Muse

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, it's twice as much shame on me. I cannot believe I allowed you to fool me again. Definitely learned from the first time not to be fooled. Fool me four times, shame back on you. Actually, you are picking on a vulnerable man. Something has obviously gone wrong with me. Fool me five times, shame on me again I mean, I'm vulnerable But at some point you have to take some personal responsibility For crying out loud Fool me six times And I have lured you into my trap Pretending to be a fool Six consecutive times To give you a false sense of security Only to flip it And now you are the fool and you have the shame for me seven times you saw through my trick but there's no shame because I'm getting fooled by the best TBTL

Hey Johnny Oh hi Danny, what's wrong with Mark? He's cranky today

Alright, let's toss the ball around

I'm a man of few words but those words will count and so will my actions sooner or later gentlemen you will eat your words you can't be that overly confident remember baby never you might eat that mic i get it i know who you are it's been explained to me i'm into it let's talk all right hello good morning and welcome everyone to a

wednesday edition of tbtl the show that just might be too beautiful to live here we go again My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. Burbank, who is he? Coming to you once again from Hell's Kitchen on the west side of Manhattan.

Cup of coffee in the big time.

And having some adventure-filled days here in New York City that I'm excited to tell you about here on episode 4,431 in A Collector Series. Let the fun begin. Speaking of adventures, I went up to New Haven, Connecticut yesterday and I took the train, which involved, well, you know, when Burbank is on the move, I'm trying a new thing where I refer to myself as Burbank. You know, when I'm traveling anywhere, I'm going to have incidents with people. I'm going to want to tell you about them. Oh, and the adventure begins again. This is no different, including the two weirdest lift rides I've had in a long time, and also a very rude person on the Amtrak Acela train. But that doesn't stop a foamer. Also, I was going up there to deep dive on the subject of the Pez candies, and I have now just enough knowledge around the Pez candy empire to be very, very annoying, and I'd like to share it with all of you.

Smarty pants dance. Smarty pants dance.

If you'll have me, if you'll allow me. I think this guy will. He has to allow me to download my Pez knowledge to him because he is the longest-running Cobra of the show. Maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. I'd like to grow a pair sometime. He's Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

Good morning, Luke. I'm sorry somebody made you a little cranky on the train, but before we get to trains, let's talk about another kind of conveyance. It's something that I think will put you, I think it's going to sweeten that mood of yours. Are you ready for your mood to be sweetened?

I do kind of need my mood to be sweetened because along with my run-in on the train yesterday, we've been having some technical times today, a lot going on, and I do think I'm coming in a bit of a grumpus, grumpy, pardon the term. And by the way, there is a Johnny Depp Pez dispenser, Andrew, Although they're very, very insistent that it's not a Johnny Depp Pez dispenser. It's a Captain Jack Sparrow Pez dispenser. Anyway, I'm a bit of a grumpy. Pardon the phrase. So, yes, I want to hear something that's going to perk me up.

So, true story. I spent more time than usual thinking of you yesterday while I was involved in a project in which I was deleting all of my enemy's phone numbers from my phone. No, I was going through old VHS tapes, as you know, I want to do. I don't know if we've talked about this recently, but I kind of fell out of my my habit or, you know, I have various low level hobbies churning at various times. And I'll kind of go through a period of intensity with one of them and then I'll put it down for a while. And, you know, I like to collect VHS tapes, like things, you know, recorded off of the television at garage sales or whatever.

I'll say here, I'll give you primarily for the commercials and promos. If I have it right, most of the stuff in between the stuff.

Yes, except I've been fascinated, you know, for a couple of years now by these early tapes of the FX network when they're all when Jeff Probst was hosting a talk show out of a living room. Anyway, so I like to I like to grab some of the programming when it seems unique, but often it's just like movies taped off of television. I'll go through and I'll grab the commercials, like you say, and I upload all I digitize them and upload all the commercials to our after these messages YouTube channel. You can check them out there. What I downloaded last night, or, well, I guess digitized last night off of a VHS tape, didn't have commercials in it. Whoever was recording this actually paused their machine so as to edit out the commercials on the fly, which seemed like a smart move back in 1993, but is a bummer move for me now in 2025 when I want to see those sweet, sweet commercials. But the actual programming itself, Luke, and I know that this is from 1993, is so good because I got myself here a copy in full of the Point Magoo air show live KCAL coverage, KCAL TV LA coverage. Have you ever heard of the Point Magoo air show before?

Have not. I've heard of Point Magoo, have not heard of the air show. Have heard of KCAL 9.

Have heard of KCAL 9. This is definitely the 1993 air show in Luke, the local TV station, KKL, which, you know, it's a when you talk about local TV, it's a little bit different in L.A. because L.A. is such a TV town. But this was like it's like they're covering this thing sort of like it's a Seahawks game. They're doing like play by play sort of of what the pilots are doing here. I'm going to play for you a little bit here. I think you're going to love this. I'm going to play for you maybe about a minute of this. And, you know, they're covering, there's like a table out there with two people from the television, you know, from the television station. And then they have guests coming on, like former Blue Angels pilots and people who had just performed are coming down and giving interviews. And so it's got a sort of like local, you know, like we're broadcasting from the car dealership vibe, but also live sports coverage. I want you to take a listen to this.

That's what they call the burner loop on takeoff. As soon as they clear, they'll go smoke off. And then we'll start rolling the solos. The first one, as you said, Blue Angel number five is Captain Kent Switzer. And he's going to accelerate his aircraft, climb to an altitude of 50 feet, and roll at 360 degrees with the landing gear extended. That's called the dirty roll on takeoff.

Now, again, see, Tracy, earlier we saw the Snowbirds with their mature airplane, 170 knots. But this airplane has got a quadruplex digital flight control system in it. So, Kenny Switzer is very safe. Keep it rolling this 40,000-pound airplane right there.

Now, as he clears, if you look back to the right, we have Blue Angel No. 6, Lieutenant Commander Dave Stewart, and he's going to accelerate to 300 knots and execute a very low, precise transition, just pulling the gear up right off the runway. As he gets to the end of the runway, the gear will come up in the jet, and he'll pull back and execute a high-performance climb. He'll get about six Gs in this climb on the pole.

It feels like it's coming right through your living room. Yeah, watch now. The airplane doesn't really look like it gets off the ground at all. It just kind of sucks the wheels up from underneath. And if there was any dirt on that runway, it's gone now.

I had so many at sometimes conflicting emotions watching this, Luke. I've recorded an hour of it so far And I thought it was going to end after an hour It still is going I eventually decided to turn off the machine last night And say I'll come back to this tomorrow But first of all I love the sound It reminds me of watching the Blue Angels with you up on your rooftop

Well I was going to say I don't think it has anything on the recognized master class In broadcasting that was you and me on my roof As the Blue Angels Strafed us

But they have a few moments that are sort of similar to that where they don't realize that one of the planes is like the whole point of one of these planes near the end is to sort of sneak around. Your eyes are on like four blue angels over there and then another one sort of sneaks by and strafes everybody and everybody screams, including the people who are on the dais. It also goes from that sort of like jargony play-by-play.

Right, you know that guy is in sunglasses, that fly boy who's like brought into and he's just like, oh, we call this one the greasy bagel.

He works for the Blue Angels. He's like the Blue Angels event coordinator. So I believe he flies Blue Angels himself, or at least he's like the main PR guy in charge of these events. So you have him. Then you have another guy who's with the station but is just like a total airplane nerd, like the kind of guys I used to work with sometimes at Cairo. You could identify these guys who are just like, you just mention, you know, an airplane.

