking out at, I don't know, a good six inches of snow that is not going anywhere. I did go outside this morning and do a significant amount of snow shoveling. I have a weird thing anytime I'm snow shoveling, which is I get worried that I'm going to go into cardiac arrest. And that's not something I should probably be overly afraid of. I have decent cardio for my age. But you hear stories this time of year about so many people out shoveling snow and then keeling over. And so the entire time, and I wasn't shoveling like that much, but while I'm shoveling snow, all I'm thinking is don't have a heart attack, don't have a heart attack, don't have a heart attack. Because the TBTL listeners need you to bring them episode 4019 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. So here we are, bringing you the episode that you so richly desire and richly deserve. Over the weekend, NBC was very, very proud of their accomplishment of forcing a record number of people to watch a football game via streaming. They were bragging about it.

I won't trash talk. I won't be out there blowhard.

They had a whole video package celebrating the fact that they strong-armed us all into something, which we'll play for you coming up. Speaking of television, I watched a lot of television this weekend, trapped here in this cottage in the snow, and I found a whole new way to enjoy television. I love television. I've got to have that thing on 24-7. I love the patter. It's a thing that probably most of you listeners have already been doing for many years, but it it revolutionized my experience and we will talk about that too plus we'll talk to this guy the longest running cobra of the show maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships america woke up this morning wondering what he did this weekend take a nap did you build a snowman did you catch a mouse what did you do he's andrew walsh and he's joining me right now

good morning my friend is that how you stave off a heart attack i didn't realize that you You just say over and over again, don't have a heart attack?

Yeah, it's been working for me out here on the Madrona Hill studio. I really did have, well, here's the truth. I've been having, as I get older, I have more and more thoughts about what is my level of physical safety, particularly when I'm alone up here, which is most of the time. So I was putting up some shelves this weekend. I was trying to make it a very productive weekend since I wasn't going to be going anywhere. and I was up on a stepladder putting these floating shelves up and I was standing on the stepladder and I was kind of leaning over the television because one of the shelves goes above where the TV is and I had this thought is this how it ends? Does this ladder kick out from under me? I think

it just happens so often in movies right like like that's just it's this these kind of very what's the word banal ways that that people sometimes leave this planet like hey he was putting up a floating shelf he was standing three feet off the ground uh on a snowy saturday and uh and that's you know when the ladder kicked over or even this morning i woke up and i realized i had slept kind of funny and i have i have sort of a sore neck and i didn't know how bad it was going to be like if it was going to be the kind of muscle spasm where you kind of can't do anything and I thought I'm all alone up here there's six inches of snow the road is not plowed like am I in some sort of danger from that and of course I wasn't I just took some ibuprofen and then I was out here shoveling snow this morning and again I had the thought I wasn't even getting that winded but I thought is this how it ends am I just shoveling snow and then I have a cardiac event and then I keel over like in some Coen Brothers film. Just me wearing too much snow gear lying alone in a snow drift. Well, I need

to get out in front of something here. I am trying I wanted to make a little not even joke, just a reference to a film and of course it's me so I can't think of the name of it. So I just Googled... Rango 2? So I just Googled Rango 2. I'm trying to see if I can call it up. I just googled movies where teens die in interesting ways and I didn't god yeah I just occurred to me that I did I didn't have that on private when I when I googled that so that's attached to my or what do you call it what do you call the little um gosh darn it I'm bad with words when you open up a browser but it's it's private it's like a oh incognito is the word oh sure well that's not

Listen, in your defense, all the different web browsers have different names for that kind of thing. There's private browsing, there's incognito, so don't beat yourself up. That's not the industry standard. I think that's like Google's. Is that Chrome? That would be Chrome.

So I could have just stuck with private there, but what movie am I thinking of? And I hate to put you on the spot, but it's the one where...

Final Destination.

That's literally it. I was trying to think of a final... Like you trying to affix that shelf above the television, that sort of scene. But then it's not that, right? Like it seems, it's setting you up to think you're going to fall.

And as the viewer, we're watching Luke's life and we're like, oh, this is when it happens. Right, exactly. And then it's like, and then he just installs the floating shelf and then just gets down and goes and eats some warmed up soup.

And then has a heart attack on the toilet.

Well, that's always a danger for me, believe you me. Right. But again, you know, I don't want to worry the listeners. I think that that happens too frequently on the show. But like, it's interesting. It's an interesting experience living here where I live. I'm certainly not in the wilderness, but I'm not like right near emergency services. And again, there is still so much snow that is out here. And I will mention, Andrew, my neighbor yesterday, I was again in my many projects. I decided to really channel, I think, you and do the world's most thorough cleaning of the sliding glass door in the living room that goes out to the deck. Yeah, because it's never been cleaned. like they were installed and then for the last six months my dad and i and other people have just been working in the area so there's all manner of dust and dirt and grime and i was kind of waiting until most of the real messy construction work was done to actually invest the time of like cleaning out the little tracks the run you know what i mean just going to town on it i spent two hours yesterday cleaning two six foot no two 12 foot sliding glass doors i mean it was like trying to repaint the Sistine Chapel or something but as I was doing that I noticed my neighbor Brian he's got a tractor and he was out uh like snow plowing he was out clearing his like his driveway and stuff and I I waved at him because I don't know I just he's my neighbor and he kind of waved back he's like a he's a very nice but also fairly serious fellow he kind of

waved back you kind of like two fingers just sort of gently the sort of well what it was was I did

two waves at him and i couldn't like the first wave i kind of i lean out my door and i see him and i wave and he doesn't wave back and then i'm like does that because he didn't see me and then i wave again yeah and then he kind of raises one hand yeah and i'm going did he see the first wave and was like i'm driving a tractor in the snow i don't need to wave at you or gave

you an imperceptible nod that you didn't see from across the way and then he's like oh did he only

see the second wave like this and part of this this is a whole other thing when when I first started living out here and when I first became acquainted with my neighbor who again I actually really like he invited me over a number of times to like just hey grab a beer and we'll kind of catch up and you know he basically was being neighborly and it just kept being like a schedule

problem like i'd have to be out of town or i'd be in the midst of something here so i basically turned it down a few times and then he was kind of like we'll catch up when we catch up and now it's just been kind of like i don't want to say radio silence but i'm a little i'm a little worried that i kind of he i kind of offended him in some way but anyway i see he's out there snow plowing and i just give him a wave like hey neighbor you know we've got a lot of snow going on and then I realized this morning when I look out the the my front door that in plowing his driveway he's created a huge embankment that blocks in my drive oh really I mean I can totally picture what

you're talking about like the city snow plows used to do that to us in Concord all the time then you have to go out there and shovel that really heavy plowed snow away it's not as bad

as like you're describing it's not like up to the waist but it's like up to your knee he seems like a very conscientious neighbor and seems to be very like into neighborhood he's like maintaining this road that's at the base of our properties like i know and i'm wondering if he when i was waving at him if he knew like i'm really screwing this dude over like i'm wondering if in the back of his mind he was like didn't want to get involved because he was like i wonder if he was conscious of the fact that as he's clearing his driveway he is creating a barrier for me getting out of my driveway again one that was easily remedied i just it literally took five minutes i shoveled out a path to victory for me so that if and when i do actually try to start my car which i haven't done for like three days now which is slightly concerning um when i do try to start my car and get out of here uh i can do it it's not like i'm not trapped here by that embankment but it was funny because i was like did he consider just going down did he consider going down my driveway

a little bit in the tractor yeah that especially if you're the person with the heavier machinery too this is this is very curious it almost seems like you have to almost i mean i'm not trying to get in your head more about this but it almost seems like you have to deliberately kind of acknowledge like when i'm when i'm um trimming the hedges that go all the way around our house and they're kind of tall hedges as i've described many times these hedges also go partially around my neighbor's house now there's no expectation for me to do my entire neighbor's hedges there's too much of them nobody expects that but i have to make a conscious decision about where that line ends yes you know what i mean and so and so i act accordingly i stop where i think it seems like i should stop but it's never not on my mind and then like in like we had neighbors in new hampshire in fact like this this fella isn't around anymore because he was an older guy and he did pass away several years ago but our neighbor david he would be out there we had shovels to shovel our driveway but he had a snowblower and he would often not always but quite often come over to our house with his snowblower and do our driveway and i think there's several reasons for that neighborliness it's very kind of like that's a very kind of new hampshire neighborly kind of thing to do secondly because he did know that he had the power equipment to do it third because i think there is some joy in doing that depending on how much if you have a snowblower but a small driveway like you want to snow blow other people's driveways too i i would i think there's some satisfaction in that even shoveling there's some satisfaction in that although i'm glad i don't have to do it to go to work or whatever but be careful you have a heart have a heart attack yeah no because i'll just say don't have don't have a heart attack don't have i'm gonna stop eating vegetables in fact and just start that mantra but anyway yeah so i'm not i'm not trying to paint your i think that i think i'm blowing this up bigger than it is but it does seem like a guy who's got the tractor who's doing the plowing or whatever and who has probably been doing this for years before you moved in there like he it's not lost on him what he's doing to your driveway what wtf the food it's interesting i i

