Muse

We can't bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. Oh, yeah. Oh, you got it. One trick is to tell them stories that don't go anywhere. Like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville, I needed a new heel for my shoe. So I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they call Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on them. Give me five bees for a quarter, you'd say. Now, where were we? Oh, yeah. The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was a style at the time.

TBTL!

I got recognized on the street today. Guy had already met me and then forgotten he met me and then recognized me from TV and then remembered me again.

What a space. Like, what is that about? I don't actually think that that space is real. I think people just keep saying that it's real and saying that, like, that there's stuff out there, but it's like, well, we're never going to know for real. You can't go there.

What I love to think about this is a puzzle, and each of every one of us is an integral piece That puts a big picture. And once we're all together, it puts a big picture. The show lets us to see the big picture. Yeah.

Well, all right. Hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Monday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live.

Ready to laugh and drop until your socks come off? My name is Luke Burbank. I'm your host. I'm off-putting. I'm an embarrassment. But I'm also a legend, oddly.

Coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio perched high above the mighty Columbia where the atmospheric river, the first of many, has arrived. And it played a sneaky trick on me this morning. I was looking out at the mighty Columbia and the weather kind of cleared up for a minute. Like it stopped raining. I even saw a little bit of blue sky. And so I thought, well, this is a chance. this might be my last chance to go jogging outside still trying the 75 hard ish ish major ish although here's oh something happened yesterday was quite encouraging i was at this yearly autumnal get-together at becca's parents place down in salem and uh a friend of mine aj showed up and we were chatting and i was trying to be i'm not really like one of the hosts of the party but But I'm like host adjacent. I try to be a little bit helpful. And I said, can I grab you like a beer or a wine or something? And he said, I'm doing this stupid thing. What stupid thing? He goes, 75 hard. I go, what? He goes, yeah. I go, what day are you on? He goes, 71. I felt very inspired. I felt very seen. I felt like a person who's had a very niche experience, who never meets anyone else who's having that niche experience and then you do and then i was like all right well that's my sign from the universe to not completely give up on this thing uh so i thought well this chance for me to get outside and get my jog on this morning and then by the time i got down to lake sacajaway it was just fully dumping rain and it was miserable out there but anyway uh as we like to say it's warm and dry here inside the madrona hill studio and we have made it to the next episode of the show let the fun begin i'm stalling because i think i might still have a ghost in my machine let's see i'm gonna go to the tbtl.net uh website tbtl.com was too expensive when we registered this as you know as a listener to the show so uh we've just been going with tbtl.net all these many many years and um maybe when you get the .com the the website loads faster maybe that's part of it i'm trying to figure out what the episode number is you know what i'll wait for my friend andrew walsh to tell me i have 4319 written down on my my little sheet here but i i still think that might be a little light anyway uh yesterday i know this much yesterday was october 20th and it was a special day this is special this is special it was the anniversary of something or it was a date that was significant for something that's come up a lot in old tbtl history so i'll see if andrew can guess and if you can guess and i want to preface this by saying i would have never in one billion years guessed this if i didn't see it on someone's instagram page so uh don't beat yourself up if you're not able to figure out what was significant

about yesterday um also i uh saw a play i bought a ticket for one to see oh mary on broadway on

friday night you know it's just living truthfully and imaginary circumstances it was very very fun i really enjoyed it want to talk about that uh and also want to talk about the life of tony ventrella seattle uh broadcasting legend sports caster a guy that i when i was a kid let me tell you i just thought this is the coolest dude of

all time like the coolest person i've ever met you grew up in seattle like i did at around the time

i did tony ventrella was a loomed large in your mind probably and had me thinking about just Just the kind of media we consume and also don't consume anymore. We'll talk about that. Oh, we'll talk to this guy. He's, at worst, he's the second coolest person I know. He's the longest-running Cobra of the program, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. Please welcome the wickedly talented. He's Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

Good morning, Luke. You know, before you mentioned in your introduction that yesterday was a some sort of special anniversary, which I'm not sure what it is.

Anniversary is the wrong term.

A marking of something. I was going to tell you that it's a date that was important. Well, today and I was going to have this sort of be a guessing game, but that wouldn't really I don't think that'll serve us. And it sounds like yours is maybe more substantial. But I was going to tell you that I promise you might as not. substantial wait oh wait do you hear mine i was gonna tell you that today is sort of a i don't know a special day a day that maybe we should note for future anniversaries because luke and i'm not gonna make you guess but i am going to undo a couple of buttons here on my shirt i don't know if you can see me right now on the screen oh you're right about the show show number though i don't know why the it's 43 20 right no 19 is right according to oh and also i don't love you besmirching the speed of the website it loaded immediately for me i was trying to do it on my

phone which is not on the wi-fi currently because i haven't been home for long enough to reintegrate

my phone into the environment and also well actually though that might be a good lesson for me though because um you know usually we have a just a regular static show pick for you know to illustrate each episode but i'm just remembering that friday show we were talking about chess so So I found a very, very simple, very simple, but very long animated GIF of little video game chess pieces moving around a chess board. And that was the show pick. So I was hoping that wasn't slowing you down.

No, I don't think it had anything to do with slow loading content. I think it's because my phone is not even on the Wi-Fi here at my house. Because what happens is I land on the airplane and then immediately the Wi-Fi stops working. but my obsession with my phone does not end. And so then I turn off the I tell my phone stop looking at Wi-Fi now. Stop looking at that. Stop remembering that. So that it will go switch over to cell service because now that we're just taxiing around on the tarmac, now my phone can go on cell service and I can continue doing whatever inane addicted stuff I was doing on the phone but then it'll take me a day or two to remember to turn the Wi-Fi back on my phone. So that was the issue. The issue

was completely user related. I see. Okay, well, that's good. The website's up. Your show number is right. I'm going to be guessing some sort of day of significance that yesterday marked. But before we do that, I am going to tell you why I was thinking today is a day of significance for you, especially, and for me, and for anybody within the sound of my voice, which is today, Luke, is the final day that I will be wearing my Daniel Vogelbach Vogelbombs. official mariners t-shirt from what do you think i got this in 2018 this was my first and one of my only instagram buys there was a you know like if you're on instagram and you're into sports at all you'll see a lot of like third party vendors selling you sort of like you know they're not official mlb branded um you know various t-shirts and hats and stuff so you can celebrate your team and maybe a more quirky way and we had a player who's still daniel vogelbach is still out there somewhere right where is he now is he was he in chicago i don't i don't know where he is now but he was a hefty hefty first baseman in dh forest i think he played first base sometimes right and um and i got this shirt that said vogel bombs in celebration of him looks like he might play for the toronto blue jays currently oh interesting that's interesting so anyway um but the thing is and this is one thing i'm trying to be a little bit better at is not keeping shirts even special shirts like this that i that i bought for some significance or to celebrate something too far past their due date right and i gotta say this one was a tough one for me what defines the due date well i mean the armpits are pretty like you know i've switched i've switched a style of deodorant so i think some of my newer shirts last longer almost to the degree that i think some of my shirts are lasting too long and i kind of want to ride in the herd a little bit No.

Now you're starting to, yeah, right, you're having an unexpected, unintended consequence of fixing your deodorant game.

Yes, and also, yeah, sort of at the same time that I got an influx of T-shirts that are kind of like, fine, but not like my favorite, not my Vogelbombs. And so what I'm trying to do is, for a shirt like this that had special meaning to me, but is no longer, and again, I don't even really ever discard the button-down shirt I wear over top of these T-shirts. Nobody really sees what's going on underneath here in most cases, but at a certain point, I got to stop putting on this T-shirt in the morning, and what happens is I put it on in the morning, and I think to myself, this is the last run for this shirt. When I take it off at the end of the day, I'm not going to wash it again. I'm going to play taps on a bugle, and then I'm going to say goodbye to it. I would like to play that for you, but somebody complained.

By the way, I recently was thinking about that on a jog. I may bring taps back. I'm sorry. I just, it's very appropriate for things that are not a big deal, like a t-shirt, like a Vogelbach t-shirt.

It's the juxtaposition of it.

Not having it at the ready, I feel like it deprives me of something I need as the host of the show and some of the listeners. And I'm sorry that we have listeners who maybe lost somebody in a wartime activity. But I think, and by the way, the fact that it's midi taps, it's intentionally chosen to be like the absolute worst. There it is. As we lower this Daniel VocalBot ashes to ashes, dust to dust, as we retire the memory of Lifetime 219 hitter Daniel VocalBot.

I love that you brought in some Catholicism in there as well, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. We're celebrating all the cultures with this.

I can tell you one thing. Whoever Daniel Vogelbach bribed at the MLB website to list him as 270, money well spent, that was a palm well greased. There's no way Vogelbach is a mere 270.