Next thing you know, you have to, like, sit down and be prepared to listen to, like, 45 minutes of Boeing talk. You got one of them. You have the woman there who's, like, more of a color commentator. But then they go from that sort of nerd talk to, like, just these, like, really dorky interviews with this other pilot who had just gotten done with her performance. And here's the deal about it. Like, I love that sound. I love the sound of the plane screeching by and how it drowns out their microphones. I love that so much. and then of course so much of it is jingoism and and you know just pro-military talk like i didn't play any of the parts where they're just kind of talking about like the more military aspects of these planes it's like oh it's so it's so kind of gross in a certain way the way i'm i'm falling for the propaganda here i hate that but then i had a new feeling with this luke and they're showing these formations the blue angels and i've always i've been you know with you i get really excited about the airplanes and the sound and like i know it's you know again i know it's jingoistic i know it's not good for the environment it's like it's like fireworks like you know i can't defend enjoying it but i'm not gonna pretend i don't enjoy it to like virtue signal in some way that isn't true like this stuff makes like my heart beat faster like i love this stuff but for the first time ever i'm watching them do and they had some really good like shots close-up shots of

these planes from the ground by the way i love the canadian snowbirds reference yes i used to i was into the canadians i did not know yeah they were like they were the canadian not but they don't look like the blue angels exactly but they were the they were sort of the i consider them to be the washington generals of aeronautics performance to the globetrotters blue angels well the one thing

i was going to say though is the the new feeling i was having while um watching this was a sort of sense of anger at the daring do like sometimes and we've talked about this before like when um 10 years ago when there were a couple of documentaries out about people you know climbing those really tall sheer face mountains or whatever like yeah like free solo and free solo like that stuff i realized at that time was starting to make me angry i was like there's no need for you to put your life on the line on the line there's no need to to worry your family like that just for your thrills and you know people can make their own decisions i'm not signing any bills to outlaw it but it was just like this weird instinct i had i was watching these incredibly

somebody tell trump that it's woke to climb without ropes and i would get taken care of

immediately i was like in these incredibly tight formations i mean incredibly tight and that is the whole thing of the blue angels that they can just fly so close together i was watching it last night being like stop it stop it stop it like i was so mad at them i'm just like give yourself a little bit more space like what is the point of doing it so close I'm like well the point is I'm on the edge of my seat but I was also sort of angry it was a whole slurry of emotions last night like but you

were you were on my mind like a 33 thank you again I just it's just nice to be thought of but you're on like a 33 year time delay of being like this seems dangerous this seems dangerous

anyway I'm excited to see what else is on this I'm gonna hopefully I might even upload the whole thing depending on how long it is i mean there is a music video in the middle that is so here let me see if i can get you some of the song about the clear blue skies that they're singing this is

real cringe get ready and this is this is playing while the the the jets are flying around in the

sky i think they had i think what they did was they had some like pre-made packages ready to go for lulls in the action so i think maybe one event ended they go to a commercial break and then here I think they're going to introduce this video. I hope this isn't... Yeah, it doesn't look like this is going to be too long of a setup. Let's see here.

I knew this is what this song was going to sound like.

It's so bad. They're just showing a bunch of shots of, like, you know, airplanes doing things. It's a pre-produced package.

But now we're...

Somebody is, like, lip-syncing this. People are, like, dancing in the... You should see the culottes on these women. It is amazing.

This sounds like about 40 different lousy songs. All kind of mixed. Like, every three seconds I think, oh, it's like that song. And it's like, oh, no, it's actually like that song. I thought it was going to turn into the Carnation Instant Breakfast theme. You're going to love it in an instant. It's all over the place. That is so.

There's the stealth bomber there. It's like shots of airplanes, but then a bunch of dorky people kind of like dancing, like four women in culottes for some reason on the runway dancing. Then just like a bunch of 90s looking people. You got some pilots who are like dancing and singing along to this video. luke this is i don't know i don't know this is my new personality i don't know what it is but

this videotape is my new personality something something has shifted inside you and you're never going back to the old andrew now what this makes me wistful for is just the the sort of the media aspect of this and by that i mean the fact that kcal 9 sent its folks out to cover this and that they were doing this as a live local television event um because it makes me think of the coverage of the hydroplane races in seattle now i'm guessing that that still happens maybe so that might you know sort of i don't argue against what i'm saying but i just feel like like the idea that local television used to you know direct resources towards local events and then people would turn on their tv and watch it and that was like that was a system that worked i just feel like that's just less and less the case like i remember growing up and the hydro planes were covered not just on tv but on the radio on the day of the hydro races if you turned on como am 1000 you would hear um you know i think it was i think dick curtis that was maybe his gig or something you'd you'd hear like all this breathless hydro coverage and if you turn on any of the tv local tv channels they were also covering it i just don't feel like that kind of stuff happens anymore

Yeah. I don't know what the deal is with local hydro coverage these days, but my guess is it is a shadow of what it used to be. And I'll say while I was watching this last night, I kind of keep reminding myself that this wasn't Seattle because I mean, I've never heard of Point Magoo before this, but is it like a military base there or something or is it just a.

Yeah, I think it's, well, that's the thing. Yeah, Point Magoo is somewhere, I want to say a bit south of L.A., because it's KCAL 9, but it's not as far south as San Diego, because that's a different point, Point Loma, or Loma Point. So anyway, yeah, it's down there in Southern Cal.

Yeah, and there's a naval base either there or nearby or something, right? So it just sort of seemed baked into the culture. I guess I was starting to say like I kept forgetting that this wasn't Seafair coverage because it just I wasn't here for Seafair. I don't have those personal memories of it, but it felt like so relatable in a certain way. And the the the you describe this as covering a local event, which they are. But I just swear that like this is probably this probably cost them what would today be like a year's budget of news coverage. i mean i'm probably wrong but like this is a whole long live i mean is it going to be two hours long 90 minutes i don't know but like live there and again some of the funding might come from the interests involved like the air show itself or maybe even the navy i don't know like kind of who covers various aspects of this who some of the the footage is so good that i find it hard to believe that it was just the kkl camera people doing it but i could be wrong about it

Video feed for, like, everyone to take or something?

Maybe, but it's, like, a huge event, and this is a tough thing to cover. They're in the sky. I don't know if you know that about airplanes, but, like, they're way up there. Ideally, they are in the sky. Yeah, ideally, they are in the sky. In the great white blue. What does he say? Great white blue. But anyway, yeah, I was just, like, the amount of money and resources into this one day of coverage for this particular local event. On a Sunday. On a Sunday, most likely.

Which is a real kind of ratings dead zone anyway, generally speaking. By the way, I want to save people the email I'm looking at. Point Magoo is slightly it's up kind of towards Oxnard. So it would be north of L.A. along the coastline there. I said it was south of L.A. So that was incorrect. I apologize. Oh, you know what I just found?

I because I knew that this was 1993. Oops. I don't have a subscription to the Los Angeles Times. So now it has covered up the results. But I see there is a headline from this actual event. October 1993 crowd turns out for final maneuvers of air show 93. And you are right. The closing day crowd at Point Magoo on Sunday had swelled to more than 125,000 people by the time the Blue Angels took to the skies. Yeah, I like that. I like that. You're going through something. I hear you. I'm actually starting to get legit worried about you. Not that you're not delighted by my story. I understand. This is maybe somewhat of a personal journey. But I hear you, Luke. You're feeling you've had a day, haven't you?

Well, no. You know what it is? i'm a i'm a little tuckered out because i've been running around and we're recording this after i got back from another shoot so i think i'm probably just in that i'm in that part of the day where you just start to feel a little low also i'll be honest with you my internal clock has like not adjusted to being on the east coast this is very weird because i i'm back here kind of a lot and it's only three hours but i told you that like the day i got here i got here on sunday i basically like just kind of went to sleep for a bunch of hours and then got up and then ate a little bit of dinner and then went back to sleep. I, I feel like I flew to the other side of the world for some reason. And like, uh, yesterday I, after I got done with my shoots and a whole bunch of different stuff.