will tell you this i am very very confident that if i got stuck here and i called him he'd be over here and i'm sure yeah yeah like i think he's a very helpful person and also i will add he has a lot of driveway to deal with like his property is pretty expansive and this summer when i was trying to keep him posted on where my progress was with getting so i down the hill from my house is this big kind of field thing and i have to get that as i've talked about on the show extensively brush hogged every summer which is i've got to get this guy named jerry out here to go and basically kind of mow it all down it's not the kind of thing you could do on any kind of normal mower or even riding mower you need like an industrial type of deal and i was so but i always try to keep my neighbor brian posted because he's rightfully so i think has concerns about wildfire and things like that so i was like you know this summer i said hey i'm you know i'm on this i just want you to know i'm i haven't forgotten i'm just waiting for the guy to come out here he's like yeah he goes oh thanks you know cool he goes yeah it's been uh killing me he goes something to the effect of yeah it's been killing me just trying to keep my side of things down so in other words i think that he puts a lot of work into maintaining his property and i think it's i don't it's it's not like he's out there for yaya's it's like i think that it's like you know he in other words it's not just the guy with a snow blower who has like um one little has 20 feet of sidewalk and he's just looking for something else to do with it i think he sees all of this as like the the work associated with maintaining his property but that being said i wonder i would have been it would have been such a nice neighborly thing if i came out and someone had just plowed a little path to my car like hey this is now you can get out of your driveway with this and if you're on a mechanized machinery seems like you know but anyway or at

least clean up or at least at the very if you're not going to go out of your way to do that and maybe even if I didn't know my neighbor super well although it sounds like you guys are kind of buds but if I didn't know my neighbor super well maybe I wouldn't want to be presumptuous and and go onto their property you know but I mean if I have created a little bit of a mess doing my work for my yard in front of somebody else's driveway, I definitely think it's my responsibility to clean at least that up, not make my neighbor's life harder.

I think that the part of the problem is I have a sign that says, forget the dog, owner shoots on sight.

Uh-huh.

So he probably didn't want to come onto my property because he knows kind of how seriously I take the sanctity of my castle. I have one that says, beware of Doug. That's PETA's new kind of guidance on that is beware of doug you know that i'm still that's a uh old far side joke did you know that and

there's just like oh now that you say that it reminds you're just sort of lurking behind a mailbox i've been enjoying the far side uh page a day calendar by the way you were not around for

this but i don't know did you did you actually start doing your paid and we could bring that into this program lord knows it give us something to talk about well here's the deal i um i while

While you were out a couple of weeks ago for the holidays, I went kind of far down the road of pursuing my plan of having, I wasn't sure if it should be random listeners or one person every day. I didn't know exactly what the plan was, but I got a newly rebooted 2024 Farside page a day calendar from my folks, and I was very excited for January 1st so I could rip into this thing. I used to have these in the 90s when I was a youth, and they brought it back for 2024 just using archived cartoons from back in the day. Gary Larson's work from back in the day, not new stuff. And I thought maybe we could have, like, somebody on the phone line, like, if I sent them a photo of the cartoon each day, we could play it on this show. I was not against that idea for the record. Yeah, no, and it was getting—

As long as it involved no additional work from me.

And then people started saying, hey, I want to be one of the people to read that. I got like maybe four or five requests from people. I'm like, OK, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to take a photo. And sorry for folks. I kind of already, I think, told this story a couple of weeks ago when Genevieve was on.

It's new to me.

That's right. If you miss it the first time, it's new to you. That's the co-host of the program.

This is all new information.

But I did have to explain this to several people. So I decided to take a photo of the first five cartoons. It would be the first broadcast week of TVTL of 2024 and send it to all of these people who requested it. then once i got the results i would decide like how to mix it up or whatever of and i want to be clear here i mean i know i'm a little bit of a butterfly i'm not personally offended by any of the cartoons that were in the first five days but i didn't see them fitting well with tbtl the very i don't know who compiled this thing i mean sure the far side sometimes went into some edgy territory for the 80s or 90s um but like the very first one for january 1st i think was the monday uh was about literally luke about eating dog it was like cavemen eating dog and the joke was something like where the term uh putting out the dog putting on the dog comes from which was a phrase i'd never even heard of before then there was one about cowboys lynching people whoa then there was one about and then the other one was about oh it's kind of like about blind people like protesting the wrong building and i was just like gary three out of five like welcome to 2024 three out of five of these cartoons welcome to biden's woke america where we can't even enjoy the far side and again like i think that i'm not like burning the calendar in the streets like the calendar belongs where it belongs which is on the little tall boy outside my bathroom so i can tear it off every day and smile a little bit but i was just like i don't know if the first three out of five of these kind of make me pause i'm like i'm oh and i like the idea of maybe children reading them and then i had problems imagining like the oh and then this weekend there was an electric chair one which really did make me laugh but like i don't know i was like you know what is that the old sparky one no this one i don't remember this one now i'm just doing it now i'm just doing it anyway it was kind of funny it was a classroom full of people and like an adult education class And on the chalkboard, it's just a big picture of a switch, like the kind of like stereotypical switch you would see, like an electric chair scene in an old movie. And it just says, no, Todd, quickly flicking it up and down is not the right answer. Does anybody else want to take a guess at how to operate this thing or something along those lines? And the way it was written was funnier than how I presented it here. But it was, again, one of those things where it was like, I can smile at that in my basement briefly and just be like, oh, that's a little dark, whatever. But just like bringing all of this into TBTL, especially if I was asking listeners to do it, it just was like, I don't know. I don't know how much time we want to spend explaining things or, you know, adding context.

and it it raises the question for me of whoever you know is syndicating this were there again i don't want to be like the woke police but there there had to be 365 far side cartoons that were that didn't that held up better than you know something about eating a dog or something about being you know something that's kind of vaguely racist or ableist or whatever like there's got to be enough of them that aren't that that you could throw those in i wonder why i wonder why they didn't i wonder why they didn't run it through the like because it's already a hard thing to pick because there's so many of them picking 365 you're probably you're already throwing out some some winners why not throw out the ones right away that just seem like

these might hit people differently in 2024 i want to be very clear about something though when i say lynching it was like a cowboy lynch mob situation which is obviously like kind of triggering but it was not racially motivated in any way. So there was no, I have not seen anything. It was some,

it was Pace Picante, get a rope. It was,

it was that tone. Exactly. But again, like it's just, that's not necessarily something I need to bring in, but there was nothing I've, I don't think I, I mean, I'll bet you there is stuff now that I think about it, that probably pertains to native people that actually doesn't stand the test of time. But so far I haven't gotten to anything that I would describe as being racially insensitive.

So it sounds like during the time that we had the Winter Games and I was away, the idea finally sort of came to fruition and then was rejected.

It lived a whole life cycle while I was gone. I was taking photos of them. I was like, oh, yeah, I'm going to send these to the folks. I was like, okay, oh, eating dog, okay, okay, well, I'm sure Tuesday is better. Oh, well, I'm sure Wednesday is better. Oh, come on, guys. This is what you picked for the first week.

um we should uh we should thank some donors but i will tell you that uh it is hazardous out here um with the snow and everything and the fact that i uh did take a tumble the other day do you want me to play you i don't know if this will really pay off but you want to play you some audio of me trying to um well here's what happened to go between the house and the madrona hill studio which is also where the treadmill is i have to like change my shoes there's so much snow that i can't wear my running shoes out here because they'll be soaking wet by the time i get now that i've shoveled everything there is a path but at the time there wasn't any path so i had to put on some like snow boots and then carry my running shoes and then change out here and i thought that would be kind of a funny video to send to becca and so do you want to hear the sound of me just absolutely eating shit in the snow trying to so this is me slipping on the snow boots out on my porch now I'm taking on the snow going up the stairs I'm videotaping this by the way by the way my phone completely enveloped in snow i could tell i was going to ask you like

that is not the sound of somebody in pain that is the sound of somebody who thinks they ruined

something yeah i think i ruined my phone what i realized and this is the truly this is this is the crazy part of the world we now live in or at least the world that i've constructed for myself out here i realized i have this whole event from two different camera angles because i also have like a google nest cam yeah so then i was able to go back and watch the footage i didn't even think of this i was able to watch the footage the omniscient like third whatever you call it you know sort of omniscient perspective footage of me falling on the stairs and dropping my phone into the snow drift and just absolutely mooning the camera just real strong real strong butt crack Sticking out of my running shorts It's not a good look at all But I'm like This is where I'm at out here I'm just photo and video documenting My entire journey And it's It's getting to be a little weird

