Muse

Baby, have you ever wondered, wondered, whatever became of me? I'm living on imaginary radio. I'm living on that T-D-T-L.

T-B-T-L!

This is the part where I'm supposed to do the whole intro thingy.

I just came here to hit dingers and have a good time. That's about it. This is a show for dogs, about dogs, starring one dog, and one dirty dog. Expect to feel several bone tremors and be perceived by all around you to be a disgrace. The comedy factor speaks for itself. It's just painfully obvious. It's an unfulfilled prophecy. It just has to be played out.

Oh, this is fantastic. I've been waiting for this moment for months and it's finally here.

all right hello good morning and welcome everyone to a monday 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 oh yeah coming to you from the madrona hill studio perched high above

the mighty columbia bring it back home baby bring it back home boy does it feel nice to be home

after a week plus on the road. Got all the comforts of home, including, of course, a Fresca. How about a Fresca? Delicious can of Fresca. Ready to go, ready to bring you episode 4,434 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. I was in Middleton, Wisconsin yesterday at a mustard competition. Mustard! and i was surprisingly psyched about the whole thing honestly it was very cool and then i ate some very hot mustard on camera and then felt embarrassed um which we can get into coming up but first of course we got to say hello to this young man the longest strunning cobro of the show maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships and also of course the man who brought the

Rock and Roll Edge to the Eagles.

He's Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

Good morning, Luke. I was just thinking, I was sort of pondering your words, as I like to do. Thank you. At the beginning of the show. And it occurred to me, like, how much better it was that CBS sent you to cover a mustard gathering or convention or museum than a hot sauce. I feel like you would have had such a different attitude if you were going in, looking at a bunch of little bottles of just, like, mama's flaming behind hot sauce. Yeah, exactly. Like, that is not a good cultural fit for you. But mustard is.

It really, honestly, Andrew, I had a really great weekend in Middleton, Wisconsin, visiting the National Mustard Museum. And it is sort of an interesting topic, honestly, because it seems to engender a real sort of fierce loyalty that, like, for instance, ketchup does not have. Like, you know, people use ketchup. They put it on things. Again, I've done a whole story on ketchup. But what I was not expecting was the mustard enthusiasts, part of their enthusiasm for mustard is a rejection of ketchup. It's an active rejection So it's not just enough to like mustard You must also hate ketchup It came up over and over again from people I don't like that Well, I didn't realize there was a rivalry And it reminds me of the rivalry That I, in my experience, Los Angeles and New York have And ketchup is Los Angeles And mustard is New York And what I noticed living in New York And living in LA and traveling between them a lot Was when I was in New York And I'd be talking about something in LA or going to la people would be like oh god that place the traffic the whatever the smog they were real kind of it was a lot of anti-la sentiment like i would i could never live anywhere but new york and la is just like a golden retriever it'd be in la and be like i'm going up to new york new york oh cool i love new york like that's ketchup nobody in ketchup has a thought about mustard but everybody in mustard really has a thought about ketchup in fact there was a listener see if i can quickly uh grab their name who uh reached out to uh put it on my radar that there is a uh like there's mustard influencers on tick tock people who just really deal in a lot of mustard related content and one of them i think it was listener kevin by the way who reached out thank you kevin turned me on to a a woman who kind of goes by the name the mustard queen i don't think think we're going to interview her for this story but it was kind of interesting to see how deep in the world of mustard she was but her handle on it on uh

is ketchup is garbage jeez louise ketchup is garbage just relax so i i mean yeah i don't know

if i i'm not saying i agree or disagree with it but it was kind of surprising to me um that did you know andrew that uh saskatchewan that's where most of the world's mustard seeds are grown it's an ideal environment for mustard seed growth isn't that surprising saskatchewan yeah i would have thought that like i would have thought somewhere in like the subcontinent yeah i was gonna say yeah

Yeah, I didn't have it in the States, certainly. I mean, listen, I'm going to come back to this ketchup and mustard thing. And I have a chip on my shoulder about that because people for a while there talk about hot dogs and people writing, I just always hate the you're doing it wrong attitude. And I sort of feel like that's calmed down a little bit on the Internet in the same way people just saying you're welcome when you didn't thank them. Like, there's just certain, like, sort of, like, edgy ways of communicating that kind of popped up during the Internet era that, like, kind of really grind my gears or make me grate my teeth a little bit, grind my teeth a little bit. But all of that is to say, like, I do understand why mustard, with all due respect to ketchup, I eat them both. mustard is just a more interesting story though because they're the at least the way it's evolved like the types of mustard are so varying i mean yes stone ground mustard is nothing like that coleman's english mustard i told you that i love so much or uh you know the beaver brand sweet and spicy mustard that i love from oregon it's like each one of those is so different and ketchup i mean how much you know i know that they've played around with some like you know spicy ketchup or a ketchup mayo kind of thing but for the most part you lock on to your brand but it's not like do you want the stone ground ketchup you know what's also interesting about ketchup

to me as far as how different from mustard it is is there's basically a couple of you know there's heinz and then there's hunts and there's maybe a few others there's you know like whatever the store brand might be but what i think is interesting is there's nothing worse than a particular restaurant's artisanal attempt at ketchup like it for some reason is something that is worse when it's dealt with with more love and care like if small batch ketchup there's nothing worse than being at a restaurant and asking for some ketchup with your fries and they bring out something that they've made that has some weird cardamom shit going on or whatever It's like it's whereas with mustard, you really could make your own and there really are all these varieties and they're interesting for that reason.

I'm guessing you eat at more places with their homemade ketchup than I do, but I've had that before. I don't have a bad reaction to that, but you know what my version of that is? And it's a different, it's usually going to be a different style of dining, of course. But when you go to a place and they're serving like potato chips along with a sandwich or something like that and it's their homemade potato chips, I'm just like, no. I do not want your home. I hate homemade potato chips so much. Yeah, I hate that. They're usually thicker and somehow less crispy.

Yeah, it's hard to get. That's one of those things where whatever the, you know, whatever the Lays Corporation, whoever they sold their soul to, to just get that crisp thing dialed in, whatever abomination is happening to those sliced potatoes.

Do they even use potatoes anymore? I'm not even sure.