I same thing. I came back to the hotel. I got into my running clothes because I was going to go try to run Central Park. And then I just sat on the bed and then I just fell asleep in my running clothes. So I don't know what I am. I am a little low and I apologize. But I did go up to New Haven, Connecticut yesterday, which is I don't think I've ever been to New Haven before. And I took the train up there super early. Like I got to Penn Station before it opened. I didn't even know that they uh penn station had an opening time and it turns out it's 5 a.m and if you were there before 5 a.m you're just standing outside by madison square garden waiting for them to open the train station um but anyway i i took the train up and then there was as you like to call it andrew the last mile problem the the train station in new haven was still about i don't know 15 20 minutes from where we were filming which was at the pez factory the pez visitor center so i had to take a lift and the lift out there uh the guy pulls up and i have a sense that it's him because you know i'm watching it on the little tracker thing but he is just blasting hip-hop he's blasting g-unit and it's not like uh you know you can find me in da club It's like the most graphic, like, G-unit song of all time involving female anatomy and a lot of the N-word.

We got to learn about it sometime, Luke.

Don't, you know what? Don't make it so your kids have to find it out taking a lift when they're 48 years old in New Haven, Connecticut. So I open the door and it's just like thumping out.

I'm sorry. Go ahead.

And I go, I go for Luke. Right. Which was kind of a little bit unnecessary because I had checked the, you know, the license plate number. It matched. But I just do that as a habit. I was like, you're here for Luke. And the guy just looks straight ahead. And he just like he he might have mumbled the quietest. Yes. I couldn't even tell. He did not turn his head around to look at me. He did not acknowledge me. He just said again, if he said anything, it was so quiet. I couldn't hear it. And so I just get in the back of the lift and shut the door and then put my seatbelt on them. And we proceeded just like drive together, not in silence, but in 50 cents theories on women. And guess what, Andrew, some of them questionable, really questionable theories, things we might not say on this show, things we would things we would hopefully not even think on this show. and uh and so i looked down first of all i like i looked down at the the the this driver i'm kind of like what is this guy's deal exactly and uh i looked and he has a five star rating i'm like this is this is really this is really interested because i would feel like if anybody if anybody less tolerant than me was in the car when this was happening i feel like it would be a less than

five star experience this is interesting do you know that it's never occurred to me to do that before do you do that often when you're having a questionable experience because i'm wondering if they're all five stars because they just always encourage you because like they all these companies want five stars so they can brag about their five star rating so if you're like well it was fine it was good i'll give it four out of five that's still pretty good that's still pretty spicy at a tie place you know but they're like you're only giving it four what went wrong please tell us what went wrong and you're like i guess i'll just give you five if you're gonna freak out about it so i don't know how much i trust the driver app ratings i have never rated a driver in my life oh really remember an uber oh i always just give a tip i usually just hit the stars and the tip

oh no no you're right sorry it's automatic you're absolutely right i always hit five stars it's so it's such muscle memory i forgot that that's what that is yes when i what always happens is i'm going to take my next lift ride and it's reminding me of the previous lift ride how was your time with so and so i always hit five stars i usually try to throw them a tip anyway i look down and uh i see that this guy has a five star rating i think wow that's pretty surprising and then we get to where he's dropping me off and he turns the music down and he just turns around he says to me with the nicest look on his face you have an amazing day and i went okay thanks and i was like that's how he's got the five star he makes sure to close it out with you have an amazing day with like a smile and direct eye contact I was like where was that guy for most of the journey um but um so that was the ride out whatever not a big deal the ride back was a little more I don't know a little more weird I get done with the filming and the guy comes to pick me up the the Lyft driver and I get in the car and he's actually very nice when I get in the car he's like he's like how's your day going I go it's going really well how about you he goes I'm having a blessed day i was like cool i looked down and in the sort of center console like so you know between the drivers and passenger seat uh is like what looks like a ring camera or some kind of a security camera for the home right like not something that's designed to be in a car and he's just like taped it down to the console

packaging tape and then up on the dashboard he's done the same thing with a similar kind of camera um that he's taped down onto the onto the the dashboard and i'm presuming it's facing towards the towards the street or something and i'm kind of thinking that's a little interesting or whatever

so because you've been in cars before where they have the cameras that's become quite common but

usually the the ones designed for cars yes this is like a computer camera for like a a home dell tower like that like it's totally out of place in the automotive environment uh-huh and and so we're driving and i realize he's he's driving he's driving semi-aggressively like there's this one point where he's trying to go around a car but there's a cyclist we're like right by the yale campus at this point so there's a lot of like cyclists and stuff and he's like he's going around this car but i don't know what his plan is because he's getting very close to the cyclist it's kind of a little nerve wracking or whatever but so we end up getting to like a stoplight it's like a left turn and i guess the person in front of us who is i'm first i'm not even clocking the car but he starts beeping really loud he's really mad because the car in front of us is not taking advantage of i guess what like a left turn arrow or something and and uh i he he goes ah he goes that's a fed I can tell from the license plate and I look at the car and it's like it's like a Toyota Tercel it's like a 2007 Toyota Tercel with like a 70 year old woman driving it who's in front

of us that's smart man clever like a fox that's how they get you he goes I already know that's a

fed I can tell by the license plate and I look at the license nothing about the license plate said fed to me and he goes yeah they're out here the feds he goes there's all kinds of gang stalking out here too are you familiar with the concept of gang stalking andrew no this is a very unfortunate delusion that some people are under which is that everybody is stalking them that they are being followed constantly by by by secret agents you'll see tiktok feeds where people are you know walking around with their phone on at all times are coming up and confronting people in like the grocery store because they think that person's part of a government plot following them i've had the term

I've had interactions with people who believe that kind of stuff before. It's really sad.

Yeah, it is really sad. And the term, one of the terms that the people that are unfortunately in this world or under this delusion will use is gang stalking. That's the terminology that sprung up around it. And he's like, oh, yeah, there's all this gang stalking out here. Everybody's being gang stalked. And that's why I have these cameras. That's why I have these cameras. I said, and I'm like, I realize, oh, OK, I'm dealing with a person who's mentally unwell. Yeah. and also like i don't want to enter i don't want to become part of their delusion you're like can

you just please turn on some 50 cent as loud as seriously the smell of p word put it on it was

one of the songs that the other guy was blasting um yeah like i i and i mean you had a more intense experience with this unfortunately where you ran into somebody that you helped it pop up and they did unfortunately think you were part of something going on which you weren't obviously This didn't quite get to that level But I definitely had this thought which was like I don't want to say anything I didn't even get into the gang I mean I actually know exactly what he thinks he's talking about When he says gang stalking actually But I did not even I did not want to get into the topic with him Because I did not want to say anything That in his mind Made him think that I was part Of the people watching him Because of course if that's going on in his mind There would be no reason that that guy Who you know is semi well dressed and got into his car isn't a gang stalker like that would be exactly what they would do right is they put somebody in there and and he goes that's why i got these cameras and he's like pointing at the cameras and then i i go i go where's the information go from the cameras and he goes it just goes all over and i was like oh okay it just goes all over i realized he's not getting anything from these cameras like i don't think the cameras i don't like i don't think the cameras can feed to anything unless he has like a mobile wi-fi kit because i know the way like my blink cameras are on the wifi at my house and I could look at them on my phone and stuff and they're being saved in the cloud, but that's because they're on my wifi. Like, I don't think these cameras were even hooked up to anything. I feel like it was pretty cruel of you to say, we got one boys into your collar, into my, into, into the, uh, like the, the end of my coat. What

do you call that? My, my coat sleeve. Yeah. Um, so he just goes all over and you're like, oh, these are just like these are not props to him but like just like you know he thinks they're doing something but he just taped them almost like a child just yes it was very childlike and

then i was like yeah and like i've already said the one thing was i didn't want to say anything that would give him the idea that i was part of the plot against him because you don't know where that's gonna go and then also it's like i was like this is probably the most unsafe i felt riding in a lift.

just because he also was driving really erratically and he's detached from reality on some level. And so then we just shifted gears into talking about the Luka Doncic trade. And that actually really seemed to calm things down. It always does. So then I get to the train. I'm going back home now. I'm going back to New York City. And I sprung, well, let's be honest, CBS. Sprung or sprang? What's the past tense?

