Muse

Hey, TBTL listeners, it's me, Andrew. Hey, Luke had some eye surgery today, a little procedure. We knew it was coming. He's fine, by the way. He's great. He's going to join us here on the show in just a second. I just wanted to say that as we talk about his procedure on the show, Luke pulls no punches. He describes in great detail what it was like to have a pretty uncomfortable procedure done on his eye while he's awake. So if this is the type of thing that you feel like might be upsetting, just be warned. You might want to skip to about, I don't know, like the half hour part of the show and get past all the doctor-y stuff. I don't think it's too bad, but I thought you might want to know in advance. I'm a squeamish guy. All right. Enjoy the show.

Yes, it is daunting. But I did some research on amicable breakups. I visited www.ladiesgoodhealthmag.com backslash sex hyphen relationships backslash 867-599-904 backslash 943-2-ampersand-20.html. Do you know that site? Yeah.

TBTL!

Is this a thing people care about? No! Was my underwear showing when I was climbing down the tree? I wore my Thursdays because my Saturdays had a case of the Mondays, if you know what I mean.

It's a meme-ish thing. I actually couldn't think of the word meme for a second. I could only think of the word dank. Weird.

I just want to use my muscles and my mind and be your number one guy using my muscles and my mind. I don't use foul language, and I don't like to hear anyone else use it either. Come on, is that even a celebrity? He's no Roy Donk, but he was a regular guest on the Colgate Hour. Stop talking, get off the phone, and let's do this.

let's do this immediately. Let's go. Stay patient, people. Stay patient. This is going to be worth it. I promise. Maybe not. Maybe not. It's worth it to me. Well, all right. Hello. Good

morning and welcome everyone to a Tuesday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful

to live. This song goes out to all the coffee lovers of the world. My name is Luke Burbank.

I am your host, coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio perched high above the mighty Columbia on a very foggy day. Like, you can barely see, I don't know, five to ten feet in front. A foggy day. Although some of that might also be the minor eyelid surgery that I just had, like, 40 minutes ago. More on that here on episode 4,356 in a collector series.

Let the fun begin.

More on that in a moment. Yes, it's my long-running saga. Well, it feels long-running to me with this eye situation. I'll probably have tears in my eyes telling this story because it still affects me that way. Give you the full update in a moment. Can you verify? Can you give me some 411? But not before we say hello to this young man. and he is the longest-running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ship. He's got like every meme ever produced on the Internet. He can knock us out with his memes. He's Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

Good morning, Luke. Based on a photo that you sent me that was straight out of 1989's Batman, the surgery scene.

Do you see what I have to work with territory?

You told me, oh, I guess they're going to scrape my eye today after all, so I'll be dialing up a little bit later than I expected, and then you, I guess after the scraping, you sent me a photo of the tray with all of the used That's when the bleeding starts. Yeah, with all the bloody gauze and the instruments they used on your eye It was, just based on that photo, I kind of don't want to talk about this. We will not be using that as a show photo. I believe that is too triggering for folks. It's a bit graphic

and I'm sorry that I didn't get consent from you before I sent it. I know you are a bit squeamish around blood and things like that. I think it was the point at which the doctor said to me, you will be crying some amount of tears of blood today, but that's normal.

Did they say anything about stigmata in your hands and feet?

That's what I learned, that this might be a slightly more gruesome procedure that I was totally signed up for. So I finally got this appointment this morning with the ophthalmologist the the person who is licensed and bonded to uh go in and actually like kind of cut open your eyelid and try to uh push out or scrape out this uh sort of thing that's been uh been bedeviling me for the last few weeks i did also know i was in the right place Andrew, finally, because of

I remember the other day, I thought I was going to see the person who could fix this, and I realized I was just in the optometry department, and I say that with peace and love to the optometrist listening. It's a great, great profession. You do great work. It's just not what I needed at that point. I didn't need someone to give me a new prescription. I needed someone to do a surgery straight out of the 1989 movie The Batman. Excuse me, Batman. Yes. When I walked into this little medical room that I was in and I was seated, I looked over and there was a printout. There was like 20 of them in one of those little like plastic kind of, you know, on the wall where it's like you can take a flyer if you want. Yeah. Kind of a thing. And it just said, Understanding Sties and Chalazians.

There you go.

I should have gotten that a long time ago.

You're a little late on that.

So I knew that I was where I needed to be to try to deal with this whole situation. The doctor comes in, first words out of his mouth, are you the Luke Burbank from the radio? Mm-hmm. At which point I was very glad I wasn't at the proctologist. Yes. And I said, yes, I am. Your pants were off, though, which is still kind of a weird move. I just want to say it's about efficiency, Andrew, in this managed health care environment. You've got a window of time that you can be in there, and if I'm wasting time undressing, I think that everybody loses. So, yes, I'm fully nude, shaven. It's the hair, Luke. The hair dad. It's dirty. The doctor walks in, sees me sitting there, and says, are you the Luke Burbank from the radio? Yes.

I mean, you're fully shaved. No eyebrows. Nothing. No. Absolutely nothing. Just a pink little baby man. Okay. So, no.

Like one of those hypoallergenic cats or something. But, anyway, he says, are you the Luke Burbank from the radio? And I say yes, and then I go, on the subject of which, would it be okay with you if I made an audio recording of the procedure? And he said, I don't think Kaiser allows that.

I am grateful for Kaiser today. I don't think, I honestly was thinking, oh, no, do you have a recording of this? I don't know that I, I'm not even joking. I am kind of squeamish.

Andrew, ABC, always be contenting. This is, this is frigging gold, dude.

Anyway, there's no recording. I know that I'm in the wrong business. I see more and more people posting stuff online, and I'm just like, why do you have to record every aspect of your life? Can't you just have a moment? And then I think about what I do for a living, and I'm like, I'm not allowed to say that. I'm allowed to say a lot of things. I don't believe in that you can't say anything anymore.

kind of I'm canceling you from thinking that way as a as my trusted colleague and a business partner in this content thing that we do but I guess that's the one thing I can't say but I was like

you can't just go buy a melon without taping it anyway I'm kind of glad that we don't have to hear

this procedure because I am a bit squeamish I'm actually glad I wasn't trying to record it now that I've been through it if that makes any sense I think I was hoping that maybe the record the audio recording of it could be a kind of a some like layer some defense mechanism some way of separating myself from the kind of creeping panic about what was actually going to be going on in that room yeah because one of the things that i learned about a procedure like this is um when the issue is your eyeball or eyelid there's really no looking away from the tools that are coming at your eyeball slash lid like you know if you're getting a shot in most parts of your body you can do what i always do which is look in a different direction and try to kind of go somewhere else in your mind not possible when the eye is what's being worked on yeah yeah you know and uh i asked him as he was um getting into the procedure i said how many times a day do you get a clockwork orange reference and he laughed he goes uh every time i do a cataract uh procedure he goes i'll probably hear it this afternoon which made me think he has a cataract procedure scheduled um but uh so the the process was uh they uh they did uh he injected my eyelid with lidocaine

your under eyelid right the this where this yeah the lower eyelid um and i was actually

the first thing that happened which put me actually somewhat at ease was i assumed that that the the the shot had to go into the inside of my eyelid because as we established yesterday that's really the kind of tip of the spear if you will that's where this uh what do we call it a chub chilead zade that's where this whole situation is actually like happening is inside my eyelid and So I, I thought that he was going to. gonna have to give me a shot in my eyelid which seemed especially invasive yeah i wasn't picturing

that i was because it's so thin there i was picturing but it's still a needle going in right

underneath your eye ball yes but i was because i said to him i go it's gonna be hard for me to avoid seeing this needle when you shoot me up because you just closed your eye oh right because you're under yeah yeah for that i was like you're coming in you're coming in from the outside i was like okay well that's already a w i had pictured this whole thing as like my eyelid is pried away from my body and then a team of people are just working in there you know and um that's not what happened he shot up the exterior of my eyelid with lidocaine did a great job uh the first one small pinch but nothing too terrible and then this is a really nice thoughtful thing this doctor did i'll give him a shout out dr simon he said um his last name is simon not um like we weren't on a first name basis but he um he said i will try to then do the subsequent injections in the area where the first injection went because that will be the most numb area yeah and it as advertised first one little pinch little small amount of burning very survivable and then the other ones i barely felt them um and then uh i hung out there for i don't know 15 20 minutes for to all kind of set in and that's where the eye clamp gets involved andrew and those are just words you never need to to have near each other in fact it should be like the president and vice president they those those words should never be on the same airplane keep them separated in the words of the offspring like he was like I and this is what he said he goes this is a big one I've got to go get a bigger eye clamp we're gonna need a bigger eye clamp seriously show title I don't know I said I go are I go should we call Guinness I go are we proud of this and he kind of chuckled and uh so he did went off to get a bigger eye clamp because of the size of this whole thing and that i will be honest with you despite the um the the numbing agent the anesthetic that was when he clamped the clamp on my the inside of my eyelid that was when things started to feel less than ideal what does that mean well it's kind of like imagine okay you've seen those kinds of um the thing that people will use typically women to kind of um curl their eyelashes sure yeah of course yeah imagine something that looks a little bit like that but instead of the the top of it being designed for eyelash curling it's a two it's like two circles and you put the circles together because the what's What's in the middle of that circle is the stye. So they're clamping around the thing. But the problem is that clamp has to go in your eyelid, inside your eyelid, and outside your eyelid.