Well at least it didn't sound Super painful Did you have more to play? Wait I think we interrupted No that was it That was pretty much it At least it wasn't like Oh god

No it was It was not painful But I thought I had I thought I had broken my phone I was very upset at myself, but I guess what I'm saying is I'm becoming all, you know, I'm three days into this, but because I'm up here, because I can't really go anywhere or it would be treacherous for me to, I am just kind of cocooning a little bit, but I'm cocooning by myself. So I feel like I'm getting weirder, like, you know, like I have all the comfort, my power has been on the whole time. I have enough food. I'm like complete, I'm not in any way unsafe. I mean, there are people that are in like negative 50 degrees right now. so i don't want to overstate my dilemma but it is just kind of odd being up here by myself and feeling like i kind of can't go anywhere and and and like i i don't know i'm just i i feel i feel kind of snowbound um but in a very comfortable you know way where i'm not wanting for anything here's what i want and we're going to talk more about television coming up with this peacock thing i want them to start showing television programs earlier on a sunday night So I've been reading some reviews of the newest iteration of True Detective, and this one's got Jodie Foster.

I knew you were going to say that. Man, their marketing has really worked. Genevieve came in last night. I'm sorry to totally cut you off, but we're living definitely in the same world. Genevieve came into the kitchen yesterday evening while I was making chili, because I'm leaning into it, too. And she said, you know, the True Detective marketing is too good. And I'm like, oh, yeah, I kind of want to watch that now, too. She said, yeah, but it's not on yet. I've got to wait until 9 o'clock. She's like, they've got me refreshed. And I was like, it sounds like you have a very similar experience.

Exactly. The football games were done. I was like, well, I thought, oh, I'll watch True Detective and then I can talk to Andrew about it tomorrow. And I go like, I have to, first of all, I had to log into Max, which kicked Becca off of it at her house. Because we've been watching that documentary about the woman Natalia Grace, who was adopted. And there's questions about her actual age, et cetera. So I re-log into the thing here So I can watch True Detective And I'm all like ready to go And I don't know how anything works anymore Because I'm like on the First of all I guess I don't get HBO On my television anymore You know what I mean Like through your cable subscription Is there a universe in which I'm paying for Max but I'm not getting it on my Cable package Can that be

I mean there is a way I know that when we had regular cable, we paid for HBO through our regular cable, but that gave us access to it on any computer as well with a Max login. It wasn't called Max then, but essentially.

Well, that's what I should be doing.

But I don't know what you're doing over there. But I did not know that they had any regulators on there where one person gets kicked off in a different household. We've talked about Netflix clamping down on that.

They apparently do. Because Becca texted me last night. I need to know what happens to this kid. I was like, oh, sorry. like because i had i had recommandeered the max subscription to try to watch true detective so i guess i'm doing it wrong what i should be doing is just getting stupid hbo through my cable and then if i need to go on the line and watch it do that but anyway i i log into max through my smart television and i'm like looking everywhere and it's like true detective so i hit play and i realize it's the mcconaughey season oh gosh and i'm i'm like oh okay this is the wrong one so i back it out and then i'm looking around and then i realize there's a huge banner for the jody foster one but there's i can't watch it and i'm like what the hell and i look and it's like 8 20. and i'm like are you s-ing me like i i have to wait until 9 p.m west coast for this and then i just went to sleep like i didn't i have not watched it because 9 p.m was too late for me to start a television program that's where i'm at in my maturation process well if you plan

on talking about on tbtl maybe i'll try to watch it too today because that is one that i have some interest in and so i'd rather watch it before anybody tells me anything about it yeah maybe

let's try to although tonight is also iowa caucus night and i don't really know how much it's not

tomorrow oh why did i think it was tomorrow they don't hold it on tuesdays huh i knew it was this

week but i just assumed it was i think it's today okay and um i think i'm pretty sure and i am i mean this is the how as the kids say on tiktok how delulu i am this is how delusional i now am i'm just like please somehow let the weather sit i just i don't i know this isn't going to be the case tonight but i just want to be watching msnbc and having steve kornacki kind of surprisingly pointing at parts of the big board going we expected a stronger turnout for trump here like it's not going to happen but i just want this to somehow be a night where I feel a small sense of like, I don't know, the world is not, the American political landscape is not as dark as it feels to me. And so the point is, if it starts to go in that direction.

You're a Ramoswamy guy. Just say it. I mean, it's fine.

I mean, that's the irony here. Who am I hoping is prevailing over Trump?

Weirdly Haley. weirdly probably nikki haley but weirdly i mean you know it's like it's it's just i mean i just want anything that i want anything that makes donald trump feel sad tonight all right um so whatever that is but and and i mean i you know not i'm not to get into the politics of this or the x's and o's of it but unfortunately it it wouldn't i don't think it statistically really matters who wins iowa or new hampshire i heard that like there are a good number of early primaries That could be won by say Nikki Haley or DeSantis or whatever, which is completely not feasible, but let's just say they do and it still wouldn't really shake Trump's grip on the on the party or on getting nominated as the like just the way that the math of the whole thing is I would like it if at least he can't declare victory tonight because I think that just makes his life harder. and you know the more that things are slightly still up for debate while his his legal troubles are churning on the better it is i think you know although again i don't know why am i doing this here on a monday episode of the show but like i mean the irony is i think nikki haley probably beats joe biden pretty handily yeah you know like that's very true trump is the least electable candidate they have and yet i don't want him to be the nominee because he terrifies me yeah But if you look at how anyone other than Trump does against Biden, I mean, I don't know if they've gotten down to the lowest tiers of the candidates, but if you definitely look at probably DeSantis and Nikki Haley, my guess would be that they trounce Biden on paper. The only person who's less popular than Biden appears to be Donald Trump. So it's like, nominate him at your peril. But it still just scares me. You know what I mean? It's weird.

I have no idea what happens during a general election, like anything could happen.

Right. Anything could happen, although I think that actually the chances are better for a Republican candidate who's not named Donald Trump. Nobody, people don't get up in the morning fearing the existence of Nikki Haley the way that I fear the existence or I fear the future of a Donald Trump presidency. Like that feels like an existential threat to democracy. Nikki Haley just seems like a person with bad takes. But, you know, I do think it's the general political wisdom that Trump is the weakest general candidate they have, and yet he's going to get the nomination, which is just very bizarre to think about.

I wonder if there are people in our audience right now who are like, you know what? Go back to sports. At least that doesn't put a knot in it. Stay in your lane.

Go back to talking about not watching True Detective.

And by the way, I don't even mean that you and I are out of our depths here or anything. I haven't said much and you are not out of your depth, but I just mean it in like as we have this conversation, I feel my own stomach kind of constricting and not not in the good, like tight body kind of way, but more like the pit in my stomach and just sort of like it's just been, you know, it's been seeping in more and more as we get closer and closer to the caucuses. And, you know, and I'm sure you have heard this a million times, too. I think I heard the other day that, like, no Republican has won Iowa and then gone on to the to win the presidency. And like, I think, three caucus cycles or something like that. So it's you know, it's today doesn't mean.

No, I mean, I think it's like Rick Santorum win it one year. I mean, I think. Yeah, I think there's a history of of it kind of generating non sustainable results.

Yeah, I think Huckabee won it. Anyway, it doesn't matter. And now now I am out of my depth. But my point was not not just that like for me personally, you know, I'm not saying that I don't follow national, international and political news. you know what about interstellar that i don't i don't watch star trek um i um any anyway i follow things i'm not i'm not in lockstep with everything the biden administration does whatever but like the existential i don't even know not even dread but just the existential situation that we woke up to every single morning under the the trump presidency and the pre-trump presidency and that feeling the the icy fingers of that feeling are starting to grip me a little bit as things get real again and we have to actually confront this again and so that's why I made that joke just I wonder how many people are like hate us talking about sports but at least it doesn't it doesn't give them the bad feeling

hey let's thank some of our donors who are making today's edition of tbtl possible with a generous monthly contribution or maybe a one-time yearly contribution i don't know the exact breakdown of how the resources came into the TBTB coffers, but they're coming in and it's allowing this to be our job. We do five. days a week i don't want to throw any shade at other podcasts that i really like like 99 invisible andrew it's been 100 invisible like all right no i keep refreshing the feed and it keeps being like best not even just best of but like you know a re-airing which hey no no no shame in that game but then also like it's been a while since our re-airing and I'm just like you know me and Andrew we get in here five days a week and we do the work it's all about preparation

and we have similar workloads I think absolutely

we're studying the film we're ready

we've storyboarded everything that we're talking about here today

so anyway here we are doing the show this is the remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day here we are We're doing a show for you because of folks who are supporting us, like Don Melnick, who's in Highlands, New Jersey. Greeting Highlands, New Jersey. What does Highlander say?

