Muse

All right, well let me try and help you a little bit here. Why don't you tell me something you say in one of your speeches and I'll fix it for you. I'll help you out. We only have six years to reduce fossil fuel emissions to keep warming below 1.5 degrees celsius. That doesn't sound like a lot. It's a catastrophic amount of warming when it happens over the whole planet and stays that way for a long time. It means melting of glaciers and ice sheets, changing forest cover, changing ocean circulation, currents to slow down, corals to bleach, trees to die, sea levels to rise. Here's what you should say.

Hey, hey, everybody. You know your house? Your house is about to be part of the ocean. And all your pictures, pictures with you and your buddies, that's going to get wrecked by ocean water. And a shark could swim in there and eat a picture of your daddy. Try that. TBTL!

Jokes. Do some. Okay, what makes you laugh? Comedy. Obviously. And sometimes tragedy. Light tragedy. Erectile dysfunction. Non-fatal hunting accidents. Waving at someone you think you know, but it turned out to be a stranger. That sort of thing.

I was shaking, my tummy was shaking, my head was shaking, my arms were shaking, my legs, my feet too. No, definitely. Yeah. Literally, no. Yeah. Yeah. No. For sure. No.

There comes a time in every young man's life when I'm not really sure. I'm not really sure what young men are doing nowadays. Let me know.

All right, hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Monday edition of TVTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live.

It feels wrong, but it's oh so right.

My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. I'm an activist and house party enthusiast. Coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio perched high above the mighty Columbia where it's...

Oh, ma, pa, it's just beautiful.

Absolutely beautiful day. We will take them. Here as the sunsets get a little earlier, the mornings get a little cooler, but still pretty nice here on September the 16th. That would put me at day 8 of 75 hard, which I guess really puts me at the beginning of day 67. If I'm counting this down, of trying to drink a lot of water and do some exercise and be a generally healthy feller. We have a more than just generally interesting show. We've got a real fun one in store for you here on this Monday. It's episode 4294 in a collector series. Let the fun begin. I had an adventure on Friday.

Oh, and the adventure begins again.

Trying to get my hands on some political yard signs out here in the, it turns out, very conservative county that I live in. i've i've never felt more behind enemy lines than i did at one point and then i've also never felt more rescued by allies than i did on friday we can get into that and we can get into what has been going on with my good friend the longest running cobro of the show maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships who has been uh in croatia

But is joining us once again

Making his triumphant return It is Mr. Andrew Walsh Good morning, my friend What'd I miss, Luke? Anything? So much

Heard you had a bunch of B and C level Andrews on While I was gone Trying to fill these

The show nearly fell apart Much like Vice President Harris in the debate Which I don't know if you heard It went very, very badly So we're currently looking for another replacement candidate. And the show was hanging by a thread. And you got here not a minute too soon to save everything, including democracy.

Oh, good. Sounds good. I am here to save democracy. That's what I'm for. That's what I'm for, Luke, saving democracy. It reminds me, you know, I'm back from my trip to Croatia, where it's funny because I think I told you right before I left that one of my bigger, although embarrassing to admit apprehensions about the trip was that I was you know like I was staying in this very nice house in this island in the middle of the Adriatic Sea with a bunch of friends and it sounds you know wonderful to most people but as I and looked

wonderful to most people because I follow all of these people on Instagram

I had like a real sort of fly-on-the-wall view of what everyone was doing and then what you were doing.

And also it was weird because there were like six depictions of everything we saw. Is that what happens with flies? Do flies see things in like sixes or am I thinking of spiders with eight legs?

Probably spiders, but also maybe flies. You know what it is? It's the oft-used Rashomon approach, right? It's like it's a story told. It's the same story told from six different perspectives.

I'll be honest with you. I think I assume that flies see things through six different lenses because of an old Farside cartoon I probably saw in 1998. And so I'm not sure if that's science or not.

Well, you know how I knew you made it back safely? Not because you texted your old pal Luke and said, I got here. I'm in one piece. We're good. No, because I saw you posting a Farside calendar photo on Instagram. Oh, that was a good one. And I thought, okay, I guess he's back. I guess he made it.

That was good. Yeah, because I got back here, and I hadn't, you know, it's called a page.

The first thing you did was ran downstairs to your far side calendar.

Well, it's called a page-a-day calendar, and I couldn't take it with me, and so I had, like, almost two weeks of far sides to go through. The idea that there were untorn pages that were sitting there. How funny was that one I posted, though? I don't think I'd seen that one before. Do you remember what it was? Remind me, please. There's a fella who's selling something. He's selling a bunch of animals, it looks like, in this little stand that looks like, I don't know, a lemonade stand or something. And he has a customer that he's talking to, And he says, well, I have good news and bad news. But it was G and GNU. Gary GNU, exactly. Well, that's such a good joke. I have good news. I have bad news.

It's a good joke, except I feel like if we watched The Great Space Coaster and Gary. Because I'm just too. Listen, Andrew.

Don't punch up a 40-year-old cartoon that brings me joy.

I'm not taking your joy away. I'm explaining what my reaction to it was. which was, no Ganoos is good Ganoos, that was a joke that was told to me by Gary Ganoos doing the Ganoos on the Great Space Coaster. So to me, the Farside version of it, if I had never seen that on the Great Space Coaster, that would have slayed me, but I'd been exposed to that exact kind of joke before. That was the reason for me that it didn't maybe hit as hard as it did.

Did he used to say, I have good Ganoos and I have bad Ganoos?

He didn't say good Gnues, but it was Gary Gnu with the Gnues, and sometimes I thought maybe he would say, I forget all the exact Gnues, Gnu-based wordplay that he enganaged in, but that was, I guess the idea of Gnu standing in for N-E-W-S, G-N-U standing in for N-E-W-S, to me was a comedic premise that had hit my brain a long time ago, So when it hit my brain again from that, I thought it was clever, but it was maybe not as revelatory for me as it was for you.

Yeah. I mean, I remember that. It felt different to me. It felt fresh enough. It felt like a different kind of wordplay. Sure. But that's okay. I mean, we can agree to disagree on this.

Let's be honest. A big part, a big part of you being able to get through this professional relationship is hearing the same comedy again and again from me and finding new ways for it to be entertaining to you.

The GNU ways for me to find entertainment to me is what you would say.

And I believe we've got the beginnings of a show title somewhere in there.

It does have something to do with that. But I think I started to say I have a feeling that this is going to be a little bit of a scattered show, at least from my end of things. I'm feeling good, by the way, as far as—

You seem pretty composed. When did you—may I ask, when did you actually get back home to Seattle?

So our travel day – and I promised myself I was not going to lead with travel like the actual act of traveling after like an amazing sort of like once-in-a-lifetime trip abroad. I don't want to just come back and talk about airports. Having said that, I had one hell of a day of travel. It was – so Vives and I started off on Saturday morning local time waking up on this island. We weren't even on the mainland of Croatia. We woke up the day we were leaving on this island in, you know, off the coast of Croatia. Vis. Vis, exactly, which is a two and a half hour ferry ride. It's hard for me not to say ferry boat, but I think that's an andrewism, right? You don't say ferry boat. I just say ferry boat, or am I?

I think growing up in the Northwest where you take ferries a lot, I don't say ferry boat, but I don't think it's a major faux pas.

The way I say sled riding, it's just sledding. It's not sled riding. Anyway, we took a sled across the sea.

There was a sled involved.

But, yeah, so a lot of our friends were leaving the day after us because they took Monday off or something. I'm not exactly sure what the deal was. And they decided to, like, spend one day kind of, like, traveling from the island back to the island. the mainland spend eating gelato apparently there was a lot of like our last gelato yes and i'll be totally honest with you andrew and this is selfishly motivated i was tra i was trying to like it was like norad tracking santa i was trying to figure out where andrew is because i was like how how hard is it going to be for andrew on monday to do this and i kept seeing our other friends being like last gelato in croatia i was like no no no no no this is far too late no this We cannot have an Andrew in Croatia on Sunday because we need an Andrew in Seattle on Monday morning.

You do have any more Mishas to dial up in an emergency Misha?

I've called every semi-famous person in my directory, including my mother and brother, and one of them called me back.

Was your mom on? Oh, no, no. She didn't want to. She said, no, thanks.

She said she felt like she was overexposed. You know, that did happen with P. Fletch. I invited P. Fletch on the show, and she said, you know I was just on, and I said, yeah, of course I did.

But let's do it right this time, is what you said.

I listened to every second of that episode. But anyway, so you guys – sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. But I just mean I've been very – following as much as I could your travel. So you had to do this ferry for two and a half hours to then split to get on an airplane?