So they're like little pliers, but are they little spring-loaded pliers?

I was trying to take in as little detail as possible. But the sense I got was he was ratcheting it down. It was increasing the pressure because what you have to do is you have to clamp this thing. and then you turn the eyelid inside out so as to access as we've kept calling it the the top of the volcano like in order to get to this you have to basically like in you turn the whole eyelid in a significant amount of the eyelid inside out to get to it and then uh and then that at that point again i apologize for the graphic nature of this but you know that's people people need to know people need to know what's going on with this then he goes alright well here we come with like the scalpel and again there is a basic human self-preservation you know one of the things I'll mention when I was reading the literature on understanding styes and chalasians I had some of that when I was in Croatia

pretty good uh huh good stuff right yeah I mean it depends if it's too

greasy it's not good if you get Anita's the anita's grandma's version yes absolute best one of the things it said in the literature on understanding styes and chalazians andrew was um this will go away on its own if it doesn't seem like it is you can always elect for the procedure of having it cut out but if you don't it'll final it'll just work itself out yeah like they're very clear in the paperwork on this in other words it was at the moment that he was like okay well coming in with the scalpel as my eyes clamped open that I thought, you know, this is elective. I could back out of this. I could, I could say, you know what, let's just let this thing run its course. Um, but, uh, but, you know, I, I didn't obviously, I just kind of like, I tried to just, I don't know.

I tried to sort of just grin and bear it and sort of astrally project myself out of the situation or whatever because, and he had told me that despite the anesthetic, it is sometimes, people report a certain amount of pain when they're inside of their eyelid, medically lacerated. And I did feel a certain amount of pain when it was being medically lacerated. Although the cutting didn't feel great, but it was relatively short. It was the scraping, you know, that drop, it's not the itching, but the burning it wasn't so much the cutting but the scraping and um i just i was i was grimacing but then you know he's like yeah you got to kind of keep your eye open for this you know and it's like every again everything in your in your sort of instincts is like shut this down close the eyes leave the office honestly foreclose on the building get everybody out safely just demolish the building save the snakes peewee herman style build a peace arch just pretend this never none of this ever existed please so that it can't hurt anyone else going forward that's the instinct in that moment but of course instead i just gripped the chair tightly as tears flowed out of flowed out of both eyes which was interesting it was like a sympathetic response from my right eye My right eye could, you know, had absolutely nothing going on, but it was like, we feel you, dude. It was like, you know, it was, we're in this together, right eye and left eye.

It's like being punched in the nose, sort of. I mean, I've never gotten punched in the nose because people like me, but I assume that you've gotten punched in the nose before.

I've never been punched in the nose, but you know what I have been? I've been head butted in the nose playing basketball, like you're standing behind someone and they rear their head back. and I've also probably been punched in the nose

but I can imagine that feeling I don't know what I've had that has sort of felt like that but like both your involuntary eye watering

and so and then he was like yeah we're almost there and then just again and he was also I could hear the enthusiasm in his voice when he was like oh we got a lot of drainage we got a lot

of stuff coming out and you feel you know you kind of when he went to get the bigger eye clamp before I was going to mention this um like you're feeling nervous and everything but you're also feeling so self-satisfied you're like i knew this was a big one right like you're feeling like i told you guys this is a big volcano in my eye and the hearing him say like this is a big one we need a bigger eye clamp there's part of you that is kind of like yeah i knew this wasn't your pedestrian stye the fact that he got

the other doctors in there to pose with it like a prized fish. They're on the dock. My stye is on this hook, which is part of a scale. They're standing around very proudly. He put some metal

BBs in there, though, actually. Yeah, unfortunately, we'll be learning more as the weeks unfold. But I am right about that, right? You're feeling a little bit like, I knew this wasn't just a... And also, you're probably glad that if he's going in there and he's like, oh, this is a tiny little guy. Oh, this is just a tiny little guy. You're probably thinking, well, then I probably could have just let it run its course or whatever. But this thing has been dogging you. Hearing that it's significant must be satisfying.

I guess it is because I've been just, again, the number one thing that I've been experiencing with this is just embarrassment, which is, for me, worse than any actual pain that I can feel. the psychic pain of embarrassment is very acute to me and so i guess you're right i guess maybe i felt like yeah well this was worth being embarrassed over if he was like oh he's like i see styes that are eight times this size you know before breakfast i would say sir what denny's are you going why are you this is a very bad way to start your morning even as an ophthalmologist absolutely get some better breakfast reading material i would say right but um he uh but yeah i think the fact that he was validating yeah this is you know significant thing and also i just want to say that like he was he goes basically when he sat down with me initially he goes okay well there's a couple of ways that we can address this and i said let's do the way that involves you cutting this thing out because like we're not going to talk about i don't want to talk about a hot compress anymore i don't want to talk about um antibiotics i don't and and he goes all right i go i go this is a weird thing to say because no part of me is looking forward to this procedure but a big part of me is looking forward to this thing not being in my eyelid anymore and so i'm more than willing to go through that i think he probably has people that come in and they're like what do i do about and if they have normal civilian jobs or maybe they're just not racked by insecurity they say he's like well you know we could just keep hot compressing it i can give you a topical ointment and we can just see what happens and you don't have anyone slash

I bet you 90% of the U.S. population goes, yeah, let's do door number one. 100% of me does that. I'm part of a small and deeply insecure group of people that are just like, take it all. I don't care how uncomfortable this is. Now, the thing about it is, Andrew, and you'll note, I don't know how well you can see this over the internet connection here, but I have a Band-Aid on my lower eyelid.

Oh, that's what that is. We don't have very huge screens here, so I thought you just had a slight discoloration. That's why, okay. I got to say, I was a little surprised. I thought you were going to be coming in with, like, seriously, potentially an entire patch covering the eye, or that I was going to see much more redness under your eye. What I thought I was seeing was almost like a black eye, like the early beginnings of a black, like a yellow bruised eye. But what I'm seeing is actually a bandage.