I'm not either, but like it's working. It's good. Or like a Pringle. Yeah. Yeah, like those are that's you know, those are tasty and crispy and it is hard to achieve those on the artisanal level. But so, yeah, I am on Saturday interviewed the guy who is the founder of I'll tell you this, Andrew, on the record, but also off the record. This guy, his name is Barry Levinson. He's a really charming dude. He has like a million great stories. i don't know i wonder if they might be ever so slightly apocryphal ever so slightly building

the mythology but they're great stories so barry levinson yeah also the name of a film director

right yes not saying well barry sonnenfeld and then i think there was a producer or is he a

director barry levinson is a director i was just like barry levinson i know it's not i but but you're you're i just needed to clear that out of my head yes okay i i it was how it helped me

remember this guy's name because there's a different Barry Levinson so he was this guy is like a real character he's you know he's wearing a mustard yellow collared shirt he's wearing a tie with a hot dog on it that has mustard on it he's like right out of central casting he used to be the assistant attorney general I think of like the state of Wisconsin that was his real job and this is his story Andrew that in 1986 he's from Worcester Mass okay and when so he's a dyed in the wool red sox fan and in 1986 when the red sox famously uh the they lost to the mets they they they appeared to have the world series locked up and then bill buckner had a ball go through his legs that it gave the Mets a chance and the Mets end up winning the series. His story is that he was so depressed from this when the Red Sox lost the 1986 World Series that he didn't know what to do with himself and he just found himself wandering an all-night grocery store with a shopping cart and he just found himself standing in front of the mustard section and he just had this epiphany, I'll just start trying to collect these mustard jars. And he said it to me, he said it to other interviewers, i heard him saying it to random attendees he was like and that's something just said to me if you collect them they will come and i did and you have and that's such a great story and i wonder if it's true but he tells it so well i think i'm just gonna have to in the story what i'm gonna have to do is i was talking to our producer i was like we're gonna need to footnote these with according to levinson like just put that out there that this might be real because this is his other big story he is and this it really happened he argued a case in front of the u.s supreme court the william rehnquist u.s supreme court and this was a year or two after his mustard epiphany so now he's on the prowl for mustard and his story is he's leaving his hotel room he's literally walking over to the u.s supreme court and he's in the hallway of the hotel and there's like a room service tray you know someone's already had their room service and then they put the tray back outside and it had one of those jars of

mustard. Well, the little mini guys.

The little mini guys, which are really kind of cute little objects, you know. And he's walking by, and he at this point, he's trying to accumulate any mustard that he doesn't have. He's building his collection. And so he looks around and figures this is fair game, because people are done with their meal. So he gets the mustard, he puts it in his pocket, and according to him, he argues in front of the Supreme Court with this jar of mustard in his pocket. And it was a good luck talisman. He ends up winning the case. And And that jar of mustard is framed in a little thing at the Mustard Museum. Again, also a great story. Difficult to—our producer, you want to know about dedication to the craft, our producer, Young Kim, read the entire Supreme Court case to see if any of the justices commented upon the mustard jar.

Is that mustard in your pocket, or are you just excited to argue in front of the Supreme Court?

Literally, what Barry said to me on camera was, and the last question from Sandra Day O'Connor was, is that a jar of mustard in your pocket, or are you just happy to see us? And then he pauses and he goes, that is, of course, a joke.

Okay, I was going to say, there's no way that's true. There's no way that happened. Although, if he does have it framed, let me just give you my, as you recount those stories for me, let me give you my gut check on it, because I know that's what you really need. is the honestly the second one i i think both of them have kernels of truth to them you know and certainly based on true events based on true events and also like i'll be honest like the way i remember things even before i started retelling a lot of the stories from my past on the show for my job just in in retelling or recounting them for myself there are certain things that i remember from like high school like when i met a huge chunk of my friends i remember it all happening on one very special evening and the more I think about it I'm like that couldn't have quite happened the way I remember it you know like and so but I know that there's a lot of truth to that to my memories of that night as well so it's kind of like well over time you tell stories almost kind of like we're discussing Mulaney had somebody call into his show I don't think you heard it and he kind of just finally hung up on the guy he's like you've been telling this story for too many years you've turned it into a yarn you've added too many little details to it and so that's what the first story feels like to me like I could I totally could imagine being as I mean how a Red Sox fan must have felt what did you say that was 84 or 86 I can't remember and like how a Red Sox fan must have felt after that must have been like the lowest of low you can feel as a sports fan because of the the whole idea of breaking the curse and just feeling like we were being thrown back into the darkness like it just like I can't imagine a more devastating blow and that's somebody who was rooting for the seahawks in 2015 you know so um so i can imagine being stunned i can literally imagine being like i don't know what to do with myself right now and i can imagine myself wandering around a grocery store you know what i mean yeah i actually just all sounds like something you would do yeah actually wait a second my name is barry i can imagine myself fighting a security guard at stars i can imagine myself getting getting tased in the meat aisle at sars i uh but anyway so i can sort of imagine maybe just even you know like going there and like maybe buying a bunch of mustard i don't believe that in the grocery store he thought to himself i will start a museum and i certainly don't believe and i'm sure this is just a bit of a joke that he put to the end and i said if they build it they will come that is the field

like that is so corny i don't believe that i don't believe that a man is going around framing a special little bottle of mustard just so that he can go and lie and say that no no i don't think there's any i believe that that is probably there's probably even more truth to that one

