Muse

Sorry to interrupt your breakfast, but our overseer wanted to say a quick hello. Overseer Benjamin, this is Lucy and Titus. Hey, guys. Just wanted to say hi. Hello. And obviously, welcome to Vault 4. Just some housekeeping, a few things to be aware of. Stay out of level 12. Obviously, we'd prefer you not go there. Oh, and we only have one foosball table. So if you want to play, you got to sign up. If there's no pencil on the sign-up sheet, please let me know. I do have pencils. Oh, and if you're unfamiliar with how the bathrooms work, just ask. Asking is less embarrassing than getting it wrong. Trust me, we've had incident after incident with newcomers. Okay, that should cover it. Any questions or concerns beyond foosball or pencils or bathrooms, Bertie's available. And once again, welcome to Vault 4. We're glad to have you. TBTL!

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

How'd it go?

well he's gonna acknowledge me on Instagram so I guess you could say it's one of the best conversations of my entire life I saved a life my own am I

a hero I really can't say but yes I'm not very good with chit chat I like a structured communication, like a hard out, you know, chit, chat, chit, chat, chit, where are we

doing with that? It's kind of weird. I feel like I'm being interrogated, but by someone who doesn't really want to know anything important.

For the sake of customer service, try to chill out, my mom. Stinky.

Well, all right. Hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Wednesday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. We're getting medium play on three independent radio stations in Central Europe. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. Gotta have that root beer. Coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio perched high above the mighty Columbia, where we're looking at another very beautiful day, although it is spicy. Be careful, though. It's spicy. It is warm.

I get warm, and I'm levitating.

We still do not have proper HVAC. That is the project for this weekend with old Walt B. And so hopefully the house will be a little bit more livable, because last night, Gigi, the black standard poodle, and I were relegated to hiding in the one part of the yard that had shade until like 9 30 at night because it was so so warm up here high above the mighty columbia speaking of gigi of course i'm in day three of dog sitting her we had all kinds of adventures yesterday but i have now officially entered the phase i'm calling myself a dog uncle i think that might be where i fit in in the family structure with gigi and i'm entering the phase of dog uncle dumb where i have now started singing made-up songs to gigi around the house i'm singing i'm in a store i'm singing and it is humiliating i hear myself doing it and i am humiliated for myself and i know a little something about being humiliated because i've done 4 251 episodes of tbtl let the fun begin uh well that today is episode 4 251 so i guess i've done 4 250 technically But anyway, here's the plan for today. You know how we're obsessed with the rant and rave column in the Seattle Times, and it's most of the content we do on the show.

I'd like to point out to anybody watching, this is really bunk journalism.

Never more true than today, based on a rant and rave column that came out the other day. Also, you know, I like to get dressed up sometimes. I like to put on a suit. In fact, I spent an entire year wearing a suit Monday through Friday, which, yes, that was pretty, like, that was like a big affect I was doing. That was a cry for attention.

I feel cute today. Look at my outfit.

I was surprised to read in The New Yorker that the necktie was one of the many casualties of the pandemic and may never come back again, so we'll talk about that, too. And we'll talk to this guy, the longest-running Cobra.

of the show maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships that's a tuna bro it's andrew

walsh and he's joining us right now good morning my friend good morning luke i'm sorry i i had no doctor's appointments since the last time i talked to you so i i don't know man i tapped out are we going to talk about on today's show shit we might actually get to those top stories i wasn't prepared for that i actually do want to talk about both of those by the way because you and i have not talked about that rant yet and um i think we're in the same boat yeah it's uh involving the

airport and i i'll be honest with you i did not i did not see where it was going like i you know i started off thinking oh this is i guess what i thought was it was it's i guess it's technically

a rave that's the thing yes that's a good should we just get into it i was wondering about that Well, let me do this, because if you do want to talk about your dog song, I thought it might be. I don't, actually.

That was the amount that I wanted to talk about.

Okay, well, then I'm not going to press you anymore.

Rant to the 48-year-old man who's singing to a standard black poodle that doesn't even belong to him. You just, like, also, I call her G-Unit now.

Oh, okay. So it's a funk sort of sound you're going for.

Well, the song does not reflect the work of Fiddy. Okay. I just call her GG unit, which I think is a new one for her considering her actual home is on a beautiful estate in the Willamette Valley where she is generally supervised by an extremely elegant landscape painter named Sudell. I don't think that the G unit references are flying fast and furious up there.

You don't think that she has access to Yo! MTV raps? It just occurred to me, I don't think we have access to Yo! MTV raps anymore. I don't think Ed Lover. Was he another Dr. Dre? He was another Dr. Dre. Yeah, it's very confusing. Yeah. In fact, you just brought another wave of confusion. Because I remember I was very confused about that in the 90s.

Great Pixies song, by the way.

A wave of confusion. Yeah.

Wave of confuation.

So I was going to say, while we're singing, I'm not putting you on the spot.

I'm sorry. I sound like that girl doing the national anthem. Hey, that, by the way, was, I guess you could say, a bullet dodged, sort of. Sorry, not to interject here.

Wait, hold on. Let me just say one thing. Speaking of singing to their pets.

And you said we had nothing to talk about today.

I just want to get out this one thing, and then I'll not say anything else. We do, I mentioned this during the TV telephone. I have a cache of listener voicemails of the songs that people sing to their pets, which we are going to be crafting into a special episode of TBTL. So if you did not get in on that action yet and you want to share with us the songs that you sing to your pets, 206-414-8285, 206-414-TBTL, leave us a voicemail and we'll include it. Maybe we can get a whole week of programming out of this, Luke. That's what I'm looking at.

Yes, I would love that. And I will, I'm going to start, when I'm singing songs to Gigi, I will try to record them into the voice memo on my phone.

Good, good. So the drunk national anthem.