Yeah, listen to this. So – and originally, I think the reason we did it this way – and again, I got to say, like, I did no planning for this trip. It's sort of – I got to say it was the type of trip that I found out was sort of happening. Genevieve and I had talked about this on the trip and I don't want to throw her under the bus or anything because I think she felt a little bit bad about it but I kind of said I kind of didn't understand that this was happening I felt like you came back from the Eagles one night and our tickets were basically already booked which is a bit of an exaggeration but I definitely had a good time I told you I had some anxiety about such a long involved travel trip with a big group of people and will I have my personal space and all that stuff will end up being just an absolutely lovely time And also just like, again, I got to see things that I would just have never had an opportunity to see, like this tiny little village where my where my friend's mom still lives. It only has three people in it in the in the wintertime, like just like old, old school living. We had this feast of homemade like with homemade wine and olive oil in an olive orchard. It's just like ridiculous. The things I saw were were just so wonderful. So no complaints about that. But I do remember at one point when Genevieve was making these plans, She sort of told me, OK, we're we're landing. I think the plan is now for us to land at like nine o'clock on Sunday night or something, something along those lines. I remember. And I said, listen, I need some. I mean, you know, a trip to Federal Way, I need a buffer day. Like I can't be coming back from the White Feet store. You need three hours to recover. Right, exactly. It's more of a Linwood excursion, but you know what I mean. I mean, I go look at the big egg. Where's the big egg again? It's in the world's largest egg. Oh, Winlock, Washington. I come back from Winlock, I need a buffered egg.

I mean, give the man a day to just process.

So anyway, I do remember at one point saying, I need at least Sunday to recover. I mean, there's going to be jet lag involved. This is going to be a whole thing. So she changed the trip. But what I kind of didn't realize was she, who was Genevieve, So Genevieve, like a lot of our friends, I think, is somebody who embraces FOMO or at least suffers from FOMO. I don't know if suffers is the right word. So she's like, well, I don't want to miss out on a day. So basically what happened was all of our friends kind of left the Airbnb, which, again, was on this island on Saturday. But they just kind of left at noon and then spent another day on the mainland and then flew out the next day and blah, blah, blah. Genevieve was like, no, no, we're not missing out on our last night on Friday. So we had to get up around like 4.30 on Saturday, local time, get on a ferry that left at 5.30 a.m. from the island. And the ferry was a two-and-a-half-hour, you know, drive. What do ferries do? It was a two-and-a-half-hour float from the trip from the island. So that was like already two-and-a-half hours is a long time.

Yeah.

Then we get to the airport in plenty of time because the ferry, only a few ferries run, so we had to take the really early one. So then we get to the airport probably like three hours early before we take our first flight to Copenhagen, which is like two and a half hours. Then layover in Copenhagen, then to Iceland. Reykjavik. Did you have to fly through D4? I don't, no, D21 was us.

Did you have to go through that customs bullshit? No, because we were.

Oh, yes, yes, yes. There was some. It wasn't bullshit. You didn't have to.

I need to. I'm going to write a strongly worded letter because I did. No, no, it's not.

It's not bullshit. That was just the usual like customs thing because we were coming. We were I think that was where we were then leaving the EU. We didn't have to go through customs and in Copenhagen. But then we were leaving Reykjavik. So we're going into the US. So, yeah, I think that's it was funny. when I found out we were also flying Iceland

islandic air or iceland air uh like on the way out there i said oh i didn't realize that i mean luke had a really bad time she's like what happened and i'm like i don't know uh one of his flights flights was late and then somebody stood in his way and that was all i could remember of why it was such a bad experience those are the high those are the broad strokes and then i said and i think bjork flicked him off one time but that happened decades ago so um but no no actually that well that experience was good except for one very key thing which i will tell you about in a moment but let me just say that so the the our entire day started with a two and a half hour ferry trip to a two and a half hour flight to a three and a half hour flight and then eventually to an eight hour flight on the way home and we traveled for like and that was all you know no breaks in between so that was like a 25 hour travel day i landed on saturday night my brain yesterday sunday was so so scrambled i ended up staying up you'd think i'd come home and crash right away but i think i kind of get manic on these things and i'm so glad to be home honestly

like the perfect that sounds actually like the sort of i mean except for it sounds brutal the 25 hours but if you get in on saturday night i would imagine you just fall into bed sleep for like 10 11 hours wake up sunday morning and kind of like be you know on the right schedule that

isn't what happened no because my i mean first of all my brain was just really scrambled for just being awake for so long and just everything that goes along with that and the anxiety of traveling and whatever. Let's be honest.

The relief of darts.

Did you play darts? No, I still haven't played any darts. My body was still physically kind of tired. I still haven't picked up the darts. I'm hoping tonight, if I can get my work done, I can kind of have a nice day of kind of like reclaiming my regular life. The last day, Sunday, was very scrambled for me. We're watching our friend's cat. So we still had to wake up on Sunday. It was just kind of a weird day. I don't have to get into all of the ins and outs of it. But I will say that I think I finally crashed around four. I did sleep a little bit Saturday night, but then woke up on Sunday morning, went to feed our friend's cat. Since we're up anyway, I did get to watch the Seahawks game, which is a rarity for me these days. So that was fun. But then we came home from the Eagles where we watched the game and tried to watch some television. And then at like four in the afternoon, I literally went to bed at four in the afternoon, maybe five in the afternoon yesterday. That's not true. We fed the cats. I went to bed around 6 p.m. yesterday and essentially slept through the night. I woke up a couple of times, read for a while, but then went back to sleep, powered through. I think I'm back on a regular schedule. It was a I'll probably get a little bit foggy later on in the day when my body thinks I'm still in this and that it thinks it's the middle of the night. But I think I can I think I took care of most of this jet lag. The the one thing, though, while I while I say that we had no issues traveling and for the most part, we didn't other than it just being a really tough, you know, travel schedule. except oh luke sweet luke when um we come into a sea tag airport and um by the way when you it's you had no time in rankovic at all did you uh like you were rushing running yeah because our

flight was late so then we were sprinting through the airport through no fault of our own and then that was what made everything in that airport kind of frustrating for me because then we had to go through that customs and they were really giving us the business about like did becca and i go through different oh right italy and it was just like all right calm calm down but anyway um uh but but so yeah that was uh that was why that was frustrating for us but you got you had problems

getting into sea tack well the reason i asked though is because that the the reikovic airport really was beautiful i think i remember you saying you part maybe in the back of your brain you were thinking well this will at least be sort of a something to see by going through there and you probably didn't notice because you were running your ass off but like i saw the sabaro and the

Wait, really? Humorless people that were standing in my way. Those are my two takeaways.

See, that's funny because I know all international stuff goes through the D gate where you and I both would have been. Again, my gate was D21. But anyway, the point is right as you're coming through there, there's like this commissary area that doesn't seem like an American airport. It just had like a little cafe area. I didn't see any like Sbarro's or name brand restaurants like that. But if you sit in this little commissary area and have a beer or whatever, which Genevieve did, I'll let you know that I did not have a beer there. She is the one with the problem. We just sat there for maybe 10 minutes before. Would a person with a problem not have a beer in Reykjavik? Exactly. See, I'm fine. I'm doing fine. No, but anyway, we were sitting there for a little bit, and I noticed this amazing thing. And it might have just been the time of day we were there, but it was probably getting to be sunset around there. And I didn't see any windows where I was, but there must have been some windows on a skyway sort of behind us. And if you watched this one wall, you saw you would see the shadows of travelers going across this sort of, I guess it would be a sky bridge or something. But you don't really notice. You're just sitting there. You just see the sun reflecting off this wall. You don't really think of it until you see somebody quickly walking by with a roller bag. But it's a shadow of them. I'm very much.

What is your photographer's eye? No, I know it was set up. It was something to see. I know that this was not a design accident. It couldn't have been. It was so beautiful. I mentioned this to you. This is very boring, but I mentioned this to you when we were at your place because you had hung up those nice letters that say Madrona Hill Studio outside, and they sort of cast the sign, these letters.

They're kind of three-dimensional.

Yeah, and so they cast this shadow that sort of changes on the wall behind them, And I'm just very much into the the the the the the architecture of shadows or how designers use shadow and design the Burke Museum here. The rebuilt Burke Museum does that so that like they knew at a certain time of day here in Seattle, the sunsets. And so these shadows will cast across the new Burke Museum.

It's so cool. I think you have an eye for that, though, because I think you take really nice photos. I think you you see that, I think, more than like I do. And I think that's cool, actually Again, for once, not through any fault of my own We were so pressed in that airport That there was no time for taking in any of the sights and sounds I will have you know that when our friend television's Chris Hayes Was on the program, he defended Iceland Because he had a very fun time with his family there And now, you saying you had a nice time in that airport I'm basically outvoted two to one that Iceland is okay

The airport was fine. There was one moment where they don't, like, kind of board by, like, group numbers or whatever. And so you would go to the gate, but then you're like, oh, no, this is one big long line, which I thought was going to be a disaster. Vives and I were muttering a little bit, and Vives was like, maybe Luke was right. And we get in this, like, incredibly long line so that, like, gate 21, our gate, is so far ahead of us, you almost can't see it. We're at the end of this long line. We're like, this is going to be a mishigas. But it wasn't. The line moved really quickly.

