Muse

It was the bottom of the fifth quarter and the baskets were loaded. It was me versus the Boston Celtics basketball team. Ready to lose again? I said to the James Braun. He was sweaty and out of breath. Please give me another chance, he said sexily. It's basketball time, I yelled in a booming voice. Then I did a layup, which is different than slam dunking. It's where you throw the basketball in the hoop when you're really close to it. I was too quick for them. I was dribbling all over the field, and the Boston Celtics said, wow, she doesn't even double dribble, something I know about. Just then, Seth Curry did a humongous jump and tried to block me from the basketball hoop, but I threw the basketball so hard it went straight through his chest and into the hoop, but he was okay and didn't die. The basketball went in so good that I got 100 points and won the game. Can we please be your boyfriends now, said the Baltimore Celtics. Sorry, that was a deal you can only be my boyfriends if you beat me in a game of hoop ball i said winkingly then they

all cried the end tbtl i don't know what this is but jay says it's a big sea turtle i was just fixing to get me some grub beans i love beans big fat hot juicy beans oh don't get me going on beans or i'll be jabbering away till the sun comes up why would either one of you uh you know

why dear god why actually you know what i could email you or you know you could email me at uh splat2 at splatnet.net splat1's my father i mean i'll be sad to see him go it'll be nice to get

my hands on that handle you know and i also think it wouldn't hurt you to talk to a therapist about your bathroom issues because there's really something going on there all right hello good

morning and welcome everyone to a monday edition of tbtl the show just might be too beautiful to live why now what are they doing and how can you steer clear of it all my name is luke burbank i'm your host oh wow coming to you from the matrona hill studio perched high above the mighty columbia where uh mercifully things have dried out a little bit it's not actively uh raining uh which is nice this time of year uh we've got a very nice episode of tbtl for you nice and dry it's episode 4344 in a collector's series let the fun begin because it was horrendously stormy this weekend for most of it i actually went and saw a film so who needs a movie at a movie house it was one of those uh cool cool movie houses uh cool theaters where they let you uh you can eat dinner while you're watching the movie but there was one thing they hadn't really fully thought through i've made a huge mistake uh speaking of uh huge mistakes later in the show we will be um correcting the record i said something very confidently on friday which is always a dead giveaway uh that i'm making a huge mistake and i did and we'll fix that during the uh email segment people think that the jaguar motor company is making a huge mistake by rebranding itself and not uh featuring any cars in a new video that it released um and uh we also had that story on friday we didn't get to about tropicana hello juice how they're changing their bottle and people are mad we'll talk marketing branding and huge mistakes coming up on the program and we're going to talk to this guy longest running cobra of the show maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships

i'm flying in hot for that hottie he's andrew walsh and he's joining me right now good morning

my friend good morning luke i meant to text you a photo over the weekend and i didn't i had forgotten so we'll let's take care of this here at the top of the show absolutely while you're

doing that can i just credit that audio at the top of the show is someone named grace fennel on tiktok yeah that was i think she performs or performs i don't know posts she talks ticks and talks under grace fennel 10 that's i just wanted to give credit where credit was due yeah that

made me laugh i uh i do really i hope the baltimore celtics are okay after all of that they really wanted to be her boyfriends um i um i i know that this topic has come up on the show before maybe even about a year ago i just don't remember if we got closure from this i feel like i didn't get i didn't get a satisfying response from you and i don't know if i ever showed you the actual evidence but there is a billboard that i had seen around town like in this north aurora part of seattle that i live in for a greek like greek pizza shop kind of place that's up there in shoreline spiro's i wasn't sure if it was spiros or spiro's i've always heard it called

spiro's okay then again i'm listen i was loud wrong on friday so i'm still a little a little nerve.

And I was just going to say, every time we get into this style of restaurant in Seattle, the conversation always turns to like, well, is it part of the, because there is an Olympia and Olympic pizza that were similar.

And it's a cascade up in Bellingham in the north, which is the exact same vibe.

It's that style of pizza shop where you can also get a meatball sandwich. And if you're going to get a salad to begin, it's going to have like, you know, olives on it. You know, that kind of place. I've been making that salad lately, by the way.

I've been intentionally purchasing. You know, last week I purchased two different heads of iceberg lettuce at different times.

So you had two at one point?

Well, no, but, like, it actually, honestly, about half of a head of iceberg is what you need to make one of those salads. And I was making exactly as my memory of the kind of salad, again, Cascade Pizza up in Bellingham, but the Spiro's, any of the Santorini over by Nathan Hale, any of those places, It's like a bunch of iceberg lettuce, some shredded carrots, some black olives, like you said, mozzarella cheese for some reason, and then some ranch or a blue cheese and a couple of tomatoes thrown in. That is the perfect, totally unhealthy salad that I love to eat each night now.

And I like often when they serve this kind of salad. When I say I like, I mean I don't like. They basically cut a tomato in half and throw half of a tomato in there. It's not like edible or cutable.

I intentionally purchased, I usually will just throw cherry tomatoes in a salad. Yeah, me too, yeah. I bought a full-sized tomato so I could cut it in an unedible way, Andrew. I took a picture of this. I will send it to you. I shit you not. I wanted the tomatoes to be that weird, not helpful shape because that reminded me of the salad at Cascade Pizza.

What is the, I'm blanking here. What is the show with Peter Griffin? Family Guy. Family Guy. Let me see if I can find this on the fly. Pizza store salad. I believe there's a – somebody just happened to send this to me recently too, I think, maybe a listener. And let me see if I can play this here. This is just two guys in a – it's just two guys in a pizza shop, and I think one of them is showing them how to make a salad. It looks like I maybe have to cut in here a little bit. And here we go.

Okay, four pizzas and a salad. Salad? How do you make a salad? First, you throw in the whole head of lettuce. Even the hard-to-eat white part at the bottom? That's what the people want. Now, what else? I got a can of whole black olives. Should I slice them up? What are you, crazy? No, you keep them whole. You're gonna want to know you've got an olive in your mouth. What about this tomato? Cut it into thirds. It should be big enough to pretend you've got red teeth. How about this carrot? Should I cut it up? Yes, but very thin lengthwise. The whole length of the carrot. One thin slice. Okay, what else do we got? Well, we got these hot peppers, but you can't really eat them. No problem. Dump them all in. Now, should we put it in a bowl? No, let's put it in a lasagna tray. Okay, great. I'll take it. Oh, and make sure to stick it right on top of the pizza so it stays nice and warm. Hello, every pizza place.

I forgot the pepperoncinis. Dang it. I sent you the salad, though. You leave the stem on and the seeds in there, yeah. Actually, you know what? I like the stem on there because it's a little handle.

Yeah, it is. It is, indeed.

It gives me a little something to hold on to as I, but I sent you, Andrew, a picture of this salad. which is, I think, about eight out of the ten things that are mentioned there are featured in that salad.

But we're losing focus of the picture that I sent you, which is this billboard for Spiros, which it's back. Like, I don't know if, are there certain billboards? Always, Andrew, always. Are there certain billboards where they have, like, a sort of a default, like, whatever the ad is behind the new ads, and then when they remove the new ads, the old ones just show up again? Because I find it hard to believe. So let me explain this again for the people who missed the first scintillating time I brought this up. It's interesting that a small pizza shop, and it might be a small chain, but if so, it's very small. It's a little family-run restaurant. Yeah, I'd imagine maybe three locations tops. They have, like, billboards, not little signs around town, not one of those A-frame signs you put outside on the sidewalk. I mean, billboards, full-ass billboards, but they're so minimalist. They don't mention pizza, I think, or maybe in the logo it says Spiro's Pizza and Pasta, but it doesn't show pizza. It doesn't show pasta. It shows just a big, white, empty space. I'm a big fan of minimalism, by the way, and negative space. That's my vibe. But this is so weird. it's just a big white billboard and i don't even have in front of me right now you have in front of you i believe it just says spiro i'm in a relationship with spiros it says in a relationship just not even i'm not even i'm just in a relationship with spiros and then in slightly grayed out for some reason slightly grayed out

and non-centered text it just says always almost like a whisper underneath it and then it says spiro's pizza and pasta i i will i have to make this the show pick we can we can use your salad photo on the blog as well but like i don't understand i promise you i'll recover from my salad photo not being above the fold why is this the approach to the billboard just totally blank in a relationship with Spiro's logo and then always in gray lettering beneath it and so much white space. I have theories. Please explain