Yes. We dodged a bullet because we didn't know it was a drunk national anthem at first. And it seemed like good TBTL content. Somebody sings a national anthem very, very poorly. And I had the thought yesterday, I think, in the morning, oh, but we should probably talk about this. we could play the audio we could have a little fun with it and then basically by the time the show was posted the singer um i i'm thinking she's a country singer named ingrid andrus i was not familiar with her work came out to say that she was in fact drunk when she did the national anthem and that she was checking into rehab yeah and so it was the kind of thing where if we would have just like spent an hour roasting her only to find out that she's dealing with uh you know sort of addiction we would that would have been a bad look so once again our laziness my laziness paid off my laziness of not wanting to enter the song uh the audio into my system so

I could play it for your audio system I will be honest and you will not be shocked to hear this I didn't know about the story um until actually it was the tens who brought it to my attention it was on the uh people were sharing it on the um tbtl slack channel and somebody said oh this is rough or something along those lines and then somebody else said oh I kind of feel bad for it And I'm like, what did I miss? Who is this? So I did a quick Google. I listened to it. By the way, I don't think we set this up for people who don't know. This is the woman who sang the national anthem before the Home Run Derby, which is part of the baseball all-star festivities, which are going on this week.

The coronation of Te Oscar Hernandez.

There was a moment before the show today when you might have heard me say, never mind, let's just get going. And that was me because I need to talk to you about that. But I don't think that the top.

No, we need to do an hour of show for the listeners, and then on the back nine, you and I can...

I need to talk to you about that.

Because you did see the Seattle Times piece, right?

Not until... Not when I had texted what I had texted. This is really bad. Salt, meat, wound. This is really bad. No, not until you highlighted it for me. We'll talk about that either off air, or we'll bring the listeners in on that in the 11th hour of today's podcast. But I will not... We cannot do that to the listeners today. But so if you did miss it, this this woman, again, I was unfamiliar with her, too. I wasn't familiar with all of this until yesterday afternoon. Ingrid Andress sang the national anthem before the All-Star Game or the home run derby, really. And it was rough. And the first wave of reaction, of course, was people passing this around the Internet and saying things like we were too hard on Fergie.

Because I think somebody said, Fergie, you're released.

Because I guess she was on record for having the worst performance of a national anthem before this.

I think she did one at like an NBA. It might have even been the NBA All-Star Game.

That rings a bell now.

Like an important NBA game. And the amazing thing about the Fergie performance was I believe there was a lot of shots of the athletes trying to process what was going on.

Yes, I know. I do remember that. It's funny because when somebody, when I saw that reference online, I couldn't, I didn't know what they were talking about. I just got from context clues that Fergie must have, you know, done a bad version. But as soon as you said NBA, now I can picture the video. Anyway, so the first wave was, of course, mockery. And then the news broke that the singer is entering rehab because she said she was intoxicated during her performance. And she said, that's not me. That wasn't me who was out there. And I have a problem. I'm going to go into rehab. And this is where I had the most uncharitable thought. But keep in mind, I'm processing everything I'm saying here. i'm processing in like 45 seconds of internetting right like wait what are people making fun of

oh i've now i've heard while on a medical journey yeah well i want to mention to everyone you get to park right next to the target right now for the next two weeks you're dealing with some medical

stuff and uh and then i'm like oh i don't even know who this person is who is this person oh and now she's checking herself into rehab and my very first uncharitable thought was oh don't people check themselves into rehab when they want to change the narrative on something you know Usually men get into some sort of scandal, then they say, oh, I'm going to go into it.

It's described as sex addiction.

Sex addiction is off in it, or if they acted inappropriately, then they enter a drug or alcohol rehab or something. But that's not a very charitable way to look at the problems that people face with addiction.

Although I will say this. i i had a weird experience with the whole thing which was um i was actually i didn't think the song was as bad as people were saying i was expecting something really rough i was thinking i was expecting roseanne bar oh wow at the roseanne arnold at a padres game that's or whatever level of of of problem it wasn't you know there were there was a couple of times where her you know she kind of went for it and it she wasn't quite able to get there in terms of the notes but it wasn't the disaster that i was expecting based on everything i was reading like when i went and finally listened to the song and the other thing was now maybe there's part of the story that i don't know which is maybe they just have it on a teleprompter somewhere the lyrics but i didn't see her looking at anything with the lyrics on it and she didn't forget the words to the song and i thought you know sober i don't know if i could do the star spangled banner word for word you know what i mean like yeah like this if she was drunk it was a pretty decent drunk

performance of the national anthem i'm just wondering like now we've talked about it so much that you said we weren't supposed to talk about it now we've talked about it are we doing our listeners a disservice by not playing it or would we i think it's let's play it okay with the full context but do you have it there i yeah i think i can call this i have i've already mentioned

that i was too lazy to load this audio into my system so well watch me get watching me get fooled

by the internet and find out this is somebody's like home star runner remix or something first

of all yeah it starts it starts with a prescription drug drug ad which by the way may or may not help you andrew depending on where you're at on your health journey and then someone pointing their phone at a television showing this woman

singing the national anthem. So, anyway, let's hope for the best here.

Who's brought stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight o'er the ramparts we watched Can you just pause?

Not, I mean, honestly, at this moment, not the worst, right? I mean, not as good

as I would do.

Well, sure, but that's because you're a recognized master.

So far, not the worst. And, you know, clearly...

not hitting all the notes perfectly and going for that sort of, I don't even know how to describe me talking about music. Breathy. Yeah. That kind of breathy diva.

Female singer kind of vibe that, uh, Kobe Coway, um, which whose name I only know because she's coming to EQC.

Oh really?

With Gavin DeGraw.

Are the, are the, uh, fabulous Butler boys gone or whoever that was. Who are the guys who are reinventing country music who were there a couple of weeks ago? Now the Brothers Osborne? Oh, the Brothers Osborne. How could I forget? Sure, Andrew. Sure. Okay. Back to the tape.

And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night that

Okay, right there, again, you know, maybe not the best performance that she could have turned in or the best version of the national anthem. But again, not I would I just I thought it was going to be worse on us. And I mean, this is a compliment to this singer. Like, I thought it was going to be much worse because you read all based on the script, based on everything I read.

Now, if you flipped on your TV and you're just ready to watch some dingers and you hear this, you're going to be like, wow, what is happening?

Correct. Yeah, if I just turned it on, I would have been shot, fairly shot.

Oh, say does that star spring a banner yet wave? O'er the land of the free And the home of the brave

Now, can we compare that to the Fergie performance? I was hoping you might have that dialed up. And as far as I'm aware, Fergie has not attributed this to any sort of substance use disorder. I will also mention that I don't even remember how this goes. I don't know if it's that this was bad or just weird. I think it might have been more in the weird category, the Fergie performance, but let's take a listen.