Were you able to get onto your airplane from the airport or did you have to get on another bus to take you to the outside of your airplane?

We had a walkway on this one. There were a couple of our flights where we had to do that thing. One of them had a shuttle. Flying out of Amsterdam, that would have – I thought that our experience or maybe your experience in Iceland was like our experience in Amsterdam on the way there where we had to wait for a shuttle to take us down to the tarmac. But the organization was just terrible. They were very nice people there, but I just couldn't believe that this is a daily occurrence. This is how you manage loading a plane. That was pretty bananas, and maybe that was more similar to what you were dealing with in Iceland. Having said all of that, travels went remarkably. No delayed flights. I was like, you were relying on a ferry and three planes. One of these is going to be delayed and screw us up. I'm going to be stuck here. Like, I was kind of really worried about our margin of error as far as being stuck, you know, like in Iceland or something. But everything went without a hitch until I went to pick up my bag, which was checked. I don't usually check bags. Unless they force me to at the gate, I never check bags. But because of these tickets and the international is of the whole thing.

Yeah, and also it's a big old flight and a big old trip. It's hard to fit that all into an overhead.

yeah and i use my regular like away brand um suitcase uh which you know is what i always travel with but yeah just like having to deal with that every single time like getting off a plane crash it just did it would not have made sense for me to try to like just deal with that in every airport i would have been i was so so exhausted you know through this yeah having said that so we ended up checking our bags and it was like kind of a free service so you do it anyway and mine was the one bag that did not I still don't have I don't have I don't have my arthritis medications right now I had to write to my doctor I'm like I might need that I have a like $1,500 lens in that bag that right now is like oh I think it did I think it's finally made it to I think it's finally made it to SeaTac now because I got a call at 10.30 last night that's right I did wake up at 10.30 last night to take a call from SeaTac asking if they still want me want to ship my bag so now it's supposedly in transit they say I may get it sometime between today and Wednesday um and the mistake Luke you will be I I take no pleasure in saying this but you will be very happy to hear that this apparently was a mistake in Reykjavik where they quote didn't put it on the airplane so it's one of those we didn't put it on the airplane

problems to Bjork in a kind of oversized like uniform from the baggage handling people

I hate I hate that you get this definitely definitely definitely no logic to loading the airplane oh by the way they did they do when we walked on the plane I don't know if it was in Reykjavik or maybe on our way to Reykjavik it was they were playing Bjork I'm gonna plot Venus as a boy I love that song didn't I tell you that's what they were playing I told you they were playing that when we boarded the plane and I actually that actual was it that actual song

Let me double check with my Shazam, because this will be the permanent record. I love that.

I do love that song.

I don't think I knew that. Venus. Oh, my God. Andrew.

Venus is a boy. Yeah, yeah. Off a debut. Can you see this in the thing I'm holding up? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Also, what are the chances that you and Genevieve would be, because that's a playlist, right? The chance that you and Genevieve would be coming onto the plane at the same time in that playlist as Becca and I were. I think it's a short playlist.

I think it's a short playlist because I heard the music coming out of, like, getting on the board, getting, I'm sorry, boarding the plane in Amsterdam and then getting off the plane in Amsterdam. They were playing some terrible, like, overly sincere, like, I don't know, singer-songwriter stuff. But it's Icelandic, right? Well, no, this was Amsterdam, so this was a different airline. And they were just playing the worst music. And I heard the same song twice, once when we were boarding and once we were getting off the plane. And so I think those playlists are pretty short and are probably what you mean.

Were you on Iceland air? Because I was also Shazamming the other things they were playing like in Amsterdam. You're saying this overly earnest music. What were you in the airport or on an airplane?

That was on the airplane as you board and then.

Yeah, but an Iceland air flight, right?

No, no, no. My point is my point in bringing this up is I think generally speaking at the airlines, it's my assumption that these are short playlists. Because while I was in Amsterdam and I heard this music that I really, really didn't like, I heard the same song twice in the very short amount of time with A Flight in Between. So anyway, putting all that confusion behind, I am waiting. I hate to give this to you, Luke, after all of the complaining of Iceland. I know how much it pains you to give me anything on this program. But listen to this malarkey, if I may quote one of my favorite presidents. um the uh so we still have some we have friends who are of the seven of us two of them are still um out in croatia three of them are actually out in croatia one of them is hiking the mountains of croatia or something um but of the four of us to come back tune me genevieve and our friend katie tune and katie i believe traveled separately on different airlines vives and i are the only ones who took our particular path, three out of four of us did not get our luggage back. When I was, I almost had, I almost threw a fit at the airport. I'm like, I literally said, why is it always me? I was like, so after 25 hours of flying and ferrying and all of the various things that I did, I had no, I mean, I was just little bullied Andrew at my core, you know what I mean? I had no energy left to present As a responsible adult I almost laid down on the floor And just threw a tantrum And said why me, why me, why me

I totally understand that I think the listeners do too There is something about that amount of travel That just breaks down Any even tiny shred of maturity Problem solving Being able to roll with it You just reach this incredibly As my therapist would say Very young place Not like J-U-N-G Not young Ian But it is like you're seven years old

at some point exactly well the one good thing to get out of it is it ended up saving me another hour of travel because i know that genevieve at that point seeing me um just on the very verge

of throwing for the sprung for the lift yes sprung the hundred bucks for the ride home instead of

making me do another hour long uh train bus ride on saturday night um which i was like i was trying to remain open to that but i just kept saying like let's see how we feel when we're there and then i did not feel good when we were there as you know we're watching all the bags come out of that turnstile and everybody's grabbing theirs. I'm like, it's okay. Genevieve's comes out so I'm like, that's a really good sign. That is so odd to

me. I've never heard of such a thing. That means they had literally loaded every other possible bag and there was one little lonely Away You said it was an Away? Away brand, yeah. Yeah, that we both got for free, I believe. Mine is now covered in fragile bumper stickers from Alaska Airlines which i got because one time i had gear in there and and i was like can you put a fragile or i don't even know it might have been something else now i kind of like it it looks like i don't know like a suitcase from the 1950s when there'd just be weird stickers on your suitcase yeah exactly

the the yeah i love that shorthand you'd see somebody's suitcase and just would list all of these i wish i had that i was going to say because i actually went up to somebody who already had their suitcase and i said just to make sure i'm sure you did but just make sure that isn't mine right because we have the same exact black away and then i pulled another one off the belt and i'm like oh this is mine i was like oh no i saw a small difference i'm like i need to put some big

stickers on mine so i know which one is mine but this the idea that like veeves's bag made it on and they had to be next to each other you check them in at the same time they went onto that conveyor belt behind the gate agent in split but yeah exactly and think about how did they become decoupled. Exactly.

And that would have been the third – well, let's see. I mean, I'm going to make this super boring. Whatever. Yeah, we loaded it at Split. They took it there. It clearly made its way to Copenhagen because it made its way there. But then somehow in Reykjavik, that's where it just didn't make it on the plane. So supposedly that little guy is in the States right now, and I'm waiting for it. I wish I had a fragile sticker on it. I am worried about that lens in there. I'll get you on. I really shouldn't. Can you give me a new lens? I really shouldn't be packing that lens in there. but I just kind of got lazy and I was like it's kind of a heavy lens I didn't want it in my you know my carry-on I didn't want it kind of jangling around in there so I packed it between a bunch of shirts and stuff and I was like yeah this this should do I've done this a few times before it made it out there okay it's a pretty strong it's a pretty strong guy but if it does you know if it just gets banged around too much or crushed underneath a bunch of other stuff I could be looking at a really really sad state of affairs but hopefully it will make it here sooner rather

than later um i'm wishing you the best on that yeah i can't i i have a hard time believing that luggage goes missing or isn't doesn't make it onto the plane anymore because it's so everything is so tracked now this is why i don't know maybe a year or so ago when i had this big actually it must have been two years ago i had this big bundle of a bunch of suits of mine and clothing that i had shipped supposedly down to portland from seattle because i was filming a thing for microsoft and then going another direction and it just turned up lost and I was like nothing can be lost lost in this day and age because we everything is is everything that you know this has a barcode and is like being scanned and is part of the one world alliance I mean god we've given up everything to these um globalists can't they at least get the stuff to where they say it's gonna go like you just think there'd be something in the system that would like as this plane is about to take off from Copenhagen or, sorry, Amsterdam for, you think there'd be something that would say, well, Andrew's bag isn't on here yet, and we know Andrew's bag is supposed to be on here because it's on the list of bags that are supposed to be on here, and everyone else's bag is on here. Like, that's just, it's strange to me that that can even happen anymore because of how digital the world is.