it to me. I think that somebody and by the way it is a very high likelihood that someone at Spiro's will hear this because I know that somebody in our audience is a regular there and or a family member because the other thing about this style of restaurant like my friend Dimitra Papadopoulos and her brother George Papadopoulos or no Apostolo Dimitra and George Apostolo their family ran Santorini pizza that was across the street from Nathan Hale and they both I think George still runs it to this day like their dad and mom ran it you know this is a tight-knit family-run business and I'm guessing that somebody in the Spiro family said oh you know what would be kind of cool for a billboard because when people on social media when they hard launch a relationship they say I'm in a relationship with so and so like when you change your status on facebook or i don't know how instagram works for this stuff but in some of those places when you finally hard launch when you finally are ready to tell the world i'm in a relationship with this person it says in a relationship with and then it'll have a link to that person and their little feed and this is saying so what if it's like you're in a relationship with our pizza place and then it's like yeah but somebody said yeah but always how about always and i think that this was something that was made by some folks who make probably amazing food but don't have a ton of background in marketing and

advertising and things like that i could imagine let me ask you this though when was the last time you signed up for any social media site that asked you for your relationship status for me it would have been probably facebook version one in 2005 at the very latest like it's just like when you sign up i don't think it's about or instagram people aren't like what is your

relationship status but are you forget are you familiar with the term hard launch yes i'm familiar with the term hard launch because i don't think it's so much about if the default if the if the intake of the of the social media site asks you like if you have to fill it out i at all because i bet you that they don't and i can't remember the last time i'm saying maybe the thought was more like when you sort of make it official when you make it instagram official when you when you when you you're out there with the relationship being a real thing that that was the germ of a thought with this is like because in a relationship with is a sort of that those that is a string of words that I kind of associate with a social media thing right yeah it seems antiquated to me

like I mean I think you know when you think of the word like hard launch like then you know that is you just like sort of hey here's a here's a bunch of photos of me like you know on vacation with uh with a fella that you've never seen before hard launch you know what I mean but like you're not writing in a relationship with handsome boy well that's where i feel like

the concept of it in the execution there's a bit of a break in the linkage there yeah well

that's why i'm almost wondering is this a design that came out more in the facebook era and i mean i just i can't figure out if they are continuing to pay more money to get this thing reposted on this billboard in my neighborhood or are people removing something and it's defaulting back to this thing that is actually something from the Facebook era I think best buds marijuana went

out of business and when they took down the best buds sign what was behind it was in a relationship

with Spiros always that might be it and I want to say too if somebody from the family is listening or somebody from the business I've eaten there I remember at least once but maybe even twice

I've eaten there so many times it's so good the one up on Aurora the one by the Fred Meyer I think so. I mean, I've eaten it definitely at one of them because they've been around since I was in high school.

Yeah, and so I have nothing but good things to say about the company, about the service, about the vibe in there, about the meatball sandwich I remember eating with that starter salad that we just described, minus the cheese for me, please. So, yeah, I have nothing bad to say, and I would encourage people to check it out if you're in the mood for that kind of food and you're just sort of cruising up the boulevard on a Saturday night. as Tom Waits might say having all having said all of that I'm still just very befuddled by this billboard certainly and I think it's more than I feel like it's more than just a bad a series of bad decisions I feel like I maybe it's just a social media thing but I guess my point is I'm not quite satisfied I'm just not satisfied what is your alternate theory that my alternate theory is that I'm unsatisfied with this I don't know I have no I don't have an alternate theory other than More of a darkness cursor than a light lighter.

It's just so confounding to me. And this is my neighborhood, and I have pride in this neighborhood, and I want answers. That's all. I want answers.

Well, think about it this way, Andrew. The Spiro's Pizza concern of North Seattle has gotten, by my count, 15 minutes and 11 seconds of free earned media on this show right here. Do you know how many tens of dollars that would have cost them if they bought an ad on the show and they didn't even have to? So maybe they're playing the long game. Maybe they're playing three-dimensional chess. They're just going to keep putting stuff around my house.

Just befuddle him. Make it even weirder. In this one, we're just going to put a photo of a single bay leaf and then a plus sign and then a question mark. And then we're going to put Spiros.

Who is Trammell Crow?

I don't know. What is that?

Well, I mean, unfortunately, the end of the story on Trammel Crow is it's a gigantic, you know, kind of development company that one of their big things is all those like Amazon processing, not even warehouses really that people work in, but more like logistics kind of fulfillment places. You know what I mean? That they're going up along the freeway everywhere now. One just went up down the hill for me. basically they like Trammel Crow is a company that handles a tremendous amount of very unsexy commercial real estate type of stuff but when I was a kid and we used to take we would leave our house in the sort of Green Lake area and we would drive all the way up Lake City Way all the way to Gospel Outreach Christian Fellowship we would go on Lake City Way past this series of billboards that used to say either what is or who is Trammel Crow And as a kid, I would just stare out the window and I would say, what is or who is Trammel Crow? He's quite intrigued.

I believe it. And then you eventually got your answer and you were not super satisfied.

No, I got my answer like five years ago when he was one of the people who was giving Clarence Thomas stuff that he shouldn't have. Literally, it took 40 years for me to get the question answered, who is Trammel Crow? And it turns out a piece of shit.

I didn't like the answer. Yeah. Very, who is John Galt?

like from yeah well you know and by the way probably the most important book in the life of the trammel crow air exactly i don't even think he's like trammel crow he's like trammel crow jr or something you know he's like the son of the guy that they were or the people i don't know if trammel crow is a person or two people's last names but uh i really did have this moment of of reading into the sort of like allegations around rich people trying to like get clarence thomas to like them by taking him on expensive trips and buying a house his childhood home for so his mom could live in it rent free etc and one of them was just like it was mentioned and casually like uh the you know the ceo of trammell crow and i was like okay well that

answers the question all these years later also i gotta believe clarence thomas is in uh john

galt's pocket as well like absolutely right it was like well i mean clarence thomas is a weird one because he was not always a super hardcore conservative he was actually in his earliest days i think more inclined towards civil rights and then had some sort of you know uh sort of you know change of heart i guess you will or change of mind like because you would think of clarence thomas as like a high schooler and he gets a copy of the fountainhead although he's old enough like was the fountainhead written when clarence thomas was in high school 50s right i'll look When did old Ein write it?

I feel like this was probably mid-50s, but let me see here.

But, like, I could see a world in which— No, 43. My apologies. 43. Okay, so it would have been out. Otherwise, Clarence Thomas would be 1,000. Like, I could see a world in which, like, Clarence Thomas was just a lifer in the conservative movement. He was just one of those, you know, young people who, for whatever reason— And, again, he's a person who I do think grew up in some degree of segregation. I mean, I do think he's old enough for that, or at least very close to it. But the story on him, oddly enough, is that he wasn't always this like super hardcore conservative. He was I think he may have been in law school or even post law school when he started to tilt this way. So the idea of a Clarence Thomas walking around with a kind of a a well-worn copy of the Fountainhead in his back pocket. I don't know if that totally checks out, but I do think at this point he thinks John Galt is a totally cool ass dude.

Oh, you know what just occurred to me? And I think listeners are probably getting ready to send in an email. Uh-oh. I don't think John Galt is Fountainhead. John Galt, because I didn't read The Fountainhead. I read Atlas Shrugged, and that's why I know that reference. So everybody who is about, everybody is like getting- I read neither of them. Well, let me be honest. I read the- so Atlas Shrugged is divided into two books. I mean, like it's all in one volume, of course, but it's kind of like book one and book two. and I got really into book one and then I think with book two it got a little bit more theoretical and the the intrigue of the john galt thing sort of like it became less narrative this is my i was like 19 when i read it so i don't know what it would be like if i were to revisit it today but um so i didn't read the whole thing i read about half of of atlas shrugged and then i was like i'm not sure if i'm more john galt please

never thought i'd say that on this show i'm more of a movie guy andrew as you know i went to a movie this weekend i don't know what it's saying about me that like the very act of like figuring out when a film was playing and then going to it and sitting down and watching it felt like some kind of achievement for me that used to just be a probably a weekly part of my life

you would call the you would call a and like an automated number on your phone and they would

list all of the different exactly oh call you'd call oak tree cinema yeah it'd be a recording of

some pimply 17 year old you have to wait for it to go all the way through if you missed yours and like now all you have to do is open up Fandango I mean it's so incredibly easy now to know these