Oh, say, can you see?

He cats and the she cats. Is she biting all the he dogs and licking all the she dogs? I mean, so going for that, like that extreme Kim Cattrall kind of Shades of Quincy. I think Billie Holiday called. Yeah, she wants her anthem back. Yeah, yeah. i love it because um uh what's his name uh steph curry is looking at the jumbo there's like cuts to steph curry looking at the jumbotron i think trying to make sense of this jazzified version

of the anthem he's hearing i do think like right now it sounds it doesn't sound great to me but coming off of the the one we just heard it's not as bad musically and also i think you're getting a kick out of it because i think the visuals go a long way with this the befuddlement of the players i think it adds a lot to the experience is this your way of telling me to stop playing no no no it's only interesting to me you're laughing and stopping it in places where i'm like oh i'm not having the same reaction as you necessarily at this point it's definitely a strange arrangement yeah

is she's is this about america or mini the moocher Yeah.

I wonder how mad Fergie was that this was considered to be a terrible performance

because, again, musically, it's not terrible. It's just creatively like a kind of a weird choice. Yeah. But, again, this is one of those things where if you would have asked me, like, hey, worst national anthem, I'd be like, oh, Fergie, definitely. Fergalicious Death Fergalicious Death and yet it's not terrible from a musical standpoint

and I think that we are doing Fergie a grand favor here by playing Ingrid's version first

this sounds so good

to me right now I'm just like okay I dig it alright

I feel like she, like me, likes to start the day

with an Ella Fitzgerald Pandora station. Yeah. And it just kind of got to her a little bit. But I think we get the sense of what was going on there.

Yeah, I mean, she's hitting the notes. Again, it's just interesting choices that the players apparently weren't totally on board with.

But, yeah, and to be honest, you don't even actually know what the players were looking at. They were probably thinking about, you know, their shoe contract or something else. And it's one of those things where, like, a slightly disinterested Kevin Durant, it visually reads like some kind of big joke but he was honestly somewhere totally else in his mind

yeah that was the other thing when I watched the um Ingrid performance the other day yesterday I should say um I thought it was an interesting choice by the producers not to show her until the very very end and I wasn't sure if that was a reaction to something that was going on uh with her performance or if it was just because they really did want to show as many players as possible i mean is the i mean that is the magic of the all-star week you know it's like you have all of these players together in the same place representing their team so like the camera does not show her until the very very very end and i won't say it looks like or was it a was it the director trying to protect her from that's what i was wondering right exactly um so yeah anyway

more now if we can just if we can if we can just you know polish this i'm gonna call it an apple and not a turd if we can just put a finer point on this let's hear roseanne's version of the national anthem this will by the end of this fergie is going to be given a kennedy center honor okay

oh boy oh no we're in some rough territory here how is that let me buy you some time here

1657 people commented on that do you think roseanne had this pulled down

potentially it's interesting when you brought that up i was like oh that's right roseanne and

i feel like this is a very generational go-to video when you google roseanne bar national

anthem performance but that's awful quality yeah there's no chance that you have something going on with um the output of yours i used to run into issues with sometimes like only having one channel coming out of my computer and uh sometimes these youtube i'm hearing myself talking and i'm trying to stop chit chat chit chat anyway sometimes these youtube uploaders upload some janky version where it's like only left channel and then we have our system set up to only output right channel if that makes sense i know it's not interesting but it hopefully makes sense that might be what's going

on by the way new york post roseanne barr defends ingrid andrus years after her own disastrous

national anthem performance oh really let me yeah not even oh it is i don't know how well you can hear it but it's exactly what i for as painful as that was yes this is only coming out of the left channel in my headphone so can you maybe that was the good channel yes and i think that you have it probably reversed on your side tell me if you can hear this at all

the booing starts so early like at this point now maybe i'm laughing she's like

that was the thing she's not taking it seriously which is i think what made a lot of people mad

but from the very first note i don't want to belabor this but can you go back to the beginning of this i swear from the first note that she hits people are booing like they were they were ready

to go yeah i i think they might have been booing her even if she did a really great job and she sticks her fingers in her ears immediately she's singing the whole thing with her

and i'm wondering i believe she grabbed her crotch and spit on the um yeah at the end famously that's right so the whole thing was more about like the disrespect that

she was showing to the flag and you know san diego's a naval town so you got a lot of military folks to think that that wouldn't even be in the top five things that suck about roseanne at this point it's true right like that's this is this is actually sort of charming behavior from this person and i'm relatively speaking i'm thoroughly unshocked that she's weighing into the discourse in the New York Post to talk about national anthem performances because, I mean, nobody else is calling her. Funny, I'm looking at a... She doesn't have a speech

tonight in Wisconsin? Oh, God. Yeah.

She's opening for Amber Rose. I mean... Sorry. I love a good through the coffee.

Mid-sip.

that was celery man in real life that was that was maybe the most paternal you've ever been

towards me andrew no i was it was my fault i i regretted taking him there um so wait uh where were we we're talking about rants and raves so if anybody wants to call in 206-414-TBTL and sing the songs that you sing to your pets. But also, yeah, do you want to jump into this rant and rave?

Yeah, let's just do it. So the rant and rave column on, I think it was Monday maybe, was pretty short and sweet. It was a rave and then a rant and rave. And the first rave was rave to the airport security employee the other day who, when he found some prohibited items in a passenger bag, started singing everybody and mentioned a few of the items with his own music and lyrics he hit and says by the way this national anthem conversation was the perfect perfect lead into

that now really quickly because i found this difficult to follow even reading it on the page and then yeah so is everybody a song i believe it's a song and i'm thinking

well you know what i was assuming it was the backstreet's back all right song because that song is everybody yeah yeah okay but that's but that song is not called everybody it is

it is wait i think so i didn't know this i'm looking it up backstreet boys everybody and then parenthetically backstreet's back but the song is called everybody so this already makes It made so much more sense to me because I didn't understand what this raver was raving about. So in other words, so far where you are in this, this security person in TSA finds some things in somebody's bag that are prohibited.

Finds four ounces of shampoo.

Right. And then decides to start doing a parody version of the Backstreet Boys, Everybody, while singing about prohibited items in luggage.