Yeah, well, it was interesting. Vives and I were kind of standing by the by the carousel and, you know, it starts with everybody standing around, then there's fewer and fewer people, of course, as they get their bags and then i noticed i was like oh this isn't looking good but i still weirdly i was still optimistic about it because there were still like maybe four people waiting for their bags and then i realized oh this one person was actually waiting for his partner who was in the restroom and then they left and there was this one other guy and then he grabbed and there was a custodian sweeping

up a spotlight exactly and then is there anything sadder than the baggage claim when everyone else is left and that thing stops yeah exactly i mean that is like that's a that's a mood and it ain't

a great one the only thing this one didn't stop but it was also sad because there's just one piece of like imagine like kind of a larger sized completely clear um soft bag that you would maybe take to a stadium because you need to see through bags somebody had left one of those on the on the conveyor belt when we showed up so we show up and that thing is kind of just taking a ride around waiting for the luggage. Does it have anything inside? No, it's just empty and kind of it looked like a Pixar you know what I mean? If Pixar was to make like a movie about luggage, which why wouldn't they honestly?

If Pixar was to make a movie about unnecessary steps taken to try to curb terrorism

I'm just

mad because of how many times I've had bags taken away at public places now because they're not clear

vinyl. Right, well this thing, I don't even know yeah, is it terrorism at T-Mobile Park

or what is it? It's probably beererism. Beererism

Exactly, that's what I think it mostly is.

The War on Beererism also is not a terrible show title. We've got to go with GNU.

Yeah, it was something related to GNU, all the GNU that's fit to print. Anyway, this little plastic bag, it starts by being the only thing on the belt, then it gets a heavy population of other bags, and then after like 45 minutes, it's just this sad little plastic bag.

Would you watch a sped-up, like a time-lapse of that? It fills with bags and then the bags get emptied It's just like the same little thing

I can't anymore because it would trigger me But you know Honestly I forgot, I swear to god I forgot about this And I'm wondering if you're open to something here I I told you I was staying with this group of friends And it was such, again, it was such a lovely time And here we are just talking about airport travel But it was just a wonderful time I don't have to get into all the various things we did I ended up having a lovely time I loved the pool time that I was able to have Oh good, I wondered about that for you The house was beautiful. I don't know if you saw that. You probably saw it. Yeah, it was really beautiful.

You were talking about FOMO. My only joy in all of this was that it sounds like there might have been mosquitoes. And that was like, thank God there was something that wasn't going right out there.

For other people. Honestly, and they had this weird mosquito device where all of my friends were getting a mosquito bite. And then they would take this little device.

device that was about the size of um i don't know like three maybe like three inches tall or some little handheld device that apparently heats up and they'd had to press that to the mosquito bite when it was fresh and they would hold it down for like 10 or 15 seconds and grimace and and apparently this helps the mosquito bite not mature and itch on them and i just watched and then they're like we're gonna do it to you at one point i swear to god anita was gonna have somebody hold me down and she was gonna try it on my skin just because i just did not want anything to do with that luckily for me i am toxic inside and out no mosquitoes bit me at all so i was they're

like uh i noticed that i mean that swimming pool looked unbelievably picturesque and but i did see i think katie probably posted like kind of jokingly we're in the pool hiding from skeeters and i was like well well okay i'm glad i'm not there they have mosquitoes forget it dude i'd

much rather be here no there was a county that's a um that actually i think that's miss skeeters was the guy who runs around the little town in Vis, and we, yeah, just harassing people. He ain't right. Skeeter ain't right. Skeeters ain't right. How do you say that in Croatian? Anita probably does. I think that is in Croatian. No, but sorry, you were saying you had fun pool times. Yeah, and there was one time where everybody went on this big, long, all day boat adventure that I kind of didn't want to go on anyway, but Genevieve kind of wanted to go on. Yeah, I noticed. That was like cave diving. And then it was like, yeah, and then we showed up. I was going to do it, but I didn't even dress in trunks or anything i'm like i'm gonna skip the swimming parts of this but then it ended up being like the majority of it was going to be swimming parts in this in the main part to see this blue cave was like canceled and so it was just it was this moment where can't cave anything anymore wave cancel culture has gone too far it is true it's too woke anyway i'm getting into either too much or not enough detail on what i'm trying to fast forward through right now but i know that genevieve on i think it was maybe wednesday had it was like hey we're gonna all go on this boat trip together part of it's going to be swimming in these interesting locations but you can stay in the boat if you want to i wasn't super into it the pinnacle of it was supposed to be to see something called the blue cave well there had been a thunderstorm the day or two before so that raised water levels that made the blue cave off the agenda for that trip so we're all in there and then like the woman who's like going to sell us the tickets has a sort of concerned look and she's like well do you guys still want to go she says it's still very beautiful but you can see instead of the blue cave. We'll take you to this place where you can see a museum and a church. And I just turned to Genevieve and I said, I said, you know what? I just, for all this, I just don't want to see a museum and a church. I don't want to be on a boat all day without trunks on, like just so that I can see a museum and a church. And so I just went back to the place. I had the entire house to myself. I had a pool. It was the day after the debate. So I just like, I had some, some cans of Smirnoff ice, a little vape pen. And I turned on Pod Save America and I just floated around with a basketball in the pool.

That sounds fucking awesome.

It was so, and I love, I mean, I honestly, one of the things about this trip too is how much I love my friends. And I just think about like, I will always remember this as a time. It's like how, how many people have this close of friends in their life where you can kind of have the opportunity to do something like this. So I just felt great about the whole thing. I probably, if it were me, I probably would have scheduled things so that maybe I would have shaved a couple of days off it so I could have gotten maybe a couple of recuperation days here in the States. I'm a homebody. I miss home, you know. But it was a really wonderful trip. But I forgot at one point, I don't know, maybe midweek, I was starting to maybe some of my predilections were starting to leak out. And so everybody had gone to bed. It might have been the day. Maybe it was even after the Monday night football game or something because we stayed up to watch that late at night, which was amazing, just to kind of watch the Seahawks home opener with a bunch of friends in Croatia. But anyway, at one point... It wasn't Monday Night Football for the record. No, it would have been Sunday night. So anyway, one night, it was like 2.30 in the morning, and I'm just like, I had puttered everything. Everybody's asleep. I'm puttering in the kitchen. I'm sitting there waiting for the dishwasher to stop running so I can unload it. I'm listening to the Levitard show, and actually one of my friends snuck in. It was like, I was just down here for a glass of water. Sorry to interrupt your your puttering time so i was carving out this time but i just saw in my email that while i was listening to the dan levitard show and stu gotts's weekend observations i did write an email to myself called croatian observations i don't have a parody i don't have it in full parody form but i know you want to talk about um uh kamala harris tim waltz signs but do you think maybe after we thank some donors i can go over a few of my croatian observations with you as long as you

say the words collision course that's my one request and i begin by saying luke luke's experiences over the weekend andrew coming back from croatia collision course all right we'll do that all right let's do that thank you for being a 10 let's thank those daily donors who are keeping tbtl cooking. Let him cook. that these listeners cook we actually have uh formally filed uh the paperwork to have let tbtl cook anything we're allowed used to be the um it was trademarked by russ wilson but i think right now it's um that's no longer this he can no longer enforce that trademark since he may never be a starting quarterback in the nfl again i god i want to talk about that and i know now

is not the time but i gotta say that is not what i wished for him i wanted him to have a good season and i'm ridiculously kind of disappointed that that we didn't get to at least see what it would look like for him to to be a qb in that system i would like to we you and i can talk

about this off air but i have a lot of sports feelings right now and unfortunately what has happened is there because of what happens for me on monday which is after we're done with tbtl i often have to do kind of an extended live wire recording session this whole like the idea of a no point conversion and also not to mention that you've got a lot of stuff going on you're doing after these messages you're doing spotless things like that um and so we've gone away from the no point but boy yesterday and i want to tell you about this maybe a little later um i just had a day yesterday in a good way of just of just mainlining sports in a way i haven't gotten to do in a long time a good sunday i just kept having thoughts that i wanted to basically like text you about or call you about or like i have a lot of sports thoughts right now so maybe we can schedule a special no point yeah to get that out of our systems um and and put it in a place where it can't hurt anyone who doesn't who doesn't want to hear it it's like you know it's put it in the yucca mountain of sports content of tbtl what's the half-life of a of a luke sports take

this is once again where anna king gets her shout out what is the half-life of a sports all right so here's the here's Mike what I was going to say about that I can feel my brain not working right let me know anytime you want to do that is fine with me oh I know what I was going to say it was interesting that our sports because I actually got to watch the Seahawks game yesterday which I don't know if I get to do on Sundays and I was surprised how quiet our text chain was or as everybody you experienced that too right it wasn't like something with my phone because I've been out of the country