things and and even to stream these things a lot of the time and yet I don't I engage with so much less cinema than I used to which I don't I don't like about myself but anyway uh Becca and I it was such a rainy Saturday we were thinking what should we do we thought well let's go see a movie So we went to go see that movie, A Real Pain, which is kind of interesting to me because I was supposed to go interview Kieran Culkin about his role in that movie. And I ended up, the scheduling didn't work out. And then I basically, for once in my life, chose work-life balance, decided to go judge a pet Halloween costume contest instead of being in New York on a Saturday. But anyway, the movie, I think, is really good, by the way. It's really, really good. Would recommend. It's Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin are their cousins, and their grandmother has passed away, and they're cousins, but there's periods of their life where they're almost more like brothers, like they just kind of did everything together, but they've grown apart because Jesse Eisenberg's character has kind of ended up in a fairly conventional life. He's married with a kid. He works in advertising, online advertising, and Kieran Culkin is kind of suffers from failure to launch. We've talked about hard launching today. He's sort of failure to launch. She's, you know, still living at home and kind of a little bit adrift. And they go to Poland to try to visit the place where their grandmother lived in Poland before she escaped the Nazis to come out to America. So that's the premise of the film. I thought it was really well executed. But we went to this place called the Living Room Theaters in Portland, where they give you, you know, a pretty expanded dining menu. And I'd never been to this place before. i'd never been into the little theaters or whatever so we go and we had like a half hour before the movie it's also one of those places where like and i love this when you buy your tickets they just say what seats do you want they show you a little screen and you pick your seats i mean that's 80 of the anxiety around a movie is what seats am i going to be and i think just am i going to be way up against the screen or am i going to be way in the back or on the side or whatever like as soon as you solve for that then my like i'm like great well we we've got a whole half hour to do anything we want whereas if we didn't get to pre-reserve our seats or pick our seats i'd be in there right now because it would be so critical that i'm not getting stuck oh i

allows you see yeah see i like i know that i'm the heel on this one nobody in our audience agrees with me i think i met one person in my life and this was like a couple of months ago who agrees with me that I just these these modern theaters with the all of the modern sort of we'll call them conveniences are not for me I find them inconvenient I like to walk into a theater and scope scope it out like what are some good seats because I know I can pick a couple of seats that look great at 345 but by four by 355 maybe some jabronis have chosen seats on either side of me and now like I'm sort of I guess that's the same deal then do you get up and move well I'm saying with assigned seats, you're sort of like kind of stuck where you are because I don't like the feeling of moving into another seat and then somebody else coming along and saying, hey, no, I have tickets for this seat. I really don't like ticketed seats in theaters. Oh, I love it. It's not the worst. I mean, of all the things I dislike about these modern theaters, which we'll get into, I'm sure, more now, like the reclining seats and the food and all that shit, I hate all of that. Like, this is not your living room. This is a public place. Let's act appropriately.

Literally called the living room theaters. Yeah, I just don't like it. Well, I will tell you, I'll give them a credit on this one thing When the guy who was very nice Was selling me the tickets He said, okay, well here's all the available tickets You know, these are available seats And it's a very small theater too And I picked the seats And he said, and if you don't like those seats You can absolutely come back and we'll give you different seats Like he just threw that out there Which I was like, wow, that was really thoughtful of you So then, Becca's using the bathroom And I'm just kind of sitting at the bar Trying to decide Because it's also a weird time It's like 4.30, it's not quite dinner time I don't know.

but also, I'm super hungry, we had gone on this run, we had run like 10 miles, because I'm training for the Seattle Half Marathon, so it was kind of like, I was famished. And so, I asked the guy, hey, I'm looking on the thing, and it's like, they got a wide range of food there, they got burgers, and they got that, and I was like, how about this Mediterranean plate? I was like, how long does that take to send out? And he goes, oh, it's like, because it takes like a minute, I was like, perfect. And, you know, and that's like sliced up veggies and hummus and a couple of pita chips or whatever. So like, cool. So I'm sitting there and then Becca finishes up and comes out and then she's sitting at the bar. And then we're like kind of waiting and it's taking a while. And then she's like, oh, what are we going to do for popcorn? And I was like, and this is where probably Andrew, you and Becca might bond. They give you the popcorn. We're watching the popcorn come out in like a sort of, I think they're actually plastic, but they look like they're white ceramic kind of angular bowls. So not round, but sort of like a square bowl, if that makes sense. The popcorn's in a bowl? Seriously? Is that what you're saying? I'm just reporting what I saw on Saturday night.

No, you're not on trial here, but I hate this place.

Well, listen, I thought everybody was pregnant.

I am not in a relationship with the living room.

They're going to hear him get always. Never. Always or never, and you're a never. It's like hitting 16 at blackjack. So Becca's like, well, what about popcorn and stuff? And I'm like, I think we order it here. And she goes, well, it's coming out in those bowls. I go, I think that's what they serve it in. She's like, all right. So we order some candy. And again, everybody, I really like the people at this place a lot, a lot. Because, for instance, we ordered M&Ms. And I didn't realize that this had happened to me, Andrew. but I am a person who has not eaten a non-peanut M&M in 10 years when I say M&M I mean peanut M&M now that's what my brain my brain cannot conceive of a time where M&Ms didn't have a peanut in them

we had a lot of um we don't have a lot of candy in the house usually um and probably because I don't have any willpower when we do and we had a whole bunch of like just so much candy after Halloween like most people do because Genevieve bought all these bags for trick-or-treaters and it just rained all night here so i think one kid showed up or something and so i found the stash of of leftover candy like kind of in this cupboard under the sink worst thing i could genevieve needs to hide this shit better anyway i started eating so much candy over the past couple of weeks that for a while i was referring to peanut m&ms as dinner and regular m&ms as dessert because like i thought peanut i actually think you know what i think there's a logic to that i actually

think that that i could i could argue that point because yeah there's a peanut in the peanut m&m like a regular m&m like a what what i grew up with eating as m&m's now feels like just this tiny little chocolate pellet to me this sad little chocolate pellet whereas a peanut m&m that's that's really what i'm talking about so we ordered m&m's and red vines and a bowl of popcorn and then they brought out regular m&m's and i went oh you know what i'm so sorry i was totally thinking peanut m&m's he goes it happens all the time which made me think oh and by the way that wasn't the guy who sold me the tickets either so everyone we dealt with who worked there were exceedingly kind and and polite but so the mediterranean plate is like so here is the complication though i mean there's a couple one of them is there's clearly this thing where they're they they keep saying oh we'll bring the food to you but it's also clear that they'd rather that they didn't have to bring the food to us because it's a pain in their butt you know they've got to like figure out where you are you got to tell them your seats and they've got to basically run it would be much easier if you could just take the food with you because we're waiting now the movie starts or at least the preview start in like three minutes we still don't have the mediterranean plate which was supposed to take a minute it's been 15 minutes now no mediterranean plate and i'm and i'm like could we could you just bring it down to us then because i you know i love watching the trailers it's my favorite one of my favorite parts about the movie going experience And the guy's like, yeah, yeah And then he checks He goes, actually, you know what It's ready, it's going to be one minute And I'm like, oh, okay This guy is like Meanwhile, we have popcorn Red vines, now peanut M&Ms Diet Coke And they don't carry the drinks down to you He's like, yeah, we don't carry drinks I was like, that makes sense You probably don't want to be carrying drinks into a dark theater Although we're more qualified, by the way because I granted it's plastic it's not in glass but it's in like tumblers like this is not you know it's it's the thing is because this is the idea is that you can eat in this movie theater the food is not being served to you in the theater safe containment that it would be if you were at a standard movie theater in other words the the soda is just like a pint glass like a plastic pint glass that's got ice and soda in it the popcorn is in a is in a bowl i was not nearly as bothered by the bowl thing as you and becca were but maybe you guys should start seeing movies together at uncle al's antiquated

theaters and more you'll be very happy to get all i want is to ride that goddamn roller coaster where there's popcorn popping around me and there's giant cups of coca-cola with ice being poured into it.

Ideally, there will be a spring in the seat that's going mildly up your butthole.

That's right. And you know what? And I want to hear when somebody is walking on the floor. I want to hear that sound of tape being ripped up.

You want a child losing a shoe to the dried soda pop.

That floor is so sticky. People are walking in with two shoes and leaving with one. How God intended it. That's right.