Highlander says, never die twice.

Oh, really? No. Is that Sean Connery or Christopher Lambert? Oh, that's right, because there was a movie and a TV show, right? Oh, I didn't. Yeah, yeah. Honestly, I never really watched the Highlander series, but I do think our friend Camaro Kev could give you some chapter and verse on that.

What's the main, boy? I know we have listeners who are going bananas here. There can only be one? No, that's Lay's potato chips. Wait, I feel like Highlander has a very, very famous expression that's like their log line.

It is better to burn out than to fade away.

I'm getting that too, but that's not the one that I'm thinking of. There can only be one is the tagline from the 1986 film Highlander. There can only be one.

Why did the Kurgan's eyes turn black, Andrew?

Okay, so this is a...

Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near?

Oh. Just like me, they long to be.

People also ask, why can there only be one Highlander?

Oh, this is what other people are asking?

Yeah, people also ask, why can there be only one Highlander? Fair question. Yeah, no, that is true. Why can there only be one? Copyright law. The answer is copyright law. What if there were two Highlanders? I mean, what is the world going to implode? I used to, Peter Williams and I used to always say, I think when the Highlander film came out, was Sean Connery in the Highlander film?

I'm not sure. You threw that out there, and I'm double-checking it here.

There's some kind of a scene that, in the film version, and my memory is that it involved Sean Connery saying, greetings, Highlander, to, I guess, the Highlander, or whatever.

He's listed here. He's listed as a cast member.

And he says, like, you know, in his very sort of Scottish brogue, if you will, in his Sean Connery way, greetings, Highlander. And that's a terrible Sean Connery impression. But I just remember that Peter Williams and I, it must have been in the trailer or something. Peter Williams and I used to say greetings, Highlander, to each other like three times a week from age 12 to 17. We'd just say greetings, Highlander, all the time. I've never even seen the movies or the TV shows.

Let me ask you this. this is very much a sidebar issue but yeah who do you think makes the decision what photo is used for your imdb page if you're an actor because i'm noticing that sean connery's profile pic on imdb is like an old black and white i mean he's a handsome man he's always been a handsome man obviously it's been noted um but this one he's like probably in his i don't know late 20s early 30s or something maybe older than that i don't know people back then always i think gave off an older presence um but then other people other sometimes you look up an actor and it's like their most recent thing and you're like really I mean nothing wrong with aging but sometimes it's kind of unflattering and more recent it's like well that's not what I think of like when you think of somebody's like kind of glory days as an actor and then you see them what they look like today but they only did one voice in uh Rango 2 is that your joke I'm trying to yeah is it Rango I believe he only made one I think it's Rango More on Horse Commander 3 later on in the show too We'll get to that in the email

Promises made, promises kept

But anyway, I'm just wondering Is it publicist? Is it just somebody at IMDB? Who gets to make these decisions?

That's a great question I mean, Sean Connery Boy, he had a long career Because if you scroll down a little bit So you're right, I've never seen a photo of him as young as the main photo. It doesn't even say Sean Connery to me. It's like young, handsome actor of the 1950s. Yeah, giving a steely gaze. Which is kind of what, you know, but it's not how I think of him. Maybe it's just an age thing. I don't even think of Sean Connery as James Bond. That'd be people maybe a bit older than me. I think of him as the guy in The Untouchables.

Oh, yeah, right. He played a Bobby.

right yeah or like or like you know

or a Russian sub commander seriously naturally yeah those are the

like that's the era of Sean Conner that I think of and so you're right to see this like 1950s version where I presume he was also in a local band in Glasgow you know what I mean like he was also you know in the I don't know what the band was called the Black Diamonds and they were like a four person quartet like I feel like all of these famous people you know who became famous like they were all trying a lot of shit when they were younger probably trying to make it you know like this version of sean connery this young hungry i'm just trying to you know make it in entertainment is not the version of sean connery that i think i feel like the band would be the something men like yes no you're absolutely right or the you also you also had more time to think about it no no no that's definitely true yeah yeah no no But you are so right. I'm verifying, or what's the, under protest? What is it like when, what happened in the NFL a few years ago? I think we're like, a coach said, I'm conceding the game, but under protest. Or I'm signing off on the game, but under protest.

Oh, I don't remember.

I'm signing off on that reference, because it was way better, but under protest. Okay, gotcha. You had more time to think of it. Amanda Triggs is in Cedro Woolly, Washington. The Wolves. Love that place. Thank you, Amanda, for supporting the program. Jessica Shard is in Portage, Michigan. Oh, I bet you it's cold there. Oh, man, I know. Oh, I can't even imagine. Thank you, Jessica, for supporting the program. I'm glad also I've been thinking a lot about, not a lot, but I've been reflecting somewhat on the fact that the University of Washington football team is undergoing a period of rapid change, Andrew. And I'm kind of proud of myself that the day after the national championship, I think I handled it with a certain amount of... I was respectful towards the fact that Michigan won. I wasn't happy about it, but I also didn't get personal. I didn't get ugly. And I'm glad because we have a lot of listeners in Michigan.

You mean you didn't refer to their coaches as a pinch-faced bastard or whatever I called them? I'm proud that I didn't take it personally either, and I didn't even go to school there.

Amanda has footnoted—excuse me, Jessica has footnoted her donation, this is only going to Luke's salary.

Fair enough, fair enough.

No, but I've been thinking, honestly, like, this happens a lot because we—I'll talk for myself here. I'm very caught up in sports, and whenever the team I'm rooting for is playing another team, there is a large number of people that are rooting for that other team who also donate to the show. Yeah, of course. And it makes me think, ooh, I got to just make sure that I don't unduly— it would really, really be a bummer if I was alienating what few listeners we have over something as meaningless as sports.

Yeah, and as I was saying to you before the show, we won't get into the details because we specifically had our sports talk off the air today, so we wouldn't bring it up here. But like, generally speaking, my own fandom has evolved in weird ways that I wouldn't have expected so that I'm, you know, here I am in 2024, actively rooting for the Baltimore Ravens, a team that I had so many personal, I mean, ridiculously personal animosity towards, you know what I mean? And so you never know what your journey is going to be. There could be a day where you and I, Luke, are in the stands in subzero weather in half blue and half yellow body paint. Yep. Yes, I look forward to that day.

As does Chris Murray, who's in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

Now, that's interesting. Thank you, Chris. Also, that means we have at least two listeners in Kingston, Ontario, right?

Because do we have, is our listener Bill? I think Bill moved over there, yeah. Formerly Bill of Toronto. I wonder if Bill helped tell Chris about the show or vice versa, or if they know each other.

Yeah, maybe. Or Chris heard that Bill moved there, so Chris moved there, too.