Sprung, I think. although I like the word sprang.

CBS sprung, really? Spranged? CBS sprung, spranged?

Wait, he was in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I believe, spranged.

Oh, by the way, just so you know, and I know you were wondering, yes, they are bringing back some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle as dispensers in this next season. It's already, the wheels are already turning.

That's good, but what about Master Ratface? Shredder?

Oh, you mean the bad guy or you mean Master Splinter?

Splinter. Is Master Splinter going to get his day in the Pez son?

You know, I don't think Master Splinter has a Pez. I'm not sure. Today I was at a guy's house in New Jersey who has the largest private collection of Pez dispensers in the world. And a lot of them were Mutant Ninja Turtles. But I did not notice a Master Splinter. But I bet they put one in there just for funsies. So I get on the train and CBS sprang for business class, which it turned out was totally unnecessary. I mean, the difference between the business class seats and the coach seats, the difference is, I guess, the business class seat, you can reserve it. You can just know what your seat is, and then you just go sit in it as opposed to, like, walking and trying to find a seat. But otherwise, the coach actually seemed perfectly fine once I got on there. I get into this business class area, and there's, like, it's not super-duper full. And as I'm getting, let's say, my row is row five. I'm seat 5F. and as i'm getting there i look in in in row four so the road just before mine there are these there are two women who are sitting on the other side of the aisle from where i'm going to be and they're like very very um kind of seductively dressed and they're have a lot of um like a lot of spray tan it would appear and kind of like tattoos and they're doing a lot of like that kind of when you watch somebody just selfying themselves so hard for so long that you just think and i don't want to sound like a crank or whatever but it's like it's it's a person who seems to be living living in a very limited basis in the not unlike the guy that drove me to the train station but for different reasons they seem to be like barely living in this actual world we're in and mostly living in a version of their phone that they're trying to portray if that makes any sense like this woman did not i neither of them stopped making these little selfie videos uh you know as i'm walking in and as i'm sitting there and whatever that's fine that's their life i don't have a problem with this what i had a problem with was when the train started moving one of them got up and left her seat her assigned seat and walked to the row that was directly now in front of me so she walked across the aisle and then went to the window seat which was the seat directly in front of me and then full reclined it into my knees not her seat not her seat and i know this because when the conductor came by the way this is what i love amtrak so much despite this moment i love amtrak so much it is such a throwback it's from a simpler time when we used to cover the point magoo air show andrew like they have the hat still they've got the little puncher thing

they say things like all aboard i just love i freaking you freak out you're like you actually say that you actually say all aboard that's so cute i mean i just i if i lived somewhere where

taking an amtrak on the regular as part of my commute was possible i would absolutely do it i just it's such a great way to get around i really hope that it you know doesn't go the way of the dodo bird but um i know that this woman was not like in her real seat because when the guy came he like looked at the you know that ticket thing that's like tucked up above your seat that kind of like tells them that you've paid or whatever and he like moved it over he's like oh you're over there and she was like yeah i'm sitting here now and he's like and then he so he moved her seat over to there which i didn't know was an option and of course i then i'm thinking well i'll just move to another seat in this area but then there's like three more stops between new haven and penn station and i don't want to be in someone else's seat these are reserved seats so if i'm sitting in a seat that's not mine i'm going to be nervous the whole time that somebody's going to get on at, you know, um, uh, Stanford, Connecticut. And, uh, and, and, and then I'm going to be in their seat. So I had to stay in my seat. There's like four people in the entire section of the train, this entire car. And one of them is sitting, not in her assigned seat, leaning into my legs. I was like, you gotta be, Oh, and by the way, watching videos with no headphones.

oh geez louise yeah it was a real triple threat this lady and then i had to help her get out of the train when we got to penn station because um the she was unfamiliar with the workings of the doors so you have to like you press this kind of weird button and it opens the door and she was having some trouble and then i opened it for then she was very nice to me then whatever i guess i guess beef squashed but it was how long was the how long was this trip where you had your

knees crushed and you're listening to somebody else's goddamn phone these are two of my least

favorite things in the world this was uh probably an hour 45 minutes to two hours it was also weird going through um i did i say that right is it stanford connecticut that's a place right yeah we went through the part of connecticut that has the wwe world headquarters

oh that's right whenever i hear that that's in connecticut isn't that a weird place yes it's such a strange place seems like it's such a genteel place like i dozed off at some point

despite my discomfort i dozed off and then i open my eyes and i look over and i'm just looking at wwe central and that's very triggering for me because vince mcmahon obviously terrible human being and his wife also terrible human being is the secretary of education yeah exactly how's that going so messed up good uh not great at last check we was hoping for some razzle dazzle

razzle dazzle that's right man razzle dazzle on your mark on your mark get set get set now ready

All right, let's thank some dazzling donors. These folks are donating a dazzling amount of dough. It's making TBTL possible. People like Sarah Settlemyer out there in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Sarah. Thank you, Sarah.

What up, Sarah? I usually go on some, I feel like I go on some long Jim Thorpe related Carlisle thing whenever we read Sarah's donation each year. Sarah says, Hi Luke and Andrew, last year when I wrote to you, my husband was recovering from open heart surgery, I'm very sorry to say he passed away in the middle of March, it's been a sad and difficult year without him, oh Sarah, so sorry to hear that, you know, we don't even really have the words to express how awful that is, and we're thinking about you and we love you.

I remember your note from last year, Sarah, and I know that your husband had just recovered from some pretty scary surgeries, and this is terrible news. I hope you're hanging in there. I know. I literally can't associate, but I hope you're hanging in there.

Sarah says, Tim and I, Tim was her husband, both loved listening to TBTL while going to sleep or going places in the car together. He went to the 3,000th episode show in Brooklyn with me. We had such a great time that night. This show has really helped me, and I'm glad to keep supporting it. Love the show, and love you both, Sarah. Sarah, well, we love you, and we love the memory of Tim. I'm so sorry for your loss, and glad to hear that somehow having us drone on in the background maybe takes the tiniest bit of the edge off for you. Glad to do that. Maestro.

On your mark. On your mark. Get set. Get set. Now ready. Ready. Go.

It's Anthony Crunk in Newark, Delaware.

Wait a second. I didn't look ahead. Don't we have a drop for this donor? Am I wrong about this? Do you have any idea what I'm talking about?

Is there a drop that's requested, or does Anthony have a drop?

I think, well, it's hard for me, and maybe this is just me freelancing a little bit too much here, but it's hard for me not to want to play this.

In this brochure, it says, this tour is crunk.

What does that mean? What video is that from? Oh, Welcome to Atlanta, it says. Would that be a...

Oh, Welcome to Atlanta, where the players play?

Yeah, who is that?

Is that a ludicrous song?

Is it more is it the duo? Oh, it's Jermaine Dupree, apparently.