You're seeing a band-aid because what is actually going on now, Andrew, with my eyelid is easily five orders of magnitude worse than it was before the procedure

I kind of figured but the thing is now you have an end game though

supposedly the thing he said is this will kick start the healing and I was like kick start the healing I thought this was the healing I think I had a fantasy that because basically what this has been there's a bump in my eyelid and i thought well if you go in and you make an incision and then you scrape slash kind of vacuum out the content of the bump in my eyelid then there won't be a bump anymore then this thing will be like you'll have drained it like there'll be nothing left yeah but instead at least in the short term when i finally i didn't see it he gave me some gauze He told me about the bleeding tears, and then I got out to my car, and then I looked in the mirror, and I was horrified. It was so much larger than it had been before, and a deep red color, because it's like, I don't know, filling with blood. It's been agitated. It's like it is so much worse than it was when I went in. Now, yes, ideally, the healing process has been kick-started, and uh this will hopefully go away in a week or so but i'm now i'm worried that i've actually made things much worse in the short term and we've got like live wire on thursday night at rev hall big show for us i've got filming in la on friday got a lot going on where i was hoping this thing would be better rather than uh worse and right now it feels like it might be actually

worse yeah i mean i guess i thought we were on the same page with that i kind of by the way i don't know if you're looking at me or not and i'm scrolling through my phone i'm not ignoring you i'm looking i'm not even joking i'm looking for like the cutest picture of bingo i can post for today's show pick because i think we need all of this gruesome talk about the eye surgery i think we need something that is a very soft landing for when people look at the or is that going to be

or is that misleading is that going to be the ultimate play action fake is that going to draw the defense in before we throw over the top with my tails of disgusting eye problems i mean really

good i'll leave that in your capable hands and brain i found i found a photo of both of my cats standing on our little dinette chair looking up at me expectantly looking for food this is from a few months ago but i'm emailing that to myself right now because i need that right now and i think the listeners might need that as well um so i gotta say i did expect that like here's the way I look at it, not that, and again, I sound like I'm pretending to be an expert on styes. I've never had one, but I've had pimples before. Well, I recently read some paperwork on them. Oh, good. Fantastic. Right next to the thing that had the schedule for the E-line and a pamphlet for where you can go into some caves underneath some waterfalls while you're on vacation. That's what I picture in those pamphlets. There's three kinds of things you can find in those pamphlet holders. Doctor's office.

Is anyone taking any of those tourist materials from the La Quinta lobby any longer?

It's always like the La Quinta Inn, exactly.

Is that how anyone is navigating their vacation in the year of our Lord 2024?

So I've never had a stye, but I've had, you know, pimples. I mean, I've probably even had boils.

Oh, by the way, that's also something that they said, I think, in this paperwork, is that they literally said it's basically a pimple in your eye, and I was like, come on, guys.

Well, that's what we've been talking, right?

Well, I haven't used the P word yet.

It's a pus-filled pimple.

Oh, by the way, I asked if I could keep the chickpea-sized hardened ball of pus, and he explained that's not how that works. He goes, it's not going to come out like that. Yeah, I kind of figured it was much. It's not a, I thought maybe it'd be like an. intact i go i wanted to make an earring out of it he said no um i had a good time me and dr simon

sounds like it um it's the friends you made along the way but i i would say like if you think about it like if you have a big pimple on your face or something and you pop it the this is a minor version of what you're talking about but um you know what you're gonna it's gonna be worse before it's better right like you've messed with it it's gonna be very red it's going to be open for a bit and then hopefully by the end of that day it calms down a little bit but you've had something

much more severe than that yes and no because listen i am somebody not to brag who has not only dealt with eye pimples but face pimples um way too far into my middle age than i would like and so i'm somebody who knows a thing or two uh i know a thing or two about having embarrassing acne andrew because i pretty much had it my whole life yeah and one of the things that happens is sometimes you'll have a pimple that is very red and inflamed because of course it's like that's your body is trying to fight out well actually what's happened is a sebum gland has become blocked and then your body starts to it builds up this oil or whatever and then your body starts to send in like a response to it to try to get rid of whatever's going on and that's the inflammation that's the pus but sometimes if you just very gently with a sterile needle if you lance it and you drain it it's remarkable how quickly the problem recedes now the issue with my eye is that it's the bottom of the volcano you know what i mean that's what i've never seen i've never seen what the part under my skin is doing if i'm if i were to be dealing with a with a pimple so i mean up is down cats lying with dogs like i don't know what to i don't know what to make of this whole situation suffice it to say i think intellectually i knew that it was going to probably like intellectually i knew i wasn't going to walk out and look in my rearview mirror oh by the way on the subject of rearview mirrors if you want to be humbled about anything in your life in terms of your face etc go check it out in your rearview mirror is the rear there is the worst i think so because this is my theory and somebody can confirm or deny this for me. I have a theory that there is something about the way that rear view mirrors are designed. It has to do with visibility. I know a number of women who shall remain nameless who have expressed to me that when they're trying to really figure out if they have any unwanted hairs growing out of their face, they will do it in the rear view mirror of their car. It's a known

tactic. I'm going to need you to name all of these women. I do not understand why you are not naming names. Genevieve. Okay. Rodin. Yes. Wait, I'm just looking at a text chain I'm on. Sorry. Sorry, you guys have another home project you're all working on.

No, but, like, I think this – I don't have any science behind this, but I guess I wouldn't be shocked to learn that there is something about the particular composition of a rearview mirror that is related to visibility and quickly identifying what is going on that makes it a little different than just, like, the mirror in your bathroom? I mean, what I can say anecdotally is the mirror in my bathroom here at my house looks one kind of way, and then the rearview mirror of my Mazda looks a different kind of way in terms of the granular detail of, like, my pores and things.

Were you parked outside, too? I wonder if, like, all that good daylight. I mean, I know it's a little foggy, but still, like, natural.

No, no, definitely. That's definitely a factor. there's a lot going on all all of which is to say that when even though i sort of understood well this is not going to be this is not going to fix this this morning he was so excited about the drainage as he was draining and he was like he was really this is when i did feel some self-satisfaction although i was crying out of both eyes and gripping the gripping the seat like i was in a roller coaster and my and my protective bar had just come undone yeah yeah no i mean if i were there

my fingerprint would still be in the seats i'm sure it would be crumpled like something been there something from like a naked gun movie where they have to yeah exactly like lucas lucas that's

the sound of luke prying fingers off of a chair and armor where there is now permanent indentations but um but but so he was so like oh yeah we're getting great like this is we're getting a lot out of this i was like oh man this is going better than i mean other than the feeling i was having like this is going better than we could have expected it's got a slop bucket seriously well okay so that was the other thing i i don't understand how at this point i still wasn't really and again i apologize if this is a bit gruesome i'll try not to be overly so but let me just say that after it was all said and done and i then i looked down at the um like little kind of side table that had all the instruments on it and stuff that had been going on in the pause despite having just gone through it i was quite shocked at what the at the at the aftermath of the whole thing like somehow it hadn't occurred to me that this would be something that would create a significant amount of bleeding and stuff like that i don't know why i didn't think that was going to happen but i i don't know i just didn't expect it i looked over there and that was when i was like oh okay this is like a significant thing has just occurred occur and uh yeah when i got to the car and looked in the rearview mirror i was quite disappointed in how much worse it all looked because all i could think of was live wire on thursday talica on friday i plan on referring to them only as talica that's good like my friend john de young used to um and uh and i was hoping that this thing would be a lot more tolerable by then but it seems a lot i guess i could always just wear this band-aid which is you know it's not like deep you're looking at it right now although you're also a noted face-blind person, but it's not, like, crazy distracting, right?

No, no, not over...

I mean, again, over the screen... If you were James Hetfield and I was asking you about a marching band competition...

I mean, first of all, when you're interviewing Metallica, you should try to look as sort of, like, tough, and, like, you should have... Well, that's why I asked the doctor

to go in from the outside.

Yeah, right?

I said maximum scarring, sir.

Like, I want to look like Frankenstein here. By the way, quick aside about this Metallica thing. You mentioned that, just like they're doing with this marching band event that Metallica has a reputation for being very good to like kind of like nonprofits and stuff like that. And I heard from somebody who will remain nameless and I won't name the organization because I don't know if there was supposed to be anonymity around this or not. I doubt it. But somebody who, a friend of ours who was listening to the show yesterday texted me to say, and they work for a nonprofit that does really good, really hard work in the community. Metallica was in town for a show. I want to say in the last year or so and I guess dropped like 20 grand on this organization like no idea how who set up the it didn't seem like there was any kind of like um a lot of communication around it ahead of time or that it was a it was just like they were in town maybe they looked up local organizations they decided this was a good one and and just dropped 20 20 or 20 grand so that's really cool yeah it's kind of nice it was it was nice for me to kind of hear that because Sometimes when you hear about really, really rich people, well, I mean, like, he's just, no, you know, you never know, like, is it a tax thing? You know what I mean? How much of it is, but whatever, that hearing that very specific example of that, it's like, oh, wow, that's really cool. But having said that, I do think that you're, I mean, I think you saw your eye at the absolute worst that it's going to be. It's not going to get worse after that. And also the swelling, swelling goes down. You know what I mean?

Well, if you notice, I'm icing like a maniac.

Oh, is that what that is?