Well, okay, so now we have a lot of stuff. we're carrying a lot of stuff because the guy doesn't want to bring the mediterranean plate down and uh and it's and they don't carry the drinks so we've got like all this stuff and we've got our regular stuff like becca's got her purse with whatever you know so we make our way into the theater and we get down to our seats and i was very happy with our seats we're in the second row but it's a small theater so this is actually the right size there was no one sitting in front of us and this actually maybe gets to your point a little bit andrew about the saving of seats is great unless there's something non-ideal about your seats. And when we come in, I look around and the very back row of the theater has tables in front of the chair, so little low tables that you put your food on. And then the very front row of the theater, so the row in front of us has almost like on the airplane, some kind of a little table device that's attached to the chair that you can put your stuff on. Would you believe the row that we're in, and I think maybe even the row behind us just regular chairs with now granted with luxurious cup holders like if you had if you were just if you brought a soda and like a bag of popcorn in you could maybe make this work you'd put your soda in the couple it's like a it is like a nut you these chairs do not recline by the way nobody was in like full nobody was doing a teeter hang-up at this theater uh you'd be you'd be happy to know andrew they were just like they were sort of a little nicer than a theater seat but they didn't like lean way the hell back there was like a comfy i say recliner but i don't know if they

had a reclining feature or not what did you say about a teeter i'm not familiar with that you're not familiar with the teeter hang-ups is that when you're hanging or is that when you're tipping back

in your chair in grade school that was no that was that was this inversion board that was big in the infomercial world in fact one of our friends ex-husband worked on the teeter hang-ups commercials they were these infomercials a guy named teeter had invented actually i don't know his name was teeter because it is kind of teeter tottery they're called teeter hangups and he was this old guy and he would strap his feet into this inversion board and then he would invert

himself completely yeah i believe his name is teeter because i think that i'm looking this up now and or i'm thinking of a very similar situation where vives and i were unfamiliar with this but we talked about it on after these messages this is years ago and when we found out that the dude's name was teeter we were like oh this was this was in the stars this is this he

had no choice yes so i wanted to establish that like because i know one of the things you don't like is people sprawled out like fully like that wasn't happening in this theater but the problem was andrew there was no i kept looking at our seats so my seat was like again it was like a very comfy a beautiful seat for me to sit in to watch a movie if i didn't also have a mediterranean plate a thing of popcorn uh again the soda was handled because it was in the cup holder that i'm not going to complain about we have the candy so we're i'm just like holding the the mediterranean plate and i'm actually becca's having some of it i'm having some of it i'm having some of the hummus we're not a big hummus family um just generally i'm just not that into hummus yeah when you said

You got this plate because I like this Mediterranean plate because I like most of the stuff that's on there minus like kind of if there's feta or something. But I was thinking like, is he going to eat the hummus? I've been secretly wondering is how is he going to handle the hummus?

Well, I wish this is how hungry I was. Yes. But I said to Becca, I was like, can you eat some of this hummus? So this is mutually assured destruction on our breath, please. Yes. Um, but, um, yeah, I mean, the, the basic, the basic thing is that because, uh, we don't eat a ton of meat, we're always, I'm always ordering something unless I go to a place that's specifically vegetarian, I'm always ordering something that's one click to the side of whatever the specialty is, because it's like, that's always the thing that doesn't have any meat in it. But so I'm sitting there, we're eating some of the vegetables. It's fine. I'm eating the hummus again. I'm just so hungry. I've got the pita chip. i'm just i'm just ladling the hummus into my mouth like are there calories on this plate i'm eating them so because i literally had it's 4 30 at night it's the first food that i've eaten today just big

chunks of cucumber by the way i love the cucumber on a mediterranean plate yes yes and i was loving

the cucumber i was um so so then it's like i don't know half of the plate has been consumed but now i'm like getting excited about the popcorn and the candy and i go to becca i go do you want more of this and she's like no she also by the way has not consumed any of the hummus no which is really really um i don't think being a good partner that was against the agreed upon protocol well she never agreed to it that's the thing it was against the proposed the proposed protocol i said uh i said are you in a relationship with hummus always and she said never she's also not a hummus gal so anyway so i i mean you know where this story is going the movie is now starting i want to be eating popcorn when the mood i don't want to be eating i don't want to be eating hummus when the movie is going on i don't know why just like spiritually it feels like i need to be eating pieces of popcorn as the opening credits are rolling out of a shallow angular bowl the way god intended but you know what i mean like and i want to say for the record i'm not a big you know i don't go to these kinds of theaters where you can eat a full meal like all the time like i don't actually think it's my dream to be like tucking into a lasagna as the beginning of you know a movie is starting in a theater like i do i am into the tradition of like you're eating popcorn or you're eating candy as the movie starts. Something in my mind switched where I was like, I don't wanna be dealing with a Mediterranean plate as the opening credits of A Real Pain are starting. So I put the plate down, because there's nobody sitting next to me, there's nobody sitting next to Becca, and the armrests are very large, and I put the plate down, and I'm eating the popcorn, and I'm very excited, I'm at a movie, and it's starting, and I'm totally intrigued, and literally right as the movie starts, there is a tremendous rattle. And I look over, and the entire Mediterranean plate has slid down the armrest and flipped face down, hummus side down, crank, onto the floor next to us in the movie theater. And I just thought, if you were going to send people into this movie theater, because again, there were things on the menu. Can you imagine a giant burger, like trying to eat like a giant, like kind of messy cheeseburger or whatever with like, you know, pickles and things falling out of it, just holding it on your lap? Like you have not, you have not thought this through. You should not be sending people into this theater with like three course meals when there's nowhere for them to put the food or some of the aisles have a place you can put the food and some don't. like now it's possible I was missing something although I really particularly when the movie was over I really gave these chairs the once over because I knew I was going to talk about this with you and I wanted to like make sure I wasn't just misunderstanding something like there was actually like a table thing that I couldn't find one in row B of theater six at living room theaters in

Portland so unless there was something I'm missing it was kind of like either you're in a row that has a table which would be great or you're in one that doesn't which we saw the outcome and luckily there was no one else in the theater no one was trying to get past us so i just left it where it was but the whole movie yeah you're thinking about it of course about how i was gonna have to clean this hummus up because i'm not gonna like leave this like this i'm not gonna leave it for the staff it's not their fault really i mean sort of is but not really so the whole movie i'm just i'm enjoying the movie but i'm the back of my mind is like do i have enough napkins like how much hummus is on the floor right now do i have enough napkins to to clean that up properly like i'm i'm five percent of my brain is thinking about this hummus the whole movie

when i was a kid this is related just go with me on this when i was a kid it was my dream to live in like kind of a city or even more of a suburban area where i could ride my bike to see a movie that was not possible in valley city ohio it was just it was just country roads as far as I could see no sidewalks nowhere to go when I was maybe 13 years old my family moved to Medina which was still by most standards kind of kind of sparse as far as like kind of um if not population certainly sort of commerce is concerned like there was sort of a center of town you could go to um and I also got my first mountain bike around this time and I don't remember the brand name but i can picture it it was like day glow colors i'll bet you my parents might be maybe even got it at like sam's club or something but i loved this thing so much this is this was the bike that that a goose menaced me on one time but we'll save that for another time i know we're trying to string that along in case we ever run out of things to talk about we always have the time a goose menaced andrew on his mountain bike got that in our back pocket in our back pocket and is bowling a sport um but anyway

Anyway, I remember being so excited to live in a place that was just like kind of quasi like suburban sort of. And there was an old school little movie theater in the tiny town of Medina. So Medina at this point, if you're really going to a store or something, you're going to the outskirts of Medina where there's going to be more of a shopping center or something. But there was still this sort of old school, you know, literally a gazebo in the middle of the old part of town sort of town. You know, there was, I believe, various little niche stores and then an old movie theater. And I believe, I think I rode my bike to watch two different movies. I rode it into town. It was probably like a four-mile bike ride or five or something. But I parked my beloved bike outside, and I know one of the movies I saw was Hook. And I went and we could figure out what year that was. And I remember locking my bike up outside and going in to watch Hook. And I also think I might have seen Father of the Bride. I don't know if my I don't know if my timing works out on that because I only lived in this house for probably like two years. Maybe if those two came out around the same time. But I know that like I had my dream of just being a kid who rode my bike to the movies by myself. I could watch a movie by myself. Maybe that's where my love of seeing movies by myself came. but my point is what I remember most about seeing those movies was just being obsessed with how my bike was doing outside I couldn't concentrate on the movie because my beloved bike and I had it locked up but I'm just a nervous guy the shiny guy is always nervous and so I just remember trying to enjoy Hook but the whole time being like will my bike be out there when I leave

the mean streets of Medina, Ohio

I'm just thinking now, I can't even think of a safer place to put your bike. You could put your bike out there.