i would guess and apparently he loaned it out to someone else who was arguing a kind of a younger attorney who was arguing in front of the wisconsin state supreme court he like loaned it to him as a good luck uh sort of talisman so no no i i don't think that i don't think that there's any intentional mistruths i just think these are really good stories that have been told lots of times and i'm fully including them in the in the piece but i want to footnote them that that this is you know kind of this is this person's version of events um i by the way ran into a couple of tens uh first i think it was uh laura uh came by on saturday and i got to chat with her i think she was over from madison at the mustard museum or the mustard store that's like it's a gift shop upstairs that's what i was really into andrew i bought like i don't know 80 bucks worth of mustard that i'm having shipped home and i am psyched about it like dill pickle mustard i got some storming gorman thomas which is i couldn't get over that like so there's a baseball player named gorman thomas who was a milwaukee brewer so folks in the in wisconsin remember him but he was also a seattle mariner and he was a seattle mariner right when i was coming into consciousness about the mariners and we had these two guys i don't even know if they were on the team at the same time but gorman thomas i included a picture of him in the text chain yesterday when gorman thomas was a mariner he looked like he was roughly 75 years old and we had this other guy our our we had a pitcher named Gaylord Perry who was roughly 80 years old when he pitched for the marriage Gaylord Perry's whole thing was he used to somehow figure out ways to get spit on the ball he was a 300 game winner Gaylord Perry but he was at the way end of his career and he was like always like everybody knew that he was doctoring the ball somehow but it just I guess they just let him do it because it was like ah what do you it's Gaylord Perry so we had like Gorman Thomas and Gaylord Perry these two just elderly looking dudes to me um you know playing for the Mariners this like young startup recently you know uh minted team or whatever so when I thought there was a Gorman Thomas mustard which so I found out that he was this year in the competition one of his mustards was in and this is what I really want to get down to oh by the way I also met up with a 10 uh named andrew who was judging the contest on sunday he was one of the many judges and he works for uh public television in wisconsin and he said that there was a period of time where he had somehow you just in his life in public broadcasting he because i guess rewind was on in wisconsin you know that like satire show that was hosted by bill radke that i worked on and i guess rewind Had sent out as a promotional offer Like rain bonnets Like rewind branded rain bonnets To stations like as a little tchotchke Probably because like we're from Seattle it rains or whatever And he said that he used to have one He was going to send it to me and he can't find it anymore I was like oh my god dude I gotta get eyes on that

Yeah definitely

I love some old weird public radio ephemera

That is a weird That is a weird giveaway Especially because I feel like other parts of the country It's also interesting that Seattle back then was still trying to like kind of tell the world who it was sort of sure like i don't know if you do that today

and also we were going with you know i mean that must have been such a hail mary that was probably like we're getting distributed by in fact maybe npr made that i think we were distributed by npr which didn't mean much except that they were allegedly supposed to get us on a bunch of stations but um that might have even been promotion from them from dc or something or whoever did their But all that is to say, I was very impressed at how seriously the judges and everybody was taking the mustard championship on Sunday. So what happens is, people who make mustard, including baseball player Gorman Thomas, one-time Seattle Mariner Gorman Thomas, all these people, and companies too, you know, like professionalized companies, they will make these different mustards and then they will submit them to the contest. and then there's like it's double blind like nobody knows what brand of mustard they're tasting um they're not supposed to know anyway nothing is like i mean it's a very serious process the the guy barry levinson not the director he like discourages people from sitting near anyone they know and you're not allowed to influence anyone else's thoughts on what mustard they like there's no kind of like you know jury tampering or whatever like is it broken down by category

though so if it's a blind test like you can't be comparing like i say i mean there's it's so disparate to the different kinds of mustard it must be broken down by category right there are

i think like 12 or 13 categories there

There's like most of the ones that you would think of. There's Dijon is a category, of course. Deli is a category. Yeah, that would be a fun one. Then there's exotic. There's fruit. A lot of fruit mustards. Yeah, and then there's like hot. And then there's like super hot. And then there was this other one. It was explained to me where the particular kind where the heat comes from the mustard seed somehow. And it's a very, maybe horseradish too. I don't know, but it's a very intense initial kind of punch. And then it goes away quickly. Whereas there's a kind of other category of heat where it sort of stays with you longer, if that makes any sense.

Yeah.

So, but the folks that were doing the judging, some of them are chefs. Some of them are food writers. Some of them are kind of regular citizens. But like, again, people were taking this very seriously. And it was funny because as I was collecting up all the different mustards that I was purchasing And having the very nice owner of the shop I believe her name is Patty She told me that her phone had just been ringing And it was Gorman Thomas trying to find out if his mustard had made it through To the next round And she was like, I don't know But I love the fact that this mythical guy from my youth is somewhere in Wisconsin calling up the Mustard Museum to find out if he's moved on to the next round of the Mustard Championship.

Do you remember a few years ago, I stopped randomly by a garage sale and there was some fella who was selling like old baseball cards for like really, really cheap. And he was just selling like packs that he made of old Mariners. And I was going to go through these and see if I could find a Gorman card. And what I had forgotten about was last year at some point in a very Andrew moment, I decided to alphabetize all of these. So I can tell you, I have a Lee Gutterman. Do you know Lee Gutterman? Gutterman. Sure, he's a pitcher. I have a Lee Gutterman. I got him. Nice. Oh, I do have a Ken Griffey Sr. Okay. But it looks like I'm going to be missing out on a Gorman, unfortunately. I go from Fleming to a Griffey to Gutterman. Was Fleming Dave Fleming? Let me see here. That would be a Dave Fleming, a left-handed pitcher, apparently.

You don't have a Scott Bankhead?

A Bankhead, that's going to be in a different package. I'm going to kill for a Scott Bankhead, sinkerball pitcher. I was really bummed. I thought maybe, because I have probably about 100 of these things, I was hoping that maybe I'd have a Gorman, but unfortunately I don't. That could have been your Gorman, man. I would have given it to you.

Oh, man, that would have been pretty dope. Sorry, bud. Yeah, so I found myself really intrigued by the whole process, and I've been converted. Like I said, I will never – I can't imagine running out of mustard ever again in my life, Andrew.

Well, what did you, okay, first of all, Stop Ketchup Hate. We just want to put that out there. Maybe that's some bumper stickers we can get.

Today's Ketchup Visibility Day, Andrew.

That's right. And then aside from that, well, what did you get as far as mustard? Did you get a wide range?

I did. Well, first of all, they made us some, like, this actually happens fairly frequently, and it's very sweet. It's very kind. They sort of gave us a number of jars of mustard that they had, like, printed out a CBS Sunday morning label for and kind of gave it to us as sort of a surprise gift. And I believe it said, it's like CBS Sunday Morning, the news show that cuts the mustard or something. And then the actual mustard, I think, is made by the Beaver Company. Oh, right there. Down in Portland. Yeah, Oregon. It turns out Oregon is really popping off with the mustard culture. I didn't know this. Of course, the Beaver brand. Yeah, that's a big one for me. Which is pretty famous in the Northwest and has won a variety of gold medals in this competition. Glad to hear it.

Glad to hear it. It's one of my favorites.