Yeah. Yeah, so it's funny. It's like life comes at you fast. Everyone who I've seen over this has been saying hot compress, hot compress, hot compress, and today the doctor said cold compress today because your eyelid will be swelling because we just cut it open. So it's a roller coaster of experience here between the hot compress and the cold compress. I'm like a McDLT.

Well, you were the one who was taking antibiotics and probiotics. I still blame the probiotics.

I'm still doing that. I took two probiotics this morning That's why you got styes Yeah, exactly I'm sorry, style, Andrew I have style I have different kinds of style

That is the irony This whole time you were searching for style And you ended up with a style

I suddenly realized they were talking to me

Thank you for being a 10

Alright, let's thank some donors these folks have I was going to say they've made it through the most gruesome part of today's show but I actually don't know that for a fact you know you don't know what I'm sitting on

what I'm going to unleash in the back half of this episode

no no no what I mean is I don't know if like Tricia Shearer of Bellingham Washington had to tune out

oh sure yeah

what I know is that these are the names I'm about to read are incredibly generous supportive folk i was trying to explain this podcast to dr simon today andrew and oh yeah because i he i said um well i was telling him can i record this for my podcast and he had i believe he was familiar with my radio work my live wire stuff and um and i was said to him yeah i know i do a daily podcast as well um i've been doing it for you know 15 plus years or something and um he asked no follow-up questions which i was offended by because i do think that's a long time to be doing a podcast

Well, next year, around this time, we better be thanking a Dr. Simon in this very segment. I think we are going to turn him into a listener and a donor in 12 months' time.

I mean, that's the plan. Honestly, that would be my greatest accomplishment. Also, it would help me recoup some of that. copay yeah absolutely um but uh what i didn't have to explain to the good doctor because you seemed uninterested was that this thing this thing only exists because of you the the tbtl supporters the folks like trisha shearer in bellingham washington a place i know and love um in the way that i know and love sisters oregon that's where jennifer johnson is does sisters oregon

have any claim to fame it's got a unique name it's on the way to bend if you're coming from

portland i know that that i've driven through sisters a few times going out to bend and coming back i've been to bend it's also where jennifer johnson's from i mean does it need anything else

no not at all in fact i feel bad for insulting jennifer by even asking that question thank you

for your donation jennifer i can also promise that i will have the song from white christmas sisters jangling through my head for the rest of the day um i love that song so much i don't know if we sing songs that way anymore with those lyrics they're not it's not the worst it's the part where it says lord help the mister who comes between me and my sister and lord help the sister who comes between me and my man i could still say that i think that's fine i think the problem with

white christmas is the black face right isn't there black face on white christmas or am i confusing that with another holiday film i you know what i mean i have watched white christmas

a lot then you would know i'm then i apologize i feel like i would recoil from that in a way that would be memorable but also it's possible that i have just no lost over it um you know what i mean so i don't i don't want to i can't say officially one way or the other um i wonder

you know it does look like white christmas um yeah there's definitely some this one might have a minstrel number without the actual blackface but there's another number there's an if it's not white christmas there's definitely a a film from this era because we have a friend blackface christmas that was you know what now that you say it it was right there in the title all along yeah yeah so i mean honestly i'm not trying to be the no fun nick here i just was asking

Just being no fun, that's all. I'm trying to be the no fun police. I just have recently been deputized and sworn in. Now, there is, I'm sure, so much about that movie that is kind of doesn't hold up. You know what does hold up? The generosity of Amy Rohrabach, who's in Seattle, Washington.

Thank you, Amy.

Amy, thank you. We really appreciate you. As we do, Nicole Hampton is down in Portland, Oregon. I feel like I'm surrounded by love right now, Andrew. I don't know if the universe knows that I'm in a bad way with this eye, but it's like people in Bellingham where I lived, people in Sisters, Oregon, where I've driven through, people in Seattle, people in Portland. It's just everywhere you look within an 80-mile radius, you've got people supporting TBTL.

Can I clarify something here? Because I feel like we have not talked about blackface and the history of blackface enough during this segment. No, I mean. And it just seems like it's like hand in a glove sort of time to talk about this stuff.

honestly what it's a it's a use case for tbtl which i think helps really spur donations only

because i raised the the wretched head of this beast the specter of this beast i feel like i should clarify here it is my understanding from a very very very brief uh bit of googling here that i was mistaken i think that white christmas i think there has been some like um conversation about some of the performances connection to minstrel shows of the past which would be more of a sort of, I guess, from my perspective, a slightly more subtle critique because there isn't actual blackface. I believe the movie I was thinking of was Holiday Inn, which still has, I believe that has Fred Astaire in it as well and Bing Crosby. So anyway, I believe that if people were sort of like, if people were in the know on that and throwing their phones, I just wanted to sort of clean that up a little bit.

but let me also get your back on this because i was searching the the the leaky database that is my brain and there is a song called mandy no relation to the uh barry manilow number where i believe they say something about how they miss those minstrel shows uh maybe that's what i'm thinking and it's bing crosby and danny k i believe singing this and it's i think what it it kind of ends up being, well, first of all, a nostalgic mention of minstrel shows, which is gross, and then overall, just kind of like sort of almost blackface vibe minus the actual blackface, but just a kind of a vibe that's not my favorite part of that particular film. So you're not wildly off. I mean, I'm wildly off for bringing it up. I mean, that's your new MTV show, right? Wildly off? Wildly off.

Is it legal to be this insane?

Excuse me, America. Do you, excuse me, Chelsea.

of Seattle, Washington. Do you mind? Do you mind? Thank you, Chelsea. Appreciate you, Chelsea. And then Troy Tortorich is in Lake Stevens, Washington. Wow, beautiful Lake Stevens. Another place that I've been to. Me too. It's where Camaro Kev hails from. It's my one and main connection to the beautiful hamlet of Lake Stevens. Anyway, thank you so much to all of our donors for making TBTL happen today. despite the fact that it didn't buy me any cred with my ophthalmologist. I'm glad to get to do this as my job, so thank you so much. Hello and welcome to Top Story. I mean, obviously the Top Story is probably this whole eye situation, but I don't have a particular sort of roadmap for this conversation, Andrew, but I did think since we talked about it the other day that we might just check in you and i on the kind of latest development in the capture of the suspect in the shooting incident the the murder in um in midtown manhattan uh and this guy luigi manzioni who very much appears to be again it's it's it's all alleged but there seems to be a lot of damning evidence uh pointing in the direction of this person and again i'll start this conversation the way i started it the other day which is like i don't want to sound glib i don't i know a person died and that is not how we should settle our differences as far as like health policy and other things it's just to never be the case and there are some kids out there who like lost their dad those kids had nothing to do with what kind of coverage united healthcare does and does not cover so putting that out there i think that it is interesting to me the way that this story ended up playing out because it was so much less cinematic than i guess i sort of expected like somehow this guy was both again he's alleged to have done this but if it ends up being the case that he was the one that did it he was somehow both super duper like calculating and also incredibly cavalier like i think because you know he had gotten away with it in the short term there was this thought that like maybe he's a a spy or maybe he's a super agent or you know like some kind of a john wick type and that he's already in russia with bashar al-assad or something like and it's like no he was in altoona pennsylvania at a freaking mcdonald's after and you know again i don't offer this as a joke but like the fact that the main picture of his face that we have was because he was flirting, allegedly. Like, it's so weird that somebody could both pull off the components of this in a way that was very sophisticated, but then also just, like, pull his mask down to flirt with somebody, and then also you had to sit in the McDonald's to eat?

Wasn't the flirtation, I just want to, I want to, and you've read more about this. I just, well, I want to just ask you about it, because I don't want to push back, because I think you've read a lot more about this, but i just and also i know more about the subject of flirtation and you feel more about well i don't know give me some credit um no you do uh but i got the i thought that like somebody at the at the hostel said hey pull down your mask so i can see that face and then that that person was maybe a little flirty because they needed to see his face like i is the story that he was going and but i mean maybe i'm wrong about that there's a lot of information swirling around i just have not read whatever you read that seems really like his undoing was he couldn't sort of keep his face unmasked because i mean although it is a drop dead handsome face it is a really handsome face has taken note of right yeah exactly um so anyway i just wanted to kind of clarify that because i'm not exactly sure i'm just not sure how much i am buying into that flirty narrative until i hear it's something more substantial about it.