I guess. He hit and sustained a high note effortlessly at the end. it took probably a minute but everyone listened and got the message rave to all waiting passengers who clapped such moments bring immense joy in an otherwise normal and some may say boring evening okay first of all uh the like the the sort of uh try hardness the look at me-ness of the tsa person Who clearly Wanted to show everyone that they can hit the notes Of this song, of whatever song they were singing That, just a starting point That bothers me Singing in public like that So as to show off that you can do When you sing in public, you should sound bad Like me or Roseanne Barr That's how you should sound So that you can be the butt of the joke Not, hey, I can really You know that some part of why this TSA person did this Was because they wanted to demonstrate That they have a nice singing voice also the public shaming factor can you I mean if I was the person with the bag and when they say also by the way when this person says prohibited items I mean I guess that is technically how you would describe them but I promise you whatever this item was it was no danger to anyone like it was prohibited in only the most technical sense it wasn't I the guy did not find a set of brass knuckles in some ladies Louise

I was literally about to make a brass knuckles joke how is it that you and i were both on brass knuckles because we have been inculcated by

the team by big tsa they love to put out that like photo montage every year that the lesser television stations pick up showing all the stuff they confiscated you know they show brass knuckles it's always brass knuckles i promise you

ks ksm was not bringing brass knuckles on whatever flight i don't know if ksm was he was not one of the flights or he would be dead he wouldn't be at guantanamo but um actually i think he's in um

can i do that through my mug again well you don't want to hear me break down where the 9-11 hijackers have have ended up no you're right this is the perfect place to litigate it i want to just

a freeze frame like a like at the end of the breakfast club but don't you forget about me but it's college sheikh mohammed oh dark anyway when they i the the mortification that i would feel if if a tsa person broke into song about stuff that i had just forgotten to toss out before going through would i i couldn't even begin to tell you and and like everything about this is just absolutely terrible i'm on the record as saying i do not appreciate and i still haven't actually asked about this andrew even though i was supposed to many many years ago i don't know if it is a designated position to be the tsa person who yells the instructions to everyone before they actually get to the tip of the spear but weirdly you can bring the tip of a spear now yes you can't bring the spear itself though but not four ounces of head and shoulders but literal heads and shoulders also okay it is a very very weird system no but like i don't know if that person who yells the instructions if that's actually a job or not like a designated job i always find that to be very look at me louis to borrow a phrase from our friends over at the lebitard show but to take it to the level of music it just it i would want i would probably just cancel my flight and go home i mean honestly this would i'd be like we're not going to hawaii honey sorry trips over from what

i just witnessed i'm leaving well i i don't know if this is self-aggrandizing but i feel like this is your this is another step on your continued journey towards becoming me which is a bad thing by the way because i mean this this fits into what i was railing about in the early 2000s an era that i have i believe recently declared to be probably the low point of a modern american culture was the early 2000s when like everything was based around like either flash mobs or breaking out into song like the internet was new ish and everybody was just trying to like like look at this look at this amazing moment that i captured where a tsa agent just burst into song and then turns out everybody in line were actually a bunch of flappers and they all started dancing And, like, I just hate that shit.

Now the SEO would be entitled Karen, owned by TSA Singer. Yeah, right.

Right, exactly. And, you know, I always, like, kind of bundle this all up with the, like, kind of big staged marriage proposals. Yeah, flash moms. And those going virals where people, like, you know, moonwalking.

You're more of an improv-in-everywhere kind of guy.

Yeah, right. I'm an improv nowhere people moonwalking up the up the aisle so they can get married and oh good news somebody caught it on their you know early generation iPhone it's just like I just hated that era so much and this is like this feels like a little taste of that

yeah and I'm I'm less bothered by that stuff than you are although I don't love it it doesn't feel great to me but this is just a whole new level like I just don't think I just don't think it had to go this way And I also would really like some more details On the prohibited item Me too Because again, if it were a butterfly knife I'm just going to go with all the things I wanted to acquire As a young child Which in order were brass knuckles Butterfly knife Nunchucks

Throwing star

Oh, I was constantly making throwing stars As I've described, they weren't good Or harvesting them from an old Like washing machine

or something in the alley by my dad oh old gears and stuff it was a gear that was from a washing

machine which then uh famous in the lore of tbtl i threw at a kid when we finally had a ninja rumble which i'd been waiting for for years and then i didn't get the memo that the rumble was off because i had to run home and get my ninja mask and my throwing star and the time that it took

me to get my weaponry they had a summit already they'd had a camp david summit and the beef had

been squashed and i was the only one who didn't know and i jumped i i scaled a fence and surveyed the battlefield and threw a a gear slash throwing star at a kid who was a kind of a maybe a slightly bigger kid whose shirt was i mean it's right out of like the sandlot or something it's right out one of those 80s movies about kid life because his ill-fitting shirt was riding up a bit.

so the ninja star caught the exposed part of his belly and thankfully didn't like seriously injure him just scratched him and he just looked at me like dude what the hell everybody was like what

the hell like so anyway i can see that in a movie where it's all like cinematic through the perspective of the person who's like running you're late to the rumble you're like the cinematic music is playing and then you throw this thing and then all of a sudden like all the action stops and you just like see the pathetic reality of this violence as the thing just sort of like clanks to the ground

and everybody's like, what the hell, dude? This awkward, probably starting to just sprout the first pimples of puberty kid standing on this fence in the alley between 76th Street and 77th Street in Seattle. Yeah, just like looking totally ridiculous. But yes, Ninja Star, definitely on the list. Point is, I wonder what was actually confiscated Again, we just know it wasn't weaponry, but the more banal the item that was confiscated, the more angry I am at the TSA person. And also, can you imagine working with this person? Because I promise you this was not the first time this TSA person broke into this song. This was not a unique event. This was something that probably happened. You could set your watch by it. Can you imagine you're reporting for your shift at SeaTac, you're in the TSA, it's probably a somewhat challenging job due to the tedium, due to people being frustrated because they're running late for their flight because they didn't plan their day properly, they're not being in Andrew, they're not there many hours before the flight. You have to deal with a lot of BS as a TSA person.

You're on your feet all day.

Yeah, like there are a lot of things about that job that I think are probably pretty challenging. And you're just like, oh, also Doug is here today. Like, the guy who just, like, breaks into song randomly to get applause from the people in the security line. Like, that would be a real day killer for me if I was one of the other TSA employees.