And I think there's one called Kelly's that's out of Pendleton, Oregon, which is also really yummy. So I got, they have a whole, they have mustard in this gift shop. They have mustard sommeliers and they really know their shit. Actually, there's just like a hundred different kinds of mustard that you can taste. And I did. And I really liked this dill pickle one. I was also starving yesterday. So I, I knew that I wasn't going to be tasting anything as part of the competition. Like I did not, I literally did not want to have my unrefined palate be the make or break for somebody who worked really hard on their particular product. Like, cause I mean, that's how seriously everybody was taking it was like, I, I'm, I'm not good with describing how something tastes in me other than to say, that's really good. That's my classic line. So I, I, but I did think, well, I'm going to be eating a lot of mustard. And somebody said, one of the folks said, you know, don't eat a big breakfast because we're going to serve you lunch. And also mustard is filling. So, like, I went for a kind of a long run yesterday. I didn't eat anything. So I show up at this mustard museum slash mustard shop, and I'm just famished. I'm literally just like careening around looking for small pretzels. and any mustard I can dip in.

This sounds like, by the way, my instinct, and we'll see where your story goes, but my instinct is the opposite of that. If you're going to taste a whole bunch of mustard, I feel like you don't want to be too hungry because mustard is just on an empty stomach, mustard, mustard, mustard, mustard. I feel like you needed a base level of something going in there.

Well, we can fast forward to the end of this fascinating story, which is we, our producer, Young, really wanted me to taste, well, he said, is there an interesting one to taste? I said, well, the obvious bit is something that's really hot. And so I did, I mean, I tasted a bunch of different things, but the kind of crescendo was to taste something in the really hot category, which there was a whole, somebody there was describing the whole scientific principle behind what exactly was going to happen to me. And so the nice folks who had been judging the hot category, I said, which one of these should I try? And they go, well, like number seven is the really really hot one and so i of course take like an extra large scoop of it instead of a teeny amount to get the sense i'm like well it's probably not that hot or it's probably not that intense or

whatever and so what's the vehicle here are you putting it on something you're well i guess that

so here's there's a whole there's a few different schools of thought one is you dip a pretzel in there but then you end up eating a lot of pretzels by the end of the day and you just like it's a lot to get through so i think theoretically the way to go is just a little black a little white plastic spoon so that there's not but then people are eating apple slices in between the courses as a palate cleanser people are drinking water but it seems like the most sort of the the the least uh the most i guess honest way or whatever to get the mustard taste is to just have it be on a plastic spoon that has no flavor unto itself so i take this little very small plastic spoon like the kind that they'd give you a sample of ice cream with at a baskin robbins do they still

have those i don't know i don't i haven't been to an ice cream shop in generations oh i had mustard

ice cream by the way which is surprisingly good well because the thing is the mustard it was like a raspberry mustard kind of sweet thing or something oh yeah you mentioned this fruit mustard

thing which is something i'm unfamiliar with so maybe i should keep my ulls to myself keep them to yourself, Andrew. Yeah. Stop mustard hate, as I always say. Exactly. This is how ketchup hate

gets started. You know, when you got mustard hate and ketchup hate, an eye for an eye leaves the world insane. Anyway, and so I take a overly, probably a slightly overly large scoop of this very spicy stuff, and I take a bite, and first of all, or just take it down, and nothing happens. for one second nothing happens and then everything happens it feels like my the top of my head have you ever eaten something where the spice it's not even in your mouth it's not like because that's this was this different category where it's like it's not like i ate a jalapeno that was like oh now my mouth is hot i ate something that was like a depth charge it was like okay gulp well that's gone nothing happened and then wham like right on top of my head oh no i've never had it is this the first time you've had that top of your head thing it was and my eyes immediately start watering and like i actually did it like it i don't know well god i don't know what this is going to look like what the footage is because this was a truly unguarded moment for me on camera i lost the ability to and like let's be honest it's not like it's working great as is it's not like i'm coming off as super cool on camera ever but i am aware that i am being documented and i am trying to probably present as best i can this was a moment where i was not able to monitor or to control how i was presenting it was that intense just like i had like an involuntary twitch like it's probably a very very um very uh uncool moment for me but hopefully i guess that will also make it kind of

funny yeah i mean that would be the whole point right i mean if you're going for the bit and then you eat the really hot thing and you're just like doesn't affect me and that's not exactly right but

this was like i i was wondering if i was gonna have to kind of like sort of uh what's the word

i was wondering if i was gonna have to kind of like uh play it up a little bit well okay so yes

thank you andrew this is a good point so i end up eating that one on camera and then i eat a few more off camera and then i'm just kind of grazing and and everybody so nice at this at this thing i really love folks from wisconsin what a what a great bunch of people but everybody was you know calling us over and say oh try this one try this one and you know and they're they're they're not giving me like hey here's the totally down the middle dijon when they're like oh you should try this crazy fruit thing or something so this is all just going into my empty stomach right because the lunch was it was very nice but the lunch was brats and and you know that's not a thing i really mess with so my lunch was some veggies from the crudite plate which was not a lot of food and now i've got

like probably 20 kinds of mustard fighting it out in my stomach as the lift is coming to pick me up to take me to the airport to take two flights back to portland from madison to phoenix and from phoenix to portland by the way i got i got home at like 2 a.m um but um i realized like oh this this could be an a not ideal situation i've got i've got 20 kinds of mustard duking it out so to speak in my empty stomach before i'm going to be on all of these kind of small regional aircraft and this could be a bad situation luckily i did eat some fried cheese curds at the airport which seemed to really settle the whole situation down as i watched uh thank you andrew for the mlb login oh yeah that thing was saving my life this weekend i was able to watch julio rodriguez hit a no-doubter, and the Mariners win the game. I ate some cheese curds, and it was right as rain.

Yeah, no, I mean, that's classic Wisconsin doctor's advice right there. It's just like, oh, you have an upset stomach? Well, have you tried cheese curds? That's what's going to settle everything down.

Well, you're famished. What is your cheese curd intake, sir?

You only had one hot dog bowl today?