That's probably a good thing to note. I think the word flirt and flirtation, I think I first saw it on CNN, and that was somebody speculating, that was like a CNN sort of crime analyst, whatever that means, saying, and then what I took to be the case was that somebody had interviewed the person at the hostel who had checked him in, but I've never seen an account with that person, I've never seen that person named. I've never, like, read a quote of them saying, yeah, he was flirting. So you're right. Like, I don't know if I can say, in the words of Anthony Weiner, yesterday it was like, in the words of Jenny McCarthy. Today it's in the words. Yeah, right. What's his name again? They're stacking up Carlos Danger. Yeah, I don't know why I know it. Carlos Danger. I cannot say with any certitude, Andrew, that he was flirting.

Okay. And I could be wrong. And maybe he was. Maybe he did sort of invite this upon himself. I just wanted to, you know, I could be wrong about it, but I just wanted to sort of distance myself from that narrative until I know for sure. sure how that well it's a big but but you know what it is actually a big it's an important point though because if he walked into the hostel and the person checking him in said look our policy is that we have to compare your photo id to your face and that's why he pulled the mask down that's one thing um if nobody asked him to pull the mask down and he just did that because he was you know uh again in a flirtatious moment that's a whole other thing because i could see a hostel having a policy it's like well people people are sharing rooms you know like we need to know if you're the person on this id and i mean the allegation is he was you know using fake id everywhere but still they might want to compare his actual face to the face on the fake id which they don't know is fake um so that would be a different thing that would be less of a self-own

i think in my mind yeah this can i can i read to you this is from and i feel like this is probably mostly ap copy although to be honest with you it's from news 18.com so i don't know what local station that is so i guess take everything with a grain of salt but here's here are two lines from the story one of the images obtained from a cctv video showed luigi revealing his face to a receptionist when she asked him to show his face a report with the new york post suggested luigi was flirting with the receptionist at the moment so i could just sort of see the post Phil, Mike Lupica says he was flirting. Yeah, you know, Phil Mushnick won't have any more of this crap. We see this photo where he looks very handsome and he looks very charming. He looks, I'm trying to think what the word is. He's flashing a flirty looking smile. That's how I describe it. But it could be one of those things where this is such a sensationalist story that the Washington Post just kind of runs with that, then CNN. Well, the New York Post or the Washington Post? I'm sorry, the New York Post. I didn't say Washington before, did I? You just said the words Washington. Oh, I just said it now. I misspoke I'm sorry but specifically the New York Post being that kind of a publication a tabloid totally kind of running with that yeah yes the only reason I was clarifying there was

not to be annoying but just because you're right like the New York Post yeah no 100% the kind of publication that would totally make up some bullshit like that yeah where you know so um so that okay well that's a really good clarification honestly because my whole way of thinking about the the aftermath of this crime and again putting aside the actual crime which is really a terrible thing is like i can't like had that moment not occurred my guess is he might still be um you know eluding capture because the person in the mcdonald's the i think it was like an employee at this mcdonald's recognized him i think from the photos that were being widely circulate although here's one other thing he did have his mask on so if you spotted him like with his mask on in mcdonald's and you recognized him like you might also recognize him from the photos where he's wearing a mask you know like you you were able to piece this together he was wearing a you know like a medical mask and i guess on his laptop in this mcdonald's i mean it's it's just i also wonder and it sounds like i'm saying why did you mess this up dude i'm I'm just, the whole thing just has really fascinated me, I guess, but, like, I'm just surprised he was eating in a McDonald's, like, and also, it was, and I say this with peace and love to Altoona, Pennsylvania, a wonderful place, I'm sure, but, like, it's so far from Argentina, or something, like, these stories that people like me had written in our mind about this guy's, like, amazing law enforcement evading capacity, and, like, he's already, you know he's on that beach with Andy Dufresne right now or something no he was just in Altoona Pennsylvania eating at a McDonald's and something he apparently loved because in his social media there's also a photo going around of him from years ago holding up a happy meal box from McDonald's with the Lion King on it he looks very excited about this like I think this guy may have

been addicted to McDonald's food I mean I do think McDonald's is McDonald's eye are places that are sort of anonymous if you're if you're on the road if especially if you're on the lam yeah um and if you're in a somewhat uh you know like not a super um kind of populated part of the country or this or that state like i could see a mcdonald's being sort of like just feeling like a bit of a safe harbor where you can go and be anonymous for a little bit use their wi-fi and then get out of there so yeah i can definitely see that i mean i feel a little bit well first of all i was really what's where i had cognitive dissonance yesterday as i think a lot of people did hearing about his arrest or detainment um because when they found him they found a manifesto which okay and then or you know alleged in front of all this alleged manifesto whatever yeah yeah um and a weapon and i believe i had heard i want to be careful here but i believe i heard also the silencer maybe.

be like something that really made it stand out and that was the kicker i think and that's where i was kind of like i don't know that i expected this guy to be out of the country i would assume that being on the lam one of the hardest last steps would be to actually leave the country because there are so many checks and yeah i don't know if there's balances but there's certainly a lot of checks the checkpoints you have to go through and to identify yourself there so i could see it being very hard to leave the country i thought maybe it would be easier just to find a very rural place and where you're not recognized much and maybe just stay out of the light for a long time yeah but the thing is i thought that he was so much smoother based on the fact that he was not caught in broad daylight in manhattan and having so much cctv coverage of him going into the park they have coverage of him coming out of the park they have coverage of him going into a bus station i don't know i'll never understand how they lost the trail at the bus buses are only go so many places it's not like he he rented or even stole a car you know but um so i was

and he had monopoly money in his back yeah which i god knows what if he had and if that was supposed

to be part of a stunt or another another sort of big um you know statement of some sort but when he was caught with the weapon still and these other things i was like oh you're not a mastermind And like law enforcement just this up somehow. Yeah, because I was going to say before I felt a little bit foolish because these are like nine hundred ninety nine times out of a thousand. These are always just one person acting alone. But because he was able to sort of disappear from New York City in broad daylight in this manner, I did fancy a little notion that maybe he did have some help. Not that he was part of some huge terrorist cell, but potentially there are some other like minded people who believe that, you know, have a burn it all down mentality towards if not just corporate America, certainly the the system of our health care right now in this capitalist society. And maybe like, you know, a very small band of people planned this out in a way that he was they were able to orchestrate an escape from for him. And then just to see like, oh, no, he wasn't even really trying. I mean, sort of seemed like, well, if they catch me, I'm giving it all up. You know what I mean? I didn't even try to ditch any of that stuff. And again, I only have fairy tale sort of like storybook sort of visions of this stuff. I have no idea what it's like to be on the lam or anything like that. So so I don't know if there's if there's difficulty in doing that, but you just sort of think like you couldn't and you why didn't you ditch this stuff at a bus station at the bottom of a trash can or something?

Right. Why didn't you shave your eyebrows before you even started this? Because he had very, very distinct. Some would say very luscious eyebrows. They're very recognizable. Like what if you shaved your eyebrows and you kept your mask up at all times? And if when you went into the hostel, they said you have to take your mask down and you just said, I'll just go, I'm going to go sleep in Central Park for this week. Like, and then what if you had a flight from JFK to Moscow on whatever the day was at noon and, you know, at 11 a.m. And you get to you get to JFK and granted, in retrospect, later on, they would have been able to trace you there. They would have seen you in a million cameras in the in the airport. But you would be in a non extradition country by that time. Again, it sounds like I'm rooting for him. I'm not really rooting for him per se, but I was, I was very tied up in the kind of cinematic nature of this and somehow just being kind of, you know, a sort of a person who is broken in some way, who's just eating in a McDonald's and Altoona. It's like, it's such a whimper at the end of this story, as opposed to something that, you know, seems like a new Netflix series.