Oh, Jermaine Dupree. Oh, yeah, I'm looking at the video now. Okay, yeah. I mean, he's your guy if you're talking Atlanta. Although Atlanta has a very rich music scene You've got Urshur You've got I think the Ying Yang Twins I mean they always come to mind when you think about Atlanta You always think of the Ying Yang Twins

That's the first thing I usually think of Why am I blanking on Andre 3000's Duo What is the name of Big Boy and Andre 3000 I can think of their names but I can't think of their duo Their duo is called Outcast Goodness gracious That's who I thought that was Anyway, Crunk

So here's the thing, Newark, Delaware That's interesting because I would have called it Newark Like New Jersey Where I flew in recently But I guess it's pronounced Newark, Delaware Hey there Luke and Andrew and John So glad I was able to able to step up to the dazzling status this year for the first time well we appreciate it Anthony thank you I've been thinking ever since the last TBTL-a-thon that I would pre-write my witty clever killer message and truly dazzle the tens but dazzle has become frazzled as I kept pushing back my top story message for other things and now the clock has run out by the way really great that's a great sort of sly reference to the fact that we often talk about top stories and never get to them i i i'm picking up what you're putting down there anthony yeah um let's see i suppose that i really only have one thing to say what you do is so important seriously i suspect that many listeners like i do find solace i know a strong but apt word in tbtl in these increasingly difficult times i've been actively trying to avoid the actual news

and you guys deliver wait a minute i'm putting that in my resume you don't think gang stalking

My Lyft driver is, you don't think that's the big news of the day, Anthony?

Hey, what are some of your qualifications? Well, I don't know shit about the news.

I love that we've monetized that. It's a feature, not a bug. Oh, yeah, no, these guys have literally no idea what's happening in the world. And that's why we like them. A haven to run to when the world is falling apart. I mean this completely unironically. Keep doing what you do. We need TBTL. And have John on a little more frequently, too. A disclaimer, John did not request or encourage that final comment. That's a good point, Anthony. We do need to get TBTL employee numero uno, John Skaroff, back on the show on whatever topic comes to mind. Maybe just, I don't know, baseball? Although then he's going to take it to the Yankees, and then I'm going to say something hurtful. I have a really hard time with the fact that he's a Yankees fan. I know.

It's tough. We were going to maybe not hire him because of that, but then it turns out there are some laws against that kind of discrimination. Yeah, that's actually discrimination.

I don't think—I think that, honestly, that's where all this woke DEI stuff goes too far, is being a Yankees fan as some sort of, I guess, special protected class. Right. At least that's what he told us at the meeting, and since we don't have HR, we had no choice but to believe it.

Yeah, and we can't afford any lawyers. We're just like, well, we could hire lawyers or hire John, and so we hired John. We used all the lawyer money on John. Here we are. but yeah no it has been a minute we need an update on the billboard probably oh yeah so that's something that's going on and so it's been a minute since john's been on now i will say this and not to sound too much like your lift driver but um it says here have john on a little bit more frequently to disclaimer john did not request or encourage that final comment but the thing is you know that we see this after john inputs this stuff into the spreadsheet right there's a real chain of custody issue with these things exactly i'm just going to say that the data may not be as clean as we want i'm not i'm not yeah i'm not accusing him directly of writing this

but i'm just saying the data is not clean yeah exactly he could have it's he's the last set of eyes and the last uh you know the last it's not even a pen right because this is all typed but he's he's the last person to see these before we see them so he might have inserted that but it's still a good point even if that was john pretending to be anthony telling us that we need to have john

on the show more it's true we do need to have john on the show he wrote it with an auto pen i think

that's kind of that's right thank you anthony uh and thank you sarah so much for supporting tbtl we appreciate you hello and welcome to top story look i don't know how long this segment is going to be

or how long it needs to be sorry because i don't know how many segment with a look just seemed

okay andrew okay barack all right um because you really only you've only aid one question you've only asked me one thing about pez which is why was there not a specific um like pez design in the in the mid or the early 1980s like you were looking at the website that was talking about pez dispensers year by year and then there was like i think it was like maybe

83 84 and 85 83 85 and 89 i want to say or 88 okay those were just years where there was no

well i i asked uh my new friend sean at the uh pez factory visitor center what was up with that and he said it's probably just a year they didn't make any new pez dispensers well that's kind of

those tautology there why didn't they make any because it was a year that they didn't make any

well right but they didn't they didn't name one because it was a year where they did not go out and like launch a new like you know black panther dispenser or some special release and this goes to the larger story about pez so anyway that's the answer to your question is they just didn't make any new pez dispensers that year they were making pez dispensers you could buy them but they were all based on existing things they were like donald duck or or casper the friendly ghost or what have you but they on those years didn't probably make a new one yeah no i mean i

Thank you.

knew that i wanted to know why because like that the site i'm looking at lists all of the new releases for each year that's what i was saying like and so they that literally says on these three years in the 80s 1983 no new releases 88 no new releases i was just okay i wasn't sure if there was like a great fire at the pez factory that year or it was just like a low it was a low time because they went like three decades before that never missing a year and then in the 80s the go-go 80s i would also would you i mean no gordon gecko pez oh my god a giant phone um that would be pretty cool i actually do have some more follow-up questions for you based on some photos you sent me yesterday but yeah i wasn't sure if maybe there was something going on in the culture now i was about to say it seems to me like the 80s were the biggest time for pez dispensers i'm like oh wait no that's probably just because i was a child in the 80s and so that was when i was in prime pez you know usage years but i i don't know what what was the big time for pez's

well andrew let's start in the different 80s the 1880s in austria oh geez where a doctor uh who was um prone to experimenting on himself injected himself with something and died unexpectedly and therefore his son who was in medical school had to come home it wasn't the 1880s this is like the 1900s or something i was just trying to be consistent with the 80s motif theme no basically the um the pez thing was uh it started in austria and it started by uh this guy whose last name was haas and he was uh the edward haas the third i believe and uh his great grand or his granddad had been a doctor and then his dad had gone into the grocery business or the food business because he had to leave medical school because his because his dad had accidentally died by injecting himself with something as an experiment i literally thought you were building

up to a joke that he like like to experiment on himself so he tried a new surgery where he could

have candy you could pull things out of his neck yes and so the the the eddie the third um realized that there was in in europe and in austria a market for peppermints he kind of came up with this new way to make these little peppermints and they were pitched as a like a smoking alternative like instead of reaching for that cigarette reach for one of these little peppermints and by the way the name pez comes from the german word for peppermint which is uh feffermint and p-e-z are just it's the first letter the middle letter and the last letter feffermints minz with a z right with a z so pez is p-e-z it's letters that are taken from the german for peppermint and that was really smart because uh first of all that's not language dependent that just pez is just like this weird made-up thing that is it's it makes the same amount of sense in german as it does in english so it was a good international marketing thing also nobody else had the trademark on the name pez nobody else was naming anything pez so it was like a pretty good idea but he's making these peppermint little peppermint drops and you would get them in a tin kind of like Altoids. And the problem was, and they were very popular, but, um, uh, at some point the, they realized, Oh, these are kind of like, if you want to share these with your friend, they have to reach into your tin of Pez mints and like get their greasy fingers on them and then pull one out. And it's kind of rattling around in there. And so the idea was to create a little delivery device, some kind of a packaging for this so that you could just pull out one mint at a time and they realized that it would work better both in the making of these like these little mints and in the in the mechanics of this little sleeve they were going to be in if they made them kind of rectangular so they started making them in the the shape that we think of a pez candy as being and they started selling the pez along with this little kind of distributor whatever you'd call it this little thing that you could put your 12 pez mints in and these were very much mints at the time and then you could just you know pop them out one at a time and that was very popular and so they came over to america with this and they were like we have arrived with our anti-smoking mints and america collectively shrugged and said uh we we want to keep smoking we don't have any time for your anti-smoking mints um so go back to austria with that but they didn't go back to austria they they had a really good idea which was what if we try to make this a kid's thing what if we put something kind of you know childlike on the top of this little thing we're already making and uh and what if we change the flavor so instead of peppermint we do like some kind of fruit flavor and they did that they started putting like fruit flavors in there and the first thing that they did like that really worked was a witch they put a witch head on there around halloween time and it was like a huge hit couldn't keep it in stores and so then later they reached

out to the Popeye people and they licensed Popeye's head and they made a Popeye one and it was also a huge hit. And pretty soon that was all they were doing. Basically, it went from being a thing for like Austrian smokers to horf down while they're taking the train to like a fruit flavored thing for kids with like a SpongeBob SquarePants on top of it. I'm clicking through year by year now.