Uh-huh, sure. That's happening a lot these days. Thank you, Chris. thanks also to good old gather kenyon gather gather together again here we are how many years

in a row have we had gather in there i know and so it started as a typo right gather like what seven eight years ago and now your wife's new name is gather gather gather it's just a real

legal name is now gather kenyon that's right thank you gather for supporting the program all these years and allowing us to now intentionally misstate your name thank you Heather, a.k.a. Gather. Thanks also to Margaret Kearney, who's in Whitefish, Montana. I bet you there's no snow in Whitefish, Montana. No, it's probably pretty balmy there. It's probably about like 70 or 80, potentially. Margaret, I hope you're doing all right out there. That's the other thing, too, Andrew, is I, you know, I'm going on and on about my little adventures here of needing to shovel some amount of snow. But, like, compared to what is happening in places in the United States right now. I got nothing to complain about. Like, I can only imagine Whitefish, Montana, and our listeners out in upstate New York and in the Midwest and pretty much just about everywhere, maybe north of Palm Beach, is dealing with weather stuff. So I hope everybody's doing okay out there. Thank you to our donors today for making TBTL happen. hello and welcome to top story so nbc says that 23 million people streamed the football game this weekend the game between um the kansas city chiefs and the miami dolphins streamed it on peacock and that is uh they say a record in the u.s which i thought was an interesting distinction like was there something not in the u.s that's been streamed more um they basically i noticed this was this the build-up of this was happening last week as i was watching lots and lots of football and nbc kept promoting the fact that history was going to be made this weekend because this particular playoff game was only going to be available on streaming if you didn't live in one of the two cities where the teams were from and i thought boy that's a real that's an interesting play here they kept saying look you know watch history be made on you know saturday or whatever and i was like that is a really really interesting framing device for this that's like if you know uh you've paid for your car and you have no payment on it and then you're the dealership calls you and goes watch history be made when we charge you for the car again like that would be historic is it good no but it would be something that's unprecedented like they were it was as if this was it was just a really weird way to talk about it to me people started noting it last week they're like what is with nbc trying to pretend like this is a historic event we're excited about they've historically figured out a way to get us to pay extra money for something by withholding it from us but like the the framing of that is just so odd to me that's

really interesting because i've heard some people talking about the peacock thing of course i uh let's see i didn't watch the game that was on peacock so it doesn't matter but i also just sort of bootleg all of the games now anyway in fact i was a freedom fighter essentially i did watch last night's game the lions game and um whatever feed i was watching went down or my computer didn't react well to it after a while so i uh had to switch to a different feed and it took me a second to realize all the commercials were australian i ended up watching i ended up watching a u.s football match um u.s football game via an australian feed so it was all these like espn australia commercials and like getting the ring stuff that's what i call like the punch fighting whatever you call that stuff um but anyway is a wonderful island so um yeah but i i heard people saying like are you going to sign up for this game so you can hear for peacock so you can watch this and then will you cancel it right away or you can get a free trial but you have to give them your credit card so like how many people will remember to unsubscribe afterwards yeah so you

actually have today's show pick if you want it's a screen grab of me canceling my peacock account and me writing in the comment section why i'm canceling oh okay oh sounds like you gave him what for i just i i think i wrote it's on my other computers in the house so i'll send it to you after the show i think i said something like you extorted us into buying your service to watch the game you monsters i don't think that's gonna ever i don't think humans are gonna see it yeah and to be honest with you i i go back and forth on this whole thing like how how actually mad i am i mean i i was annoyed at it annoyed by it but also it was like i don't know like there's a lot of things that cost money why how is this like a sacred how is this a say i guess the reason that it's frustrating is because if you're me anyway i'm also paying a bunch of money every month for like my cable service to watch these kinds of things i saw somebody going why is everyone mad you already have to have amazon to watch the thursday night game which is kind of true i guess because i have amazon i don't have to go sign up for a new thing that one doesn't hit me as as that's not as frustrating to me and and this is a playoff game so it sort of seems like

a national thing like if it's a thursday night football game and it's like jags chargers and you know in in november or whatever it's like whatever i i don't i don't care that i'm missing you might you know i like thursday night football um but no that that kind of that did kind of bother me but now you have like these are all national games now they're all like they're all playoff games and so that was like I think I think this is the first paywalled playoff game I'm guessing I believe so

and this I mean they made this is this

This was Mike, yeah, history was made, Andrew. This was Mike Tirico. This was the thing that was also getting a lot of grief on Sunday because, you know, as they were getting into their Sunday games, they then took a moment to celebrate how many of us they made sign up on Saturday.

But what a scene last night as the Chiefs began defending their Super Bowl title with a 26-7 win over Miami, a night memorable for many reasons. so many unforgettable images from the fourth coldest playoff game in nfl history and the passion of nfl fans added to the record books an average of 23 million people stream the game on peacock making the first ever nfl playoff game to be exclusively streamed the most streamed event of any kind in the u.s ever super wild card saturday was also an all-time record day for u.s internet traffic with most of those people interacting with nfl content online congratulations to our comcast and nbc universal teammates and thanks to commissioner roger goodell and our partners

at the nfl by the way that's a weird i don't understand enough about how all of the you know tentacles of this corporation work but why are they thanking or why are they nodding to the comcast people that sounds to me like aren't isn't comcast that's isn't that who i'm paying money to Isn't that Xfinity? Isn't that who I'm paying money to have this on my goddamn cable?

If I answer that, I'm going to get a lot wrong. But Comcast wasn't Comcast under the same corporate overlord as NBC, NBC Universal Comcast. No, I'm not sure. But either way, like that whole thing, I'm just struck by like, I know that the NFL does all kinds of like promos or whatever. but like i don't know i can't remember ever just hearing them reads it's a long dry press release that must have been just like part of the deal and like thanking goodell and all like what what terrible programming is that god talk about just like sniffing your own corporate farts but like

really trying to convince us all that somehow a we were part of history and part of some sort of like we did it yeah america we got we we banded together and we repelled the ruskies oh wait i'm sorry we just all paid five dollars for something that we had to pay five dollars for if we wanted to watch you know this game without having to go through a sort of extra legal means like I just the the idea that somebody at the at the NBC kind of marketing level was like here's how we're gonna talk I mean it was a very consistent messaging which was we're not gonna get it we're not gonna pretend like this is not happening and we're also not gonna to soft pedal it and we're not going to apologize we're going to try to reframe this as like a national celebration of a streaming record and just not mention the fact that everyone doing it who didn't have Peacock had to sign up for it I'd be really curious to see what the cancellation data looks like today I canceled my account even though I signed up it was 599 I had to do it for a month I still have the account for a month I could have waited till the month was over i was like i'm canceling this today to kind of send a message to them a small a very very small message and also because i know that i will forget 29 days from now and then i will just get that update on my phone that just says you just re-upped your peacock subscription and i'm going to be mad so i was like i'm just going to cancel this right now even if it does cost me some part of this month that i'm entitled to which i guess it actually doesn't i i would guess not

like if you paid for a month and then canceled i was going to ask you that but you still do have until the end of that first month that you paid for right yeah i do but i will tell you this

i i mean this is just the beginning would be my would be my guess like i i have a feeling that that next season it's going to happen more and more and we're just going to be you know buying these games a la carte or from so many different sources and i guess if the price listen if the price of my cable TV goes down, I guess I don't care that much because it's like I'm paying this money. I want to get this content. Either I pay it all to Xfinity or I pay less to Xfinity and a little bit more to other people and I just cobble it together. But it just feels like we're going in a direction where I'm going to have to be subscribing to 20 different things if I want to

get all of this kind of content easily available to me. And Peacock is the one streaming service that we don't pay for in our house that it has the biggest impact on me if that makes sense um the the the only thing there are other streaming services out there i'm sure that we don't pay for we pay for the biggies um but like peacock has had a lot of programming that i'm like oh i would watch that now some of them you can find through like you say it's sort of like extra extra legal means um but

But like the Monday Night Football has been on Peacock. And as somebody who doesn't have cable subscription, like the whole season, I think Monday Night Football was on Peacock. That was tempting. Our friend Kat Solon directed a full length comedy special with Chris Fleming. And I still haven't seen that because that was on Peacock. And I hope Kat doesn't hear that. Kat, the parts I've seen are amazing. Some of it went viral on TikTok. I love it so much. I actually have seen a lot of it on TikTok. We can't pass a Kumon sign anymore without laughing, thinking about that special. But anyway, and also the monk.

Wait, is the joke the joke that I've always been making, which is that the Kumon drawing doesn't look like the kid has it together?

Oh, that's not the joke. But I know you know the Chris Fleming joke because you and I were both tittering at it over the clip that went viral of Chris Fleming doing the song Parents with Floppy Hats. I'm ruining it and Kat will probably hear this. Wide brim hats. wide brim hat parents yeah and they're like negotiating with their monster of a child and they say do you want to go to kumon which oh that's funny yeah because i've always just said

that i feel like the kumon drawing you know there's like a logo it's like the kumon drawing looks very confused which is the opposite of why you're taking your kid to kumon that is sort of a

good point do you remember the simpsons joke where they're like bart's been drawing some some dark images or whatever and he's like oh that looks good like homer but homer doesn't really pay any attention to and really actually looks at bart's drawing he says ah send it back to hell send it back to send it back to school um anywho oh and i just was going to say the monk uh you know genevieve and i are fans of the tv show monk and they just like created a like a one final like kind of long monk episode i guess they're calling it the monk movie but i i think of it as a long Monk episode since it was made for TV. But anyway, so I got to say Peacock is the one thing we don't have in our house that it sort of seems like, you know, there's more and more programming there that I want. But I am just a bit of a holdout on it. I'm just like, I don't know, man, I just don't want to. Eventually, I'll probably pay for it. But I just I'm a holdout. I'm just I feel like they've what I should do and this might make me feel better, putting the sports stuff aside, Because I think there's something I do think there's something bad on the baseball side of things where they're where they're stripping local broadcasts of local of local Mariners or baseball games so that you have to subscribe to Apple to watch it. Like we don't subscribe to Apple or Disney either, but there's not much compelling there for me. But I think it's real bullshit to have taxpayers who like, you know, their money does go towards the stadium and picks up some of the bills for these rich teams like the Mariners. But then you literally can't watch it over the air because you have to subscribe to Apple like that is much more insidious to me than not being able to watch a national football game that is out of market. But leaving that stuff aside, like I probably should just tally up everything that we pay for our streaming services and compare it to what we used to pay monthly for cable. And I'll bet you cutting the cord has still been financially beneficial for us. And adding Peacock would still probably keep us under whatever we were paying for cable because we were paying out the nose for cable. But it was bundled with our, you know, Internet and everything.