Is that kid with a slingshot in his back pocket who's saluting a flag at a barber shop, is he going to take my bike?

I could literally have put it outside the theater, not locked it up, put a sign that said free bike, or I'm an easy mark and nobody would have touched it. But anyway, yeah, so I can't imagine being able to – knowing that there was, like, a splattered mess face down on the floor next to me, like, knowing that I'm going to have to deal with it or if somebody's going to come through the aisle or just, like, just having it down by – if I dropped a thin mint or a junior mint down the crack of a seat, it would still probably bother me for act one.

Yeah. We made it through, thankfully. The other update from –

Well, did you – and you did clean it up, though?

I did clean it up, yes.

With tiny little napkins?

How was that?

Well, I mean, the full and elongated and even more boring story is I did start by cleaning up with these little... It's another thing, is that they gave... Becca asked, well, where are the napkins? I guess maybe for the popcorn or something. And the guy said, a different guy actually said, they're right there. And what they were were those black plastic like cocktail napkins, which are not plastic, but, you know, I know you're not super absorbent, not super absorbent, not super like, you know, there's not there's not much to them. Like that is a napkin that I think works exclusively to sit underneath a drink. I don't think it does any other purpose or effectively.

Maybe you balance a stuffed mushroom on there during the grazing period before your friends get married.

There you go. OK, those are the two uses for it. But cleaning up a biohazard Exxon Valdez-esque hummus spill, I've retold you this joke a million times, that I didn't even understand it as a kid, but it was one I heard some grown-up say, which was, you know, the guy who crashed the Exxon Valdez, which was this big oil tanker, and it was in, actually, I don't know if it was called the Valdez, but was it in Valdez, Alaska?

Oh, that's funny. I always thought it was. I thought that was the name of it.

I think it was the Valdez. Maybe it was named for one of the places that it went to a lot, but I think his name was, like, Joseph Hazelwood or something, the captain. And it was a big environmental disaster, and it was, of course, later it was found that he had been drinking. And although, you know, looking, I guess it's just the deal is, if you're the captain of one of those ships, you should just never be drinking. I was going to say, I don't know, he might have had a glass of wine at dinner or something. Who knows when the crash happened? But the joke was, how many captains does it take to drive the Exxon Valdez? One in a fifth?

Yes, that is where I learned what a fifth was.

I never learned what a fifth was. I didn't even know what, I just kept repeating that joke with literally no idea even what it meant. I just heard a grown-up tell.

I love that we used to have, and probably a lot of them were inappropriate, and I'm not even going to bring them up here, but like growing up in the 80s, which was a much more coarse time, we told jokes as kids about major events. Some of them were tragic disasters, and looking back, what was it like to...

see uh andy walsh in third grade telling you know the exon valdez i think was a little bit later than that yeah that was 89 so maybe that's sixth grade for me but still like just telling exon valdez jokes that have to do with a bottle a fifth of whiskey you know what i mean that's literally where i learned what a fifth was and when somebody explained it to me i thought it was the funniest joke in the world and i went around and told anybody with two ears and some patience but like

also this is where i don't want to slip into you know yelling at too many clouds but like i have a hard time imagining that the average or like a fifth grader in in 2024 is telling a similar joke about like the what was that called the the the evermore what was the boat that got stuck in

like the suez canal i don't know the name of it right yeah like i don't feel like there are as

many supply chain related jokes being repeated by fifth graders like i don't i don't see that for them like i don't know i don't hang out with a lot of fifth graders i will tell you this becca's nephew alexander is literally one of the smartest human beings i've ever met in my life and he's i don't know how old he is he's maybe a freshman now so he might have maybe he would have been telling those jokes as a kid i don't want to assume that that all kids these days are checked out but i do think there was this weird thing because there was just less there was less entertainment we had to spend more time and i'm not saying this was better by the way we spent more time listening to what the grown-ups were talking about because we just didn't have a Nintendo Switch like I felt like my main form of entertainment as a kid was listening to the grown-ups talk if you would have given me a Nintendo Switch or whatever I would have been playing that I promise you that's more fun than listening to the grown-ups talk but absent that I was you know a sponge for the stuff they were saying and you're right much of it probably inappropriate

yeah and I don't even see I feel like these jokes that i heard were from the playground as well so i don't even think like that's the funny thing like somebody else is listening to their parents i guess because i mean we did have nintendos we had ataris like that was out there i mean trying to figure out like how much of that it was just like you because you're a precocious kid i'm picturing you like under the table listening to the adults talk and i was really that way yeah so i could sort of see that but yeah i don't know if i'll go with you on that comparison of kids these days and like what what the um you know what the discourse is regarding like you know like world events i'm

just wondering if and again i think i was an a bit of an oddball kid i was probably much much more and you know what's funny is like becca was actually this way as well um and so we can relate on a lot of things about like you know uh you know like just weird i was watching chris hayes show the other night and he was going through like a cabinet uh a would-be cabinet appointees over the years who were found basically who had to drop out because it was in the wake of matt gates dropping out thank god um and it was and it was just it was laughable the other things that in the previous versions of our politics had forced someone to drop out and it was like you know uh zoe uh zoe baird wait so is zoe baird the this american life reporter i know that name but i'm having trouble playing i was about to go off on how i remember all these things from my childhood but of course now i'm i'm i may be conflating names but like they were going through these lists of these like political sort of quote-unquote scandals mostly about like undocumented household workers domestic workers there's this period of time where every person who got nominated for something for a cabinet position it turned out they had basically like a nanny who was undocumented who they weren't paying the taxes on yeah yeah yeah or or they had paid the taxes but too late only when it was called to their attention and they were just like listing these like truly deep cuts from like american politics in the 80s and 90s and i knew every single one of them at least i recognized the names of every single one of them you know it is zoe baird who had that

undocumented um nanny specifically by the way i just wanted to you know i was confused is because

this morning i was on the knife's edge about if i'm going to fully if i'm going to go in and become a tbt or a this american life partner if i'm actually going to subscribe because what they were promoting was zoe chase yeah who's the tal person interviewing ira glass about like his intros he's done over the years like the beginning of that show the first five minutes where he's usually talking about something maybe in his life or someone else's life kind of um in a less produced way you might say and i saw that i was looking for something to listen to this morning for the treadmill and i was like oh because i think zoe chase is one of the best radio reporters out there in the world and so zoe talking to ira about this and then i looked at it and it was like you got to be a tal life partner yeah i was like ah they're gonna get me but all that is to say i was i think a very i was a sort of a strange kid who was way too plugged in and obsessed with the kind of goings on in the world. So that doesn't mean that the kids

these days i bet you if i would have asked brian gator or uh mike cloberdans or kenny higgins if i would have asked any of the kids on the schoolyard they may have been equally they may have also been pretty unfamiliar with the with the deal with the exxon valdez at the time yeah maybe and

again i don't want to get into it because they were very callous jokes but and we were kids so i don't know how much we were responsible for it but like there were major disasters like the challenger disaster and i don't know about you but i remember we had a lot of jokes there were a lot of jokes lying around those were real schoolyard jokes yeah yeah i think the grown-ups i well a

grown-up must have invented those because they were too they were sort of too high concept for like a second grader but i also have a feeling like the grown-ups probably i would hope anyway the grown-ups understood the gravity of that situation so to speak um but as a kid man i was I prided myself on my challenger jokes I had like 10 of them I don't like to admit it but yeah yeah no I had a tight five like the more of those that you could have like that was like currency on the schoolyard yeah exactly I got a new one guys and I guess I bring that up just to say that plan b if

we run out of goose stories do I break out my challenger jokes nope not not on this one you can do that on Luke and Andrew's lifeboat podcast which apparently still has an RSS stream um the You and I had created an RSS stream, a backup, because we weren't sure how the transition would go. If APM was not going to allow us to continue reaching the listeners. Or if everything, if the files would transfer over. Okay. And the other day I was logged in, but for some reason it defaulted to the old Luke and Andrews lifeboat, which just, I believe, still does not have anything populated in there. But, yeah, I mean, that was such a huge event that you didn't have to be, like, reading the newspapers. You didn't have to be precocious to know that. I mean, most of us watched that happen live in school. you know like it was just like it rocked the and because there's a teacher on board it hit very close to home but yeah and also but we were callous kids it was the 80s we were like third graders smoking cigarettes telling inappropriate jokes behind the 7-eleven yeah we i mean we had a lot