In his defense, it was sausage grease.

he's got the same he's got dr ronnie jackson who does trump's physicals

he's a stellar health anyway i love daniel vogelbach no matter who he plays for i loved him as a mariner i loved this shirt but what happens is i always tell myself all right i take it out of the little locker that i keep my clean t-shirts in and i put it on i say today's the last day but then i forget at the end of the day i don't even think about it i throw it in the laundry and then i'm folding laundry and i'm like i was supposed to throw this thing away But now it's clean, and I feel bad throwing away a clean shirt. I'm going to wear it one more time, and then at the end of the day, I'm going to throw it away, and then I just keep forgetting about it with my goldfish brain. But since we are now kind of celebrating the life of this Vogelbach T-shirt here on October 21st, 2024, we will now remember at the end of the day that it is time to say goodbye to this thing because you will hold me accountable, the listeners will hold me accountable, and we will forever mark this day as the day we say goodbye.

I have the same thing going on with a couple of Everlane T-shirts, which, I mean, I've had since Everlane-sponsored TBTL.

Really? Okay, I wasn't sure if you went back. Because there are some things, you and I both really liked Everlane, we would go back and buy some things. Yeah, I bought some stuff from them, too. But this is from the sponsorship era, huh?

It must have been, yeah, because I, and the thing is, it may have been the fashion at the time, not unlike an onion on your belt. Sure, sure. But they're, like, a little bit thinner, right? So they're actually very comfortable to wear because they're very thin. But that means they are very – I find them to be on the unflattering side. Like, if I were to be wearing them out and about in town, every little secret of my torso would be outed to the people who looked at me. So, in fact, what I switched to –

Every little thing we do is tragic, as I like to say about my own body.

I think that's Vogelbach's walk-up music.

I think so.

But so, in fact, what I've kind of switched to lately are these shirts that I think they're tailor-stitch, and they're much thicker. They're a black T-shirt, but they're way thicker. And here's the trade-off. They're not as comfy. Yes. They're not like, you don't, you're not, like, in fact, I will wear them. So I was wearing them for a shoot on Friday in New York because they're a little more flattering. they're they're like they just they just obscure things a little bit more but they're not it's it's it's not it feels starched yes in a way it doesn't it's not like a nice just put a t-shirt on and

kind of like slouch and relax thing dude i i just i just am i in your world i just have so much on this and none of it is podcast worthy and i just hey i'm really no no you're fine you left it at a good place. Whether or not I follow up is really the question here oh i will um no this is exactly so what some of my issues are so 90 of the time if not more when i'm wearing a t-shirt even if it has a special little message like vogel bombs on it i'm wearing it underneath a shirt and i'm the only one who knows that i have this shirt on underneath and it makes me feel special the ideal kind of shirt for that is exactly this kind it's a very thin right shirt and i love that but a lot of these other shirts that i mentioned are sort of piling up and given my um more responsible choice of deodorant and the fact that these other shirts are a little bit thicker um i have a bunch of shirts that i like less but are thicker and are lasting forever and i don't really like wearing them underneath

shirts particularly if they have some kind of like writing which i'm sure they generally do like i've got these these running shirts from the like portland 5k from like six years ago or something they were like leftovers becca gave them to me because they had a bunch of them from where she works for the chamber of commerce stolen and uh i i love it's quite true by the way

people come up to you be like oh man i ran that race too how how would it be a more clear example

of stolen valor but like i like i i love them because i have a bunch of them uh they're black whatever but they have this big what is it like a vinyl you know there's like a thing on them so i can't wear them i can't sleep in them they're kind of uncomfortable to sleep and i would never wear them under another shirt like so anyway i'm just saying if you've got t-shirts that are both thick and also maybe have a lot of kind of graphics going on these are all because also you can't have the graphics going up above where the collared shirt opens right is that something

that you give consideration to yeah like even this you know i can't see anything right now i don't see any kind of vogel bombs no yeah yeah but but what you see is like yeah so when i button up my shirt you can sort of see that i'm wearing a t-shirt underneath here but you can't not what's on there yeah it'd be kind of strange to have graphics up that high i don't there are people

that don't care about that andrew and i think those people need help i don't have any t-shirts

that go hard if that's what you're thinking god was that just a year ago is that what the significant anniversary is that one year ago today people were still wearing t-shirts that go hard do you remember those just like it had like the um some usually i feel like kind of broish or conservative messages and is just jam-packed with text and all the text like every line if not every letter was in a different appalling font and it was like the shirts were just a goddamn assault

on you and it ended up being some i mean they're real graphic design is my passion yes and it turns

out there was some sort of a there was some sort of a there's there were articles written about this it was some sort of a scam like it was these things were all over instagram and somehow the people behind these shirts figured out some sort of i don't know instagram trick to kind of jam them down our digital throats my apologies my apologies for that phrasing i didn't i didn't

like that as it came out yeah there i'm looking at this it seems to still be a going concern shirts that go hard yeah and uh they don't they look like they're still really looking to ride the absolute bleeding edge of meme culture i see the latest arrival is a mudang related shirt what does that mean okay andrew can we um move for a moment off of t-shirts although i could definitely do another solid hour on this with you because what's happening with the everlane shirts is now they've become they literally have holes in them and i just need to throw them out but first of all probably if i would have bought them retail they wouldn't have been like you know the cheapest t-shirt of all time and then secondly i'm like is there a point where this becomes kind of rock and roll like is there a point where i'm moving into tommy lee territory with these um no but anyway and the answer was no and the answer sadly was not yes um okay i have even more than t-shirts i want to talk to you today about the phenomenon that is mudang you okay first of all i want to i want to make sure i understand this you do not when i say the words mudang to you that doesn't

mean anything it doesn't look like anything no but i'd like to remind you that one of the i don't know this is an embarrassing thing yeah i guess one of the more embarrassing things in my casual life is that you were the one who told me about oh geez what are what is what are the posters that are all over town for some sort of shen yun and you told me like you see this stuff all over the place i'm like i have no idea what shen yun is and you're like you've seen it a million times like no i haven't and then that day i went out into the world and i just saw them all over the place and i was like how did i i never heard them singing it was really strange i was like i guess i just had a huge blind spot so if this thing that you're about to tell me about is something that i should know about i will say i might just be blind to it in society

mudang is a uh pygmy hippopotamus Oh. in thailand oh of course yes sorry okay so you've seen that hippo i always forget the name but yes

yes um this is the thing about mudang it's like it's a sensation she is a sensation and people are like flying from the u.s to thailand to just go to the zoo to look at mudang and and i will say that i and listen andrew i know you're a fan of things of scale yes so mudang really fits into that framework for you because uh most hippopotamuses are really big and mudang is small still so it's like cute because it's a thing you're used to seeing that is big but it is small but what I feel like is lost in the discourse about mudang is first of all hippopotamuses how am I what is the plural on that by the way

I think it's hippopotami but I don't you know what no I think we've looked that up and I think I'm wrong I'm sure we have

of hippopotama and the other problem is hippopotami works according to an AI overview Andrew hippopotamuses or hippopotami what doesn't help is there's that whole rhyme rap nocerous whatever that flight

of the concords thing is that's i don't usually go in for the musical parody on that show which i know is their whole thing but that is that is the one that just gets me every and it's it's

really clouding my memory around hippopotami because i think that's part of the rappers hip-hop hippopotamus or something but anyway so this is the thing first of all in nature hippos are terrifying they run very fast and swim very fast have you ever seen any of the footage of folks in like let's say in a kind of um a little like uh uh outboard like a like a little uh motorboat in like a river in africa and they're there with maybe like a tour guide and they're kind of just you know tooling down this river and then like a hippopotamus decides to come after the

boat i don't know if i've seen this particular thing but i do know that they're scary they are

in nature extremely dangerous. They can, again, they can run very fast. Their jaws, the crushing power of their jaws is a lot, and there's this one video in particular of this hippopotamus chasing a boat where it is coming for them. It is roughly the size of the motorboat, and the guy working, it's like I said, it's a little outboard, you know, it's like, so there's just a guy sitting in the back of the boat going like... Yeah, exactly, and it's like not going enough faster than I would want it to were I in the boat. I'm thinking about you and Veeves when you went to Secrets and you guys were, didn't you guys go down a river in an open boat or something? Yeah, we actually got

off of the Secrets resort for one day, one wonderful day that made us realize we don't want to go to resorts anymore because it was just like this one amazing day where we had these tour guides. It was just me, her, and two tour guides in this little boat going down this um going down this river and seeing did we see al we see some monkeys we well i don't think we actually got to see monkeys there are so many monkeys in costa rica and we didn't anyway point is we did get to see things that i think we saw some alligators i was like oh is this okay uh but they they did leave us alone but that's what kind of what i was picturing as you were talking about

this hippo story too yes basically that and the and i i'm assuming they got away because um the video got on the internet yeah had the hippo caught up with the boat the boat and the people would be at the bottom whatever of whatever river that is we call the drama in real life theory

when i was a kid i used to love drama in real life until i was like wait a second they always survive we always know where this is going because somebody tells the tale somebody wrote this story

right exactly so anyway the thing about mudang is mudang's like like main sort of uh kpi is that she likes to try to bite the zookeepers incessantly and i'm like and we treat this like it's just the cutest little thing you've ever seen and i'm like this killing machine is practicing killing and like maybe just because i you know got really immersed in the world of chimp crazy i'm thinking about what happens when these charismatic you know microfauna turn into deadly megafauna but I just think, again, it's not lost on me that Mudang is at this point very cute, but I think it's funny that Mudang trying to basically assault all of the zookeepers is commonly listed as one of Mudang's cutest kind of characteristics. I'm like, you better hope you don't run into Mudang in 15 years.