See, the problem for me is that I am I'm just such a creature of habit That all I want to do Like, so, you know, tonight I will be making some dinner And I will turn on MSNBC And I will put on Like, I will go Turn the TV on I will hit a guide And I will Oh, there's a helicopter flying over I was wondering

Yeah, what's going on with you over there?

Can you hear that?

No, I couldn't hear that I could just hear that something I wasn't sure if you were messing with your TV or something caught your eye.

No. There's a helicopter that's flying, like, I don't know, 100 feet over the house in the neighborhood. And for a moment, I was like, is that FedEx? Because I keep getting these updates. FedEx is. I was supposed to have a bunch of appliances delivered over the weekend. And as of Saturday morning, they were like, we're bringing them out. And I was like, there's no way these are getting here. And sure enough, you know, halfway through the day, they're like, sorry, we're actually not going to be delivering those. And then I got another thing from FedEx this morning. We're coming on out And I was like Yeah I'll believe it when I see it And then like As we started the show I got another update No we're actually not doing that today And then In midst all that There was just like This weird rumbling noise That I was like Is that a truck? So what you heard Was me turning around Looking out the window Of the Madrona Hill studio To see if a truck Was rumbling down My snow covered road I see And realizing no In fact it's Oh you know what it is Andrew It's three Military helicopters Oh That's why it was extra loud It was three Blackhawks But these are Blackhawks up They're up in the

the sky and their show title black hawks up i don't know anyway they're flying over my house that's why i got distracted but what i was going to say is tonight i will put on my tv and i will go to live television i will watch the the channel that i like to watch uh msnbc hopefully our good friend chris hayes will be getting lots of air time and like i like doing that i don't like wow there was my inner sean connery i don't like i do not like having to jump around between apps some of which may be loading some of which may not be trying to figure out which thing is going to give me the live sports or the live whatever like i i am such a creature of habit i like to have a television that has channels on it that are sending live things down the line to me at all times and i can watch them and even uh last night i found myself watching the local portland news on like k2 which i never do but they're covering all the weather stuff and you have like trees that are down and they have some guy actually i don't remember what this was k2 or one of the other ones coin they've got a dude who just rides around in a car all day and does reports and he's not driving somebody else is driving but he's just like on the road and they're live streaming from the road it was kind of cool actually i'd like to point out that traffic jam jimmy did all of his own driving and fish sandwich buying exactly i just like i like live television that is and again this is just because i'm used to it i like turning on a television and flipping through the channels i do so much more than telling my drawing from one of 900 different sources on my smart television uh you know and even like last night on max that was annoying to me because you know what used to happen in the days when i used to watch the sopranos i would turn on the tv i would turn on the cable guide i had all the hbo so i could watch the east coast feed of the sopranos if i wanted because you had hbo west you had hbo east you like so you'd be like oh what's happening on the hbo east feed it's just obviously the same stuff but three hours ahead i just like that and i know that makes me a luddite although by the way luddite gets a really bad it's kind of a bad rep the story of the luddites is very interesting are you familiar with it no is that biblical no it has to do with um kind of industrialized the industrialized uk and i think that what happened was um there was when the invention of the loom happened the kind of commercial loom yes when it all went south so textile because before that the story goes that people like basically textile workers were people that were just working from home and making you know fabrics and stuff and you could basically be a weaver or somebody who just did this stuff at home and uh and then eventually they invented these these large looms and they put them in buildings and they wanted the people to come in it's it's seriously like the conversation

we're having today about work from home versus going into a centralized place and there was a lot of like uh pushback against these big industrialized versions of it because the pay was worse and people had to go in and it was unsafe and so there was this i think maybe even apocryphal kid whose i forget his name was like lud and he had i believe supposedly been injured in a an industrial accident or he had stood up to someone there was this this kid character became kind of this folk hero and the people who sort of celebrated this folk hero and who were pushing back against industrialized stuff were called luddites and so it was a labor thing it's almost

like it's a labor almost like a ai almost like to make it a modern comparison no because this is more about like it's not about taking jobs away but it's more about making jobs more dangerous or

am i misunderstanding that uh it was an organized it was in the 19th century english hand craftsmen who rioted for the destruction of the textile machinery that was displacing them uh i'm trying

to figure out who it was displacing jobs okay yes yes because yes because of the fact that like

instead of a bunch of people being able to work from home on this and and make different parts of these textiles they were like just they only needed a few of them to run these big giant looms but really what i want to find out is what the name oh ned ludd a young apprentice who was rumored to have wrecked a textile apparatus in 1779 so he was like ned ludd was this guy who supposedly came in and just destroyed a textile place. And then his followers, they called themselves, there's no evidence Ludd actually existed like Robin Hood. He was said to reside in Sherwood forest, but he eventually became the mythical leader of the movement. So all that is to say, I know it makes me a Luddite and I use that in the best way, but I just want to be able to turn on my dang television and go to my dang channel. And I feel like that is going to become harder and harder or more and more expensive for me in the coming.

years and i don't like it you know what i say all eli whitney's are bastards see i can get one you see the cotton gin i think he's a cotton gin aka interchangeable parts i don't know if that really has anything to do with the luddites i just wanted to drop something but listen to the thing the

cotton gin didn't make gin right it was a it was a it was also like a weaving thing yeah yeah i think i always found the word gin being associated why is it called the cotton gin that's i don't

point I don't even know I just always took it on faith 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 email or v-mail before

we get out of here yeah I wanted to mention a couple of things first of all I saw this right as I think we were getting ready to roll on the show today um this is just a small little thing i thought was interesting uh the music for my weekend on friday was by a musician called linda rich that i stumbled on in a record store and somebody pointed out that it's ironic that that would be my music for your weekend considering that that is the name of your made-up neighbors from a previous house linda and rich i didn't even put that together i don't remember who posted that

but but kudos there uh if you have a if you have a music for your weekend this weekend from brian

and bob something's up right and gay right don't you have a neighbor yes you can't say that anymore andrew according to gay um so anyway i just wanted to point that out kudos to the person pointing that out um also i mentioned earlier that we're going to get into this horse commander three situation and i'll explain this so during um the i think daily thank yous to our donors a couple of days ago um uh we thank somebody named andy um and i don't know how we got on the topic but i said i'm going to tell you about horse commander 3 one of these days a new video game i'm playing and andy wrote in to say thanks for your donor shout out on friday luke said i demanded to know what horse commander 3 is in his segue and it didn't very much make me curious about it but the topic was never returned to imagine that so andy wants to know all right andy okay yeah you

don't need to be so smart you know who's not doing a show today 99 invisible thanks for your support

again andy um so here's the deal i don't know if this is really going to translate into anything interesting but it's something you can potentially tease me about but um you know we were talking about grand theft auto uh the other day and they released their big trailer for the for the uh big release that'll come out later this year for the latest installment of grand theft auto and you know people who even just casually have heard that but know nothing about gaming probably just think of Grand Theft Auto is like the game that's been sort of notorious for the violence and and and sort of ickiness of it which is all which is all real but it's also like this open world game which is what really kind of caught our fancy as we talked about on the show that like you can just get in a car and yes you can probably rob banks and 7-elevens and what have you but also just like the verisimilitude of the cities that it's based on in this case Miami and the ability just to like kind of go off the grid and do your own thing in this open world that's something that's always appealed to me in video games even though i don't play a lot of video games you know relative to you i play a lot of video games relative to most people who have a video game unit i don't i'll play like a football game or a soccer game or whatever um but there is this other game that's made by the same people as grand theft auto and essentially it's the same kind of deal in fact it's very similar sort of in its gameplay but it takes place out in the old west and a lot of people have heard of this i'm sure red dead redemption exactly red dead redemption 2 it came out i'm gonna say oh like rango 2 quite a bit ago now i'm gonna say like maybe even five years and it was a phenomenon when it came out and i've been hearing about it forever and it's one of those games that's like it was like 60 or 70 bucks to buy and i never trusted myself to buy it because whenever i buy any game that is anything other than me swinging a bat or throwing a football pass like i just i end up spending the money and then regretting not playing it more i'm not into that kind of gameplay that much but man i feel like every now and then you'll just hear another person say oh man red dead redemption too you just you can go out and you can ride your horse around just go hunting and set up camp and i'm just like that sounds so great the characters did

look pretty badass i remember that guy with the wide brim hat uh-huh yeah take it back to wide

brim hat talk yeah right and so i've been sort of keeping an eye on it and one of the podcasts i listened to had somebody who was reminiscing about how obsessed he was with it for a while and it had been on my brain and then with all the talk of grand theft auto it's been on my brain and then i don't know if this is a coincidence or not but sometime around the holidays i noticed that the price dropped from 70 or 60 to uh under 20 like i don't know if it's because they're like moving on to the new Grand Theft Auto, and so that, you know, drops the price of this, but I was like, 1999.