Exactly. Yeah, they're really leaning into it. I did see a T-shirt. I put a few pictures up on Instagram, and i did like right when you you know i don't know if this stat is true anymore but for a long time wisconsin regularly led the nation in drinking per capita you know i guess average amount of of alcohol consumed per person in the state i don't know if that's still the case if it i don't know why it would have changed but like i had a sense that that's kind of a big part of the culture when the first thing you see is a sweatshirt that says drink wisconsinably and then has the outline of the state it's actually a pretty funny spoof you um also

shared what i thought was a really good spoof now i i don't know why it's important for you to know how i received this spoof because it was on the text chain but i was already driving in my car running some errands yesterday by this point uh and so uh the mariners game is on i've listened to like the first part of it on the radio in my kitchen now i am in the car and i'm listening to the mariners game but the ongoing text conversation that i've been a part of with you goofballs is ongoing so my phone is plugged into my car and so i'm listening to the game but then every now and then it's like you have a new message from david burbank you have a new message from luke burbank and then i hit play and the robot reads your text right oh and so i was kind of enjoying the back and forth your brother david had a good spoof about um instead of a designated hitter um calling gorman is it gorman i'm sorry uh gorman thomas gorman saying calling him a designated or i'm sorry a dijonated hitter i believe that was pretty clever but then what i heard the robot quote to me was your text which was apparently they have a video area here at the museum called mustard piece theater i gotta say that is some that's really that got me that was good wordplay honestly

i think this barry guy got into this whole thing for the wordplay yeah so he i it's also being mailed to me but he if you go to the mustard museum and i don't know what you have to do to qualify but he will he'll print you out a diploma from his pretend university he's come up with called poop on you like as in gray poupon but poop on you sure yeah he he like he is he's an attorney as well he doesn't really practice but he teaches food law and apparently he wrote a book about food law called habeas codfish he's so this is why he did it he really really loves a good like food related or mustard related kind of spoof like there's everywhere in that place which was pretty fun i was a little let down because i was flexing when he told me he wrote a book this is we were in the sit down he wrote a book called habeas codfish and i said produce the codfish because that's i believe what habeas corpus means it means produce the body yeah right it's sort of you know but i but i think i think that he kind of was didn't quite catch what i was i wanted a little attaboy i wanted to like hey good job that you understand understand what habeas corpus means the other thing that uh didn't maybe get the strongest of reactions was when i did play this off of my phone like i asked him i asked i believe 76 year old barry levinson not the director are you familiar with the work of kendrick lamar and and he sort of said yes i've been hearing something about it and i said well uh do you know that he has a song where he just yells this and then i just like had it on my phone ready to go and i hit play and then it's just him just kind of looking at my phone as it's just that and um he shifted pretty quickly goes

well you've also got the uh the 1910 song baby cut the mustard or whatever he starts going into like broadside ballads yeah yeah yeah and i was like this has got to be really good for the movement you know the fact that the the young people of america are walking around yelling

mustard at the top of their lungs and he's just kind of he's doing that great people who are good with the media do this like if you don't have anything to say about kendrick lamar screaming mustard then just shift to something that you do know which is my baby's got a mustard bonnet or whatever and just like kind of keep the conversation going but he obviously found the super bowl show to be a little too black yeah right yes or as some idiot on a podcast i heard said it wasn't for people of my skin color which are something just so so just like somebody just saying i don't know that was such a a immature way of describing race i really can't i i don't know if i can think

of a pop culture event that's been more of a slow build for me than that halftime show i mean you you and a lot of other folks were right were very excited about it right when it was happening i was i was in a weird place because i was on an airplane going to england and so i couldn't really watch it it was like freeze framing i had my cell phone propped up and like the front row of coach on this flight so i didn't really get and then i watched it later but i was you know was just a weird way to experience it and i was a little down on it but now it's like it's really grown on me and now when it pops up again in various forms or just people are playing it for whatever reason it's like every time i watch it again i'm like i think i saw something on tiktok the other day by the way tiktok is so bad now like i actually think i'm probably i'm not gonna like quit it per se but i'm like i'm finding my interest level in looking at tiktok has really

waned like it's tell me about this because you know i had an instinct the other day i was looking i was missing instagram and for a very very quick fleeting moment i think this was literally yesterday luke i had a thought that i don't think i've ever had before which is maybe i should just open up tiktok because i still have it on my phone right and i was like maybe i should get it because i can't remember i think i was like looking for something not just something to fill the void as usual but like something and i'm sorry to cut off your story but like i remember just feeling like i've just been feeling disconnected oh you know what it was and i'm trying to think i don't remember the specifics but i know it was somebody that i used to follow on instagram it might even it might have even been some of our listeners or something and i was like oh well you know what everybody's on tiktok now i could probably just look up this person on tiktok and i could be kind of plugged in because i kind of miss some of my parasocial relationships you know and that's what it was and then it was a fleeting moment and something flashy caught my eye and i moved on But I just had this weird moment of being like, well, I don't know if I want to get into TikTok at this point. It's not like they've been some beacon of impurity and democracy in these dark ages.

Well, my journey into TikTok, as the listeners are well familiar, is like pre-pandemic or maybe right about when it was starting up. I just kept noticing that a lot of the things that I were seeing online that were like funny or weird or like maybe audio drops, they had that TikTok watermark on them. Like, I was seeing them on other platforms, but they were from TikTok, and I just thought, well, let me go to the source on this, and then I just fell down the hugest rabbit hole with TikTok, particularly during the pandemic. And my memory of when I started with it, and when I was really heavy-duty into it, it was just this really interesting place where you just had—the algorithm is very smart in the way that it delivers content to you, and you see a wide range of things. And it's, it feels very confessional. It's just tons of people just in their houses, talking into their phones, all different kinds of people. Like a lot of the funny humor. I mean, a lot of the stuff that I'll send you as intro tape is stuff that, you know, came through TikTok. I see standup comics on there. I see people doing weird sketches. I see old Tim and Eric. It's just like, it's a, it's a crazy stew of content that, that I really, really was enjoying, but I don't know. I think something has shifted to where they're in full advertisement mode now. Like, my sense is it used to be that you'd see an ad or some sponsored content on TikTok, like every, let's just say, five things you were watching, maybe one out of five, maybe it was one out of ten. It now feels like it's three out of every five. Like, there is more advertising. And, of course, it doesn't look like an ad. It's not like a Juicy Fruit commercial or something. it's some person going i am so sorry to all of you who bought the viral pendleton blanket because now it's been marked down to like this is the weirdest construction and it's a very tiktok thing which is some voice of a person or a robot or a robot yeah or a robot some weird ass thing where the person or robot is apologizing to a a hypothetical group of people who purchased a thing before this deal on the thing was available because now the thing is way cheaper sorry to any of you who bought the viral beer koozies because now they're half off it's like it's the it's the strangest sales pitch but it's just like it's thing after thing after thing of that or or you know just like it's just all commerce now and i i don't know if just because there's a bunch of people that are trying to make money on TikTok. In other words, there's like, basically, I could go on TikTok right now and I could be hyping some product and I don't know exactly how it works if I have to actually like somehow have the inventory or if I'm just partnering with the people that make it so that when someone goes and buys it, if they go through my TikTok feed, then like I get a credit or something. I don't know how it all works, but basically you've got a bunch of normal people that are