And the earliest examples of the actual dispenser you're talking about are really cool because they're not far off, at least in these pictures, from what a modern Pez dispenser looks like, with the exception that the cap is not frivolous in any way. It's just a cap. It doesn't have a Batman or a witch's head.

Actually, I like those more.

They're very cool looking. Now, I don't want to sharpshoot you. This is your story. But according to the website, the first toys, things that they, that witch came out in 1957, it looks like. But it looks like back in 55, they started playing around with robots. There were some Santa-shaped ones. Yes, but those were called full-body pezzas, if you'll notice. Oh, yes, they are.

the first thing that worked was the witch oh that way actually oh okay so they can't yeah they came out with the with the robit and i think a santa claus santi claus but those were both called full body pez's so they did not utilize this like yeah pre-existing little because the whole thing with these pez's and why they're so why they can make so many of them why it's a good design is because the bot the stem doesn't change and in those ones they were and they were too expensive those ones were bad sellers because they cost five times what um like just regular candy would cost and so they had so yeah they did they did try something before the witch but the witch was like considered to be the first thing that like where they kind of clicked they kind of figured out what the like you know um how to do this and and how to do it at a at a you know cost efficient uh in a cost efficient way and in a way that people you know were going to respond to now the holy grail of pez's the holy trio of pez's as far as rarities andrew of course because it always does it relates back to jfk when jfk visited uh the town in austria he just so happened to be visiting the town in austria where pez is made i think it's called lintz maybe and so the the pez people being very smart made this like special gift for the president and it was like this like very fancy like cigar box it was like a leather box actually and it had three pez dispensers in it it had a donkey like i guess because he's a democrat it had a bozo the clown which was meant for his daughter like it was just like oh a kid will like this and then one that's called a golden glow i think which is actually for jacklyn um kennedy but it doesn't have that one doesn't have anything on it it's just like one of the regular ones but it's kind of nice and gold and they thought may be nice for a woman or something i'm looking at it now it also had its own little

stand so you can put the gold in the gold into a stand yes and so no one's been able to figure

out what happened to these three pez's they are unaccounted for library huh because i've been to

that jfk library i don't know if you've ever been i'm not trying to brag no is that is that in dallas

or is that up in it's somewhere in massachusetts it's outside of boston but dallas would be a weird place for considering that was the end of his life yeah exactly although ironically i think wasn't it the book depository wasn't that where lee harvey oswald was i think so yeah but um yeah

i'm looking i'm looking at all these i i have a question for you are you um did you well well two questions or maybe a part a and point part b are did you eat a lot of pez during your coverage and are you thinking about eating a lot of pez because i got to be honest with you we said on the show earlier this week like i i don't find myself craving pez all that often but just looking at these things i really want some pez right now and i'm not joking buddy i drank right out of the

freaking strain i got down on my hands and knees and just like sidled up to the fire hydrant that was spitting out pez willy wonka style exactly that's when they kicked me out then i turned

into a giant grape and they rolled me out of there and boop lucas boop okay i did get to the

in orange connecticut uh which by the way they so they were selling pez in america um but they were just bringing it all in from austria where they were making it and then they decided well we want to we should start producing this in america to sell to americans it'll just be easier and the guy who was in charge of the operation in america had just built some beautiful house in larchmont new york so he was like wherever the headquarters is it has to be driving distance from my new house i just built in larchmont new york so connecticut orange connecticut was picked um and it was uh they they make the candy there and i got to go and and kind of watch it being made from the like it literally comes in as raw sugar and then they mill it and then they basically turn it into a powder and then they add the flavoring and then they sift through it they do this whole thing and then it gets you know cooked into these little pellets and then they're all like it was serious Mr. Rogers territory back there like you know those Mr. Rogers when they would show how something gets made like a crayon or like

I loved the one that was a saxophone I don't remember if that was Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers but do you remember that footage of a saxophone

being made? I do but I think because it must have been you somebody directed me to that recently because I feel like yeah it must have been on the show you must have mentioned that and then I looked it up and maybe was watching it in the background while we chatted

I just love watching stuff get made and also just the the processing the machinery is crazy for these little Pez candies like they come you know once they're made into first of all they use a a pharmaceutical pill press machine that they've modified to make pez candies because i mean that's probably you know that's the only other sort of commercial similarity or application for this kind of thing is you're either making pills or you're making pez candies or something and so this thing is just like can do like i don't know like a half a million of them in like an hour or something crazy it's like insane and then they all come down this chute and then they're separated out and kind of like they're like jostled so they all kind of get in line and then they come down in these like little different channels and then they get put into the wrapped and everything and then there's all these ladies sitting there where they're taking the Pez dispenser and then they get two things of Pez candy and then they put it in this other thing and then it gets shrink wrapped and it was like so fun to watch and I did eat some freshly made, I ate a handful of freshly made orange Pez. Orange, I was going to

ask like because I was trying to think like what Luke I'm not joking when I don't even know where to go to get a Pez but I'm sitting here on the Pez I've switched from the dispenser over to like the flavors site and they seem pretty modern I'm not going to lie to you like I was thinking grape was probably my go-to when I was a kid grape and orange now they have like dragon fruit and sour green apple and sour pineapple I don't know about the

yeah they got some sour stuff going which you know I'm not a I'm not a real sour guy and I mean I'm a sour person I know personally and interpersonally but even i don't really go in for the noise i don't go in for the super like super sour warheads of vacation of everything yeah but they have the classics here

i'm seeing cherry strawberry grape orange lemon i might well a little bit of lemon might go a long way but where would i go oh i know what i wanted to ask you so this is fun and like i'm not joking when i say like i want to go buy myself a pez toy and just like pound some pez oh dude did they or as a journalist could you not accept any gifts did they offer to like give you some pez stuff to

take home yes they did you accept it i did because it's a gift and i can't get more specific than that because i don't want it to get out but let's just say oh it's a gift for someone else it's a gift for someone else and they you know i do they host a podcast with you uh they do it's called Spotless. It's for Hanbrook Solson. Dang it! No, it's, um, they, I generally don't, I generally don't accept stuff when it's offered, just because I do feel like that's a little, uh, maybe over the line. It would never sway me in one direction or the other, and also this is not a hit piece about, about Pez, but, um, there was, I was admiring something, and I was, I was mentioning, oh, there's somebody that I can think of who would really like this, and the guy was super nice, the guy running the thing He was like, you know what, I have like hundreds of those in the back room. And he went and he got them and brought them to me. But I have to be a little coy and a little vague because there is a chance that the people in the orbit of this gift would actually hear about this with a grapevine. So I'm trying to be kind of vague.

All right. Well, I won't push the issue. But if it was a Waxahachie one, I know that's going right to your daughter. I know that right there.

Or me first. And then if they give me two. The Kevin Morby is for you. The Waxahachie is for Adelaide. I actually, I think about, here's, here's kind of my big takeaway from this whole, this whole Pez thing is like, I actually think there's a, there's a sort of life lesson there, which is you come over to the U S and you're selling your, you know, you're selling this mint thing and it's like a total failure. No one's buying it. And you would think, well, this was a terrible idea and we've, you know, made this huge mistake, but instead it ended up saving the company Because I just don't, they would have never made as much money as they ended up making when they got into this, like, let's put some funny stuff on top of these dispensers. And they only did that because their plan A wasn't working. So it's just kind of interesting how something can seem like it's really a negative. And you might, you know, it's that perhaps principle that I talk about a lot. But, like, it's interesting to me that basically the survival of this company is because something didn't work when they brought it to the U.S.