Now, I am with you on all of this, but should we—

I just realized something, by the way. I regularly break into song on this show, which is also your workplace.

Well, that is true, and I have—

But I do it poorly.

I have filed a ticket. I was going to say, though, I mean, we should probably leave some room in this conversation for us to acknowledge that we all while we are in agreement on this and it doesn't change my opinion at all. We may be on the wrong side of this. Absolutely. These are people who like it sounds like at least one person was brought joy in their otherwise sort of tedious day. People applauded. People liked it. I mean, I think most people who are not like already like a kind of grumpy toads like me are kind of like, oh, wow, this was a little moment of joy spreading. And maybe even some of the other co-workers enjoy it. Who knows? It wouldn't be you and me. We'd be trying to shiv this guy with a makeshift throwing star. But like the chances are you and I are on the wrong side of this.

You're absolutely right. That was occurring to me, too. Like the normal person probably reacted the way that this raver did, which was, Hey, and, and by the way, I have my versions of this where I see some little, you know, moment of beauty or grace in the world, but it's the kind of moment of beauty or grace or levity that I tend to prefer. And so I, you know It makes my whole day It's just not the TSA person singing But, you know, the people in line Broke out in applause Yes, most people are not Angry, sad, broken men Like we are And so I'm guessing that the I'm guessing like 8 out of 10 people Would have really enjoyed this experience We're just the two that probably wouldn't have

I think, what do you think about our audience? 9 out of 10 10s would probably

I'm still reeling from how hard you went after the bare naked ladies yesterday and i think they overlap i had i had

had a lot of advil no i barely even remember this you uh oh that's right you started singing that

patter song and watching x files with the lights on or no lights on or some lights on right right right right that was we're here to believe you i believe i mean i think people yeah i'm here to

No, I'm saying the Venn diagram overlap.

I'm here to listen. I'm here to throw my phone. The TBTL fan mantra. No, I'm making it, like, I'm taking something that was totally innocuous, and you handled it very well. You just said, like, hey, if you love Barenaked Ladies, that's awesome. It's just not for me. That's the appropriate way, by the way, Andrew, to handle it. I'm taking that, and I'm making it potentially a lot worse by saying, I think the likelihood that somebody both enjoys the music of Barenaked Ladies and would enjoy the experience of this TSA person singing is probably there's a high likelihood of that. And there's nothing wrong with any of that. I'm just saying our listeners are typically...

nicer more forgiving more joyful people than you and i are andrew and i would imagine that our the majority of our listeners would have enjoyed this experience i blame our generation

i feel like we are very i think that in this particular instance and this particular sentiment you and i embody very much the eye rolliness of generation x which is very out of vogue these days

yeah it's the it's the eye rolliness of somebody who's letting their guard down right i mean essentially what's going on it's like oh you're in an unguarded moment you are genuinely doing something to get a response and you're not being arched you don't have one eyebrow raised you're not quote unquote in on the joke and that is so threatening to me for me to not be in on the joke for even five seconds uh it feels like it's my life is in danger from that and and you can ask any of my ex-wives and the fact that i have to use the plural for that tells you what a wonderful

person i am to be around because of this and i'm just allergic to cringe too now this instance might not be cringy to everybody but it's it hits my cringe meter immediately and like cringe is something that i don't know how to you know we have different like organs in our body that like process various things whatever organ processes cringe like is just doesn't work for me for some reason that's another thing that i'm going to talk to the doctor about i think there's got to be like some sort of palexa drug or something that i can take right help me help me process whatever organ that is for you it's fatty and no longer functioning that's absolutely right yeah yeah i i

don't i don't i don't do particularly well with that uh with that either now should we i want to talk about neckties with you but should we also jump on to the the the is it a rant i guess the next thing in this rants and raves column had to do with the firefighters testing their hoses that's not hey by the way that's not a porno i'm not describing a porno right now um i didn't know

that you wanted to talk about this one this one i found a little bit it's a rave it is a well isn't this one both a rant and a rave it starts as a rave and then it slips into a rant oh yeah

It kind of does.

About the water.

Yeah. It's not the water, but in this case, it might be. So we have a rave. If you're scoring at home, we have a rave to the TSA employee, and then we have a rant and a rave. But then it says, rave and kudos to the Seattle Fire Department, who frequently test equipment at Madison Park, North Beach. They run hoses full blast, ensuring that high-rise buildings can be reached with water. So that's the rave.

That took me a long time to figure out. I thought they were, like, hosing down buildings in the heat for the people in the high-rises so that they could have, like you mentioned the other day, the classic, like, you know, uncork a fire hydrant and put a trash can lid on it and play in the street. I thought it was something like that. But, no, no, these firefighters are taking their equipment out to a beach or some sort of big area somewhere and just testing the strength of the streams to make sure that were they to need to hit a high-rise, they could, right?

i feel like this person who wrote this rant rave and rave and kudos must have gone up and asked them what they were doing at some point i would have never put that together right yeah good call like if i was driving past and and this is right by uh where i used to live where the um the old studio de bajo was this beach that they're referring down the street if i drove by and saw the firefighters just like firing their their water cannon a hundred feet in the air i would just think they're showing off but um so this person must have asked about what was going on uh so they but they're happy to see that the fire department is preparing for the worst but on the flip side as they write a rant that every time the fire department does this exercise the water in our condo turns an ugly brown color and stays this way for several days we are not sure if the water is even safe to drink what this seems like the most seattle

passive-aggressive, this is a rant that is wrapped in a rave because the person is so passive-aggressive. They want to complain. Tied in an enigma. They want to complain about the brown water, but they do not have, they are not like me. They won't, they don't have the gumption to go right after the fire department.

Or promote their blue sky account.