of jokes about there was a lot of ethiopia jokes oh yeah that we would that we because it was like again i didn't even know i didn't know like particularly i mean i knew ethiopia was like in africa i knew there was generally a famine somewhere i mean the thing is if you think about there's probably you know on a human on a sort of a catastrophe scale there are probably you know famines going on right now and people who are you know who have food insecure doesn't even begin to describe it like there's people starving all over the world right now i don't know if it was just because live aid or something they actually made a point to talk about it in the 80s in a way that then drove a whole bunch of just like yeah horrendously evil and racist and mean jokes just like you know but yeah on the schoolyard as a kid it was like if you could just have if you could get your hands or get your brain on the new you know inappropriate joke like it was like you you you you were sort of cool for the afternoon or something now i feel like you know

how did we get here we were talking about the exxon valds oh okay you're talking about cleaning it up you were cleaning it up with the little black napkins i guess and and i did and then my

hands were kind of covered in hummus but i got it all back the vegetables luckily were pretty dry so they just yeah gotta put them back up there well the leftover vegetables took like 30 of those napkins got all the hummus up got it so that there was there was no hummus on the ground which was my standard for this and then uh looked around and noticed that everyone else had left their plates on their tables so i was like well i guess that's a thing we're allowed to do although We didn't have tables. So I kind of consolidated everything, cleaned it all up, and then placed our leftover dishes on one of the tables of the other row and then got the hell out of there.

Okay. I know that I heard you say you want to thank the donors. Before that, though, we have to wrap up a couple of quick things here. We don't have to, but we're going to. I want to verify Roger Teeter was the founder of the Teeter Hang-Ups, the thing that can hang you upside down. It helped his back. So it was Roger Teeter. Secondly, I just want you to know about something. Do you know about the app Fandango that helps you? I've heard of it.

I don't know if I've – I've never used the app version of it, but what I can tell you is that when I've internetted – like, is this movie playing near me? I often end up at the Fandango website.

Yeah, and we don't see as many kind of spur-of-the-moment movies as much as we used to, Genevieve and I, but we both have Fandango on our phone and sometimes we'll just be having lunch on a Saturday and say oh you know what we don't have anything to do let's go see a movie let's see what's on Fandango and we can only say it in that way it's impossible to say it any other way especially when we're around each other and do you have I'm assuming you do not know why we say Fandango

I don't think so that's not a Clem Fandango reference right that's not a I don't know what that is either That's a, well, you tell your fan down.

story and then i'll tell mine we all have our fandango stories don't we uh it is a um scene from strangers with candy and the the you know strangers with candy they i don't know how much they stuck with it but the idea was they were sort of like after school special formatted shows and there was one where she's trying out for the cheerleading squad and so you think that that's the main thing but really it turns out she doesn't know how to read and we learned so it's about illiteracy but we learn it during tryouts for the cheer so it's this weird combination of of a jerry blank being sort of like nervous and being judged by all these cheerleaders and of course by knoblet and um or i'm sorry who's the art teacher jeline jelinek yeah everybody like judging her um and here here i'll just pick it up here give me a v i c t o r y

V-I-C-T-O-R-Y What's it spell? When? Jerry, what does V-I-C-T-O-R-Y spell? Fandango

She's literally, she reaches behind and picks a wedgie

while saying Fandango And that, my friends, is why I can only say a Fandango in that voice.

Well, I don't even know what show this is from, but it's some British show that has Matt Barry in it. You know, of course, Matt Barry, who we talk about a lot on the show these days from what we do in the shadows in New York City, et cetera. And some of our listeners 100% know this bit better than I do, but there appeared to be this repeated bit where... So Matt Barry's character in whatever show this is is like a voiceover actor, does a lot of voiceover. and this part I really identify with having done some voiceover stuff in my time there's always like you're in a studio you got headphones on there's a microphone and then there's like a room full of people and they're talking to each other speaking of food in my days of doing advertising they always were just getting so much food catered in for some reason it's like just eating and then you're in this room and then you'll do something and then they'll kind of talk amongst themselves and then one of them will push down a button and say like oh okay look uh Well, try it this way. And then you go, okay. And then you do it again. And then there's like a long silence. They're all kind of putting their heads together. And then, okay, we like the beginning, but try to let's swap, you know. So that's the line of communication. The bit on this show is that there is some guy named Clem Fandango. He is constantly reintroducing himself to Matt Berry's character.

Every time he gets on the producer mic. Every time.

And he's like, it's Clem Fandango. And Matt Berry is incensed because he freaking knows who the guy is at this point. That is so great. So let me just play you. this is a super ghetto so this is across i think multiple episodes and scenes we'll see if i don't

know if this will work or not but here we go yes this is clem fandango yes can you hear me yes i can hear you clem fandango hi steven this is clem fandango what the work experience boy yeah can you hear me steven yeah i can hear you clem fandango where's that other prick hi steven this is clem fandango can you hear me yes i can hear you clem fandango hi steven this is clem fandango can you hear me yes i can hear you clem fandango hi steven this is clem fandango can you hear me yes i can hear you clem fandango and just goes on and on like that i could listen to that all day

i love how much that pleases you there is just something about matthew perry that is just so

inexplicably hilarious i'll send you the link i would highly recommend i mean what we should do is figure out what the show is because whoever came up with that everybody the wider realm of That show must be amazing.

Whenever we talk about him, everybody's like, you've got to watch the show. And, of course, I can't remember it right now either. But everybody's like, if you like him, why are you not spending your evenings watching this old BBC show?

I'm spending all my time cleaning up hummus spills at the living room theater, people.

Thank you for being a town.

All right. Let's thank those donors who are making TBTL possible. here it is the holiday a week it's thanksgiving week and we've got brand new shows for you each and every day including a really fun one on friday yeah it's going to be one of our one of our beloved crossover shows with our friends over at text me back that's right i i'm already nervous

about there's a moment where we're all supposed to bring something to the table and i believe last time i brought a topic to the table it was kind of a disaster so i was a little nervous this weekend yes it was Tidings and I think mine was I thought we'd all be on board with some old game show from the 70s or 80s and you guys all just stared blankly at me yes

I don't think that's what happened but we will be doing that on Friday we'll have a new show on Thursday so the way we're able to do this oh we're doing this

sexiest meals that slay you said for the thanksgiving show uh yes did i give that away i'm

sorry where were we yeah i was going to try to kind of like sort of tease that over the course of the week um anyway the reason that we are able to do five new shows a week is because this is our job and this is our job because of people like michael seaton who's in wait for it andrew west

lake ohio oh i saw that west lake oh let's talk about theater shall we you have your regal cinema there uh right in crocker park you got your uh and by the way you probably do have to reserve your seats there i don't know if they're reclined or not but you're not going to be getting any uh you're not going to be served popcorn and bowls at at crocker park i'll tell you that much right now and you got your big giant eagle there it's just at that giant eagle last time i was home i know west lake ohio welcome you sure do yes thanks michael uh what do you know about reva

Virginia. That's where Stephen McConkie is. Riva, Virginia.

I like to think there's an AMC there, but I honestly don't know for sure. I don't know for sure. Riva

Virginia. Wow, I wonder if

anybody's ever done that before because that's actually a pretty good

parody. It's a town in Culpeper County, Virginia. Andrew, that sounds bucolic. It really does. That sounds like I'm looking at the post office in Riva, Virginia. That is a... Old school. That looks like, I mean, just a little bend in the road where you've got, I'm sure, a couple of, maybe an older gal running the post office in Reva in Culpeper County. I've got to get to the post office today. Okay. Thanks, Stephen. Good reminder for you to do that. I need to go to my actual mailbox. This is my mail retrieval policy because everything important mail-wise in my life is now just an email or a push notification from my bank or whatever That I tend to forget And my mailbox It's not like it's super far away But it is the kind of thing where I need to put on The right kind of shoes And walk up the hill to my mailbox And then eventually my mail person She's the absolute best She'll just start bringing Things down and putting them on my porch Because the mailbox is too full to fit them That's when I know I've got to go Throw that thing out That's a much easier thing than you're doing Driving all the way to the P.O. box So if you can do it, I can do it