Well, you know that I am unironically sort of obsessed with this and I continue to click through the various years. I love on the official Pez website how they break it down like you click on a year and you see whatever new release they released that year. And this it's not like overwhelming. Each year might have between one and maybe.

you know maybe like an early Popeye like you said Casper was early Bozo was early oh by the way

the the guy who was running Pez in America just happened to live in the same New York apartment building as the guy who drew Casper oh and he just like and then one day they were like in the elevator and he was like hey you do that like ghost thing right he was like yeah he goes we

should probably team up nice I love that that reminds me of Cavalier and Clay a little bit It's just like some small little apartment walk-up where a bunch of, like, it turns out, like, brilliant comic book minds are inventing Superman. But I was going to say, as I'm clicking through the years, they're pretty straightforward. They're all, like, you know, toys based on characters or just sort of a generic clown or something. Although, I take that back. I don't see a generic clown. I only see Bozo. But what I find interesting is 1968, and I'm interested in knowing if you saw any of these. only two things were released but they really leaned into the 1968 of it all that the flower power of it and there are it looks like a set of flower power ones are like flowers on the top almost like tulips or something but then like the the the bodies of the thing say like love and that really like kind of like 60s psychedelic kind of writing but then the other ones they release in 68 i don't get they're called psychedelic hands did you see these they are the only ones that are legit with the eyeballs in them yes speak my boy what is up with these

i don't know but i thought they were so cool they're so scary looking they were my favorite they were like my favorite maybe my favorite ones that i saw i was also i'm kind of a sucker for the old school santa claus ones the full body thing you were talking about yeah um oh maybe not quite that old but like back a little bit a little bit past that um yeah i don't know what the i didn't i didn't i should have asked more questions about the eyeball hands the thing is it's kind of overwhelming there are so many and then today when i was at this guy's house in new jersey uh he's got 6 000 of them in his in this very nicely put together basement office of his and like it's almost just like you could ask about each and every one of them and you'd be there for three weeks so it was like it was almost overwhelming but kind of in a good way yeah um i was into uh i sent you a picture yesterday of some pez guns yeah yeah that's been a thing over the years i think that that probably that era has ended as far as the company making guns oh another thing that i found out was for the longest time the official rule at pez was we are not going to make a dispenser that depicts a real person like a person who's alive out in the world okay yeah and i was like why well first of all you know who they finally broke that for the guys from the tv show orange county choppers it's like they're they're kind of out that's

obviously an exception how can you not make it for the choppers if you're not going to put the

total family of orange county choppers it's like total or something i think their last name is like total i love it something it's something unique um but uh but like so basically those people they wanted to make a pez chopper like a pez you know motorcycle but like with a bunch of pez stuff on it and i guess the orange county chopper guys offered to do it but their one condition was you have to make pez dispensers of us so they did but i find that hilarious because the reasoning for not depicting real people on the pez's is because the real people might go ape shit or they might they might get canceled and then you've got a bunch of pez's you know uh you got a bunch of bill cosby pez's or something or whatever and then they decide to break this for the dudes from orange county choppers who seem to have a high probability of

doing something cancelable if you ask me nope that's the safest bet i don't know any this may be the first i'm hearing of orange county choppers but you you probably what you definitely was in

an airport on a tv at one of the bars that you were walking through there was a period of time where you couldn't get away from the orange county choppers guys and um and i just find it so funny that they decided the only other person who was a real person at that time was betsy ross who again r.i.p and like so you know that's a pretty safe bet betsy ross isn't going to do anything but they they they do have pezes of the orange county choppers guys so those guys better keep their

noses clean there's also apparently a stand by me movie premium i was going to mention i'm just clicking through every year as we talk i saw that by the way oh yeah i want to hear more about that i was going to say the one thing as i earlier i said it seems like the 80s were the big year for pez but then i was like oh that's probably my perspective because i would have been the target age for it but it is interesting that i mentioned that a lot of the years there's maybe between one or at tops maybe four releases 1980 itself had 22 releases spanning from the wily coyote to somebody called mr ugly i think i saw in here i don't know who that is that might have been another year uh anyway they and so they had tons in 1980 which might be why they took a few years off later on in that decade and then yeah tell me about this 1984 stand by Amen. me thing because it looks like it's a boy's head but i don't know if i isn't stand by me isn't that

sort of a dark movie or am i wrong about that uh it is they find a dead body yeah i believe and i think here's here's all i know about it at this collector's house today he had something that was packaged up that was like a stand by me um a stand by me pez and it had this like the the background had a quote from the movie i think one of the kids in the movie must say like i have it here if you

want if you want it it says if i could only have one food to eat the rest of my life that's easy pez cherry flavor pez no question about it attributed to a character named verne there

you go and so that put it on the pez folks radar and so they made i i didn't even actually clock what the pez dispenser looked like i just noted that it had that quote on it this kind of packaging um also the guy that i was talking to today had a like an old like a pez gun from the 50s that was signed by daniel craig because apparently the movie what's that movie that he was just in

where he's william s burroughs is it called queer yeah queer did you see that i didn't did you i

did yeah it really stuck with me remember daniel craig's character pointing a pez gun at someone

i well gun plays it's a very surreal movie as you'd expect it's based on a william s burroughs book and it's you know kind of like it's it's his i can't remember what william s burroughs is sort of like character name is in a lot of his works but it's kind of like you know it's basically him um and guns play and gunplay plays a real role in it because William S. Burroughs in real life shot and killed his wife at a party and there was question about whether it's done on purpose or just a parlor game gone wrong either way you know something that followed him around the rest of his life maybe one of the reasons he did leave the country although I'm not sure about it I'm not a big burrows head i didn't know much about this before i saw this movie that i kind of end up being obsessed with for a few weeks um all of that is to say because of the real gun violence there's also like sort of dreamlike recreations with toy guns as well but i did not realize that

it was a pez toy gun one of them is a pez toy gun that was rented by the production company from the guy that i went and interviewed today and now he has the gun they sent it back to him And they had Daniel Craig sign the bottom of it, which I thought was kind of cool.

There is a really great article, I want to say, in the New York Times. I don't even know why I'm suggesting this because you haven't seen the movie. And I don't know if you would like the movie. It's very surreal. You really do have to take some leaps with it. There are some sort of pretty intense drug experiences. Because he was famously a heroin dude too, right? Yeah, so it's interesting. There's some really tough depictions of withdrawal, but also a big part of it is him, I believe, going out into the jungle looking for ayahuasca. or something that would be similar to that i can't remember i think ayahuasca but is that a is that a jungle drug or is that anyway i don't know yeah it is okay yeah then that's what he's looking for anyway it's an incredibly so i i don't know if you would like it or not i think there would be parts of it that you would like and i think aesthetically you would like it um but there's a really interesting article about um how the person who is the costume designer like went for a kind of a reality uh vibe and so like everything in the movie and i read about this later because again i i think i didn't know what i was going in for when i saw the movie it was literally like a saturday i'm like i don't know instagram keeps telling me to see this movie queer i'll watch it i didn't even know i was sitting down for a burroughs experience and then i watched this movie i'm like oh as soon as i sat down i'm like oh this is burroughs and like oh okay and then I had so many questions afterwards because it is kind of surreal and weird and time jumps I started reading more and more about him and his life and how the story sort of fits into it and then I found this article I believe in the times all about the costume and I think you'd really appreciate this aspect of it like it was all true vintage stuff and they were not precious about it one thing that stands out in the movie is like when things are dirty they're dirty like it's it legitimately feels dirty It does not look like somebody rubs some dirt on something to make it look a little dirty. Like there is a verisimilitude of like the costume that really stands out.

And I'm pretty sure if you do some Googling, it was probably transforming Daniel Craig into a very grimy William Burroughs. There it is.

Yeah, I think that was it. Yeah, I think you'd be interested in.

That's the movie where he says, I'm grimy, I'm slimy, and I need shower.

That's exactly right.