Be like, Mudang, dog. Mudang. Mudang. Listen, first of all, I misspoke. I thought I was saying alligator. I thought I was being wise by talking about the alligators in Costa Rica. It's not? I guess it is crocodiles. Really?

I thought it was only crocodiles in Australia. Does it have to do with salt water?

I don't know what it has to do with, but I really thought I was being the smart guy. I thought you were right, too, man. We were wrong. together just wanted to clear that up but also mudang oh am i wrong that a lot of the images are literally of mudang biting kneecaps like yes like that detroit lions dan snyder style dan campbell style dan campbell style excuse me exactly like gross yeah we talk about two different nfl people

talk about the former owner of the commanders awful human and then dan campbell who for being a kind of a for being kind of some sort of juice head is actually i think a kind of a force for

good in the world that i can tell not to get too much into sports here but yeah i gotta and not to get into the weekend sports where of course the lions did beat our um dear friend stew bots uh minnesota vikings you gotta give credit to that organization where where they wait this is for the for the minnesota undefeated undefeated season yeah only one standing i guess now um yeah right but uh anyway you do have to give them and him credit like i root for him like when When our teams aren't at stake, I definitely root for the Dan Campbell Lions to come in and give that ridiculously crazy speech about biting kneecaps and being aggressive towards football opponents. So he came on. He burst onto the scene with that. And now, like three, four years later, he's turned that word into something that very rootable and very good.

Absolutely. Can I just say one quick sport thing? Yeah, because this is, I think. a real failure of the... Because I was watching that the end of that Lions-Vikings game because, again, we have a lot of fans in Michigan who I'm always thinking of, folks like our buddy Ken out there and others. And then also, you know, a lot of folks in Minnesota who we love and I think of our friend the Stewbot a lot and how he ruined our text chain name. And now anything that happens to him is honestly karma. No, but I was watching the end of that game and, of course, that game came down to a last moment field goal by a kid whose name is i want to say like jake bates or something i'm that's from deep in the recesses of my brain i could be wrong about that but i'm watching the game and actually that's not true i'm sorry i'm listening to the game on sirius satellite radio and i'm listening to the vikings broadcast and maybe this is part of it because actually i'm I'm I'm going to like pre-tracked my statement here okay I was going to say I was going to chastise the announcers but now that I think about it if you're the Vikings announcers and you're about to lose this real tough game you're not going into the like lore of the kicker you're not going into the like great backstory of this kicker because it's the guy trying to beat your team so I guess I understand why but here's what here's what happened there's this you know last sort of last 15 seconds field goal from this guy who may or may not be named Jake Bates and they just kind of go he comes out here he kicks it you know he made it okay now the now the vikings are losing this morning i wake up and i'm just like the jake bates discourse is that his name it's jake bates i just checked it out yeah thank goodness is popping off because the guy's got an insane backstory are you like are you familiar with any of this so i'm gonna tell you

you know how in Arrested Development when Buster doesn't have his glasses on he refers to his own girlfriend I believe as a brownish area brownish area with points I'm going to give you my sort of brownish area with points kind of guess as to what was going on with the story because here's what I did I actually did I know she's a brownish area with points I did have a kind of a TV on I was watching the Seahawks game on my computer and then I was interested in that Lions Vikings game and so I was like oh, there's still a couple minutes left, and it's down to a one-point game with one minute left or two minutes left, so I switched over. So I did have the quote-unquote TV on, I think, a national broadcast of the game, but I wasn't paying enough attention. I was making coffee. I was doing this. I was doing that. So here's what I think I heard. This kicker was kicking for the Lions. Is this the team that had already had two kickers injured this season, or am I confusing that with a different team?

They definitely had at least one kicker that was injured. This kid, Bates, was definitely only on the team because of an injury to either one or two of the other kickers. This guy was not the first choice for this. Do you have any other backstory on him?

There was a team that trotted out a backup kicker, and it was interesting because there were two kickers who had gone down before them. I want to say that was the Lions. I could be wrong. And then the last time he kicked on this field, this is where it gets real brownish area with points. The last time he kicked on this field was... I know she's a brownish area with points. Was it a Super Bowl and he missed?

No.

No. Okay.

That's what I thought. But you I mean, you here's the story that I learned this morning about this. This young man who kicked again. I usually think this is why we're going somewhere interesting. And then I just got off to the side. I tend to think that there is a hierarchy of very stressful field goals to kick. It's not an extensive hierarchy. It's really just two places. The one place is you're tied. Actually, there's three spots. There is you're taught, you're leading and you're kicking a field goal. that to me feels like kind of a very low level of pressure. I mean, you do want to hit it. If you don't, if you miss a lot of field goals, even when you're leading, you will get fired. So maybe I should say this. There are no kicks for an NFL kicker that are zero pressure. But if you're leading the game at the end and you're just kind of like adding on, that feels like a lower pressure, relatively speaking. If you're tied, that seems stressful, but also not the most pressure because if you miss it, you're still tied. and then you're actually down by a point and you're trying and if you miss the field goal you lose yeah but if you make it you will win that's the highest pressure kick to me so i guess i had the order inverted that to me is the top of the hierarchy of stressful things and that's what this kid jake bates was doing he's coming in he's kicking this field goal if he makes it they win the game probably if he misses it they lose the game there's no like well we'll just have to beat him in overtime anyway this kid uh was a he played college football for a very brief period of time but his only thing in college football was long kickoffs he was a long i'm guessing he might have been a converted soccer player that's kind of how this usually would go down he played he kicked at some tiny like university in texas where he wasn't even their field goal kicker his job wasn't to make the field goals it was to kick the kickoffs way far so the other team could which is a completely different like thing really it just means you have a strong leg it doesn't mean you can aim the ball in any direction and then again I'm doing all this from memory I've only had eight minutes to google this guy and I haven't done it Andrew so I apologize for what I'm going to get wrong but basically this kid is not has not historically been a field goal kicker like at both the college or the pro level. And I heard a stat that this field goal he kicked yesterday that he made was like the second field goal he's ever kicked in competition.

Oh, I did hear so.

Because he didn't even kick field goals in college. How in the flip are you in the NFL trying to... And then, this was the quote from him that I thought, because, you know, Dan Campbell gave him, he was like, Dan Campbell was like, where's Mr. Bates? Where's Mr. Bates! Post-game, Dan Campbell's just like, just careening around the locker room, screaming, where's Mr. Bates? The kicker. You could tell the kid was like, kind of excited, but also afraid in the way that like babies are around me, because I'm so into them. I'm like, get over here, you cutie! And they're like, I don't know. But the quote, the press conference from this kid was, Jake Bates was, last year I was out of football, I was selling bricks. and i was like how does that business work not bricks of marijuana i'm assuming here i bet he would not have copped to that on national television so he was apparently in brick sales this time last year and i just thought like what's the sales call hey have you considered red bricks you know what i could really see for this place um rectangular bricks what's the how What's the differentiator on the Bricks? What does Bricks sales even look like? What a thing to have been in, and now he's kicking field goals. But there was something about, and again, I must be getting some part of that number wrong. There's no way this was the second field goal in competition of this kid's life. I'm trying to fact check.

I would definitely have the Bricks thing down.

We agreed to no fact checking.

Oh, okay, sorry, no fact checking. On this show, okay? I will withdraw from this program right now. He's got a little Detroit free press backgrounder on this guy, but I'm not clear as to what his background was in kicking. Let's just call it limited. Yeah, and the whole thing that I said, I'm thinking of a different game. I don't know if I had the red zone on or what, but whatever I was saying before about two kickers going down and then kicking in this place where they had.

You're not thinking about the Jets, right, or the Giants. One of those New York teams recently had a kicker who was injured going into the game, who then injured himself worse. Then they tried to have their punter place kick, and he couldn't. So then they just couldn't kick extra points the whole game. That's not what you're thinking.

Luke, I don't know anymore. I thought I heard something. yesterday maybe it was a highlight on my way home on the radio i don't know i am uh but whatever whatever i thought i knew about mr bates i was where's mr bates i was uh wrong about it i want

to mention he is apparently 10 for 10 on field goals this season so wherever that number i got about two field goals is wildly wrong point is heaven lost a good brick seller andrew what

What happened on October 20th? Will we find out after the break?

After we thank these donors, let's do that before I get into maybe even more esoteric content, okay?