Yeah. I also was struck by, you know, as you were reading the background of this guy. Yeah. How he and he grew up like, you know, in a rich family with a lot of valedictorian of things. Yeah, like he went to like really good schools and he excelled in them. So he's like this like kind of he's grown up to be a, you know, a wealthy, successful or poised for success, good looking white guy in America with, you know, like these parents who own a couple of different golf businesses, a couple of different businesses, including a radio station, by the way, a radio station. Yeah, a conservative radio station, I think. I believe so. And and I think maybe involved in I think they are involved in or some family members are involved in politics, I believe, Republican politics. And so he kind of grew up in this way. I guess the one thing that I start I was thinking when I started this sentence was he also totally dropped out of family and social circles about six months ago, which, again, if you were trying to if you were thinking long term about this as opposed to just maybe spiraling and not thinking straight. If you were.

truly strategizing this by yourself or potentially with others you would probably not you would not like just suddenly disappear to the point where people were like dude are you are you going to be here for my wedding or not i don't know if you read that dazzling detail there was some some friend of his after he had disappeared for a while was kind of like i need to know are you going to i don't know what his role was in his friend's wedding but like clearly he's left a community behind who's already panicked and wondering where is he from family and friends so when this news breaks and everybody's like and you see this flash of the smile or whatever there's a whole bunch of people who knew right away that's our dude who went missing

that's the thing none of them apparently dropped a dime on him which is really interesting i think i didn't yeah i didn't read the news because i'm a kid but i saw a headline in one of the papers that said the question was like do you have to report a family member or someone you know if you recognize their photo and the short answer is no you don't actually that was the extent of my reading

of the article was the headline but isn't that raises a question also of how many people might have recognized him at other mcdonald's or other places and they were just like kind of swept up in this populist like hero worship for the guy i mean here's what i think i think if someone else

recognized him and didn't call the cops they would have been so freaking out with their friends like oh my god you have no idea who's here that my guess would be that it would eventually like if you had 30 people in altoona being like holy shit the guy is here maybe that burbles up to the the law enforcement level at some point but i definitely think it would be it would strain credulity that his family members including his cousin who i think it's his cousin who's the republican politician who's now like getting some amount of heat because it's like i mean just imagine andrew it's you know it's my face um who you know you like you see that picture of him talking to the person at the hostel but instead it's me it's like you know immediately that it's me like there was no way that hundreds of people didn't know exactly who this dude was and as far as i can no one called it in which is a really interesting part of this story like it would appear that i mean who knows maybe they again total speculation on my part but there's just no way that there weren't people including maybe even his family members who saw the photos and were like holy shit it's it's luigi right good good irish boy yeah that's right as i said on uh as i said on the ascendant social media platform blue sky this brings to an end chuck mangioni's time as the top

search result for that last name who's tom mangioni again i know that chuck mangioni he was like a he's

like a jazz horn player okay he was the only mangioni i'd ever heard of before luigi mangioni who i think will now be probably the the first mangioni that you get you know who really liked that Blue Sky post was our friend Bean Baxter. That's my demo, Andrew.

Good, fantastic. With my Chuck Mangione material. I will say that I did not, I chatted with two people. This story came up very casually and not in depth in any way with a couple of people yesterday in my dealings around town. Dealings around town. I know that sounded so whatever. But I will say that the reaction from both people, I was like, hey, here they got that guy the reaction is like yeah i mean yeah yeah like both like both people were kind of like yeah i mean i didn't mean to have that tone i mean yeah and then you know it really does kind of raise the question would you would you have dropped the dime and like i know that that's an insensitive thing but i mean listen yeah we i have not heard from any listeners and it doesn't mean that they're not out there i have not heard from any listeners who said um that um you know i have not heard from anybody who has taken offense to the people who have sort of celebrated this guy or or the attention that he's brought to the industry i have heard from listeners who are like you guys were i mean kind of going to light you guys are going too soft united healthcare i've seen such messages as well exactly so you know and but like like you say like i don't i'm not comfortable um talking to a microphone and saying anything that sort of advocates for assassinations Like, I don't mean to, you know, I don't know if that's too scared of a position for me, but I feel like that's generally, I think that's generally responsible. But I would also say that we'd be missing a huge part of the story if we didn't say, like, when you do kind of mention to people, you're like, yeah, they caught him. I mean, yeah, they caught him. Like it's kind of it's it's a tough place to be because, you know, it is. And again, with all the caveats, I think a lot of people are saying and people who we've heard from are saying, I know people.

They've lost people because of the system and because of – and you can't even – I was talking to Genevieve, and so this is like playing a game of telephone. She reads one thing at the Atlantic and then tells me about it over lunch, and then I tell her on a podcast later. I mean, that's a dangerous game, Dano, as far as getting accurate information out there. And then Dr. Simon hears it, and then he becomes a donor. He says, Simon says. But but Genevieve said she was reading something at the Atlantic saying, hey, listen, you know, like, you know, kind of slapping back at the people who were positioning this guy as some sort of a hero or whatever. But they were saying and he's not responsible for the way the system is. The system's broken. And that's where I call bullshit. Like, no, no, somebody in his position is 100 percent responsible for the way the system is. You're talking about the CEO. Yeah, the CEO, because when you're in that position, you are involved in and have power over one of the most powerful and richest lobbying communities that sets up laws that help establish this as status quo in our country. And like the the the you know, I'm glad people I am glad that people are talking about that now. I'm glad politicians are talking about it now. I mean, it's a it's a bad thing to happen. But like, boy, is this the definition of populism? Like somebody has to lose their life at gunpoint with the cinematic flair of having words written on the shell casings to have people in Congress starting to say maybe we need to take another look at it.

i mean that's the to me that is a really really interesting question as far as the i think most people at least people like me uh who maybe haven't i haven't like personally bat i mean other than being mildly annoyed i had to go to an optometrist before the ophthalmologist but like i i haven't seen the direct results of like a health care provider denying coverage and it causing someone in my life to become very sick or to lose their life i don't think i understood the visceral level of rage that so many americans feel at the healthcare system i mean i know that people don't like it but i don't think i understood how strong it was until this thing happened and and within minutes of the of the news that it was the ceo of united healthcare immediately the internet just said good you know basically like i don't think i understood where the temperature was on this and i wonder if if this isn't something that that will also like tell those clowns in congress and other places that like and also it's like a lot of people got on the internet and said good and nothing happened to them like i wonder if this doesn't begin i think you might have said this to me and you're either on or off air but i've been reusing it that sort of eat the rich idea like it's i just wonder what the if this will start a conversation in a way um that we wouldn't have expected where we really do say at least we we have a real conversation around should this be a for-profit industry i mean it's so messed up that this guy was going into if i understand right a shareholders meeting like for united health care in other words people and businesses and funds that are like you know where we can make some money health care like or lack thereof like the idea that a company would be incentivized to try to spend as little money as possible helping you stay alive so that they could perform well and reward their investors the idea that that would ever apply to health care is

so profoundly fucked up yeah you know it's just and it's so messed up the level of wealth of the people who are getting rich off of it like that's kind of the thing it doesn't feel like well we're all in this together it's the system we have and and and therefore we all are trying to work within it and yes some people are doing a little bit better than others if you're in a position of like you know running one of these one of these you know for-profit insurance companies but like when you look at and yeah i was mentioning to you the sort of eat the rich mentality because i mean and again i i want to be somewhat careful i don't want to sound like a pundit who doesn't know what he's talking about trying to create a pattern here where maybe there isn't one but it's hard for me not to immediately think of the celebration i saw on social media when um when orcas started attacking rich people which has a bit more frivolous story to it um you know knocking over yachts and what have you but then also the much darker story of the of the millionaires and billionaires who died at the bottom of the ocean with that whole saga of the um submarine that yeah so anyway i um i i feel like and i'm seeing kind of more and more of it and i i will say this too like people hate i mean we we we take advantage of the airline industry but i do think that there's a there's a hatred in many ways of the airline industry and you know like leaving people on planes and mismanagement and the the

the lack of like kind of a power as somebody who is like, you know, a consumer of airline services. The asymmetry of it is so frustrating. But I tell you if a, if the head of a airline was shot dead in public like this, going into a shareholders meeting, the reaction would be very different. I do not think that the, the killer would have as much sympathy. It's very specific and it's literally a life or death thing that people are just making Scrooge McDuck swimming pools full of money while people are

are dying you're totally right like that was i think all these big you know fortune 500 companies are like taking down the headshots of their ceos and you know executives from their websites and it's like look you're not in any danger monsanto exxon like maybe you know we should be talking critically about what you guys are doing to the world but like this is an incredibly specific industry that you're right this if it was the it was the ceo of an airline we would all be horrified it was the ceo of of anything that wasn't health care we would be the initial thought would be probably horror maybe with some questions around like well what is this industry doing that it engenders it creates such strong feelings and such violent feelings in people but like this health care thing is is sui generous it's just like it's the only thing like this i think where Everyone was just like, had it coming, you know?