I will read that. You know, I have to say, like, I knew that that movie was about William S. Burroughs, and I knew it was a little bit surreal. And so, surreality is not usually my thing I go for in movies. But I have to say, aesthetically, I loved everything I saw from that movie. Because are they in, like, Cuba or something?

I think Mexico, I should know. I'm pretty sure it starts in Mexico, yeah.

The outfits and the look of the whole thing, I actually thought looked really interesting.

Interesting to me.

Yeah.

So that's pretty much it. Just, you know, it was a German, or sorry, it was an Austrian breath mint, and then they brought it over here, and then they made it into this whole other situation now, and they probably regret the Johnny Depp one they did. Did you see any giant Pezz's? I saw the world's largest Pezz dispenser, as verified by the Guinness Book of World Records, Andrew. I stood at its feet, and I worshipped it, like an Easter Island head.

I'm seeing some giant – see, I think I'm seeing something different here. I'm seeing giant recreations of packages of Pez candy being hoisted by a crane on the website, and it looks like you can actually walk into it. But actually, a Pez dispenser would be more fun. How big was it, and what was it made of?

It was made out of wood, and it was probably 20 feet tall, and it was like a kid with a baseball cap. You press a button when you walk into the visitor center there, and then the head tips back and a fake Pez comes out. The other thing, Andrew, if you decide to get serious about this lifestyle, they have a lot of Pez conventions, and apparently they're wild. They all get on the same floor of, like, a Holiday Inn, and then they all bring out their Pez dispenser collections, and then they just open all of the doors to the rooms and prop them open and just put out signs in the hallway about what kind of Pez dispensers they have in their room, and then everyone just walks around, and apparently the hotels are just littered with Pez candy in the carpets by the end of them Because people are shooting each other with Pez guns the whole time.

Put it in my veins. I am looking at, there's only one upcoming event on the website right now, but it's May 17th. That's not too far. Woodlawn, Maryland.

No, that one's, that one I've heard is a smaller one. The one you want to go to, Andrew, get this. It's in the Cleve. Cleveland has the biggie each year. And so you could maybe, you know, visit with family, go wander around a holiday inn with a bunch of Pez heads.

I'm looking it up now. Yeah, I'll book my flight. I hope it doesn't. Definitely.

How about you do your half of the show from the Pez convention?

That would be so amazing. If it interferes with the TB Telethon, I may just have to bail on TB Telethon. But you understand. Let's see here. It looks like July 16th through the 19th, 2025, the magical world of Pez begins. Oh, they have a countdown in 111 days. Wait a second. Is it really 111 days until July 16th? Yeah, I guess so. Holiday Inn in Independence, Ohio. All right. Forward my mail there.

Here I go once again with the email. Every week, I hope that it's from a female. Oh, man, it's not from a female.

All right.

emails or v-mails yeah do you remember um last week i think on the show or sometime recently you were talking about barry bonds and how he now has a reputation for like speed biking by speed bicycling around the the bay area do i have that right yeah like marin county and his

like strava his strava thing page is kind of legendary because he's actually set a bunch of these records for like weird little sections of highway that he's you know cycled them faster than

anyone else. He's apparently an avid cyclist. Well, we have this tale from listener James about actually putting eyes on Barry Bonds in various cycling situations. Hey, friendos, James here in

Oakland. Just a quick anecdote about Mr. Barry Bonds' cycling career. I grew up in Marin County where he's been setting all his recent records that you're talking about on the show the other day. And after college, a few years ago, I moved back to the area and started working at a bike shop, which is in Sausalito, which is very close to all the Strava segments that you're talking about, Barry Bonds setting all his records on. And when I worked there, he would actually come into the shop pretty consistently. You know, I'd seen there on weekends as he was kind of out on his rides um he was always trying to get free stuff which seemed kind of silly but anyways um and one kind of funny thing was that he had as you might imagine a very nice very expensive road bike and it was actually a unique road bike like this was like a special collaboration between um mclaren the the car company and specialized um which is a you know big bike company and so his bike was not only recognizable for being very large since he's such a big guy but also just was a very distinctive uh you know color and and you know all the components and everything were very recognizable um so so i always knew that you know if i saw that bike around barry bonds was right there um and so you know this went on for a couple months whatever no real incidents with him in the shop but then one day i was driving from my house up north a little bit towards uh sonoma County and And there's a kind of famous speed trap going down a hill from Marin over into a town called Novato. And, you know, of course, being a local, I knew about it, slowed down on that section a little bit. But then, you know, in my rearview mirror, I just see this big black Range Rover zooming up behind me going super, super fast. And, you know, I kind of get out of the way a little bit for it. And then, you know, to kind of look on the back of the car as it passes me. and what do you know there's barry bonds is you know 25 000 mclaren tarmac from specialized and so i immediately knew that's like one of two guys in the area that i know with that exact same bike um so i knew that was barry bonds um and you know then a couple minutes later as i go down the road uh you know of course see the the kind of blue lights on the back of a squad car pulling him over uh for that speed trap so that's my that's my anecdote about uh barry bonds and the mclaren tarmac all right talk to you later bye i wonder if he got a ticket

does barry yeah that's a great question you know that's a really good question would he i guess it would depend on how much the state patrol officer cared about the role that steroids played in barry bonds's right career particularly the last like say five to eight seasons also putting aside the Barry Bonds-ness of it is there anything more gratifying than somebody speeding around you and then getting their comeuppance I can only think of maybe one time in my life where that's happened where someone's been driving on and what I feel like is an unnecessary unsafe way on the road and then you know some miles later I saw them pulled over and I'm telling you I'm still high off of that experience it was the greatest feeling it never happens it's like i drive kind of like a turtle but still it's like people will sometimes speed past me or be weaving in in a traffic i'm talking about talking about on the freeway they're going 100 miles an hour and just like i saw somebody driving on the shoulder the other day to pass someone they literally went on the shoulder of the freeway to go around someone for no good reason there wasn't like an accident and it's like those people never seem to get caught it's like they never they're never driving through a speed trap so the idea that barry bonds did that that's so awesome i can't imagine having

a 25 000 bike on the back of my car also yeah what's with the trying to get free stuff yeah

right i you know like i mean barry bonds my sense of barry bonds you know for the last 10 years of his career was that he was just absolutely just like a miserable cuss like he hated the media the media hated him he was just he was supposedly just one of the most unpleasant pro athletes of all time now the question is was that because every time a reporter asked him a question it was about was he cheating yeah right you know it could have kind of hardened him um it it seems the evidence seems overwhelming and if you believe victor conte and the cream in the clear like also if you just look at look at what barry bonds looked like at the beginning of his career what he looked like at the end of his career and what he looks like now it's amazing what does he look like now and can we make it looks like he did at the beginning of his career he's like a super svelte he's a super svelte normal looking dude again which is what he was when he started out and then at some point he had a head like a jack-o'-lantern from all the roids and and now he's back to not looking like that because he's not doing all the roids so um but yeah the idea that he's trying to get free stuff at the bike shop kind of doesn't it doesn't make me think he is a cool dude or like he was misunderstood by the media it makes me think he's kind of a kind

of a handful the only real life people depicted in pez were barry bonds and mark mcguire for some reason and they both had giant problematic giant heads on top of the on top of the pez dispenser so yeah that's right anyway well thanks mark i appreciate that by the way i want to mention to folks so you can probably tell that that was a kind of a voice memo that uh did i say mark i don't know i said mark i was thinking about mark mcguire that was james who sent in that voice memo and you can you can email in voice memos weirdly i think iphones can't uh text me voice memos so you can text me 206-414-8285 206-414 tbtl you can leave us voicemails there or you can record a voice memo and then email me andrew at tbtl.net those are ways to get your voice

heard yes you could hear your voice on this very show exactly if you utilize that all right thanks for listening everybody we are going to be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you so please if you can join us for that in the meantime have a great wednesday take care of yourselves and please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all power out