Thank you for being a 10.

All right, Lee. Let's thank some donors today. As I mentioned at the top of the show, the weather has turned here, And there were some guys this morning that were kind of working on some stuff here at the Madrona Hill studio, picking up various scraps of lumber and things, concrete forms from where I've been having some concrete poured. And I was in here, Andrew, like selecting audio drops, finding things like this to play. and i just was like had a moment of deep gratitude that this is somehow a job for us yes yes i would fare poorly if my job was to um you know do challenging physical labor in the rain that would be i would i would i would crash out very fast on that by the way look for it andrew much like shun yun now that i've told you this the the term crashing out is having a real moment right now oh really no it's the new cool way to describe anyone having kind of like a meltdown or just like you know just sort of having a an unfortunate episode we now uh in the internet parlance we say they've crashed they're crashing out watch this person crash out trump crashes out at a campaign event where he just plays music for 30 minutes i wouldn't call that if my understanding

of crashing out which i just learned 30 seconds ago i would not describe that as crashing out i I would describe that as boogying down.

You clearly didn't watch it. And by the way, that's probably good.

Or you've never seen me boogie down.

Anyway, these are donors. They are making it. So this is my job and your job and John Sklaroff's job. And we are incredibly grateful for the Megan Hamiltons of the world out there in St. Louis Moe. Thank you, Megan. Thank you, Megan. Thanks to Kathleen Aiken, who's in Port Orchard, Washington. Beautiful Port Orchard, where I'm sure Megan, or excuse me, Kathleen, is enjoying the same waterworks that we're enjoying here today. But it just makes us all feel closer. Thanks, Kathleen. Paul Randall is in. Now, I don't know this place. Look at this. What is this? Malin, Oregon?

Malin, Oregon. I've never heard of Malin, Oregon. But I've not heard of many places, so I guess that's not the most shocking thing.

I kind of feel like City of Malin. Let's see here. Oh, it's right on the California-Oregon border. It's in Klamath County. Population, as of the 2010 census, was 805. If you're there, you might want to check out the Wild Goose Lodge Motel. Looks like a cute place. And you might also, if you are in the local diner, you might say hi to Paul Randall, who's a TBTL supporter. Thanks, Paul.

Do you know that Malin is founded on the discovery of a large horseradish? What am I reading here? Hold on a second. Hold on. I can't hear it.

I think you're reading the plot to the next Christopher Guest film.

It was the style of time. According to Lewis MacArthur, Malin was settled September 30th, 1909, on land that was formerly at the bottom of Tule Lake by 65 bohemian families who named the new town after the Czech town Malin. The settlers had found a large horseradish, and Malin is famous for that plant. Okay. Am I having an episode? Am I breaking down?

No, but what I want to do is chop that horseradish up, make a little sauce, and then eat it with the world's largest egg from Winlock.

Yes, absolutely.

Get these largest things working together for me. I mean, it is right on the border, Andrew, right on the Oregon side of the border. from like i mean you could walk it looks like from that radish down and you could be in like kalina california it is it's very very close to california i'm really sorry to do this but

so a horseradish is a root right it's not i think so yeah so it's like some root how is i think maybe is there a chance that somebody is not keeping up on the wikipedia page from aelin Oregon and somebody just like threw that in there as a piece of non sense because the there's no follow-up here the settlers had found a large horseradish it's just a sentence in here and there's no follow-up about what that means and i feel like i'm being had i feel like some some wikipedia author is getting away with something here okay um hang on a sec

first of all i'm so you know what i wish i had like some kind of taps music to play or something like a mini version for internet search andrew because the days of good search are over and they'll never come back oh it's so flipping frustrating that i just can't get it and and if you're listening to this you know this because you're probably somewhat online now when you try to google something or search for something on the internet you get this ai bullshit that's how is it that this is supposed to be so much better but it seems so much worse then it's amazing then then i mean maybe it'll learn and get better but i'm trying to i'm so first of all apparently um there is a bohemian there is a style of bohemian horseradish in malin czechoslovakia okay so maybe with the confusion here is when they say a horseradish it's not a singular maybe it's a type of horseradish maybe there were fields of this type of horseradish that was blooming that and they they it reminded them of the old country or somebody had you know eaten this in czechoslovakia and as opposed to like one horseradish a giant like world's largest horseradish that somebody was pulling on a truck and then they

put it at the state fair there is something to this story i am on the oregon institute of technology's website now. I am too. Dot ed. Okay, good. So you're seeing what I'm seeing. Oregon Institute

Technology dot com was too expensive when they signed up.

That's right. Boy, it's taking forever to load. Too many gifts. But anyway, it does sort of seem like these settlers, which is, it's mentioned in that Wikipedia page, but just glanced upon. This offers a little bit more context. The city's name reflects the city's heritage. Legend says Mrs. Frank Zumpfy, who with her husband was among the original arrivals. found a large horseradish root growing and chose the name to honor the bohemian horseradish found in Malin, Czechoslovakia. So I think that's kind of close to what you were saying.

It was a singular horseradish plant.

So they stumbled on something and they're like, hey, this is like those horseradishes we had back in Czechoslovakia and we should name the town Malin. So at least, okay, there was some truth to that. My apologies to the Wikipedia editors. I know that they don't let stuff just sit there. They don't let lies just sit there on their website.

This is a little bit of Malin's history, though. And this is, Andrew, why not only am I not cut out to work outdoors and why I'm extremely appreciative of, like, Jennifer Brooks, who's in Laverne, California. Thank you, Jennifer. And our friend Ann Taylor of Washington, D.C., who I got to hang out with after the Philly show. It was so fun to catch up with them. We love them. Old school TBTL supporters. And then, of course, Lauren Powers in Portland, Oregon. We know Lauren. We've hung out with Lauren many a time. Absolutely. So thank you to our donors for making this a job. Never have I been more appreciative than today when I'm reading about the history of Malin, Oregon. Because the early days sound tough, Andrew. This is continuing from the Oregon Institute of Technology website. Somebody named Marge Burley was writing about the early days of Malin. so marge burley was there in the early days and then wrote something for the local paper quote just here's my point imagine showing up at a place that sounds like this andrew and being like okay let's make it work quote the sagebrush grew rank and high sometimes five feet tall causing hardship to both men and women who had to grub it out by hand wind and dust blew through the cracks of the hastily built cabins women worked side by side with the men in the fields shocking grain pitching hay shoveling ditches they made beds of meadow hay and furniture from used boxes it was not uncommon for the settlers to work by lantern light far into the night as burley also wrote the pioneers must have wondered at their settlement choices in the early years when they suffered many hardships crops that didn't freeze or which were destroyed by wind were eaten by jackrabbits. To control the rabbits, drives were started. Louis Kalina, son of Eloise Kalina, recalls joining a rabbit drive when he was 10 years old. The drive, with participants walking or riding horseback or driving wagons, began at 10 a.m. on the California side of the state line and ended in the late afternoon in a wired-off area. About 4,000 rabbits Habits were caged, et cetera, et cetera. Point being, it sounds inhospitable. I'm always amazed at the places people planted their flags in those days, and we're like, all right, well, let's get to it, everyone. I guess this is about as good as it's going to get.

So are you saying when I complain about the lack of daily hotel housekeeping, I am being somewhat spoiled by that?

I'm saying you would never cut it in mainland

yeah sorry I didn't say that in the proper way I just actually by the way have you noticed as Mr. Traveler I call you that Mr. Traveler is daily hotel like housekeeping services that's kind of back now huh like I just remembered like when we were in Philly

well remember when someone busted in the hotel room when you and I were doing the show the other day I'm guessing you probably cut that out yeah I did I think it depends on I think it depends on the hotel and I think it like so for instance when I was staying last week at this Marriott in Times Square that is a very very well staffed hotel it's a huge hotel that is you know I think pretty much at capacity all the time that place every single day housekeeping is coming in out of every room my guess would be if you stay at a much smaller like hotel that is owned maybe by a local family let's call it like a you know residence in or something on the oregon washington let's talk about a residence in in mallon you know oregon or something uh that's owned just by a family maybe they own a couple of hotels in the area and they're very your eye is very much on the bottom line and maybe these places are not sold out all the time those are the places where you'll see oftentimes a little printed thing that's in one of those, like, plastic stands so that when you walk in and you look at the front counter, it's just looking right at you?

Mm-hmm.

Does that make any sense?

Yeah, I know what you're talking about. Like a display kind of thing.

And it'll say, like, you know, housekeeping every three nights unless otherwise requested or something.

But you don't really stay in those kinds of places. I just feel like, and I don't travel all that much, but I have been on the road a bit lately, and I feel like I have not stayed in it. Like, there was a period kind of right after the pandemic where it was unclear whether your standard hotel, like, let's say somewhere in between the two that you're talking about, like, maybe, like, a boutique hotel. Like, what was that place that I stayed in Portland when I went down there for a weekend for you, me, and John to sort of plan TBTL's future? That was probably the Jupiter Hotel, I'm guessing. Maybe the Jupiter, but like those style hotels, I remember it was kind of like, no, no, you have to, you have to really ask for a room, you know, for housekeeping to come on a daily basis. I'll bet you places like that have returned to normal, normalizing daily service. No, like I can't remember the last time I was in and they didn't come.