Yeah, and again, because it is life or death, I think, on both sides.

Here I go once again with the email. Every week, I hope that it's from a female. No, man, it's not from a female.

All right, emails or V-mails?

Yes, I wanted to say, I think this might be a super appropriate voicemail to play at the end of this show because we talked about some pretty gruesome things. Actually, both of our stories had a bit of darkness to them. Well, one was about surgery, which I guess is not darkness, but it certainly gave me some weird feelings. But we got a voicemail here, and this is a long story. This is a full four minutes. We're going to lay out for it. I was on the edge of my seat listening to this voicemail this morning. It comes from a listener who did not leave their name, and it came onto the voicemail line in early November. Now, if you'll recall, around Halloween time in October, we were asking people to send in spooky stories from their real life to celebrate Halloween. This came in about a week after Halloween, and there's a reason for it. It's that the person telling the story was too scared to submit it at nighttime, and finally, I guess, under the November sun on the 5th of November was able to call in with this story.

So I know I'm late to this, but every time I thought about this story, it was late at night, and I was too scared to call in. So I wanted to call in with my spooky story. And this is actually a story that involved my dad. And I had heard about this as a child, and I thought about it a few times as an adult. But when I brought it up to my mom a few years ago, she said to me, like, very directly, do not ever bring up that story to your father. So I never did. And I actually remember when I was young, someone bringing the story up around the campfire, and my dad got up and walked away. So my dad was visiting me recently, and I figured, you know, now that I'm older, I can do what I want. I decided to ask him about this story. and I actually saw the change in him as we were talking about the story. So when I was young, my dad got a promotion for his job that had him working in a town that was about two hours away, and my parents were looking for homes in this new town on the weekend, but during the week, my mom had offered up her family home and had been vacant for quite some time, and my dad was going to sleep there during the week when he had work. And this is in rural, you know, cornfield-laden southern Illinois. And it is important to note that my dad only stayed at this house for a week and a half. So after work, my dad would get back to his house in the evening and he would turn on the radio and play his favorite music, which is classic rock. And he said that he would be listening and the music would just change stations back to like post-war big band type music oh no and my dad changed the radio back again and then it would revert back to big band music so my dad was like okay this is like weird but whatever then one of the nights when he was cooking supper he left some of the cabinets open and the cabinets would slam shut when he wasn't anywhere near them so he was kind of like starting to freak out now he talked to my mom about it but they were just like whatever so

one of the nights my dad was sleeping and he heard the front door unlock and then slam shut. So my dad jumps out of bed and looks around the house, but nobody was in the house. And then the next night when he was sleeping, he heard the door unlock again and he heard a voice say, mom, I'm home. So my God, my arm hairs are sitting up. So my dad was, you know, really starting to like worry about this, but he couldn't be driving like two hours each way every day to work. so finally you know my dad's getting ready for bed one night and he's you know in this you know leaning over the sink brushing his teeth and when he stands up and looks in the mirror there is a face behind him in the mirror and so obviously my dad freaks the fuck out grabs his stuff and he got in the car to go like find a motel and when he gets to the end of this like long gravel driveway a figure was standing by the mailbox next to the road and waving goodbye to him so oh my god my arm hairs so when i brought this up to my dad he um said that he had only talked about this once his entire life and that was right after it happened and he talked um to my uncle um which is his brother-in-law you know my mom's brother and my uncle said he actually thought it was my mom and his deceased brother who died a couple decades before when he was only 16 years old and so um when i talked to my dad about it recently he thought you know it was a test of his faith and blah blah blah um but anyway so that story is like really scary and every time i think about it at nighttime i have to get it out of my head because i don't want to see ghosts or spirits as my dad calls them okay power out bye okay power out there's the fastest power out ever um well

Well, you got to, honestly, you got to power out before the devil knows you're here.

May you power out a half hour before the devil knows you're dead. That had, every time the caller said the hair on my arm is going up, mine was already standing up.

I mean, okay, I don't think there's anything that can compete with another face in the mirror. But I think old-timey music is right up there. It was a good setup for what will happen later, yeah. has anyone ever heard that kind of like shining era music you know when they weren't looking for it and felt like this is a good thing like there's not a scarier kind of music if you're not expecting it right like it's just and i don't know if that's the effect of the shining or not but like i've told this story on the show before i'm sure but like when i was uh young and impoverished uh i would uh i don't recommend this kids but i would sometimes visit the radio station i worked at uh late at night to let's just say maybe take possession of some of the free books on the free shelf the review copies of books which i then very possibly would take over to the half price books on a roosevelt way and uh get a little uh pocket money i think literally money to buy diapers okay so don't judge me people actually do judge me you know life is all about decisions and consequences And I've got a pretty spotty track record But anyway Sometimes when I would be in there And it would be the swing years and beyond But it would be the rebroadcast, Andrew And this is the old KUO

You're in the radio station after hours Nobody else is there Nobody else is here

It's already the swing years With Cynthia Doyon, Rest in Power Had aired, and I think in these days In the mid-90s or something I think it was like the show She would live, she would host the show And then my memory is that There would somehow be a rebroadcast of it Maybe starting at midnight It'd go from midnight to three Just like the tape of the show or something And there is Honestly it was probably good for me Because it helped keep my kleptomania in check Because there's nothing more terrifying Than skulking around KUOW At one in the morning Trying to pilfer free books When it's like it's like this i am in the shining right now and i am going to come around a corner it's going to

be an old lady looking for me or those twins yeah right i am i don't believe in ghosts like at all i don't believe in anything except for sports jinxes and that i have the power of affecting the outcome of a game by jinxing or not jinxing it um but that story is so oh by the way i do want to say i had to edit that a little bit because it was even longer um it was a really well told story but i should mention that the listener did say at one point and i think i clipped it out just like this my dad doesn't go around telling these stories all the time you know what i mean he's not somebody who like it is it has tells a lot of fantastical things he sounds like a very grounded down-to-earth fella this was in you know it happened to him once in his life.

which makes it even more kind of scary because he's not like some BS-er type of guy who's looking for this kind of stuff. I do think, though, the weird thing about the kind of, I guess it wasn't, was it classic? No, it was like big band-y kind of music, I guess, is a 16-year-old boy probably who I'm guessing died in the 70s or whatever. It seems like the boy would be listening to classic rock or something. Also the classic rock. Yeah, yeah. He'd be getting the let out, too. Yeah, exactly. It would be weird. Not Guy Lombardo and his Flying Canadians. It just kept coming back to cashmere by Led Zeppelin for some reason. That would tell you so much deep purple. What? Yeah, right. What's this?

What's like the pot-smokin-est music from the 70s?

Right, right, exactly. So that's the one thing that is kind of like, wow. That's where the story really falls apart for you.

I did have the same thought. Interesting taste. But maybe the teen, listen, here's the thing. Maybe the deceased uncle, maybe what he knew was if he's getting the lead out, this guy's going to stick around. This guy's going to be having a party. Yeah, right. If it's freaking Barracuda by heart, guys like, you know, is that Freedom Rock? Turn it up. You've got to play something that's going to get this guy the hell out of there. There's nothing like some Artie Miller or something, some Glenn Miller to get him out of there. There was two Millers.

That is so funny that you said that because I have something queued up here that I was going to play for you as a bit of a spoof, a spooky spoof. I think you're confusing Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw, the one-two punch of swing-era clarinetists.

Didn't Glenn Miller die in a plane crash in the English Channel or something? In the war, I think he disappeared. Yeah, it was related to the war. I don't know if he was performing for the troops.

No, no, I think he was flying a plane. I mean, I thought that he actually fought, but maybe he was just a USO.

Not just, but maybe he fought the menace of boredom for the troops.

Maybe, you're right. Maybe he didn't fight. Maybe that was a silly thing for me to think. I don't know, dude.