trying to supplement their income or make their living on just like talking me into buying like a rubber thing that sits on top of my stove that I can put all my spices in it's just like a weird random shit that's made in China and they're trying to they're trying to get me to buy it but somehow me buying it if I see it on their page they get a percentage of it or something it's just turned into this really weird place where there's almost no it feels like there's actually not very much new content i'm also seeing stuff i've seen before which is very unsettling like i i you know the whole idea of of tiktok is it's the endless scroll you can't get to the bottom of it there's no bottom andrew i think i got to the bottom it's like silt it's like silt down there it's like fucking the titanic is down there there's like one of those trigger fish like that live in total darkness but they have like a dangling part of their body as a light yeah yeah Like, it's weird down there, dude, because I seriously now will see something, and I'll be like, oh, I know how this DUI stop went. Like, I've seen it before. Oh, I know this entitled Karen messes with the wrong no-nonsense target employee. Like, I'm now seeing content that I've seen before, which means I've gotten to the bottom of TikTok, which is really messed up.

Yeah, it seems like it's a pretty bad time for me to start, like, decide. I wouldn't start.

I don't think, I don't think, I don't think that, I think it's, it's, I wonder if other people are having the same experience to where it's just like, it's so shit posted now. The inshittification, I guess, of TikTok is so, it's so noticeable that it's actually now changing my behavior. Like, I don't have the desire to like sit there and scroll on TikTok as much because it's, it's actually less, it's notably less satisfying.

That's good. That's good.

Honestly, I mean, I guess that's all it took was five years of my life and then the full in-shittification of TikTok for me to walk away from it. It wasn't me making better decisions. It wasn't me prioritizing family and health and brain expansion. No, it was just that it ended up getting so crappy that I just didn't want to go there anymore.

Well, you know, it's a good time for that. Honestly, this is not an introduction to baseball talk. You and I, as you like to say, foamed all that off.

We talked for literally one hour. We could have just no point.

Yeah, I know. We did a one-hour conversation about various developments in baseball.

Your love for Julio Polanco's bug eyes.

Jorge, first of all. Jorge, excuse me. I do like Jorge's face. But also, anyway, we talked a lot about baseball before the show. I'm not trying to get into that, but I will say that one thing that I noticed this weekend is I went full baseball mode, like probably more than ever in my life. Like, I always look forward to opening day, and I always follow the Mariners. But this is the first season where, like, I had MLB TV on just like kind of in the background, but like for a big chunk of the weekend, I got a fantasy team going. I was out doing some yard work this Saturday, I guess. And so I was just listening to whatever games were on. They're just like, you know, the radio broadcasts of games around the league. I was just like kind of as I came home from my volunteer gig yesterday and just turned on Sunday night baseball to teams. I don't really was like San Diego. I can't remember who the Padres were playing. It was, oh, maybe the Braves. It was two, you know, NL teams I don't have tons of interest in. But I just, of course, I'm not listening to anything else. I don't have to choose between Comedy Bang Bang or The Levitard Show or whatever. I told Veeves, I'm like, the nice thing about baseball season is you never have to think about what to listen to. It's just there's always baseball on somewhere. And it's kind of like I was, it was like refreshing because like this happens to me around this time every year. I'm kind of like, I'll just get obsessed with The Levitard Show. try to like like listen to every single minute of it and then it's around this time of year that i get compulsive about it and then i burn out on it right as baseball swings in to take my attention away and i'm like oh this is good like yeah i can now just lean into baseball for a while now and then eventually with my fantasy team starts you know going downhill or whatever maybe i'll i'll get in it maybe i'll get too saturated on that as well but like right now take your this is all for me to say take your

sort of TikTok hole, and just you have my MLB app now. Watch some games, dig into stats. Do you want to help me with my, well, I don't know. I don't know if that's a good idea. Let's end it poorly once. Yeah, let's not get you involved in my fantasy team. But it's all or nothing. Either take the whole thing, take the thorn. Take this cup, Lord, if it be thy will. Take the crown from my head or get your own team. But I just sort of feel like there's plenty of other things if you just have a bottomless hole that you need to distract yourself with. Well, I'll be very honest with you.

I mean, part of the way that you and I got on our unsanctioned, unrecorded Mariners podcast this morning that we just did for each other is I asked you, oh, is there a game tonight? And you said, yeah, I think that they're playing the Detroit Tigers, or as I like to call them, the Detroit Lions sometimes. And it made me so happy to know that there is a baseball game tonight that I can watch. It was like, oh, that's going to be great. And then my next thought was like, and I'm also going to be miserable for easily 80%. I was so mad this weekend going back into last week. It was like, I was just so mad watching them. And I was like, I feel like I really got to start. I need to kind of make sure that I don't just become such a force of negativity in our, in our sports text chain. Because first of all, I get on other people about that. I police that a lot during football season, which is probably not cool. And it's just not fun for it just to be a string of negativity. But it's so hard because so many bad things keep happening repeatedly, like guys just like not hitting the baseball or catching the baseball or doing the baseball things. And it's just like it's just one defeat after it's like it's like a baseball game is just when it's the Mariners, it's well, OK, I should just know this. How is it? Twenty seven at bats? Is that like a three time? No, it would be three times nine. That's pretty easy. Up to. I guess if you're the home team, you might not do the bottom of the ninth if you're leading. But it's just like whatever that is. Yeah, 27. It's 27 chances for me to die inside a little bit. And with the Mariners, it's like generally 26 of those 27 events go poorly. So it's like I'm both completely buoyed by the fact that there's a Mariners game tonight. And I also know that with it comes a lot of emotional pain and frustration for me tonight that I'll probably be taking out on our friend group.