I definitely think it's, it's probably the majority of the hotels out there. Certainly if they're part of a big chain, my guess is that they've mostly gone back to standards. Right. I also just, if I'm in a hotel that doesn't automatically offer that, I'm then going to be the nudge who's, like, asking on my way out, hey, could I get my room made up? Really?

I thought you didn't care for that that much. I swear, we used to travel, and I was shocked. You were like, I don't know. I don't like people coming in here. I'm fine. I just make my bed myself. I could have sworn that was your move.

Sometimes I've done that, and certainly, like, I'm actually pretty good at remaking the hotel bed, kind of to the style of how they do it, if that makes any sense. Yeah, sure. Because they're just like masters of it somehow because they do it all day. But no, I mean, I'll ask if, because I do like, particularly when Becca and I were in Europe and it was so hot and everything, we'd just be like walking and walking, walking. You really wanted to come back to the room being A, ice cold.

Yes, exactly what I was going to say. Yes, yes.

And the bed really nicely made. Like that's something something so kind of comforting about that that I was always like asking on the way out. Can we please have, you know, somebody take care of the room and stuff? So maybe that got me back in the habit. I'm not totally sure.

But glad we could have that conversation, though. Glad I could take a mail in there.

I want to say again, thanks to all of our donors for, you know, making it again. So this is our line of work because we're not cut out for much else.

I don't know if I'm cut out.

hello and welcome to top story i saw this on the this is going to give you a hint andrew i happen to follow a producer of the howard stern show named um chris wilding chris wilding yeah chris wilding he's very he's very funny on the show he does a number of really does a great uh bigfoot impression he does a great doctor now Zarden from my 600 pound life impression he's very talented mimic pretty funny dude and he posted something yesterday that said happy October 20th day to all who celebrate now that's again not a very helpful hint to you but it's a reference and then there was a screen cap on on his Instagram page that was showing a kind of famous maybe on this show slightly infamous person for being kind of out of touch and a little bit high on their own supply who had declared October 20th as an important day in how he related to his fans.

Oh, wow.

Is that pointing you in any certain direction?

Let me think about this. When you first mentioned at the beginning of the show, I was like, oh, I don't know why I thought this. I was like, could this be the day of Felix Hernandez's perfect game? But no, that would not be in October, of course, And I realized that I'm just giving you, I'm just stalling here. Like, obviously, I appreciate it in October. But that was one of the first things. I appreciate hearing the process. And then because I think I think this year might have been the 10 year anniversary of that. And for some reason, I have that on my calendar, on my Google calendar. Once a year, I get a little update that says, oh, it's the anniversary of Felix's perfect game. I have no idea when I put that there or why. But I did. So it's not that, obviously.

Well, it's any consolation. The alarm on my phone is The alarm on my phone is called Leaf Eiffel Tower

I'm sorry?

Because I needed to set an alarm For Becca and I to make sure we were leaving The Eiffel Tower at a certain point To get to our flight but I misspelled it And I've never changed it

It's just Leaf Eiffel Tower

Anytime I set an alarm for something I'm reminding myself to Leaf Eiffel Tower

Do you ever Mess around with um with like attaching your spotify to your alarm so that you can actually program a song

to wake you up in the morning um i don't even know if it needs to be spotify on my phone because it's an iphone i think it actually probably wants to do that more with like oh sure yeah sure sure mine just but i don't i don't do that i i might think about that i i'm pretty i'm pretty locked in i'm pretty laser focused on my current alarm that i've used for the longest time um let's see do you want to hear it what i like it's called first light and what i like about it let me switch on the speaker here let's see if this works um is this going to play i need you to stall as much as as possible I'm sorry if that's giving anyone like anxiety if that's also your alarm I've just pavlov'd you right into a stress moment um what i like about that alarm is that it is not uh it's not aggressive and i have found that it has actually made getting up less horrible for me because it's not i i you know it's it's i don't need something abrupt if it's abrupt i'm already like cortisol is already like just being dumped into my system whereas that thing just kind of And I'm like, hey, wait, what's going on in this dream? Okay, someone's making some noise. And then I realize eventually, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the alarm I've got to get up.

See, that would probably be too gentle for me. Or maybe I could set that as a first alarm if I'm going to do one of those things where I need to set three alarms because I really have to wake up and I'm nervous about it. Maybe I'd set the very first one to be that gentle, knowing that I'm probably going to snooze out on it. That's another thing people are saying online a lot. Yeah, yeah.

He snoozed out, then he crashed out. What about this one? How about this for your alarm?

That might work. Well, the thing is like the idea I I've been thinking about this lately, the idea of choosing a song to wake up to, which is something my phone will sometimes encourage me to do. And it seems like such a fun thing to do. Right. Let's choose the song. But you have to be so careful with what the song is, because it can't be a song you really like, because if it's a song you really like, you're going to associate it with waking up and the song is going to be ruined for you. and it's so rare that I do it but Genevieve and I had to get up very early for something I'm going to say maybe this was our trip to Croatia or something we had to get up very very early and it was very important that we wake up and so I did one of those things where I set a bunch of alarms for myself and while I was in the alarm app it was like hey do you want to use a song and I was like what would be a song and I'm pretty sure this and this lasted on my phone for maybe a couple of days this was so I picked a song that was perfect because boy you're going to hate it because it's going to fly you. You said you like to wake up more gently. This is not a gentle way to wake up. But it's a song that I know that starts...

with a bang but also i don't really like it that much so it couldn't be totally ruined imagine waking up and i god i hope i have the right song here imagine waking up you're snoring you're

sleeping you're sleeping oh am i allowed to swear yeah oh bleep no oh bleep no i had to sleep in

I sleep and I have to wake up, and then all of a sudden... I would scream. I would just lunge from my phone. My heart is immediately racing, and I'm out of bed trying to put out a fire.

That feels to me like too much stress on the old ticker. I also have...

I had to wake up, though.

Well, that's the thing. I guess it was effective at what it was supposed to do. So there you go.

And then I sent it back to hell. It did what it needed. That, of course, is the song Cosmic.

He threw it back in Mount Doom.

That is the opening track on the B-52's most famous record, by the way. That's how they just launch right into it.

Let me see if I can name the B-52's.

Does it have Cosmic in the name? It does. And by the way, this is the—you're very close.

I mean, it's got to be the one that's got all of their big songs. It's got to have Love Shack on it.

It's got Love Shack and Rome on it. And the very first song, which is the song I was playing, is the titular, it's the title track, I guess they would say, for the album. So the album name is the same as the song I was just playing. Cosmic Disco or something? It's not Cosmic Disco, but it is two words, one word, two words, one word, Cosmic.

I love, boy, I've got to give you credit, Andrew. I'm supposed to be quizzing you, and now somehow I'm on the hot seat. That's a good point.

I still have to figure out this.

Very well played.

I wanted to tell you what my second guess on that one was, was I thought for a second it might have been the day that Dave Matthews dumped a bunch of poop, because that's a day that's celebrated.

That's a solid guess, and that's, like, more in this category of things. Like, I mean, this is a totally—I meant for this to literally be two minutes at the top of the show. No, no, I love this. Please, everyone manage your expectations about this.

But, okay, cosmic— So you take a guess, and I'll take a guess. Is cosmic the first or second word? First word, cosmic. Second word.

I told you that. I know I told you about this, but it was very interesting. Fred Schneider from the B-52s was a guest on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me by video. I remember that, yeah. And what I found really interesting about him was, and I know this is going to sound, I do not mean this to sound critical, but he was surprisingly humorless. now he was a great guest and he was very earnest like he wanted to answer the questions and he was unintentionally actually very funny and charming but he was not like a jokey guy

does that make sense yeah but i mean we had this conversation i don't think of him as a real jokey

guy though i think of their entire oeuvre as a joke i mean not in a bad way but just being like Like, you know, if you say a faded sign, somehow it all feels camp to me in a way. And maybe that raises the question of is camp a joke? I haven't even talked about O'Mary, which is high camp that I went and saw last Friday. Okay, cosmic. Could you give me any hint about the second word?

Yeah, it's one syllable. It's monosyllabic, as I was going to say. Okay, okay, cosmic. Don't you think monosyllabic is such a terrible word? It is. It is. It has so many syllables to describe. many syllables to say there's one syllable. The opposite of that is onomatopoeia. I think onomatopoeia is the perfect word to describe what it is, whereas monosyllabic is the worst word to describe what it is.

Except something that's onomatopoeic can be like, whoosh. Yeah, that's what it is.

Bark. Woof.

Okay. Okay, okay, okay, okay.

Tin woof. Sorry.