No, it was, I think maybe because it was an earlier game, maybe the rhythm was off. I was actually texting with my brothers, David and Sammy, about the game. But here's the thing, and I'll just say this briefly, and then we'll thank Shannon Teaton from Federal Way, Washington, who's our first donor today, we're thanking. I'll be totally honest with you. I was after the, maybe early in the third quarter, I was frustrated with what I thought were some kind of boneheaded plays by the Seahawks. like some penalties that i thought we need to be careful about and that was a moment where it felt like maybe this game was going to really slip away from us and i wanted to express my negativity but i feel like i've set a standard where i can't really do that on our group text chain because i'm so i get so annoyed when durs does it i feel like now i get negative yeah i've create i've created a an environment where i am not allowed to come on there and be like seahawks have impulse control problems which is what i texted my brothers yesterday but so uh and also hawk squad so i was over i was active over there but yeah it was interesting that there was zero discourse on our our text chain and i don't know what to i don't know what to attribute that to i could have jumped in there but again mostly i was feeling pretty negative about things right up until i was feeling pretty positive about things which would have been basically when charbonnet caught that screen pass and converted third and six and uh we you know got in field goal range that was pretty much the only time that i started to feel good about the game all i felt during that game was

um barely conscious i mean i had some feelings about it but what happened was i told you huge long day of travel got a little bit of sleep maybe like you know like a decent amount of sleep probably like five hours i'm gonna say maybe on saturday night but did have to wake up on sunday to go feed that cat and then went to the eagles to watch it and i'm feeling still i was very i still think i was sort of manic in my energy levels because like to get over to our friend's place and then to get to the eagles the bus system was going to take too long i knew i was going to be drinking i didn't want to drive so i so i got a bike i found a bike in our neighborhood one of those rental e-bikes so i bike over to our friend's house which is like about a 15 minute ride you

were like there's one mode of transport i haven't taken in the last 26 hours i need to check it off the list that's right you found a skateboard for the last actually i last three blocks i actually

canoed from their place to the eagles i said no i ended up taking the bike to the eagles too which by the way quick little like as i was riding i was like holy shit i didn't even really think twice about getting on this bike literally two weeks ago somebody had emailed me about e-bikes and whether or not i was still like kind of curious about buying one for myself i said oh i don't know if i'll ever get on a bike again like my body was so like kind of stiff croatia

changed you yeah i will actually like meds that's what i mean

Thank you. I feel like I'm still not my full old self as far as this newly diagnosed arthritis is concerned. But holy moly, like I am so lucky that all this time in Croatian coming back, like little by little, I am clearly reclaiming my life. I'm actually very bullish on that right now and feeling pretty good. I'm glad to hear that, Matt. I do think I'm going to have to get these weird shots that I shoot in my stomach. But still, though, it sounds like it doesn't hurt too bad. But anyway, all of that is to say so that I bike there. I bike to the Eagles. So now I'm at the Eagles, and I haven't eaten in – I had a burger in Reykjavik, which I think is a song by Bjork. Yes. Only it's never eaten – parenthetically, never eat a burger in Reykjavik.

I think it's a Vici song. Okay. I don't even know who that is. With Mike Posner. I don't know either one of those people. I took a pill in Ibiza. It was a big song that Vici and Mike Posner did about it.

All of that is to say once the game starts, I'm, like, really excited. Then I start getting super, super hungry, and I realize, oh, I haven't eaten in, like, 24 hours. And then the food comes. It's just like a simple breakfast sandwich with some tater tots that, like, come out. And then after I ate those and I had, like, two Bloody Marys, I was, like, looking around the Eagles. I'm like, how do I get through this game? I was like, please don't go into overtime. Like, I consider myself a Seahawks fan, but I had to ask myself the hard question, do I want them to lose or go into overtime? Because I am struggling here. Yet, I couldn't bring myself just to leave. I never rooted for them to lose, in all honesty, but I was like, oh my god, of course it's going to go into overtime. I was like, I was almost putting my head on the bar. I was so tired.

This is the thing. My experience with jet lag is it's a different kind of tired. It's almost like what's happened is the Earth's gravity has been turned up like five clicks. You suddenly feel like you're on Jupiter where you're just like everything is just like heavy and like I can't even be upright. Whereas being tired on a normal day is like, oh, I'm tired. There's this almost physical gravitational component to it that I've experienced where it's like I have to be I have to lie down right now because there there's too much gravity on this planet for me.

Yes. And I just had done so many. It was. And also, even if it weren't just the jet lag, it was the intense day of travel. It was the weird eating schedule. It was just like everything that I had done to my body is like, well, of course, I'm I can't tell up from down or left from right. Also, I'm never really great with left and right anyway. So anyway, I've babbled too much.

You and I both have a lot of sports thoughts that we, I mean, the Mariners won yesterday. Let's get into that. Let's do a no point this week. How about this week? Yeah, you tell me when. Let's commit to a no point. Again, mostly for us and because I've got a lot of thoughts going on. Also, maybe for Nathan Valderas of Shoreline, Washington. I don't know where Nathan comes down on these things, if Nathan's a no pointer or not, but we'll hope so. I know that Wolfgang Weber of San Francisco, California is big, big into TBTL sports discussion. definitely one of our p1s i think every time wolfgang and wolfgang has donated in the past and we really appreciate it i i i wonder aloud if if we're if if i'm if i should be saying wolfgang weber yes weber which would be probably more how it would be said in uh the country of origin or if i'm going wolfgang and then if you you know the thing is if you commit to a wolfgang then you're pretty much locked into a weber that's a good point there's no wolfgang weber that's that That Way Lies Madness.

Won't you be my Vaber?

Goodwin. Goodwin, buddy. Oh, that's actually Susan's last name. Susan Goodwin of Seattle, Washington. Thank you, Susan. Lloyd Inuway. Hey, Lloyd. Our buddy Lloyd. Hey, Lloyd.

We've got a couple of Lloyds, I think. We do. This is one of our Lloyds. Hey, Lloyds. This is Lloyd who will always let me know if the website isn't, if the show is not posted to the website. I appreciate you being out there, Lloyd. Good looking out, Lloyd.

appreciate you and then hey it's our friend the smitten himself hey david zacharis i can never say david's last name and it's not that hard i am pretty sure zacharias it's not zacharias i always want to say zacharias i want to add in a letter it's not it's zacharias the thing is i was saying

it wrong in my head for the longest time but saying it confidently like i was one of the few people who had it right more of a luke move then david joined me for a week in review video a while back and he corrected me and he said that's actually not right very kindly and I was like well I will never forget it again and now that you're putting me on the spot I do think it's Zacharis I think

okay Zacharis would make sense I think that there is a tendency in my mind to want to add a letter and make it like Zacharias because that's a name I'm familiar with but it's Zacharis or Zacharis

I think I always wanted to say Zach Zacharis but I think it's Zacharis

Zacharis, like as in David flew too close to the sun on borrowed wings.

That's right, David. Of Burlington, Vermont. Who also illustrated a little drawing of you and I that we proudly use on the team.

It's our Instagram profile pic, I believe. That's right. and it's on our website. Thank you for that.

Thank you, David. We really appreciate you and all of our donors today for making the show possible. We couldn't do this without you. Hello and welcome to Top Story. All right. Our Top Story, Andrew, you've got a few more unexpressed thoughts.

Croatian observations is what we'll call them. Now that I realize we're sort of making this a segment, I feel bad that I don't have any appropriate music for this, but don't worry. I was able to find something called Croatian Rhapsody MIDI on the computer. Let's see. Oh, good. I mean, this has got to be good, right? Great. A lot of harpsichord kind of energy.

This captures the spirit of the people of Croatia. Is this what it was like for you as you went around eating your, what's that called, cevapi?

Oh, yeah, cevapi. That stuff, that spoke to me. I started by eating too much of it early on, then said pace yourself, and then forgot to come back to it. Cevapi is like, they look like little sausage links, the size of a morning sausage link, but it's actually kind of spiced ground meat, and it's kind of the kind of common food there.

And it's like in a little roll or something, right?

You can get it, the first time I got it, I sort of got it a la carte, where I was just sort of dipping it in it. Because you're low-carbing, right? Yeah, and it comes in this red sauce that we don't have here. It's called, oh, I remember the red sauce's name was something that I shouldn't forget. It's an easy word, but I forgot it. But it's basically made of, like, red bell pepper, essentially, and paprika, I think, which are maybe the same flavor. But anyway, that stuff is good. And then I had one inside one of these rolls, and it was in-frickin-credible. And I was like, you can't eat this every day, Walsh. And then I never returned to it. That wasn't supposed to be one of my Croatian observations, but we will start with that. If you think that you're eating too much cevapé, you're not. Continue eating it because you will miss it when you come back to the States. How about this? Toilets. I wrote down here, if you need a cleaning brush next to every toilet, you need better toilets. I'm not speaking to Croatia here. I'm speaking to my experience in Europe writ large. They have those, which I'm sure are better for the environment. I believe it's because they are probably low-flow toilets, or I don't know what they call them, but they don't have as much water in the bowl itself. So when you do your business, your said business ends up hitting the walls of the toilet and leaving an impression there. And I think you and I might have dealt with this a little bit. A real sort of Jackson Pollock type situation. Indeed-ly-doo. And then they have pretty strong kind of water flow, which I was happy of. It didn't seem like it was like they were cheaping out on the amount of water to wash it down. But the damage was already done, So you can flush the toilet like seven times, which then defeats the purpose of a low flush toilet. And that's when I kind of realized, oh, everywhere we're staying, whether it's a hotel room or even some public toilets, they all have little toilet brushes, not toilet plungers, but cleaning brushes next to the toilet because they know that you've Jackson Pollocked it and you're going to have to clean it afterwards. And so I repeat my statement. If you need a cleaning brush next to every toilet, you need better toilets.