I will take a flyer on Red Dead Redemption 2 the game that I've been envious of for years now and so I started playing it around the holidays and it's really sucked me in I'm still playing it and I'm even following the storyline I'm like 30% through the storyline I've never played a game where I follow a storyline like this but it really it's sticky it's really it's really got me when I'm sick of the storyline I just go out and I hunt antelope Luke and it's very relaxing you do have to skin them which is a little graphic good not for you as long as you're willing to eat

the antelope you have to yeah exactly you know yeah you know where your antelope is coming from

you actually do need it like because then if you find yourself in a gunfight later and you're losing stamina you need a quick snack that's one of the funniest parts of the game you'll be in like one of the bloodiest shootouts and you're just like hold on i need a can of corn just like in the

middle of this just to get your health up and then do you like go does the character then do you see them eat the can of corn or start eat munching on the antelope or is it just kind of puts it into of your character's system.

I think it pauses for like 15 seconds. Like you maybe stop shooting and you hear sort of a chewing sound or something. But then there are other parts. I mean, the graphics, you know, there are parts where the storytelling takes over and you don't really control the characters. And it's very cinematic. It's a very, I've been very pleased with the experience. In fact, my Dart game is probably slipping a little bit because of it. I'm trying to keep, I'm trying to balance it all. I'm trying to have it all, Luke. Dartbot doesn't have a father figure anymore? No, here's the deal. I went out for a pack of Red Dead Redemption 2's and I never came back. Now, here's the deal. I find the name Red Dead Redemption 2 cumbersome and not even really a good name for describing what's going on in the movie or in the game. And I feel like a lot of people who play this game have their own little nickname for it. Like I think some people call it Magic Horse or whatever. A podcast that Genevieve listens to, I think they call it their Magic Horse game or something. But, okay, so I've told you all of that context. Now, let's switch gears here. I'm going to bring these two storylines together. But there is also a radio commercial that's been playing on the AM sports station I listen to constantly. And this commercial is in heavy rotation. And I believe it's for Comcast high speed Internet. And the commercial is told from the point of view of a I'm going to say young teenage girl or like a tween or whatever. And she she does a really good job in the commercial. And she's like speaking to us, the audience. And she says, boy, I feel bad for the Johnson kids next door. their parents have slow internet and so they can you know they they can barely game todd can only play two rounds of horse commander three before the internet goes out and i know for a fact that horse commander three is a stand-in it's got to be right like that has got to be that commercial acknowledging red dead redemption to horse commander three now you don't play rounds in Red Dead Redemption 2 but like Horse Commander 3 has to be a nod towards Red Dead Redemption right

I'm just googling Horse Commander 3 and there's a whiskey that seems to be Horse Commander 3 I don't think it's a real thing there's a Horse Soldier Commander Select 3 Bourbon that's about all I can find there's definitely not a real thing that I can tell called Horse Commander

Yeah, so it's definitely, like, I'm pretty sure that, so, again, the story is told from, like, this teenage girl talking about the teenage boy or tween next door or whatever, saying that he can't play as Horse Commander 3, and I'm like, I know that's Red Dead Redemption. And so that is why I referred to Horse Commander 3 the other day, and that game will forever be known to me as Horse Commander 3. I will tell Genevieve I'm going downstairs to play Horse Commander 3 for a while.

But wait a second. I'm going to do something. I have my stopwatch ready to go, okay?

Mm-hmm.

So I'm going to go 3, 2, 1, and I want you to say Horse Commander 3, and I'm going to time it, okay? Okay. So, 3, 2, 1. Horse Commander 3. Okay, 1.13 seconds. Okay, 1.13 seconds. Now, I'm going to say 3, 2, 1, and I want you to say Red Dead Redemption. 3, 2, 1. Red Dead Redemption 2. Ooh, 1.30. zero. I think the two saved you. Put it just over? I think you just over. I've already forgotten what the first one. No, I do think Dead Red Redemption 2 does take longer than Horse Commander 3. You're lucky that it's two. That's really what saved you and made it so that you are making the more efficient choice by saying Horse Commander 3. When I type in Xfinity Horse

Commander 3 in quotes, I get two results on Google. Both of them, though, when I click on them they they take me to like sort of a dangerous dead end of the internet so I'm not going to go too far in it but I think but what both of these are they're from something called WTOP which I'm guessing is a radio station that is airing these commercials and then probably transcribing it in some way and I've found some some corner of the internet that is transcribing the broad

signal probably and it's they refer to it as tom i swore the commercial said todd but apparently the kid says tom can barely play a full round of horse commander 3 luckily we get fast reliable

internet from xfinity so anyway uh that is horse commander 3 speaking of the weird corners of the internet i was so i was freaking out yesterday because i turned my laptop on and it wouldn't i couldn't go to any websites i kept saying that this website is not private and i was like what and then it was like the new york times you know what i mean and like just the most the websites that i tend to go to the most and it was having some problem with the ssl have you ever had this happen where every website you try to go to and i would try it on chrome i tried it on safari everything any website i was trying to go to was telling me it's not private basically like you're in danger going to this website. And I was like, oh, is this the virus? Yeah. Is this a virus that's now telling me I can't go to any websites? But I also couldn't Google it because it wouldn't let me go to Google. It wouldn't let me do anything. And I was like, oh, you gotta be kidding me. And so then on my phone, I had to look up, what is this? This website is not private, SSL, dah, dah, dah. And then finally it said, it may be that your computer doesn't know what time it is. And I looked and sure enough, had the timing was off because my computer for some reason thought it was 1970 your computer suddenly was huge you took up an entire room and it was spitting out a roll of paper it was playing chess against gary kasparov it was like i was like it was the strangest thing i was because i thought oh well maybe it's off by a day or it didn't update for daylight saving or something like what like it was like no 1970 like it was like it thought it was January 11th or so it was off you know multiple things were off but my thought was why does this even go back to 1970 why is that even a possibility what is the whatever would be the the utility for that why would I why would why would your computer ever even have the possibility to think it was 40 50 years ago

yeah that is true i mean there must be a reason there must be a reason for it and i just don't know what it is but um do you did i tell you that like my computer the computer that i used in college which was not connected to the internet it was an old uh 486 i'm trying to think of the manufacturer that made 486 is what a very early windows computer um that i think was running like windows 3.0 um maybe but would intel would have been well intel's inside but i don't think that's the maker of the entire computer but anyway everybody was worried about y2k and then for most people y2k compact yeah maybe yeah maybe i'm just reading things on the internet seems about right um but anyway i had a little computer that i just used mostly as a word processor and maybe played free cell on or something but i wrote all my computer papers on it or whatever and then i would like save it to a disk and take it into work to email or print out or whatever um that thing When I came back from New Year's night celebrations early in the morning, got back to my apartment, very bleary eyed at like 3 a.m. and booted up my computer instead of just going to bed and passing out like I probably should have. My computer couldn't my computer didn't work. I had to like I spent hours going into the BIOS and like changing the internal clock on it. So I was like, so if this computer was an airplane flying in the sky right now, it would have crashed. My computer literally did get confused by the turning over of the calendar.

Wow.