Tin woof rusted? Okay, go ahead. Possible show title. I don't know. What is it? Cosmic what? Thing. Cosmic Thing. Cosmic Thing. I did not have that CD, but I did have whatever CD had Quiche Lorraine on it.

Oh, God. Yeah, that might be my own private Idaho. Is that the name of that one? I loved that CD. Oh, God, that's a good record.

I got that from Columbia House. Because I dabbled. I dipped my toe in the waters of the B-52s, like, quote-unquote, weirder stuff. Because, you know, anything, when I was in high school, anything that I could do that made me feel like I wasn't just in lockstep with everyone else was like a real big ego boost so it's like oh you guys are listening to uh you

know love shack but have you heard quiche lorraine you know i misspoke that that album is called wild planet it does oh wild planet that's the album i had yeah it has private idaho on it but it also has this and by the way i know that we're trying to be careful about playing music on the show i just don't think this is gonna get me pulled down

which is probably we just won't play that much of it but this song right here off of Wild Planet is called Give Me Back My Man it is one of it might be the platonic ideal of a B-52 song that guitar okay I can't play too much I totally remember this because that was

again that that era of me getting CDs from Columbia House oh by the way quick aside because I think we've been too laser-focused today, Andrew, so if I can have a minute to do a quick aside. It's good. I was leaving Becca's apartment yesterday morning to head down to Salem for this get-together and a quite elderly woman was out for kind of like a morning power walk down in the South Waterfront neighborhood of Portland, and she fully had a disc man. Oh! And it gave me so much life.

Was she jogging? Because I feel like

she was kind of briskly walking okay so it might be in her in her 80s and she had on like headphones kind of like larger headphones that we not you know like apple or not like a particularly designy brand but she had on like headphones that were more from this era than the manner in which she was playing the music and it was full-on disc man with the like hand strap she's walking with it And I was like, I was so close to chasing her down and going, Miss, what CD are we, what compact disc are we listening to right now?

I'd love to know. Okay, I'll take a guess now. And I feel like this is off by a click, but did it have anything to do with Jeremy Renner and him starting the Rennerverse?

Andrew, these are such good guesses because they give us a chance to remember the Jeremy Renner app.

It's not that, though.

It's not the Jeremy Renner app. It's not the water, but that's a really solid guess.

Didn't he start the Rennerverse? He started an app? No, it was his own social media.

I think the app was the portal into the Rennerverse.

Yes, a social media site based on my love of Jeremy Renner. All right, shoot, now I might be panicking.

So it's basically a thing where somebody who – we've also talked about this person in relation to public art in Beverly Hills.

Oh, Ringo, you son of a – Why is Ringo leaving my Monday again?

Ringo. This is a serious message to everybody watching my update right now. Peace and love. Peace and love. i want to tell you please after the 20th of october do not send fan mail to any address that you have nothing will be signed after the 20th of october if that has a date on the envelope it's going to be tossed i'm warning you with peace and love but i have too much to do so no more fan mail thank you, thank you and no objects to be signed, nothing anyway, peace of love peace of love 2008 that was

so you this must have been literally within the first month of TBTL existing, right? yeah, we started January of 2008 oh, you started in January of 2008 okay, so this would have been near the end of your first year because this was October of 2008 that he posted this I'm just looking it up here Also, so Howard Stern really has an obsession over this because the most definitive document on this was an article written in 2016 that is on the Howard Stern website. Peace and love.

Which bums me out because this is one of those, we used to call it on the show, shared brain syndrome, you know, where it's like there's just something that's out there, whether it's an obvious joke to be made or whatever, and you arrive at it at the same time as somebody else, but there wasn't any, you know, theft involved. we you know we saw this video on the internet when everyone else did jen was rightfully obsessed with it and so we started playing that peace and love drop like crazy just at the same time that the howard stern show got obsessed with it but of course it's like they're sort of having a bigger impact on the culture and so you know kind of uh kind of i hope it doesn't seem like we're ripping them off but i wasn't willing to like i wasn't willing to uh pass up our usage of that audio because it's just so genius. So if you were planning on sending Ringo Starr any fan mail or anything to be signed, yesterday is the, I don't know, what, 15-year anniversary, 17-year anniversary of the last day you could do that.

Yeah, so that's why you're still waiting, I guess.

Right, exactly. Hey, before we wrap things up today, I do want to say...

R.I.P. to Tony Ventrella, who, if you grew up in Seattle, again, if you're about my age, he was a really well-known, sort of beloved sportscaster figure, particularly in the 80s. He passed away. He was 80 years old. And the one thing I just wanted to mention it, because, again, it's the kind of thing that if you grew up in Seattle, that's a name that is very familiar to you. and probably anyway, because of the way that local news used to work, and I was texting with our friends JD and Thunder from the Stack of Dimes podcast about this on Sunday. I was surprised, Andrew, at how many different people brought this up for me. Someone brought it up in our Fun-Loving Criminals, and by the way, if ever us calling it the Fun-Loving Criminals was justified, it was when we were trying to remember the legacy of Tony Ventrella, because the height of Tony Ventrella's power would also have been the height of Kevin Kremen's power.

I don't believe Kevin Kremen has reached his full potential yet, actually. That's true. That's a good point.

But let's just say Tony Ventrella would have known who Kevin Kremen was and vice versa. Of course. These were two—they were both luminaries at the same time. And again, Kremen may—he may still have a—America loves a second act.

I'm sure they both have eaten chicken cordon bleu at some sort of award ceremony for sports broadcasting. in the general Seattle area. Like, how many times did they open up a cloche to get, like, the steam of green beans on their glasses lenses as they're just, like, shuffling?

Well, if Ventrella wasn't hosting it, because that was a big thing for him. Okay. He was, after his sort of television career, he, you know, he did a lot of those kind of events that I've also done at times. A lot of, like, kind of Seattle media luminaries move on to the, like, charity auction scene. The reason that I thought Tony Ventrello was so flipping cool when I was a kid was because, well, first of all, I was sports obsessed, and he was a sportscaster, but he was, like, before there was a sports center, he would do things like, he had a segment called Wrestling Hold of the Week. Oh, wow. Where he would I don't even remember how the bit worked But he just would do these kind of bits sometimes Like he was He was When I saw him on television He was like the absolute Sort of definition of affable Like He just seemed Like everybody's friend But not in a smarmy way There's also this TV news kind of thing That's very kind of like Faky and smarmy And kind of not very inviting as the viewer where everyone's acting like they're friends but they're kind of not that was not the energy that old tony ventrella was putting out he just seemed like he just seemed like the coolest dude in the world to me in the 1980s and when i was texting with jd and thunder about this i don't know why i have to use their code names in this context but anyway um uh jd was saying that we are probably the last generation he you know like our generation is probably the last generation that has that kind of relationship that kind of thought about our local tv newscasters and i was like oh yeah that's right like i promise you adelaide cannot name any of the local tv newscasters in seattle and i don't say this to denigrate the job at all but it has become a much more just kind of like i don't know yeoman's kind of position i think like it's not you know you're not a household name the way you once were it's not like we don't have our favorites that we love to tune in for at least i just don't think it's it's the way it used to be i hadn't thought of that for some reason that i am like from i'm part of the last generation that when the local sportscaster who was big for 20 years in your life passes away it kind of rocks your world that is not i don't think how it's going to be 20 years from now yeah yeah i wonder

i wonder if that is based on market as well i mean like certainly i can't even name because i didn't grow up here and i'm a transplant here and i don't so i don't watch local news either because i'm a kid um so i i definitely would be the last person who could name like a local kind of tv news broadcaster but did you have like at um grandpa just gives me a remote after we watched

the powerball did you have the cleveland equivalent of that as a kid like were your parents or when when you were living with your dad, was he watching the news at 11 o'clock at night?