And unfortunately, with the Mariners, it is sometimes only 27 at-bats. Like, that's the bare minimum, right? Like, you're hoping that it's not going to be 27, unless I'm misunderstanding what you're saying there. You're hoping that there's more than three at-bats. Right, it's not a perfect game pitched by the other team. But when it comes to the Mariners, so listen, we said we weren't going to get into this. But I want to clean this up a little bit for listeners who are just kind of like, listen, you're four games into the season. You are being ridiculous about this. The frustration. And first of all, I don't think that you need to worry about being like a cheerleader or something. Everybody who's everybody who's on that chain that has a buy into this is basically on board with the same thing. All of the Mariners fans, you, me, your brothers, Durr's like we're all in the same place. And it's like it's not like, oh, it's the season's over because, well, maybe Durr's is. I haven't checked in on him. But I understand that it's only four games in. But even the broadcasters on Sunday gently were saying, listen, the frustration that we and the fan base might be feeling here. And this is, by the way, these are the broadcasters of the game who are in the Mariners organization is notoriously very sensitive about what their broadcasters or even people in the media are saying about them. And they will like reach out to even like podcasts. I've heard podcasts apologize for things that the Mariners have forced them to apologize for. Yeah, the Mariners organization is notoriously sensitive, and even their own employees were saying on the Sunday radio broadcast leading up to it, it was Gary and Goldie, and they were saying like, well, what's going on here, though, is we're seeing across the first three games exactly what we were seeing in the previous season. And the whole narrative was the Mariners didn't do anything to change their lineup or their players or their fate other than saying, well, these players have potential. They're going to be better this year. And so when you see the same exact pattern that we've seen for two seasons now of the Mariners having amazing pitching and totally squandering it by not building up a team that can support the pitching and just has like what we've had. Like you said before the show, we've had four games and about two productive innings out of those four games. And so we're, you know, we're a 500 team right now. No, the sky isn't falling. No, we're not like absolutely absurd about this. It's the frustration of just seeing like the same thing being implemented time in and time out. I don't know if that's an expression. And of course, the results don't change. And that's where the frustration comes in. So that's why we're already freaking.

it's like and i don't think you've been through this but i sure have it's like you're in a kind of a relationship that's that's very volatile that's that feels really

When it's good, it's really good And when it's bad, it's really bad And then you break up Or you take some time off or whatever And then enough time goes by That you sort of forget about some of the bad stuff And then you decide to give it another shot And you sort of come together And there's like maybe a day or two Where it just feels great You're back connected with the good part of it And then they just do something That was the kind of thing That was really triggering for you in the past And then you're just right back in This is a continuation. I mean, I think you said this, again, in the pre-show show that we didn't record, that for us, this is not four games. This is the 166th game of this story.

Right.

It's like this starts long ago in a galaxy far, far away for us. So, of course, we're freaking out, but it's because there's a long, long kind of, there's a prelude to all of this that's making us insane. But that's all I'm going to say about that.

Yeah, there is a I just want to say that there is some guest on Comedy Bang Bang, of course, hosted by Scott Aukerman. And I want to say it's his buddy, Adam Scott. I think that's right. It might be another one of his regular guests, who's a name that everybody would know, who comes on Comedy Bang Bang at least once a year or something like that. And he oh, you know what it is? It's probably Manzoukas. I think it's Manzoukas who comes on much more than that, usually a year. But they'll always allude to the fact that the fans don't. they're like we could do a podcast about comic books but we just know the fans don't want that because both of those guys are huge comic book nerds and a huge chunk of their audience would be comic book nerds but as far as i know none of them have comic book podcasts and they just torture their audience by saying like yeah no i mean if they get close to talking about comic books they'll be like oh but we can't talk about that our audience doesn't want to hear us talk about comic books otherwise we do a whole show about it that's what you and i are doing because i know that we have some sickos out there start doing that we're always like just do like do more do another no point we want to hear a no point well and us just saying we did a no point and we didn't record it and it was before the show into these exact microphones is really again not a torture for the majority of our audience but certainly a section of it a very very very small

niche yeah of our listeners are are i mean i'll just say it andrew it's like the beatles just decided to like play a whole album and not record it that's exactly i think that's exactly what me

talking about baseball is like the beatles talking about baseball yeah 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 ready go everybody razzle dazzle all right let's thank some dazzling donors these folks are donating a dazzling amount of dough to keep in tbtl in business i don't know where they come down on the topic of us recording entire sports podcasts and then deleting the file not making it available that's that could be something that they're very relieved to hear about or something that infuriates them we know that they like what we're doing right now because they're supporting it financially with a not insignificant donation each month we want to thank ashley wilson in dallas texas hello ashley thank you the stars at night are big and bright deep in the heart of dallas texas ashley says hello boys love to you all no notes see ashley has basically no thoughts on us recording episodes of the show or a version of the show and then deleting it so that's good yeah i just wanted us all to relive one of my favorite moments in tbtl history it's the origin of not today baby face and it's a term my 11 and i continue to use all the time it was a true lol moment in episode 2289 holy smokes so yeah can i ask can i stop for a second

here and say does this does this ring a bell to you because i was thinking this would be maybe before my time if not today babyface was a thing maybe it was from the radio days but episode 2289 that'd been well into my tenure i believe well into my tenure i believe yeah but also a long

time ago right yeah talking maybe not 10 years ago but would this be like well let me see i'll

let you continue reading this oh so it's 2017 because ashley included a link here so uh it was

a true lol moment in episode 2289 at about the one hour 20 minute 57 second wow back when that was a yeah remember we used to sometimes do three hour shows just to see if we could oh yeah gosh um uh while luke was playing babyface's whip appeal i do love that song okay um i'm curious as you're reading this do you remember that moment keep doing what you're doing dummies I don't remember this moment, Andrew, but thank you so much, Ashley, both for the financial support and for sending us a link to the episode and the exact timestamp, because are we going to try to listen back to what this was? Yeah, I guess so. So we said

or Ashley said one hour, 20 minutes and like something like 50 some seconds, right? So let me just start this at, I'm going to start this at 1-20-25 and I have not pre-listened to this, by the way, so this is... If we hear the

Babyface song, Whip Appeal, we'll know that we're in the right neighborhood. This is it? This must be it, right? We're going to be pulled off here. I'm going to try to talk over this a little bit. I mean, the irony the irony that we probably got pulled down back when we did this and now we're getting pulled.

Yeah, no, go ahead. So I'm going to pause this for a second and then it looks like the music's going to go out and then you're going to talk over it. But what were you saying?

I was just saying the irony is that us playing this segment again here today will probably also get us pulled down.

Yeah, exactly. We're lucky that this is still online here. Is it ringing any bells at all? No. Well, we just got to hear the whip appeal part. Okay. It still doesn't ring a bell to me, by the way. I'll do it just on. It's so good.