Right, right. By the way, I just paid my first garbage bill yesterday since I started my Blue Sky accountability account, and there were no extra charges. So that works out well for me. No extra charges for the past two-month cycle. But now, I don't believe Genevieve died. I did not give her the keys to the kingdom when I was out of town last week. So if we get any extra charges for the week that I was out of town, we have no.

no way to prove that um we are being uh taken advantage of but um do you do you need to pass that off to her while you're under the knife this is like a president vice president thing she needs nuclear codes while you're incapacitated next week wednesday is so wednesday early morning

is my um surgery time and wednesday night is when we would take out the garbage next week so will i have been recovered will i have recovered enough in like seven hours to take out to the bins myself and importantly document them at the side of the curb um or do i have to ask genevieve to do that and if so do i trust her to do it properly these are questions that i have about

a week to figure out um anyway i i also feel like this this can't be actually causally there can't be a causal relationship here right like i feel like this person is kind of a crank and they have misattributed whatever the fire department is doing to the water turning brown in their condo like is it the case that the fire department is is pulling so much water out of the system that

then all that's left is the brown water well it's funny like while i was the hydrological implications of this while i was critical of their approach here because i think this is really them wanting to complain about the water but first want to make it sound like they're celebrating the firefighting heroes um i didn't question the correlation here i mean if this person has honestly noticed a pattern of two or more times of hey these firefighters test their hoses and

then my water turns brown how often do these that's also weird to me they're doing this like on the on the weekly that's a lot of times to test these hoses well i know this neighborhood i mean

this sounds like this could be somebody who's like lived in that neighborhood for a long long time right when things were more affordable around here like i'm not getting i like when you think about the people who write into the rant and rave column of the seattle times they're not usually probably like the newer tech bro type of people they're not probably not the people who are driving the elon musk trucks around town that i see or maybe even the teslas the email is not coming from one of the amazon spheres like i now thanks to our friend bobby pape who probably by the way should have been a copy editor on both of these rants and raves today he's shown himself to be a good a good writer and have a good ear when it comes to these things um but i feel like now whenever i picture anybody writing into it it's somebody who looks like the guy who yelled at me at the Mariners game for quote-unquote cutting on the stairs which I still say that is the wrong word to describe what I did like it's somebody say cuts what I think you can say cutting the line right is that well I don't think I was cutting is what I'm oh right I'm not I'm not admitting to anything nice try Matlock I thought you were saying that we can't say cuts anymore

because there was a version of that that we used to say that had this kind of like ethnic component

that we wouldn't say oh i didn't know about that but um uh but anyway yeah so i anyway try way to try to get me on the record luke um but no no i did not cut you cannot cut in a crowd um uh having said all of that um you imagine that's the person that's writing i imagine they're all like people who drive subaru outbacks are probably in the 55 to 75 age range have lived in seattle most of their lives bought a house when things were more affordable seeing things change around them And have a bit of maybe even deserved, but I'll say entitlement. I don't know if entitlement can be deserved. But anyway, that's who I always picture doing this. So I could definitely see this person having experienced this phenomenon more than once.

Yeah, I guess so. I guess I just don't understand how this works from like an aquifer perspective. So there's a bunch of brown muddy water that's below the good clean water. But the fire department's using the good clean water. and then all that's left is the brown muddy water. I mean, I guess it's possible. I just never thought about it that way. It's one of those things where I could also see a universe in which this person has kind of gotten in their head about it. Yeah. But who knows? Yeah. I'd like some more reporting. The important thing is they got theirs published and you still haven't.

Exactly. I'd like more reporting on both of these stories, by the way. I want to know what were the contents in this person's luggage that caused alarm and song, and I want to know if this is actually a phenomenon, and if so, why?

Let's talk neckties. In The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik with a really great piece, which is typical for him. I'm a big fan of his work, about the demise of the necktie, the naughty death of the necktie. Now, I've got to say, I don't think Adam writes the headlines. I don't think this is the finest whoever does the headlines for the New Yorker I don't think this is their best work Yeah, because, like, I like punnery, that's fun, but when you're, you would never, you would never use that word in this headline anyway. You would never describe a decline as naughty, right?

Right, and it also has almost a double entendre, like, you know, we think of naughty as maybe somewhat risque.

Yeah, it sounds like, well, it's naughty, though, not naughty, right?

I know, but I'm just saying it's distracting because it's like, it's also not, it's not a knotted issue, right? It's like just people aren't wearing neckties as much like this. Whoever did this headline got too fixated on the word on this naughty thing, K-N-O-T-T-Y. And, you know, but the essay itself is is very is very well written. And it kind of basically points out that the necktie has been in decline. This is between 1995 and 2008, necktie sales plummeted from more than a billion dollars to less than 700 million. and if a fashion historian on npr is to be believed ties are now quote reserved for the most formal events for weddings for graduations job interviews post pandemic there was no sign of necktie recovery there is now famous photograph from the 2022 g7 summit which shows the group's leaders seven men all in open collars making them look weirdly ready for a slightly sentient remake of the hangover wait senescent what is that word uh oh i you know i remember reading

that and i took it to be prescient but i was just um but no i don't know i'm clearly wrong on that the process of growing old oh okay because they're older oh interesting because they're all in biology

senescence is a process by which a cell ages and permanently stops dividing but does not die also known as a Biden. No. I added that last part. Okay, I did not know that word. Senescence. Nor did I.

But were you familiar with this photo? I don't know that I was before I read this article. You did click on it, though, right? It is a pretty funny one. I actually haven't. Oh, it's interesting. Yeah, so it's all these world leaders. Let's see. I think, yeah, Biden is in there. It's post-Trump. I'm looking at it now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think who's the bloated British bloke?

Wow. Boris Johnson. do you think biden was pissed because he had to stand next to boris johnson are they standing next to each other i didn't remember that yeah uh first of all justin trudeau what a hunk i know i mean i know va va va voom um i was thinking about this though andrew and i was i was reflecting on the fact that you know i do wear a suit when i'm hosting livewire and i stopped wearing a tie some years ago because it felt a little bit I wanted to, I was hoping to look put together but not stuffy so my brain at some point made the decision or sort of decided that a tie signaled some amount of stuffiness that I was not trying to indicate which I think means that probably there is something going on where we're not thinking about ties the same way or thinking they're too formal. All of these world