Yes. I think there are a couple, but my brain is so bad. Like there was a woman named, I want to say she was like very elderly by the time she actually went off the air. And so we always kind of, I remember being as kids, we had our eyes on, it was like, I want to say Dorothy, I want to say Dorothy full-time, but it's not that. Dorothy Neasy? Dorothy Full, I'm just going to type in full-time and see what it says. Oh wow, I was closer than I thought But Dorothy Fulheim, F-U-L-D-H-E-I-M. You know her? No, but I'm saying you were pretty close. Oh, okay, yeah, pretty close, yeah. And so I remember, like, she stood out, and there maybe were some others that are a little bit outside the grasp of my brain right now. The closest thing, because I saw you guys all, like, texting about this on various chains yesterday, and I heard, like, I don't know if it was Paul Moyer or somebody on the broadcast during the football game sort of give a tribute um to the broadcaster who passed away whose name I'm already Tony Ventrella Tony Ventrella sorry that's not a good way to honor somebody uh yeah exactly um but uh all of that is to say I did some like searching I'm like do I have the equivalent of that the only thing I can sort of think of is I remember being a kid and there there was a suddenly like kind of a new sports broadcaster on the scene named Jim Donovan and I just remember having this sense of him being like very young and fresh and like even though i wasn't really paying attention to the tv broadcast and i i want to say he was on channel 19 although i i could be slightly wrong about that um i remember him just like sort of like being like when he came on his segments there was something very fresh and sort of grabby about them that that stood out to me and then i just sort of went on with my life and forgot about him and then when i got back into the browns a decade or so ago and i would tune into a browns broadcast hearing him i'm like oh my god i'd almost forgotten about him and to know that he has stayed in the same market for all this time and now he's like the veteran browns and cleveland sports broadcaster like he's the old head i remember that kind of like that would be the closest but i didn't have the same relationship with sports that you did and

possibly not broadcasting as well i was definitely like a kind of a weird nerdy kid who was like asking tom glasgow if i could intern for him when he came into bumpy's fruit and yogurt so i will admit that probably and the same thing with with uh john and kevin now we're shifting out of their nom day podcasting the part of how john and kevin and i really bonded in our like literally our first hangout ever was we all had a hyper awareness of the local tv people scene i think we bonded talking about ken schramm from town meeting which was kind of this show that was on a uh como on sunday nights or something and so maybe i maybe i'm extra tuned into that or i was as a kid but yeah i was just thinking like it's it's weird to me to think and i remember actually i had this um i had a like a girlfriend for a bit whose name was lee and she this was like post college for me and she was from spokane and i remember we went over to spokane to kind of like hang out um with her mom and the first i swear to god hour of conversation between her and her mom was catching up on what the spokane tv news market was doing i go well he went over to this day are you kidding me what happened to dan gladstone well and they were like and and that was when i learned that the smaller the town the bigger the celebrity you are as the local news person and so it's possible that there are some smaller places where the local news folks are still kind of you know sort of celebrities although I think really what happens there is people are probably passing through a lot more quickly because my guess would be that the economics of it if you're if you're like a person who's really wants to sort of make a name for yourself and make some money in this business you probably can't afford to stay in wichita for a significant period of time if you if you get to wichita and you're doing okay and maybe that's a bad example you get to spokane you're kind of got to be eyeing the next bigger market like i don't know if if people just stay and do the news for 20 years in a smaller market anymore because i don't think that economically

it probably works out for them yeah because i wanted to run this by you and you know i'm not Listen, Luke, I don't want to fight on a Monday, okay? No, I'm not trying to counterpoint you here. We saved that for Thursday. Oh, my God, I have so much time been building up. No, I'm not trying to counterpoint you here, yet it feels like I'm doing that, but I almost feel like the last place that I can think of where people had a real connection to their local news celebrities was Los Angeles, though, which is kind of the opposite. You know, that's literally the second biggest market and, you know, close second behind New York. And like, I feel like there didn't you and I do a story about like a woman like she did get forced out of her job or I don't remember exactly what happened. Well, she went to the radio or the TV station basically across the street and it was such big news.

Well, the reason it was big news was because her colleague went on air and lost his mind over it to where he got fired. Yeah, that was, I think, what made it noteworthy. No, you're right about that, which is like in places like New York and L.A. And this is I do think that there is.

some coherence to my sort of economic theory on this, and it is this. New York and LA are these mega, and I'll put Chicago in the conversation, they are these mega media markets where the person who's hosting the nightly news on, you know, KTLA or, you know, whoever, Sam Champion in New York, these are still big jobs, I think, because the population is so large. And therefore, I think that these people are probably pretty well compensated and it's the kind of job that you might stay at for 20 years and you in doing that I think you then do become a known quantity people have just seen you on TV on the sides of buses for years and years and years I think what I'm people have seen you too I wonder if that's part of it as well like even about like some of the micro celebrities who like you know at let's say the public radio stations KCRW or what have you like

some of those people were so well known the person who does morning edition on kcrw is well known by tom hanks and all these other people right exactly he's like god i hope i bump into cherry glazer exactly who i think did i see that she just retired by the way but anyway yes so you're right

in those big cities i think that the probably the local news folks are are still kind of a thing but i guess what i really think is places like seattle i think it's just really changed because i could just again and also i was a weird case but i i could name all of the newscasters as could my parents as could most of the people i think at least people that i knew and i think that those i think markets like that i think have it's just really changed i don't think we're going to see a lot of tony ventrellas anymore because people just don't tune in in the same way and people don't maybe stay that long or if they do they're i don't know i just it gives me this kind of hard to describe on we to think about the fact that whoever does the sports i mean you've still got like paul sylvia's still at king five that guy's been around for a long long time he might be kind of the last of the the last of a sort of group of people who were there since like i was watching this stuff as a kid but i was thinking about i was like well what's happening well a lot of people are getting their information from different places and a lot of people are creating these strong kind of parasocial bonds with people on tiktok or people who do podcasts and i thought holy shit in my own much more diminished way i'm getting to live the dream i had about being tony ventrella but here doing this show with you like and to some degree live wire although live wire is less just totally rooted in my personality but like i wanted to be When I watched Tony Ventrella on TV I thought he was a guy who got to like Have fun And be sort of known Amongst a certain group of people And he just seemed like he was kind of like funny and chill And nothing bothered him Which is exactly the vibe that I think I Sort of Radiate on this show But no like I felt as a kid Even though I might have met the guy one time in passing I felt very connected to him as an idea Like I had an original parasocial relationship With him And it's like where have the Tony Ventrella viewers gone well they've gone to the they've scattered to the wind we're all getting our that kind of relationship now in different places from wherever we're getting it but you and I getting to do this show I feel like is weirdly a version of what I was dreaming I could get to do if I was Tony Ventrella and for that I feel pretty thankful for today like I really thought like oh I'm getting to have that dream I had about my job it just doesn't look the way that I thought it was going to look but it's still happening

because of the tens of listeners although i will you know he stole less bits from the howard stern

show i mean he did he did throw baloney at strippers butts which i think is why they took

him off a king five that was a very nice place to wrap things up and i really should let it go there not my joke by the way i meant your your your sort of reflection um no but i but i did want to ask you like a kind of a this is a very practical way to reopen the conversation so my apologies for kind of killing the flow here but do you think that because i agree with everything you said about like people's kind of personal relationship with like local newscasters and and like that sort of like it's just naturally diminished exponentially um do you think that sports might be in the specifically like kind of local sports broadcasters might be the slight glimmer of hope there or i don't know if hope is the right word but maybe the the the last kind of broadcasters to hang on because yes while sports can also be consumed in a very national way the way that the news can be or the way things have sort of been national you know entertainment sort of like more of a national thing with what's going on on tiktok or social media and everything is shared that way maybe we lose some of that kind of like charming localness for lack of a better word do you think though people still follow their sports teams look

Locally, you know, like if you have a choice of watching, whether it's a football game or a baseball game, if you have the choice of watching national broadcasters do it or your local broadcasters, maybe maybe I'm totally wrong about this. But I'm sort of thinking, well, the local people still might stand out there or even the newspaper reporters or the broadcast reporters who are reporting on these teams. Like, do you think that that might be the last sort of the last stand of people sort of connecting with your local news folks?

probably probably for that reason and that's why you see like i i don't live you know obviously in the seattle media market but my guess is that like the local stations whether it's the fox station or the cbs station when they have the seahawks on their station they're doing some kind of post game like a local post game extra programming they're sending you know they're probably sending a reporter to the road games which is like it was actually one of the things that ventrella had said at some point about his kind of early days of being i think it was at king five in seattle was he was like it was just so great because if we needed to go cover something they just said go do it like he was describing this era of of local television media where they had budgets and like hey if something was going on and it was in another state they just they paid for you to fly there and cover it so you could do it like that was how it worked that is not how it works anymore i'm guessing that sports is local sports is the last bit of still having that kind of be a thing and for the reasons you've described because there is now the question is you don't really have an option as far as the game itself goes you just got to watch you know friggin kenny albert and jonathan vilma that's just it is what it is because you don't you have a radio broadcast of the seahawks which is obviously steve rabel and dave wyman which by the way so good yeah i know i love those guys i love him i mean i love steve rayville but dave wyman is just a national treasure well he's a local treasure andrew he's a local treasure and like notably like i just love it did help that by the time i switched over to the radio version of the game yesterday so i was kind of doing stuff i was running errands getting stuff for this party down in salem so i was if i was standing if i was like in the store waiting for these sandwiches i was on fubo watching the game but then if i was in my car i was listening on serious satellite by the way this fubo thing has completely and totally changed my life of sports viewing and have you

disentangled yourself from your your cable bills now because i know at first you were still yes

being billed the old i was being it was like it was catching up on what i guess allegedly already owed them but i'm now down to the point where i'm only paying them nice like under a hundred dollars a month for that's yeah but i also now i get my cell phone through them which seems fine no you

did take that yeah and we heard from a lot of listeners who said actually that's a recommendation

of the listeners so far so good but um i mean it's it's absolutely wild this fubo thing because it's just it's on my phone like i was you know i and it's on my computer it's everywhere it's just like oh my god how was i i was even though we live in the future i was so connected to my home television screen for this experience now in a way i cannot believe like there's just like i was uh where was i was like in a lift somewhere going to or from the airport and there was like a critical moment of a game and i'm just watching it on my phone and i'm like listening to it through the headphones and i'm like i am totally getting to experience this even though i'm not sitting at home looking at my tv i know that this is something everybody else has figured out but boy am i enjoying that but all that is to say i think part of my yesterday i switched over to the radio broadcast of those guys and i think it was around the time when the seahawks had kind of like fully blown it open so everyone was just in a good mood if you're a seahawks you know fan but just the interplay between those two guys just like there was some kind of a hall of seahawks hall of fame thing that they were trying to promote and wyman is one of the nominees but And he was trying to downplay it. And he was like, yeah, it was just being so funny about how no one's going to vote for him. And so I was like, I just love this energy so much.