I agree. That's yeah, that makes no sense. It's like you're just you're treating the symptoms, not the problem.

Exactly. But let's not stay negative and let's continue to talk about household appliances. If you consider a toilet and appliance dishwashers. Now, I didn't have a lot of experience with a lot of dishwashers over there, but the Airbnb we were staying in had a nice one. And I don't know if this is something that I can attribute to Croatia or Europe or maybe just a new dishwasher. Our dishwasher here in the United States here in my home is, I believe, from 1991. It has a Nirvana bleach bumper sticker on the front of it. What a year.

The Huskies were co-national champions along with the University of Miami. Steve Empman was on the precipice of becoming the number one overall pick in the NFL draft. It was an amazing time.

And by the way, for all the Nirvana heads out there, I know that bleach came out in 89, but I think the dishwasher kind of got into them when Nevermind came out. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So they put the bleach sticker on there. Kind of jumped on the bandwagon.

Anyway, okay, so the dishwasher at this Airbnb was wonderful. As I told you one night as I got deep into my kind of puttering and cleaning and listening to the Levitard podcast, I was...

By the way, I know, I absolutely know this version of you from having stayed in now kind of a lot of Airbnbs. It's so great staying at one of those.

Oh, I'm polishing the polish cleaner.

I love it, though, because it's like there will be a time at the end of the night where you've got your big headphones on. I don't know if you're still using those, but you've got your Bluetooth headphones going. You're listening to something, and you're just kind of doing a final pass on getting everything really spiffed out in the kitchen. And I love that for you because I know it's a happy time for you. And I love it for everyone else because it also leaves the kitchen very clean.

Yeah, I was hoping that – that was one thing that I was hoping that my putter – that I seriously had to make a deliberate effort not to over-putter. because I know that that is one thing it's like I will maybe get too far into it then I start throwing away things that people read Genevieve was still going to use or what have you and so I was like trying so hard not to like over putter and dump out somebody's wine if they were still using it or whatever right but of course I did make that mistake once with our friend Katie who was totally gracious about it but like we were all drinking from these similar looking drinking glasses because they were a set you know and one of them had been left outside and had collected a bunch of rainwater and so i was so i thought i was being so careful i'm like can we empty this is this okay and she said yep that's just rainwater i bring it into the kitchen set it down on the counter and then literally like three minutes later katie's like where's my wine did you just throw away my wine i'm like oh my gosh i thought it was the rainwater i grabbed the wrong glass and she didn't she was totally cool about it she was like there's only a sip in there left don't worry about it but i felt so terrible because i told myself i was not going to over putter do not prove Genevieve right do not putter to a point where you're driving people crazy you know you're

starting to just take things out of people's hands they're kind of they got like a fork they're about

they're about to bite eggs and I'm like those are done yeah I'm just dumping their eggs out I think

I'm sure that you were as I've experienced a force for good but anyway the dishwasher you love the

dishwasher first of all when you um put the when you put everything in the dishwasher and you hit go on it a little red light shoots from the bottom of the dishwasher onto the floor because like the dishwasher was built into the cabinetry you couldn't really see any buttons or anything on it but to let you know that it was running you know how like some of those like cars or i was gonna say fancy cars but maybe they're just cars that want to be fancy sometimes like when you when you unlock them they'll shoot a little logo of their brand on the ground below them have you

seen yes yeah i have they're in those mcconaughey commercials a while ago oh are they they were actually spotlighting that feature yeah it was like he was at his like cool weird uh concrete bunker and then he would open the door of like was it Cadillac and he would like show Cadillac I think it was Cadillac yeah so anyway

it has one of those only it doesn't it's not fancy it doesn't show a bat signal or a dishwasher it's just a little red dot but essentially if you see a little red dot on the ground it means the dishwasher is in use it is working and I was like that is incredibly helpful I loved that but then what I loved even more was I'm in the kitchen I think most people probably just load the dishwasher hit go and then move on with their lives no I don't have other things going on in my life So what am I doing? I'm bopping around the kitchen. I'm like using the glass cleaner on the on the on the stove. I'm like kind of making sure everything's shiny. I'm mostly just listening to my podcast. Then suddenly the door to the dishwasher just pops open and cracks itself open. So essentially, you know, the thing about dishwashers is they might finish a cycle while you're at work or at the movies or whatever. And then everything is just in there and it still kind of can be wet or whatever. This thing, it does a great job of drying them and then pops the door open to let air in automatically, even if nobody is home. I'm in love with this dishwasher.

That's very, very smart. I thought you were going to say at the very beginning that the dishwasher technology was not up to par. It was not as good as the technology we have in the U.S. It sounds like it's actually better. That all sounds very, very smart. You know, I have a new dishwasher here. I mean, new as in when we put the kitchen in here. um you know i bought like the appliances from whatever home depot or something and it was the weirdest thing because i am just used to first of all i haven't had a dishwasher well i had a dishwasher in bellingham but there was a period of time where i kind of didn't really have a dishwasher and my memory of dishwashers usually is and maybe this is what i was doing in bellingham because we probably had a slightly older one was when in doubt put it on like pots and pans like just basically tell it to go crazy that's what i do yeah because it's like i just figure if it's you know, whatever, however much it thinks it should be washing, or how much oomph it should be putting into it, I wouldn't mind a little more oomph. And so when I got this new dishwasher, the first bunch of times I washed, I was putting it on like heavy duty and pots and pans and whatever. And stuff was coming out dirty. Like it wasn't getting things clean. And I was like online in forums and I was like, what is happening? And I kept changing. There's a little, um, you know, trap in the bottom of the dishwasher where let's say you put in some food that maybe still has a couple a couple pieces of lettuce and a salad bowl you know anything solid that will accumulate down there i was like is this thing clogged i kept taking it out and rinsing it and like i was trying to figure it out and then my dad was over and because my dad is wired differently than i am and always just like well we need to turn all the lights off and let's not waste energy i think he might have just hit like turbo or something like there's basically like a shortened there's like a shortened cycle that's basically just kind of like yeah we'll do this but we're not gonna get crazy it's like the opposite of going pots and pans and when i tell you these are the cleanest dishes i've ever seen in my life when you do the like low-key cycle i don't understand how that works you would think it would be i put in like a like a pickle jar of cloth like empty obviously cloths and pickle jar that i don't know why i decided to put it in because you know i dumped out the pickle juice eating all the pickles etc and i just put it i thought maybe this will be useful maybe i'll put you know washers and and nuts in here or something i don't know i put it in and i forgot to take the the label off and when it came out of the washer was out of this which was totally clean the glue was gone The label was sitting in the bottom of the dishwasher intact, and I just took it out. I do that sometimes. But I mean, this thing is incredibly effective, but for some reason, what I had to do was do it on the less aggressive cycle, which, I mean, I'm happy about that.

Yeah, I wonder why that is. I wonder if Pots and Pans is more than just the pressure and the length, but maybe like what the mechanism. If you have a new one, those mechanisms kind of move around. They're more like robots. I have one that just has like one spinny thing. It's so old. Did I mention the Nirvana reference yet? Ice, Luke. My note here is ice. Oh, my Christ. Ice barely let you back into the country. That's right. Abolish ice. No, what I wrote here is ice. Oh, my Christ. Ice. It's a rarity. We are ice pirates and we were ice pirates, as you know, and this this would have made the list if I wasn't somebody obsessed with ice anyway. But this is where you want to talk about collision course, Croatia, Andrew's obsession with ice collision course, because I think this is probably more of a Europe thing and not just a Croatian thing. But like they just don't they don't freeze blast everything, whether you're talking about air conditioning or needing ice for drinks and cocktails or whatever. I thought that something was weird when we were on, I guess it was flying out of Amsterdam to Croatia, on the airplane, the flight attendants were pouring, like, Coca-Cola into cups without ice and giving it to people. And I was like, wow, I wonder if their ice machine is broken. And then, I mean, I look back at what an innocent young man I was then because I realized that, like, ice is just generally speaking a rarity. That's why we were excited when we got into our Airbnb to see that they had a countertop ice maker that was, I guess, elite brand, E-L-I-T. I think it's Croatian because I know this because I spent the first 24 hours there Googling and re-Googling for every piece of information I could get on this thing because it would not work. I promised my friends, I said, I will get this to work in the first 24 hours. You know, they say the first 48 hours of a broken ice machine are the most important.

And I said, I trust you don't fix it by then. Then the chances drop precipitously of ever fix.