But it wasn't Y2K related, yeah, because it was New Year's night. Then it was the earliest hours of New Year's Day, and I turned on my computer, and it's like, no, I'm not a computer anymore. I've been Y2K'd, essentially. You were the one person, all of that hype. Yes, exactly. I got it working again because I remember I brought it to New Hampshire with me. Like, this is my first job. I still had that thing in my and I didn't even have the Internet, I think, for a while with my at home when I took that first job in radio. But I still had my old 486 set up in my living room and it didn't do much. But, yeah, I had to go into the BIOS and change internal clock settings and do all this weird stuff to get my old computer to still work.

This is where you and Walt are so similar, so similar. And you know what? I'll give you both credit. you usually get a good outcome and i always think more my dad than you but i always think he's insane because because it's like he'll when something i mean it's amazing i didn't just throw this computer into the snow yesterday all i had to do was finally get to the clock and just reset it but like when something this just shows you my mentality in life which is not a good one which is like if something isn't working and i've tried to like i've turned it on and off then it's just like well this is broken this will never work and it's like well probably it will if you my dad's always like you always in the drivers always hanging out in the drivers of

drivers are so they there's i find them so scary and to mess with because i always feel like i've been trained that like if you mess up a driver install like forget about it then you do have to burn everything to the ground i think i'm exaggerating that but drivers scare me but i do

have to spend time in that area well it's always apple stuff with my dad and like we had a moment we should we should wrap things up everyone needs to get on with their life here but um it's funny because i was talking you know last week or a couple weeks ago about kind of my dad sort of buying up used hdmi cables which may or may not be functional he finally broke down and got a new macbook air which is the computer that i tend to use um i i love the computer it's very portable it has plenty of processing for doing the normal things that we do which is like emailing each other and whatever a little bit of audio stuff of course my dad though doesn't go to the apple website and buy one he buys it on amazon refurbished and i was like how much did you pay for that and he got all the apple care he gets like he and i was like how much did you pay for that and i forget what the number was but it was literally the exact same price as just buying it from apple what and i didn't really have the heart to tell him because he was still reeling from the the hdmi cable situation so i didn't want to be like i was you know but the problem he was having was when he bought the computer the battery it would take like a week for the battery to charge up to like 60 percent and then it would just start going down again like he could never get the battery power to 100 he could like never you know uh and he and then when he did get it up to 60 it just would like start dying really rapidly i was like this is a bum computer i'm just thinking like dad this is a bum computer which you like didn't buy through apple so you're like you know this is the like um you know travelocity of computers like you're not going to be able to get apple to help you because you didn't buy it from them like anyway he's on the phone with amazon and he's trying to explain the pro and i was just like he's in the other room and he's called like the amazon the number that you call at amazon if they like if a if you ordered a swiffer and it showed up was wrong you know i mean like he's not talking to a computer expert i can't believe amazon has a phone number they do but i will tell you this it does not seem to um terminate in the united states so you're you're calling somebody who's in a different part of the world who's there equally to help you with what your issues are with your computer as if you bought a cat treadmill like i did and you just can't it's like a restaurant that serves every kind of food you You can't know about all of those things. Like, and I'm just like, and he's in there explaining that the battery, it doesn't have battery power. I'm like, dad, you are, you are just, you're just yelling into the wind right now. You're talking to a person who has absolutely no expertise in computers. They're just answering a phone when someone has an issue with an Amazon product that they've received. And I hear him talking to the person and it's really crazy because I'm like, just tell him you're sending it back. And then he goes, well, the battery is getting some more life. Now he's looking at the computer and he goes from being like, he's not mean to the person, but he's just like obviously pretty disappointed about this whole thing.

Oh, because he also, when he gets a new computer or a computer, he loads like 8 million sign related programs onto it and things. And like, it's like two days for him to get the computer all loaded up with his shit. And then if the computer's a bum one, he's going to take it all off and send it in. It's like the poor guy, Charlie Brown, trying to kick the football. And I hear him in the conversation eventually switch up to, well, it seems like it's getting a little more battery power. So how about this? I'm going to see what it does today. And then if it's not working, I'm going to call you guys back and we'll have to get this worked out. And, of course, the person on the other end of the line is like, great, cool. I don't have to deal with this right now. Sweet. And so I'm just thinking, Dad, what is this thing you're doing? Like you're just going to have to call them tomorrow. well when i tell you andrew that the battery somehow from making that phone call started holding a charge and went to 100 percent and then for the next six days that my dad was here the computer works great maintained its charge every like hour he would just let out i totally forget what was going on he just let out a triumphant yop and i'd be like what's going on it's like the computer battery it's at 85 percent it's holding its charge somehow the universe just fixed this laptop battery so my dad does not have to mail it back and it's totally like it just it's working now which have you ever heard in the history of computer stuff something like that happening where it's just like i don't know it wasn't working and now it works fine i mean I just don't feel like that stuff happens.

I mean, I've had mystery. Yes. To answer your question without taking the fun away, like I had, speaking of drivers, when I bought the Dell that I'm using now, which I did buy new, like I was having so many issues. And I can't remember the details. And that's probably for the best for the sake of this program. But there was something that was sort of driver related. I uninstalled it and reinstalled it a million times. And it's still, I think, oh, it was my internet, like the internet adapter in the computer. Just like it was slowing things down. And it was just totally like, um, it's like strangling my internet speeds. And I was, I went so deep on this and I, I just like worked on it for months and then like suddenly it just started working again. And I don't know, like, you know, when you've turned something off and on and reinstalled it a million times, it's kind of hard to see exactly what ended up being.

I start from that point, by the way. Yeah. Like I start from being like, this is hopeless. You had to go through like a lot of work to be like, this might be hopeless.

Which was really frustrating. But then I always remind myself like, oh, but I actually know more about X, Y or Z now than I did before I started. So there's always sort of like a little bit of a nerdy payoff for me on that. But I will say like as much as like as you tell more and more stories about your dad's relationship with technology like that, I totally see myself in those stories as well. One thing that is a huge difference, though, is like when it's time for me to buy a new computer, like I'll limp things along forever. Right. You and I were having a conversation off air the other day. Like I got a couple of computers here that one of whom one was already retired. It was like it was in another room. It was supposed to only be used for like streaming baseball games upstairs if and when I could get it to work. That is the computer that I'm talking to you on right now, because when APM told me to send in the computer that they had issued me, I suddenly needed a computer. I was going to buy a new one or maybe a used one just because it's this computer doesn't have to do a lot of stuff. It just needs to dial up with you every day. but I temporarily pulled this guy out of retirement and then I think I told you and John that I did a full like factory rewipe on it or restart on it and now it's working fine and this thing is like should have been retired along I should have taken this not unlike Horse Commander 3 I should have taken this behind the stable years ago and just put it out of its misery so I will limp things along for a long time but when I'm buying like a new phone or a new computer like something that is going to be my main piece of technology i never want it to be used and i never even want it to be like a new but old generation like technology keeps moving so quickly if you're going to take the time to invest in the new piece of equipment i always want the latest version of it i'm never looking for a deal you know yes and that's where i always like i said want to like

just gently put my arm around my dad and be like how much hassle is this going to create in your life that you're buying the like three-year-old version of this like god bless him my dad's the guy when you get in his truck his stereo system is a decommissioned iphone that he bought just to put music on oh that's but he had to do some crazy like there it wasn't just like it's an old iphone like he was he was explaining to me what he had to do in order for this to function maybe it had been his iphone but then he just wanted it to be his ipod yeah actually that i can see do some way that he like steampunked it into being like you know it's got like a small paddle wheel on it now that's just like yeah the river power but uh yeah he loves some reason he can watch father downy mysteries on it a um yeah exactly i will say i part of me is very uh happy that i can watch whatever television i want now i can go back to my dateline nbc ways but i also miss watching shetland with that dude yeah like i keep having these thoughts like oh it's almost time for shetland then i realized no i can't watch shetland because uh because uh you know that's a special special walt and luke viewing so um anyway all right you know i just i see my neighbor bob carrying a um door onto my front porch this is a real thing that just happened i think because they accidentally delivered it to his house i've got a whole situation with home depot now that got to iron out i think i may have an ill-gotten door the other day they delivered this is before all the snow they delivered this door that i needed but it wasn't at my house and i went and looked on my neighbor's front porch and didn't see it i don't know where the heck it went but i called them and i said you did not deliver it and they recredited my credit card and now i just saw not bob is not the snow plower bob's the other guy i just saw bob coming down my stairs with this

door in his arms so now i maybe he stole your front door you gotta get you gotta go check this

out andrew you call 9-1-1 i'm gonna go take her okay all right thanks for listening everyone we're gonna be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you in the meantime have a good monday take care of yourselves stay warm and dry

wherever you might be. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

Power out.