There was a lot of these folks that went and did, like, real army stuff, you know, despite having these very— I mean, that's the thing that's so wild about how life was back in that era versus, like, now. like can you imagine you know um i don't know who's like bruno mars or whoever's currently ruling the pop charts enlisting and then going over and then actually being like like you know fighting in the world like ted williams i believe the splendid splinter i mean he was like a legit i guess this is more like uh you know can you imagine a bryce harper going over and yeah you know fighting in iraq or something like that uh let's see here the uh triple af band completed their pre-recordings and reg this is the death of glenn miller and regular broadcast on tuesday

december 12th andrew do you know what thursday is we're so close tuesday december 12th yeah

not bad um miller was on standby for an earlier flight on december 13th that's even sooner but it was canceled due to bad weather in france his reservation on december 14th was also canceled he was frustrated and impatient and fearing arrangements would not be made in time to accommodate the movement of his unit to France I'm still trying to figure out I think I have an answer for you please bail me out of this

I have a slightly more concise one I think here this is from PBS and I trust PBS more concise than what I was just doing? and this one actually does call it the disappearance of Glenn Miller so it says here I think I can nail this in a couple of sentences here but it does sound like he was a USO guy as Glenn Miller's musical career soared He traded in his commercial success for a military uniform to entertain U.S. troops during the war. Then on a foggy afternoon, December 15th, 1944, he took off from England, heading for France. His plane vanished over the English Channel. Like you said, Glenn Miller was never seen again. So I did say it was a disappearance. You did say English Channel. But he was not fighting. In fact, he was 40 years old. But, man, you're right. This is 1944. Does this say 1944? And we are in 2024. So it's actually like a, it is like a very, it is a very specific anniversary we're coming up to here.

It's the 80-year anniversary of Glenn Miller going missing. And by the way. In five days. Yeah. Not confirmed dead. That's true. That is a really good point. Also, I'm looking at his gravestone, which feels premature. It says, in memory of Alton Glenn Miller. Do you think anyone called him Artie just for fun? Do you think there's any chance?

I called him Artie Miller

his first name was Alton I'm just saying maybe somebody once was like hey Artie yeah maybe that's probably why you called him Artie

it probably has nothing to do with Artie Shaw Just because, as you could tell, I have a deep encyclopedic knowledge of the life and times of Alton Miller, as I call him.

I have an Artie Shaw record. In fact, I'll just play. I was going to sneak this up. I need to make it creep you out.

Are we going to get pulled down in ghost towns across the United States for playing this?

Potentially. There's an Eastern European ghost town that is going to pull us down. I actually do. I'll be honest. I like this kind of music. Me too. I love clarinet. I wanted a little bit of a clarinet jag earlier this fall.

Hey, dude, send me any tips you get on any of this stuff. Like I told you, I've really been digging on that guitar, that kind of jazzy guitar guy you sent me whose name now is whiffed out of my brain. Herb Ellis. Herb Ellis, yeah. I'm loving that.

Anything you got. You know what I'm going to send you is some Buddy DeFranco. He's, like, the only clarinetist I could find who was, like, sort of playing in, like, sort of the beat-hop era. Who was not Woody Allen? That's a good point. You know what? There's this guy named Woody Allen. I'm going to send you a lot of his work.

This guy named Allen Konigsberg. He's a wild man on the clarinet.

You're going to love it. I told you this on the air, right? Unproblematic.

I told you that we were described—I had to have told you this, that we were describing Woody Harrelson in detail at my family get-together. My mom thought that it was Woody Allen the whole time.

No, I don't think we talked about this.

It was remarkable. I was talking about Woody Harrelson, I was telling my sister about this podcast about Woody Harrelson's dad being suspected of, like, killing a federal judge and being a real kind of, like, career criminal, and we were all talking about Woody Harrelson, and, like, he's just the most chill guy, and, like, he just lives the chill life that Matthew McConaughey kind of cosplays, and we're talking about this, imagine, like, a ten minute conversation singing the praises of Woody Harrelson, but every single detail you think is describing Woody Allen. actually that sounds like me whatever like you know and the way he hangs out with willie nelson and he's just chilling in hawaii like to think that that's the life of woody allen is it was

incredible to me when that was revealed so was your mom like confounded like how are you guys

not bringing up like no you know what was happening was in a in a plot twist that nobody saw coming By the way, here's another plot.

Oh, I just saw you pull your Band-Aid off. Oh, yeah, you got a big black.

My Band-Aid was starting to bug me. Look at this thing.

You have something about the size of your iris right below your eye. It looks like you have two eyes. Look at me. Look at me. Yeah, it looks like you have an eye below your eye. You know what?

It looks like I've done that thing where you paint an eyeball on your eyelid or eyelet.

Yep. At the Eagles, in the Eagles bathroom, there are some old sketches that are supposed to depict drunkenness, and it's like an old cowboy, but he's got four eyes, two below. That's me. Three eyes. Yeah.

I finally opened my third eye. Yeah, way to go.

This is incredible. Nice.

No, in a plot twist, you know who was completely clocking the conversation? It was Walt. And he was trying to explain to my mom that we were not talking about Woody Allen, and she was getting pissed.

What was the indication that your mom was not following the conversation? Was she, like, kind of jumping in and saying, like, yeah, but...

No. They were having a weird, pantomimed disagreement, like, over... Like, so everyone's, I'm sitting at the dining room table. They're all sitting on the couch. I'm having a conversation with my sister Liz about the majesty that is Woody Harrelson. My dad is in the kitchen. So imagine, like, my conversation with my sister is going past my mother, who's on the couch, and landing on my sister Liz. And my dad is trying to talk to my mom kind of past this invisible beam that's created between me and Liz. There was an axis of these conversations. And me and Liz were having We had no idea at any point That my mom was misinterpreting All of this as Woody Allen related But my dad was like pantomiming to her And she was getting annoyed at my dad Because she didn't know what he was trying to say And then finally I was like what's going on And my dad was like it's Woody Harrelson Not Woody Allen And the mom was like oh I thought it was Woody Allen That was how we found out So there was something going on in her head Where she was like She was indicating I mean my mom and my dad are on connected on some sort of frequency that like is you know transcends time and space and the universe because like somehow my dad understood that my mom was confused about which woody this

is yeah as as the person who's most like your mom in this particular case like it's nice having i mean i think genevieve would probably have my back there the way walt had your mom's back like you

might no he wasn't he was telling her you're wrong well i'm sorry not have your back but have your

back socially to say, like, listen, I'm clearing this up for you because there's some confusion here, like, you know, like the Washington Post, New York Post thing.

But as, but being the person who's most like my mom in this scenario, I would be pissed. To be wrong? Correcting me. Yes, to be wrong and to be corrected. I was noting a distinct kind of indication of my mom being annoyed at my dad. And I couldn't figure out what that was my first sense that there was anything going on was my mom and my dad having this weird, silent, but like my mom being mad at my dad conversation because he was trying to act out somehow to her that it's Woody Harrelson, not Woody Allen. And then she said, I just can't believe you got two actors and their parents both named him Woody. And I said, well, mom, let's talk about Ellis Island. Mom, let's let's sit down and tell you a little about a little thing called anti-Semitism.

Wait a second. There's there's a there are two actors completely different generations. I mean, and one is named Alan Konigsberg. Right. But it also like it's that's Woody's are not overrepresented in the history of actors since the days of the silver screen. You know what I mean? It's not like, oh, man, there are so many Woodies, I can't keep them straight. It's like, yeah, there are two actors spanning generations with the same, you know, first name, whether adopted or otherwise.

I think my mom, in much the way that I was trying to save my Artie Miller reference, was trying to just salvage something about the confusion between these two guys. Yeah. Isn't it crazy that they got two actors and they're both named Woody?

Woody Harrelson could play a mean licorice stick though I'll tell you that much right now

that's a that's a crazy man reference right wasn't that the documentary they made about a wild man oh I don't know there was a whole documentary about Woody Allen's clarinet playing

that's how we ended up on Woody Allen so yeah I just wanted to throw a licorice stick isn't that what you call a clarinet

I've never heard it called that but I love it I would have played clarinet if they called it a licorice stick in high school or in middle school. I would have played a flute if they had called it a summer sausage. Oh, shoot, dude. Seriously, if they would have called that a pepperoni stick, sign me up. All right. Thanks for listening, everyone. We are going to be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you. Please do join us for that. In the meantime, have a great Tuesday. Take care of yourselves. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all. Power out.

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