Yeah. The reason I paused there, and well, because I wasn't sure if we were in a hurry or not, but also, I mean, I can literally do this in 30 seconds. I told you a couple of weeks ago that I had some debt collectors trying to get me to pay some medical bill that I had already paid. And so I'd taken a real tone with the company that sent me to the debt collection and a little bit with the debt collectors, although they were just doing their job. But I want to make it very clear. This was something that I had paid and there was a paperwork screw up on the side of the of the medical equipment provider. I had something similar happen to me. I got another notification from a different debt collection agency telling me I didn't pay a different bill that was related to some radiology work that I had done. And it gets very, very complicated because I had paid for like the radiology, but I hadn't paid for like the doctor's time. Like they split it up into a million different things. my god yeah and they're like and so i'm like i never so i call the debt collection agency i'm like i got your thing here but i need you guys to send me an actual invoice because i never and i took a real tone genevieve later on said i heard you taking a tone i was like i was taking a tone i was like i never got an original invoice like i don't know exactly what this is for i would like it itemized and i don't like the fact that this is going to collections right away and i definitely took a tone with um the person on the phone at the desk debt collection agency because I was very um she's like we sent an invoice I'm like no you didn't or they didn't or whatever and I was like and I was kind of like it's very snarky with her literally later that day as I'm eating my lunch Genevieve's like I'm so sorry I just found three pieces of mail for you that I had taken and it was in my sewing room and it was like from a month or two ago and it was from the radiology place it was the bill that when the woman said they had sent it i had laughed in a scoffy way

i was like sure you did but wait a minute they're sending you to collections after a month well i

don't know i still don't understand why i didn't see more of this bill but i think it did sort of remind me that we're not super good we're trying to be better about it but we're not super good with mail uh anyway because kind of like you like most of the important stuff is done digitally these days um so sometimes we'll really let it build up and then you pull it out and it's just like all these flyers and then just like every you know 90% of the mail in your mailbox 95% of it is just shit you don't need you know and so maybe I missed a few of these but then definitely the final notice was in Genevieve's sewing room it was literally like maybe two hours after she said I really heard you taking the tone I was like yeah anyway but I would still be like I would

still be mad at the radiology folks whoever sent it to the collection Thank you.

That just feels, listen, I know a thing or two about being sent to collections. People have been sending me to collections for a long time, babe. And I feel like it's supposed to take way long, maybe way longer than that. And like, you know, because it's supposed to be like after a long, long time of them not being able to get the money from you. Then what they do is they sell the debt. I mean, that's the thing that's so also annoying about the whole thing is the collection people. You don't know. You don't really owe them any money. You owed someone else money. The someone else decided we're not going to get this money. So they sold the debt for pennies on the dollar to these mercenaries. And now these mercenaries are trying to come for the entire amount. But like you never had any business with the mercenaries, you know, you know, that's really frustrating.

That's funny because I'm trying to did I pay the mercenary or did I go back and end up paying the radiology people? I don't know. I didn't realize that that was sort of the deal. i thought they just hire them as as sort of like um you know dogs they can sick on me but then i

actually pay the the original that might also be wrong that might be a version of it too i've mostly been sent to the ones where the people the initial person i owed has given up on it well you went to debtor's jail for a while didn't you spell it was in the stocks g-o-a-l honestly i'll be i'll be honest with you those tomatoes hurt when the townspeople would throw them at me when i was in the town square seem right thank god we've got folks like mike piecatelli in gig harbor washington who are keeping us out of debtors prison because of supporting tbtl because of this being a job thanks mike thank you appreciate you thanks also to joshua cory who's in vienna virginia oh vienna virginia yeah we got two we got riva virginia and vienna virginia big it's a big show for the folks from the volunteer state no that's tennessee what's virginia um show me state that's missouri

I thought, oh, the show me state is Missouri.

Well, I thought Tennessee is the volunteer state because the University of Tennessee are the volunteers. What does that make Virginia?

What is it? What is it? A slogan I'm looking at here? Virginia is for lovers. But that's different, isn't it? Because that's like a tourism thing. Yeah, so I don't know what the... Like Washington Post, why is Virginia for lovers? That was just in 2021.

I think we actually might have even read that article at some point. Yeah, this looks familiar. Because it's kind of a crazy old story. Anyway, thanks, Joshua. Appreciate you. Elise Pugh is in Brooksville, Florida. What a distribution. We got Ohio. We got Virginia. We got Washington. We got Florida. We got Elise. We got Samantha Hartman of Missoula, Montana.

Oh, nice. Missoula. Classic American city.

Absolutely love it. Home of Hellgate High, where Walt Burbank went to school for two years. Thank you to all of our donors for making TBTL possible today. We really and truly could not be here doing it without you.

here i go once again with the email every week i hope that it's from a female no man

it's not from a female i know i know i know many of you some of you maybe one of you were like isn't this where he plays the top story sound effect why am i hearing the emails well we're gonna do the tropicana and jaguar story tomorrow because we're running a little short on time but i did not want to let any more time go by before i basically owned up to my mistake on Friday I was excited to talk about the origins of something that I call Skid Row. It's really your fault for bringing up the band Skid Row Andrew which you thought for a moment was playing in Pee Wee's Big Adventure when he's running through the sound stage. Yeah and I was totally wrong

about that. You weren't that wrong

it was the same general vibe

Twisted Sister. But my mistake led to you getting pilloried by the

listeners. And that's what I want to really say here is this is essentially your fault exactly because take responsibility you led me you led me down a primrose path my friend um where i was talking about the origins of the term skid row and how my telling of things was that in seattle um during an economically depressed time uh or during i actually you know what maybe it wasn't even economically depressed i don't know it was just a time when people were looking for work and there was a lot of timber a lot of lumber still in seattle in the places on the hills and the places that seem so incredibly urban now they used to just be forests and they would cut the trees down and they would skid them down like yesler and there would be folks down at the base of the hill kind of looking for work and uh and so that became called skid row and i said they were in a hooverville down there because you know herbert hoover uh was i think president during a time of real economic downturn i don't know if it was the Great Depression or not, but anyway, Hoovervilles were a thing. Well, this is what Ernie said. Hey, Luke, you got the etymology of the term Skid Row almost right. Originally, the term was Skid Rowed. In the 1920s, the term became a metaphor for any place where people who were down on their luck hung out. It was universalized or misheard as Row, so the origins apparently were Skid Rowed.

So, take that, Sebastian Bach. Is that the lead singer of Skid Row? I think so. Also, the logs weren't rolled down the hills. They were skidded lengthwise. I believe the original Skid Road was what is now Yesler Way in Pioneer Square. Okay, so I did have that part right. The problem, though, was that this was happening, apparently, according to our good friend, Larry Asher, over at the School of Visual Concepts. concepts uh he said uh he said this is by the way i love larry so much he said the subject line is next time you will be even writer way to emphasize the positive you're not you were loud wrong burbs but like here's a let me let me call you into an opportunity to be even more correct next time sir setting you up for success in the future he says yes it's true that the first skid road referred to the street probably what is now yesler way where the logs were skidded down to the mill on the seattle waterfront this was the 1850s though while hoovervilles didn't pop up until after the stock market crash in 1929 so your chronology is a little off but here's the truly amazing part the first unofficial mayor of hooverville yep it was jake from state farm i remember that now because he was trying to parallel park i remember like it was yesterday andrew right he was trying

I was trying to parallel park on Yesler before it was paved.

Yes, I was trying to parallel park a Model T in front of Hooverville. Auga, auga. You know where else I think this, I blended these concepts together of it being like Hoover-related, Hoovervilles, is because there was that bar, I don't know if it's still there, Hooverville in Soto that I, I don't know.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, down by the, yeah, down by the stadium. Down by the stadium. I think it's still there, yeah.

We used to go there. I feel like that was a hot zip for us for a while, like before Mariners games and things like that. And maybe even just some socializing. I think the mummy even like worked there for a hot second. He did. Holy shit. I forgot about that. Hooverville being like a weird, like considering. Well, you know, if you think about Mount Baker where I did live, it is just, I mean, north south wise, it's pretty much equal to where I was. So for some reason, I felt like we were spending a lot of time at that Hooverville bar for a while. And so in my mind, I was like, well, of course the bar's called Hooverville because it's Skid Row, and that's where the Hooverville was. So I was wrong. But Jake from State Farm was there. Certainly. That much.