Exactly. And I said, guys, trust me. I am singular on this. I am focused. This is the most important issue in my life right now. I will get this son of a gun working. I was downloading Croatian language PDFs of this thing to see if there if there were these pictures that I could learn from. I was never able to get it working. What we did find in one drawer were these blue bags, about the size, smaller than a gallon size Ziploc bag, but maybe somewhere around those lines, only they were like compartmentalized and you would fill it up in the kitchen sink. They were just like very thin blue plastic bags with one opening that somehow you would fill up this one opening and then it would trap the water inside and it would fill up all these little pouches with little like kind of pillow shaped ice cubes. Have you ever seen this before?

No.

So they didn't even have, like, regular ice trays there. So we used, like, the six or the five of them that were left in this box, and then I was on a hunt. I think our friend Katie was able to find more in a store somewhere, so we bought more of those things. Then, like, on day, I don't know, we were leaving in two days. I found mini little, like, I don't know, they were, like, little, like, gift shop ice trays, like little mini ones. So I bought a couple of those, and, like, by the last two days, I was in, like, full ice production mode that people seemed to appreciate.

I was like, you've been able to ramp up your production back to pre-pandemic level.

Exactly. I was I was using there was no good thing to hold them in. So I was using part of a salad spinner in the freezer to collect all of the ice. People were happy to be able to just like have some ice ready to go. And so I was not able to fix that machine. But Europe's I guess it's more like Europe's non-obsession with ice really collided with my obsession with ice.

we this was very much noted by becca and i because becca eats other than you and maybe even maybe more than you eats so much ice every single day like it's constantly lugging a water bottle that has water but mostly ice in it and it's chomping down on the ice we i have diagnosed her with something called pica which is low iron and it causes people who have it to often crave ice you might have it as well i don't know but um like boy did we notice it first of all it was hot as anything, particularly in Rome when we were there. So I was always looking for an ice cold drink and it would be, even when you would ask, can we have ice? with something first of all there would be a little bit of confusion and then it'd be like the saddest ice cube you've ever seen yeah they bring out like one on a tray yeah a glass with one ice cube in it that's not even very big and then you're like that should hold you over for

the rest of the meal thank you for watering down my my drink with one ice cube that won't last

30 seconds there's actually been a lot written about this because i've been sort of googling on my phone like what is going on and like people have written whole articles about how you're and You're right. It's Europe in general. It's just not normal to put ice cubes in everything. It's a very American, maybe North American, maybe you sort of add Canada to the list. It's a very sort of, I don't know, it's a thing that we do that is not the standard in the rest of the world.

I thought PICA stood for people, icing, craft, octails. I ran out of steam. That's the other name for it. But we stopped calling it that. I really did. When you said PICA, I hadn't heard of it. I thought you had come up with some sort of acronym in your relationship for people who want ice too much. I kind of petered out there at the end.

It's confusing because there is an arts organization in Portland called PICA. Is it P-I-C-A? Is that how you're saying both of these? I think in both cases it's P-I-C-A. But PICA is, yeah, the thing I'm talking about is a thing where a person craves. I think it can be a variety of things, but one of the things on the list is ice, and it's often linked to low iron levels.

Cats. Vis is an island of cats, Luke, and we needed that. Genevieve and I both missed our cats dearly while we were there, and I don't know if we would have lasted the full two weeks had we not been surrounded by cats on the island of Vis. I mean, I've heard about this in certain places. Istanbul, of course, is famous for having cats all over the place. Genevieve, did you ever watch that documentary? You're not as much of a cat person. Did you ever watch that documentary about the cats of Istanbul?

No, I didn't even know that was a thing.

Yeah, Vives and I saw it. The last time we ever went into that old theater that was on 45th in Wallingford, you know what I'm talking about, like on the main strip there? And sadly, it just— The Seven Gables? I think that one is more in the U District, right? it was whatever it was right on 45th but anyway that sat unused for a long time before they finally tore it down it was very sad but the last thing I saw there was a documentary about the cats of his table. Or the guild 45th probably? Yes yes the guild yeah so anyway I was so delighted I don't know if I'd been to a place that had that many just stray cats and they all have their own personalities some say don't you know don't pet me leave me alone a lot of them did like my presence around them I was made fun of a lot for asking a cat if it wanted to smell my finger I didn't realize I had said it loud enough for our friend Toon to hear. Turns out that that is now my. That's your calling card in the friend group is Andrew, smell my finger, Walt. Exactly. A real dynamic had developed between me and our friend Toon who like basically anything I ever said, she would hear the double entendre in it. So that I had to start policing my language around her and be careful what I said until somebody accused her of verbal bullying. and then she had to change. We all grew a lot during this trip. But, yeah, the cats were wonderful.

Did I tell you when I was debriefing from our trip about Franny the cat? Because, so, you know, when I got back from this trip that Beck and I did, I kind of, we did this travel guide download and she listened to a few episodes and there was a couple of things that she was like, oh, I can't believe you forgot to bring that up. And one of the things I think she said I forgot, but I don't know if I did or not, Was this cat that befriended us This kitten that befriended us When we were at the Airbnb in Sorrento

I don't think we talked about this

When we got to this Finally after this like Insanity of trying to navigate this Giant vehicle down to this Airbnb And we got to the place itself There were these three dogs That we really liked that were living there But then also like literally the caretaker Opens the door into our little kind of apartment unit And just this black and white cat that's i don't know six months old just kind of goes and comes running up to us and just comes into the airbnb with us and just is following us around and was i just kept saying to becca this is cat is like bingo like it was so chill first of all liked being around us it immediately just like curled up on me and jumped on my lap it was so friendly like and for being a cat that i think lived outside mostly i couldn't believe how comfortable it was being around us the first night it stayed in the bed with us and just and you're usually against that but it was that i am generally against it but i think i was you know italy changed me yeah and what was amazing was this cat it didn't it just curled up in a ball and just like stayed there and Until we woke up and then was like, okay, and we're hanging out. And then it was like, everything, and again, I feel like this is kind of the way Bingo, my impression of Bingo is like, everything that you could, everything you would want in a cat, which would be like, this cat is playful and fun and doing weird stuff, but also is very friendly to you, isn't, like, because here's the thing with Bubbles. Bubbles is a very, like, interesting, active cat. Bubbles will play fetch. Bubbles is, like, is doing things that are entertaining. but it's also like it's very much on bubbles's terms of if we're gonna hang out or not you cannot just go pick bubbles up and carry bubbles around for an indetermined amount of time and have her be chill this cat franny like i just picked her up and i was just carrying her around for an hour she didn't do anything she just did not even care she was like all right i guess this is what we're doing now i mean i was so when i tell you that i was googling bring cat home from italy because this cat lived there was a bunch of cats that lived on this villa you know in the you know olive uh this also had the olive grove and the lemon grove and stuff like that like this cat was just living there and i didn't think anyone would notice this kitten if we took it with us like it was not an indoor cat i thought but then the problem is we were going to paris and i was like i don't know i don't know if we can take this through two different countries i ended up not doing it but i was very very close to trying to smuggle this cat what what would becca

what was becca saying about this as she was totally fine with it really how to steal that's how much

she loved this cat also this is a cat that i could probably have live out here and it would be okay whereas we're still i'm still very much trying to figure out what the long-term implicate if bubbles just lives in portland now if bubbles is going to do joint custody what's going to happen with bubbles because i i'm very afraid of bubbles getting out here on this property this cat franny francesca aka franny i think she could hang because she's always been outside and around a bunch of other

things i did okay sorry if you said that i couldn't remember if you just knew the cat's name

if it was on a note no i don't think the cat had a name i'm being like and you notice this in croatia like those cats most of them probably don't have a name right they're just chilling they're just living out there that's what was so crazy first of all this cat was not covered in fleas which i would kind of expect from a feral cat or an outdoor cat or a whatever a cat that's not a pet and also was just totally like so just friendly and unthreatened by us in a way again i would imagine if you're a cat that's just been living outside for your six months of life you'd be very suspicious of human behaviors and this cat wasn't and i was just absolutely besotted i'll