leaders in this photo i think it's interesting they are not dressed unlike you might dress for live wire right yeah suit and then they're all wearing i believe white shirts open collar i hadn't thought about it from that perspective before but this seeing this headline alone sort of eased in anxiety that i've had and this is not this this is what i'm about to say is absolutely truthful and not exaggerated having said that i will acknowledge that it's also really weird um but i have so my whole life i've worn ties i wore ties to high school you know as part of my i had a dress code um did you tie the tie or did you have a clip on i had tied ties you know ties that you would tie um one of them in fact man i'm wondering if i could even go upstairs take a photo of this and make it the show pic one year i decided I was going to wear the same tie every single day and it was a sort of narrow kind of paisley but actually from like the 60s sort of tie I kind of like the design of it and then I was so bored during class I started coloring in between some of the patterns and now I have this tie that still smells like my ink from high school where I've inked so much of it and I wore it every single day and it became an art project of some sort I was not like well whatever i was not the most like kind of socially at ease person during this phase of my life unlike now um my point is i've ties have been a part of my life for a really long time i have always had a tie rack a cheapo little thing that i probably bought when i was 20 years old or maybe when i first moved to new hampshire just so i could hang these things in a closet somewhere every time i've moved i have unscrewed again this is a cheapo tie rack that probably cost $10 in the year 2000 where you kind of pull out all. the little uh the little hooks you can hang your ties on it and they all fold back like your grandfather probably had i have unscrewed this thing and then screwed it back into closets in probably at least 10 different apartments i've lived in throughout my adult life i mean from new hampshire to la to seattle but right now all of my ties loosely clinging i believe to that tie rack are just shoved in the top shelf of a coat closet somewhere in our house. I know exactly where it is in our house. And when we moved into this house two and a half years ago, that's like the one thing that I never finalized. I never hung up my tie rack anywhere because we moved after that pandemic. I only wore a tie once since the pandemic started. And that was for a wedding that I went to, you know, Nick and Rosen's wedding, which was like two years ago. And every now and then i think about that pile of ties that i still have not made a decision about like that one like lasting thing that i haven't put away from our move two and a half years ago because i don't know what role they play in my life like sometimes i'm just like wait have i have i dropped out of

society so much that i don't need ties anymore is it a reflection on me and my you know being a hermit here but also like there i just can't think of any any events that call for me wearing a tie

anymore it is a weird thing if you break it down like we grew up with them and so it seems like well that's what you wear that indicates that you're dressed up but like it's a piece of fabric that's dangling from your neck like it is a strange thing and in this piece Gopnik mentions that it was actually Croatian soldiers who would wear some sort of a thing around their neck and I believe I can't find the exact part of this article but I believe they sort of brought this over to i don't know if it was france maybe or another country where they were like in the court of whoever the king of somewhere and they kind of had this look and i guess the the other people were kind of impressed by it and so then this idea of you know wearing a uh some kind of piece of fabric around your neck went through all these different uh iterations and we ended up with the necktie which again because we've normalized it it seems totally normal but if you were to come down from another planet and go like wait why are they wearing that again i will also tell you that like i don't know where i don't even know where the neckties that i have are that and i'm somebody who wears suits a lot actually but it's been that long since i strapped on a necktie it just feels unnecessary to me at this point it's like if you put on a suit and a nicely pressed undershirt you're letting everyone know that you're taking whatever it is seriously you know in fact i wear a bow tie much more that's another thing that gopnik points out in this piece that i thought was really interesting was that basically george will ruined the bow tie for liberals he didn't kind of bow tie bow tie yeah yeah like it wasn't always an indication of being like a neocon or whatever but at some point he became so associated with think about it the tucker carlson's of the world yeah the george wills of the world like to wear a bow tie outside of like a tuxedo or whatever, you know, just to have that be your look, it could definitely kind of indicate that you have some sort of maybe conservative worldview, which is not fair, but it's just kind of how we think of that now.

Which is weird, because I would have no connection to this at all. But I just remember an SNL sketch where they were making fun of Democratic Senator Paul Simon, right? And he always wore the bow tie. Yes, that's a good point. And it was played by Al Franken, exactly, who became a senator and then ended up resigning himself over that scandal. But it was just like we had—back then he was just a writer on SNL who would appear in occasional sketches.

And he looked so much like the Senator Paul Simon. Not to be confused with Paul Songus, who I used to always mix up, Paul Simon and Paul Songus.

But no, they didn't have, other than their names, they weren't like both bowtie.

And they think they were both senators, right?

Okay, gotcha. But they weren't like bowtie wearers or anything like that. No. Okay, I just want to see if I can find this Paul Simon bowtie. Because we had some VHS tape that was like some sort of like best of SNL that for some reason, like I was just exposed to so many weird SNL sketches that I think are like kind of universally beloved. But it turns out, no, just because that's when my family happened to hit record on some sort of a Nick at night, like SNL celebration. But I remember Al Franken doing Paul Simon just saying over and over again, that's why I wear the bow tie. Oh, right. I'm looking for it now. Okay, can I, while you're looking for it, can I mention.

For me, the breakout star of this article by Adam Goffnick is this guy named Sego Katsuragawa, who has a Thai shop on Upper Madison Avenue. Andrew, if I live a thousand years, I will never be described in this way, but I would love to. In the tiny store called Sago on Upper Madison Avenue, where Sago Katsuragawa presides in impeccable elegance over the last remaining harvest of perfect handmade silk ties, club ties, liberty ties, plus cummerbunds and ascots and all the secondary paraphernalia of the lost kingdom of the decorated neck, Katsuragawa presents his wares in neat folded array, a bandbox of small ribbons of fictive identity. He has perhaps the best taste of any retailer on Madison Avenue, exquisitely curated jazz, particularly the music of Bill Evans and Cannonball Adderley plays in the background of his store throughout the day. So I became obsessed with this guy and I Googled him because he's just seems like perfectly turned out. Right. I found a New York Times article from 2014 where they talk about the jazz this guy plays in his tie shop. This must be really memorable jazz that he's playing. I guess it just sounds like the most sort of curated, composed little section of Madison Avenue.

And I love it. Yes. And also, like, I mean, we didn't talk about this, but when we describe the tie, not the bow tie, I'm slipping into as I'm looking for this bow tie.

I don't for some reason. And that's why we talk about the bow tie bow tie.

I can't find that. So I'm going to I'm a little distracted. So I'm going to stop looking for it. I'm going to just assume that for some reason that particular skit is not or sketch sketch is not archived on the SNL website. But, you know, I'm not against the tie, like you said before, and sort of echoing what the article says, like it is sort of a strange little flourish in is in, you know, traditionally men's apparel that doesn't really serve a purpose other than like what it looks like. And I I got to say, having a little having having another little place where we can display a sense of style is not the worst thing.