Certainly, yeah. I only went for whatever it's worth. I only went to Hooverville around Mariners games. And usually I do believe with you or the gang or something. And I got to say, I just remember it just always being so crowded. Like, my whole thing of going to a bar around a baseball game or a sporting event like that is trying to find a place that nobody knows about, but that is also in walking distance, which those places don't exist. Right. There is not a bar that nobody knows about that is in walking distance of the game. And it's funny, like, now I have, like, fond memories of it, but I also remember, like, feeling anxious walking in that bar, just being like, are we going to find a seat, you know? Like, are we just going to be jostled the whole time? I don't like being jostled. but i actually have very fond memories of that place i think wasn't that a peanut shell on the floor place too or am i misremembering that am i being too romantic in my i don't know again i'm

i'm really right now i'm questioning everything andrew sure yeah it seems you know what i would say this culturally spiritually it was a peanuts on the floor kind of it really was yeah you know kind of board like lots of board games and like you know just on a shelf and like things to do and areas to lounge and stuff like that was a cool spot i really did like it actually yeah i

really liked it as well and by the way me saying that and i mean not that it it matters but like i'm not i'm not dissing the place i'm just scared of crowds i'm in a bar like that that is so close to the the stadium we get crowded and i was just like worried about that but actually if i recall they did a pretty good job i think my anxiety was always for naught you'd go in there and the service was good and right and and it was a cozy little place you had an email that you wanted to

oh sure yeah yeah i'll play one quick here i have a voice email here yeah or i think it was

this is a fun way to do it too it's a voice memo emailed in by our friend max we're talking about closet organization um and specifically the the fact that probably i have i'm gonna say like probably 50 of my closet maybe 40 of my closet uh the things on the hangers the clothes on the hangers are things i don't even wear or i wear so rarely it's like if i'm going to a wedding in three years I might wear one or something but I also have a bunch of shirts and stuff that are either you know aspirational I'll fit into them again or maybe my arms will grow an extra three inches or something or nostalgic yeah that's kind of a thing you have fond memories

of maybe something a time when you used to wear it a lot or something you wore it to certainly so anyway Max wanted to weigh in

hey fellas it's Max in Brooklyn a friend of mine recommended for decluttering a closet it. If you turn all of the hangers around so

that uh the the hook is facing the back of the closet in other words make it hard to get the hanger out of the closet and then you set a time period six months a year three months whatever and every time you wear an item you get to turn that hanger around to the easy way the normal way of hanging it and at the end of that period of time you look and see what clothes are still hanging with the hangers backwards and then you go okay i haven't worn these maybe it's time to donate those uh so i thought i'd share what you do so important power out i just sound sarcastic

when he says it max is an actor he's one of the finest actors of our time and i assume he was

pretending to be a person who makes fun of us

i will say i love a technique like that i love hearing about that i love imagining myself being that person but the thing for me is not having trouble identifying which are the clothes that I should donate I know what they are I can do that right now without without doing that trick I love that trick and if you're somebody who is trying to sort of figure that out that would be a great way to do it but for me it's like no I know I mean I can picture my like kind of I don't know if golden rod is the right way but like kind of a yellowish golden colored shirt golden really sounds like I'm like golden like I'm going to the disco yeah exactly but anyway I just know these shirts that I have that I'm never going to wear again, but I just kind of can't quite get rid of. I've identified them.

Yeah, I have been because I moved down to this newer bedroom setup and have been obsessing. In fact, literally like Sunday morning, Becca was like, how's it going? I was like, well, I've basically reorganized the closet four times. Like I'm obsessed with getting it completely dialed in since it's like it's a fresh start. and one of the things I've been doing is just getting rid of a ton and you know I mean I you know I did I got rid of a bunch of stuff when I moved down here like I you know moved from Bellingham down here like I there's a lot of stuff that I left behind but somehow I still managed to hang on to too much stuff that's like I don't wear it it's not particularly flattering on me or even a style that I'm into and like the relief that I have felt from donating lots and lots of pairs of shoes and I don't donate underwear i don't think anybody needs that i'll throw that out but like starting over with so i have like i don't know how many pairs 20 pairs of like new boxer brief underwear that i like that's all like in good shape because i just got it uh and then you know i have a drawer of socks i don't have a million pairs i just have like 20 pairs which just should be enough you know what i mean like something about uh gaining gaining a sense of well-being through the losing of actual like old clothes has been kind of profound like i literally took a picture of my closet yesterday when it was all done and sent it to becca i was like this makes me feel happy and it's come from parting with a bunch of stuff that i just don't wear anymore yep i did that i did sort of an

underwear and sock purge boy that's there's one day a year that we set aside where we can purge all of our underwear and socks because it's you don't you kind of these things will sort of hang on for a while and you'll sort of know yeah these socks aren't like really good ones anymore but yeah you kind of drag them along for too long and then eventually like it might be like you say like a closet redo or something in your life or you're moving but yeah i don't know six months ago or something i think i was just like all right all of my boxers i am wearing them one last time but when i'm done with them i'm throwing them all in the garbage can i'm just buying like two big you know like bags of the styles that i like or whatever and then and it was such a good feeling Now, though, I'm sort of like, well, how often do I do this? Because I'm starting to see, like, some of them are kind of like, you know, just like, no grossness. I mean, generally speaking, it's just like, you know, they just, the elastic on these things aren't as good. The materials start to, you know, just like, but it, like, it's so hard to tell yourself, like, well, this thing isn't, I can still wear this. I could still wear this for a long time. But at what point is it not wasteful just to, like, call it a day on these things?

Well, and I, like, one of my problems is, like, gym socks and running t-shirts, because no matter how beat up a running t-shirt gets, you can always, I mean, you're just wearing it for jogging. So it's so hard to throw those out, because I'm like, yeah, but what if I want to go for a jog, and I have no shirt? It's like, has it ever happened, Luke? No, because you have a hundred of them, and they're falling apart. Same thing with socks. Like, I have so many pairs of gym socks, because the gym sock technology, and I say gym sock, I don't mean, like, they have, like, stripes on them, and I pull them up to my calves. i'm just talking about socks you would wear maybe for working out or something they the technology is that they last a long time actually like so i have these nike dry fit socks so many of them and then just other weird

ones from various however I got them. I cannot throw socks out for some reason because I have this feeling like well these are still good and what if I need them? What if I one day I have no socks left? All the socks are dirty and these are the only ones. I'll be so screwed. It's like has that ever happened? No. Like I have drawers that are brimming that are bursting with old pairs of

socks that I just can't for some reason seem to part with. Have did um when Bubbles lived with

you your cat did you feed her wet food i let me try to think no i did not i fed her this like some kind of super um like literally like a healthy but for wild cats kind of dry food

that the vet had recommended i we feed our cats wet food one can for each of them in the morning and one can in the evening and um sometimes i'm opening up a can i think to myself boy i hope i'm never an apocalyptic situation where i have to be eating this and like i was sort of thinking about your socks you're like well what if someday like it's hard for me and i'm not a hoarder i in fact i i like to i try to be the opposite of that i don't like to just like kind of i i like having objects that that bring me joy but if it doesn't bring me joy then i really don't want it around um but there's sometimes a part of me when i'm throwing something away that i think is there going to is something going to happen in the future where i'm going to look back at these days of largesse and i'm going to be so mad at myself for even like using too many paper towels or throwing away a pair of socks too early that's such a dangerous mindset oh god

not to be confused with the movie dangerous mindset right where coolio keeps rapping about like sparking joy and minimalism yeah dangerous mindsets yeah been spending most our lives hanging on to these socks we don't need michelle pfeiffer right i was trying to i was like who's

the main yeah yeah um anyway anyway i think we're going with the show title who is spiro crow though i think that has to be what we're going with today love it i mean i thought dangerous mindsets was

maybe got in, maybe Indiana Jones-ed in under the door.

I mean, do you like, I mean, I don't know. We'll make these decisions. We'll have a four-hour meeting to discuss that later, as we always do.

I think Brian is putting up the Christmas lights, Andrew.

Oh, your neighbor?

He's got a ladder out. That usually means it's Christmas light time up here, high above the mighty Columbia.

Is he passive-aggressively decorating your ragweed or whatever it is you have out there?

Tansy. which is a rag i think it's a rag wart so you're not far off there you go uh no i think he's just

focusing on casa de brian but um oh we got to remember this tomorrow um i gotta tell you ask me about ask me about the extension cord tomorrow i have a real we have a real neighbor conundrum

going on oh i love it okay i'm putting it in i'm adding this ask andrew about extension cord good But tomorrow's show is pretty much handled because we have so much we didn't get to today. All right. Thanks for listening, everybody. We'll be back here tomorrow with more Imaginary Radio for you. In the meantime, have a great Monday. Be safe putting up those Christmas lights. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all. Power out.