send you a picture later you know the thing that i noticed near the end of our trip is genevieve and i had maybe i think maybe we're having our last dinner um kind of in this area like there's just I mean, Vis is just, you know, I can't remember what the actual little town is called. I should, but I can't remember off the top of my head. But it's like very, it's a tiny little area with maybe like a dozen cafes and two gelato stands, you know, like, and that's it. And they're almost all outdoor cafes. And it wasn't until like, Vis and I were having our last meal, our food was served to us. And then like these two cats that we knew from this one area kind of came up to us and started like looking up. They didn't, they never pawed at us. They didn't try to get our food. and it occurred to me i look around i'm like there are so many tables here many that people weren't even eating at because we're eating at a funny time there are cats wandering around all over the place like being petted looking for maybe somebody to drop some food but not one cat ever jumped up on a table like how like they know that is why coming back to my my justification for being personally affronted when my cats jump on the counter it's because they do know like how How did this entire town of hundreds of cats all learn that there are a lot of feral cats, feral cats? But not once did I see one jump on a table where somebody would be sitting down to eat a meal like they just they somehow knew they were they were all good cats. Yeah. Well. And finally, this could probably go without saying, but I guess my last observation, maybe I was trying to fill things out a little bit. But smoking, as you mentioned, in Europe, you know, they don't have the same regulations around smoking there. There's a lot more smoking. It didn't get it was not a problem. This is not a complaint. A few times I was around somebody who was smoking a cigarette. I could smell it, but it was almost always in an outdoor situation. And as an ex-smoker, it doesn't bother me too much. Having said that, I do want to speak to other ex-smokers. I said to our friend who was with us who quit smoking more recently than me, like maybe in the last I'm going to say last year or less. And I said, is this hard on you? Because like even me and I haven't smoked a cigarette in like six or seven years now. And even me, I'm kind of like, well, when it's just when it's so normalized, I get this way a little bit in some casinos where they allow smoking, too. It's kind of like, well, why wouldn't I have a cigarette? Everybody just has ashtrays around. It's fine. Even I was having a little bit of those tendencies. I did not give into them. And I said to our friend, like, is this harder on you? And she said, no, it's not too bad. But I got to say, if you're somebody who has recently quit smoking and you're feeling good about everything, but you have a plan to go to Europe, maybe, you know, brace yourself, prepare yourself, whatever that looks like, because it must it must really ramp up temptation.

yeah i was i was as i mentioned on on the show i was really reminded of how i think how infrequent smoking cigarettes is in the u.s now although i was very surprised i looked it up on some what seemed like a fairly legit government report or like international report on rates of smoking around the world for country and i don't actually believe this list i was looking at because it was trying to rank the united states above italy and i was like there's just no way because i have i live in the united states i go places and i was just going places in italy and it is totally and completely not comparable like the level of smoking i was seeing in europe and particularly in italy less so in france but also in france compared to the u.s i mean it's not even close

those places are so much more smoking especially if those numbers are per capita it just doesn't make sense now you and i and i know you travel a lot but you still probably i don't maybe you would disagree with this still travel mostly to like cities and stuff i mean you have the occasional thing where you're maybe heading south and you're in a more rural part of the country

i will say though with the tv job i like for instance this week i'm going to be in like pretty rural new york state all i'm trying to say is i do have a bit of a sense of and also i love casinos so i'm going to the hot zips for people just like smoking heaters and i still don't think that it compares to what i was seeing in italy but that's just kind of how it feels to me i was

kind of looking it up here i was kind of wondering because i don't even know if i could i would i would have guessed like a state that has the highest smoking levels i would guess would be one of the tobacco farming states like a georgia or something according to a very very north carolina according to a very quick google search here it looks like west virginia in the uh after a 2022 study maybe has the highest rate at 23.8 percent um so i'm sure there are what about west

virginia that's leading the nation in zins i don't even fully know that that's a vape oh no no that's

the that's the chew you put it in your mouth thing right the tobacco yeah it's a little like pillow

but you know it's it's nicotine it doesn't have i guess the fiberglass component that like if you were to put chewing tobacco in you know that cuts your mouth so that it gets in your bloodstream that sounds healthy yeah um zins are like the new version of that that they allege are like slightly

less bad for you but yeah anyway not a really great power out on the list just mentioning the smoking rates um but yeah that that was it but yeah it was a real all of that is to say really really wonderful trip but i'm also very very glad to be home because i was pretty exhausted by the

end of all of it i'm happy for you to be home andrew i mean i'm happy you had a good time on the trip and i'm also happy for you to get to kind of get back to the rhythms of your routine Because I know that that's something that gives you a lot of joy And in fact, I was really having a day yesterday That I thought, oh, this is an Andrew This is like an Andrew day Like a day that you would really, really like Which was like, I got up I got the fixings for some vegetarian chili I was just like simmering chili all day And I was just like watching football And like, I was by myself So it was like, nobody was in charge of the amount of football I watched so like it was so great because i like watched the seahawk game and then i watched the the the one o'clock game and then it was like by the time that was done it was it was ready for sunday night football and then i was like and then when the seahawks won i was like this is great because any highlight that i see for the rest of the day is going to be positive if it relates to the seahawks so when chris berman is doing the fastest two minutes it's like it sets you up for success the rest if you're planning on really really like settling into a like a multiple football game watching day on a sunday if your team plays the early game and they win it just means any reference of that game is going to fill you with happiness for the rest of the day versus filling you with sadness yes exactly i know that feeling and i was just like and i even called becca and i said listen because she was visiting family and and doing her own thing yesterday i was like look i love you but i just want to tell you i'm having the best day of my life and you would hate this day but i am loving it yeah right i was like this is not related to you but i just want to tell you what i'm about to do and how great it feels she goes that sounds really fun for you i was like it is yeah it's so like i don't know the last time that i had because of my travel schedule and a lot of times the way that i am able to be in so many different places is like i lose a sunday kind of because of travel you lose a sunday because of volunteering to help with people that are experiencing homelessness, which is a much, much more sort of socially responsible reason to not get to have a full, just like lost day of football watching. So I wish I could say I was doing something useful. I'm just usually in an airport somewhere kind of monitoring it on like the serious app on my phone or some bullshit so to just be like i woke up in my own bed sunday morning and was just like i got nowhere to be and nothing to do except just like getting into this football situation it was um it was very and then i was like had this chili that would end up being really

good and i've got way too much of it but like that's good leftover chili is great you got to make too much of it i actually think that chili often can be get better i doubled the recipe

because it was the weirdest thing. It was, like, it just is what the internet said for, like, savory, vegetarian, chili, and then it was, like, serves four, and I was like, four? I could put that down. I could put that back in one. So then I was like, this is not enough, and then I doubled the recipe, and it's far too much. I have, like, a gigantic, you know, but I made it in the pressure cooker, which is also kind of interesting. Oh, that's fun.

I've never done that before. I got to say, yeah, I mean, I know that, I don't think Genevieve loved hearing me say this because she mentioned later on, because I ran into another friend on Sunday, and I kind of mentioned how I kind of liked it. the weather has sort of turned you know this this vacation had loomed kind of large in and i know i'm i'm not trying to make myself sound like too fun of a person here but it just had loomed large in my anxieties for months this summer like kind of leading up to it and just kind of like we had talked it'd been kind of a tough summer for me for various reasons and uh while i love my friends and i love the idea of downtime this sounded like a pretty exhausting journey to go on and um and in in some ways in some ways it was like i mean you know but i was so glad to come home and with the exception of my missing luggage which oh my god genevieve just scared the hell out of me she and uh bingo are apparently resuming their outdoor walks and she just uh crouched into my line of view to show me the cat outside and it scared the literal hell out of me bingo is since we've been home has just been running to his leash and looking at it and then looking at us and looking at it and looking at us um so he's finally getting his walkabout but uh i gotta say to go on this adventure where the weather was like you know broiling at some times and then just generally pleasant um including one really amazing storm which that sounds like a weird thing to to be happy about but i don't get to see storms in seattle and to be again out on this island and just like the winds like i've never experienced before blowing across this island everybody's like yeah it happens out here all the time but to come home and to land and to have everything being like kind of moist from a recent rain and the the temperature dropped significantly and it really felt like okay it's fall now like it was like that was truly the end of summer and now we're back and it's fall and i know that more and more people are kind of like into whatever snuggly season or whatever whatever the internet really season yeah yes um so anyway like uh it was kind of nice to come home after all of this and be like oh and now it's fall at home and we can

kind of lean into that for a while. Andrew, I don't know if you can see me and the machinations of my body right now, but here's the thing. We've got to wrap this show up because I am so close to peeing my pants.

Oh my goodness, let's get out of here.

This is the longest, we're about 88 minutes into the show, this is the longest that I've gone. I'm going to tell you about this tomorrow, two things tomorrow. I'm going to tell you about me trying to get my yard sign, and I'm going to tell you about this, what this is related to. Because this is the longest I have gone, the recording of this show, without peeing since you went to Croatia. I've been peeing at a minimum every 45 minutes for the last week plus. If you could be so kind as to bring the closing music if you have that somewhere. Or punch it in post.

As another tease, I want to say I also was excited about something else that was on the show sheet we didn't get to today that I'm excited about. I'm going to show you something right here, Luke, that is very

relevant to your interest. I've got to switch to that screen. This is what's in my drawer at all time pen talk i have the exact this is great this is all this is really this is amazing amazing um forward promotion but i am i'm not being i'm not just trying to do this for the show what i say i am so about to pee so i will say to everyone thank you for this andrew it is so good to have you back to be back i really really missed you and um and i'm i'm glad you had a good time and i'm looking forward to a lot of fun shows this week uh so we'll see you tomorrow with the next one of those. In the meantime, have a great Monday. Take care of yourselves and please remember, no mountain too tall. Waterfalls and faucets.

Drip, drip, drip. Oh, he's gone. Good luck to all. Power out.