I am wondering. I didn't expect you to say that because you have a lot of maybe it's more bow tie related, but you've described feeling really having pretty strong feelings about not liking the experience. It wasn't like backstage at TBTL, whichever. I never learned how to tie a bow tie.

I've only had to wear one once, and it was for that, I think, 3,000th episode that we did of TVTL. And I love that photo of us up on stage. It was your idea to wear tuxedos for that, and I'm glad we did. But I had never tried to tie a bow tie before that, which is interesting because I had been in a wedding, and I thought I had to wear a tux. But either way, maybe they got clip-ons or somebody tied it for me back then. But yeah, as we were kind of gearing up for that big show, I think I had a lot of stress in general. I think I was still living in Los Angeles at that time and flying up for this show and probably not loving my kind of situation in L.A. at that time. I was filled with a lot of stress. And I remember standing in front of the mirror trying to – like Genevieve watched one YouTube video, immediately learned how to tie a bow tie, and then learned how to tie it backwards so that she could show me how to tie it. And then, like, I just can't do it. And I just remember, like, being filled with this flush of, like, anger and frustration that I used to be filled with as a child before I break down and cry, right? and that was that experience but ties themselves like neck first of all I think bow ties look good I was just mad at myself for not being able to tie it but the neck ties again I've been tying those since you know I was a child so and it is fun to I mean man I told you I've been watching a lot of the X-Files lately I'm trying to watch them from the beginning but I'm so bad at watching TV I'm only like six episodes in and I think there's 136 or something but it's amazing to see the 90s style of Mulder and Scully and it's so I mean it it's from that era and this informed very much how I navigated my own sartorial choices throughout the years but like it Mulder is such David Duchovny is such a good looking guy but every single scene it looks like somebody dressed him up in his dad's suit it's like they're all these oversized like shoulder pads and shoulder pads and just you know like two sizes too big and all of the ties are so ugly they're all like too wide and they have like paisley patterns on them or whatever and this is how i used to dress i mean frankly i'm embarrassed i think i pulled out an old suit like this when i uh interviewed for my job in la at kcrw and i cannot believe i got that job dressed like dressed like the kids in bojack horseman or pretending to be an adult um but anyway you know i sort of see that and it can definitely be done in a way that isn't very flattering but like I mean when you think about the broad spectrum of time

ties and how they can look like that can really it's a it's one of the few places where well that's not true I mean between shoes and in your whole your whole fit as the kids would say I guess there's a lot of places where you can display a little personality or what have you but a tie is there just just for style and there's something fun about that it's plumage we don't have a lot

of plumage and also for me the my love of the tie or at least my favorite way for the tie to be worn is similar to my favorite way for the bow tie to be worn which is slightly undone like what i really like about the tie is you're you're at a bar after you did the work thing and the tie is loosened yeah or the bow tie is pulled out which brings me to this video that i'm going to play sight unheard andrew when i was trying to help you out and find the um al franken plays paul simon all i could find was from c-span al franken as senator paul simon and senator paul

song i saw that too but i couldn't quite make i want you to know that i said that before maybe i

maybe i this was a bit on snl that went deep into my subconscious i think i was just a young kid and i didn't really know the difference this is a one minute and 38 second clip from c-span al franken by the way is wearing a clip-on bow tie just for the record if you're curious um i don't know what this is going to be but can i just play this for you just to see what i don't it's not the snl bit you were describing but apparently he was going around doing a paul simon paul song is kind of situation he could tell

skip that one

this is the 80th annual white house correspondence dinner so i guess he was you know the the hired comedy for do you have a year of course ninety is it there's a uh... i'd two thousand you know i don't know uh... yeah i can't I can't exactly tell. I can tell you that it's the 80th annual, but I don't know when they started it.

Okay. The American political system is not particularly kind to politicians who are not good infotainers. This is my impression of Paul Simon talking to Paul Sangas. Paul, I really want to thank you for supporting the balanced budget amendment.

Of course I would support it. We have to get the deficit under control. You know, we have to have a plan for I.A.

You know, Paul, you should have been elected president.

No, you should have.

No, you should. I don't know why you didn't win.

I do not know why you didn't win.

And, Andrew, that's how you get the young listeners. i would describe that kind of 40 year old tape of paul of al franken doing an impression of paul

simon and paul song i would describe that in one word luke that kind of comedy timeless that's just like i was having this similar thoughts you were doing that i was just like i mean first of all with us grousing about people who like sing in airports and bring joy to others and like already like being so like solid solidly into our gen x-um uh in this show and now somehow we've led ourselves to playing exactly that that is rant to the two elderly podcasters who played old al franken tape can you somehow you know how things won't kind of catch an updraft on tiktok what would it take for that tape that nemify it that tape to catch an updraft on tiktok

we'd have to get i'm trying to think who's the toast who's the toast of tiktok right now i don't even know who it is but we have to get the toast of tiktok to basically do an overdub you know where they're pretending to be talking that way but they're actually talking to their um pug i

don't something i don't even get the the paul songus impression like i guess i'd never heard that guy talked before i was very shocked to hear that that was what what the uh impersonation sounded like have you been spending less time on tiktok luke for some reason i just feel like less tiktok has been coming from you yeah i don't i don't i don't know what to attribute that to

because I've said that you can track my kind of emotional health with how much I'm on TikTok looking at it, and I've been saying that the news of the world has really kind of been pretty rough for all of us and has been tough on me, so you'd think it would run me right to TikTok, but it hasn't. What I've been mostly doing is sitting in the one part of the yard that is survivable with Gigi sitting by my feet, and then I just pat her head, and then I just stare into the middle distance. That's been kind of my ritual for the last few days. That's nice. It's replacing my TikTok time.

That's why I've always said, dogs are nature's TikTok. As you know, I've always said that. That is an excellent, I think, power out for this episode of the show. Should we go ahead and wrap it up?

Yeah, I think it's interesting that today's show had no structure at all. We didn't do top story. We didn't do any benchmarks. It was just a lazy river of Gen X content. Actually, should we name the show that and just see how bad the numbers are? Yes, a lazy river of Gen X content.

Yeah, that will be a very interesting data point for us. definitely in the description please write about the al franken bit okay definitely really try to

up that seo i am going to highlight it all right thanks for listening everyone uh we are going to

be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you in the meantime have a great wednesday take care of yourselves and please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all

Power out.