I love him so much. He's like, really? He's like, he's super funny in this very, like, trying to not be funny sort of way. He's very, like, kind of low energy in a certain way. And very matter of fact, can I, I think I might have told you about this a long time ago. But I don't know if I really should do this on the air because maybe these were private emails. But honestly, one of the most, I don't know, rewarding or proud moments of of my, I guess, somewhat professional life was when I reached out to Dave Wyman. He and I had worked, you know, in the same building for several years. We would exchange pleasantries, but not even to the degree that I would ever expect him to know me. Right. He worked for the sports station. He's a former Seahawk. You know, like I'm like this guy who is probably very different politics than him, like going on my night show and spouting off unprofessionally about things. Because to the degree that he even, like, would have remembered me as. at all i felt like would have been minimal if at all and anyway so that was back in the 2015s 20 or 2013s or something skip ahead seven years it's 2020 we're in the midst of the pandemic and he's on i'm back here in seattle and he's talking on the radio about how he had a bathroom emergency in his car and i'm gonna actually just read to you his response here which by the way is going to get us the explicit title but i just think you'll appreciate this so much so he tells this story on the radio about how he is at some park and ride somewhere in seattle and he realizes he is going he needs to if he doesn't take some sort of precautionary measures he is going to poop his pants right and he's telling this on his sports show and as some sort of aside and then he's talking about how one of the good things about the pandemic keep in mind this is in 2020 is that he has a box of masks in his car now disposable masks and he it is very down like Like sort of like just sort of like implied way, understated. That's what I'm looking for, understated way. He just tells the story about how he had to relieve himself at a park and ride here in Seattle. And thank God that he has a box of masks in his car to clean up. So I reach out to him and I'm just like, hey, man, you probably don't remember. I don't know if you remember me from Cairo. I hope you're doing great. I just want to let you know I was just like glued to my radio listening to you tell that story like that is just.

And yet you don't like it when I do it right here. Well, he's funny. And by that, I mean, go number two.

And so I'm like, I don't expect him to write back to me at all. He writes back, and this is where some swears are going to come in. He writes back, hey, Andrew, great to hear from you. What's up with you these days? Keep in touch. Which right away, I'm just kind of like, even if he doesn't remember me, how nice. Then he says, so yeah, I always wonder how people are going to take those stories. I should trademark it before that bastard Danny steals it. That was his co-host at the time. He said, listen, there are four kinds of people. One, those who have not shit their pants and think it's funny. Two, those who have not shit their pants and don't think it's funny. Three, those who have shit their pants and think it's funny. Four, those who have shit their pants and don't think it's funny. One, my wife, a year into our marriage, I waddled up to the garage door into our house, and I told her, get me a towel and a garbage bag. Stat. Thank God she thought it was funny. we're married 27 years now i write back i'm like this is the most wonderful pen pal relationship i have right now or something i'm just like thank you for responding then he goes into um he goes into this long ass story about famous nfl players who have shit their pants and he's telling these

stories about how are you sitting on this and how are you not forwarding this to me i told you everything i care about in the world nfl people crapping themselves during games yeah it's just

like this my point of this is all that like this guy who i had a couple of conversations with and i really did not expect him to to remember me at all responds with like he's really like this he just loves telling stories about people shitting their pants and so like he just he wrote me back these like very long some of the most entertaining emails i've ever received from this guy probably while he was on the air talking sending me these things the thing that i remember about uh again

and thankfully Wyman is very much with us. But the thing that, first of all, I grew up as a fan. He was arguably one of my very favorite Seahawks players because he played linebacker, and I would sort of vacillate between, like, you know, Steve Largent, Obsession, Dave Wyman, but he was a very good player as well. So I was, like, he was, I was super-duper aware of his existence as just, like, a kid and a fan of the Seahawks. So it was pretty cool to me years later to be sort of a radio colleague of his, And he was, he never sent me an amazing, you know, long list of NFL players having number two problems. But we would, you know, chat in the hallway and stuff. And it always made me sort of uniquely excited. And then one day, you know, it was like right outside of Cairo. And, like, he was driving. He had some, like, huge white truck. I feel like it was, like, something that was like an Escalade truck or something. And he was driving. And I looked up. And I was like, oh, it's Dave Wyman. Cool. And, like, I wave at him. Like, hey, Dave. and he like gives me the nicest he like looks at me recognized me gives me the nicest wave and in doing that you know that side street for cairo like not east lake avenue but the little side street where you have like the anyway it's tight as he's waving at me and being nice his truck just shears the mirror off like two cars and i just see his face realize what's going And he's just like, oh, fuck. It was like him being nice to me cost him, raised his insurance rates by so much. And I didn't stick around because I just knew, like, I'm not helping the situation. I got the hell out of there.

OK, I'm going to I need to just share the story. We are technically in the email segment. Now, here's the deal. Nobody. No. I mean, I don't I think it's OK for me. to share this whole story as david wrote it to me back in 2020 but uh i don't necessarily have his permission so like let's nobody flag this deep in this podcast so i write back to david you know or dave i should say you know hey this is the best email i received the one about the listing of people who shit their pants and then he just writes back to me he says my buddy a full back was with a couple of the other players driving upstate somewhere in new york to talk to some kids at a high school it was a tuesday which is the national day off in the nfl so usually guys would hit it pretty hard on monday nights because they could nurse their hangovers on a tuesday had hit it pretty hard and that morning had what is known as bubble gut about this gets this gets rough everybody um about halfway into the two-hour drive everyone rolled down their windows because he had quote bet on a fart and lost the smell i don't know if i get through this the smell was more than just gas and they knew it so says pull over i just shit my pants conveniently they were driving next to a river in the wooded area so they found a place to pull over disappeared down an embankment towards the river 10 minutes later he was huffing and puffing up the riverbank naked from the waist down holding a soaking wet pair of underwear and pants he had quote laundered in the river he then uh rolled his pants and skivvies up to the outside of the window and they drove on with his pants and underwear flapping in the wind like a 12 flag you see on the back of trucks from snohomish county all the while sitting half naked in the front passenger side by the time they got to the school his pants and underwear were dry he put them on gave an inspirational talk to the kids and they were back in a bar drinking a beer a few hours later like a 12 flag you would see hanging off the back of a county i love it so much god

that's just so that's so perfect the thing that they were talking about yesterday that's a great place to end the show so why am i gonna bring in they were they because steve rabel was a uh you know was a seahawk as well and before he played at georgia tech and they were in atlanta yesterday the falcons and they were talking about like uh atlanta is a big hub for delta airlines and steve rabel was saying how when he was in college at georgia tech almost all the guys on the team the football team would work as baggage handlers on the tarmac during the summer that's how you made extra money if you were in college and wyman goes that was your that was your name image and likeness deal wasn't it which was such a funny observation if you like follow you know college sports at all or whatever but just those two just like chopping it up on just like the older days of football and just you know that's just such good it's such good radio it's kind of reminds me of how you and i talk about sometimes the mariners broadcasts that will descend into just being good

talk radio yeah yeah unfortunately sometimes that happens when the game is no longer in play it's like we got four more innings to cover here let's just tell stories but um yeah that that story that's when do pitchers and catchers report speaking thereof yes exactly all right i hope that doesn't get me in trouble but i just oh my god dude andrew that's probably my one of my favorite

and it's safely buried in 94 minutes in the show so i don't think anyone will bet on a fart and I don't think anyone except us is going to hear this. Thank goodness. All right. Thank you. If there is anyone out there still listening, thanks for being here. We're going to be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you. So please do join us for that. In the meantime, have a great Monday, stay dry, and please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

so this team's going to be built on uh we're going to kick you in the teeth all right and when you punch us back we're going to smile at you and when you knock us down we're going to get up and on the way up we're going to bite a kneecap off all right and we're going to stand up and then it's going to take two more shots to knock us down all right and on the way up we're going take your other kneecap and we're going to get up and then it's going to take three shots to get us down and when we do we're going to take another hunk out of you before before long we're going to be the last one standing all right that's going to be the mentality power out