You're sweet, sweet, loving on me. 3,165 thumbs up, 115 thumbs down. 115 people went onto YouTube and just were like, nope, not today, babyface. Not ever.

Pretty good. It's so funny, that quick throwaway moment like that just stays in Ashley's head for all these years.

It's like Ashley and their 11 are saying that. I love that. here's what i want to say about whip appeal i don't think i said this seven years ago or whenever that was but um i don't somebody might correct me on this i don't think whip appeal was a thing people were saying like he's baby face is basically making this is he's you know he's wooing a woman because of her qualities because of her what he calls whip appeal oh but like and he's like he's as you heard he's singing keep on whipping on me and he i think in the song he goes on to kind of describe what whip appeal is but it's i feel like this is a unless this was something that i didn't know about that was happening in another part of the country or different part of culture than i was really privy to i don't know if people were walking around saying whip appeal before this baby face song like i think he may have invented the concept

and then convinced us it was a thing well here's how stupid i am i and i don't know if people could tell when it was me talking on the tape and me talking in real life but the irony is is way back in 2017 you played that song for me and you were clearly saying do you recognize it now do you remember it now and I was saying no and now in 2025 I'm listening to it again and if you had asked me I would have said no I've never heard that song before I'm still it still has not um has stuck has not stuck with me but I assume that whip appeal was like comparing because you know how like a lot of cars will compare situations or in some cases women to cars i feel like that was a big thing in the 60s or sort of like this idea of like a fast lifestyle and car culture was a big part of it and so i thought like whip appeal was like oh maybe you're driving in your car and your whip is so sweet that you one has whip appeal but is the term whip used as an automobile at all here and by the way yes this is how the song was intended to be discussed with me describing

whips as automobiles well urban dictionary i was just trying to look up whip appeal the definition like mostly what happens when you at when you ask about whip appeal you just get the baby face song but according to urban dictionary when a girl is so pretty so hot or so fine oh i'm sorry this is actually webster's i'm reading from yes right i mixed that other people are whipped for her meaning they'll do anything for her or let her do whatever she wants um uh hot girl colon i'm just reading from the internet don't come for me can you please take me to the mall matt yeah anything for you matt's friend damn she got that whip appeal but again like you're whipped almost like you're whipped yeah and then but that still feels to me like this is somebody on urban dictionary writing this based on what they perceive baby faces yeah definition to mean like you know i just because i'll tell you as you know walking around Seattle, Washington circa whenever that song came out, I was fully convinced that whip appeal was a thing that we were all agreeing was something that we were saying and thinking about and doing

and being a part of. Listen to this. So I did the same thing you did. As I was chatting, I typed in whip appeal slang and it took me to Urban Dictionary and I saw that same definition. Now, my next step on this stuff usually is to go to Genius.com. Genius used to be called Rap Genius. It's a lyrics repository, if that's the right word, where you can look at lyrics of almost any song in the world. And then often, though, it is like sort of annotated. You can click on a specific verse or line or lyric and somebody in. on the internet the hive mind has like kind of given you some context for it yeah and what i think is really funny about whip appeal is none of the verses or bridges or choruses or pre-choruses are uh annotated except for one line in the whole song which is you've got that whip appeal so that's what we're looking for so i'm gonna go ahead and click on it and according to an unreviewed annotation so we need to make sure that this has not been reviewed by the hive mind one contributor says the term whip appeal was coined by r&b pop singer pebbles babyface overheard a conversation pebbles was having with her cousin r&b singer sherelle i don't know if i'm saying that name correctly uh she was referring to her at the time husband antonio l e l a reid i'm sorry i messed that up so you know antonio l a reid and babyface ended up being huge producers interesting okay so apparently pebbles was referring to whip appeal and pebbles is a woman it looks like right and so and talking to cherelle so if this is to be believed this was two women talking about her

husband having that whip appeal yeah so that's antonio marquise reed okay born uh june 7th 1956 in cincinnati ohio that's a norm known more widely as la reed so maybe la reed had that whip

appeal la reed is from cincinnati shouldn't he be cincinnati red maybe instead of la reed yeah

we should actually look into that uh yeah he oh yeah la face that was that was their label so that was that was baby face and la reed they have the face records and uh i remember they were just like they were just a hit factory back in the day yeah uh they had tony braxton on there outcast uh tlc ti was on there uh amongst uh among many others um so anyway well hey thanks ashley for um thanks for quoting tbtl with your 11 and thanks for allowing us to take that little journey down getting pulled from youtube couldn't do it without you maestro on your mark on your mark

Get set. Get set. Now ready. Ready. Go. Everybody rattle, dattle.

Look who it is. It's Rachel and Matt G in Bellevue, Washington. Hey, guys. I've been really struggling with hard and soft Gs this round of donors. Oh, yeah. But this one, the spelling is G-E-E. Wait, did I add an X to E? No, you did it right. G, two E's, and it says the last name is G, like the letter, G.

That's easy to remember.

Yeah, that one. Thank you, Rachel and Matt, for helping me. Because, again, this is a real Achilles heel of mine.

You know, you did that so well, Luke, I would call you a whiz. I'd call you a gee whiz. Oh, yes. Love it. Oh, that was just good for everybody involved. Habeas codfish. Yes. God, I'm sorry.

Produce the pronouncer. They're in Bellevue, Washington, and here's what they say. As we write this, the world feels strange and dark again. With our message, we'd like to reinforce the importance of being where your feet are. We're eternally grateful for TBTL, both what you three, Luke, Andrew, and John give us, and the way the TBTL listeners surround, nurture, and support each other. Want to get involved politically? We'd like to recommend getting involved as a PCO, Precinct Committee Officer, the backbone of the party and essential to turning out the vote and strengthening the party platform. I'm just going to wedge in my own just very quick thought on this which is just even in reading this it feels to me more hopeful than just sitting around having you know being filled with existential dread all the time which is kind of my default setting right now. in other words turning fear into action i think is a pretty powerful thing and just the idea of saying okay i'm gonna really i'm gonna make sure that i'm helping turn out the vote and presumably uh you know create a better outcome at the midterm i was like i'm like i'm starting to i'm arriving at the place andrew where or at the part of the story where it's like i mean i'm obviously super upset about everything that's happening in our country super upset but i i'm heartened by like the tesla protests i'm heartened by like what's going on for bernie sanders bernie sanders is going around just having i don't know 30 40 000 people show up to say this is not normal you know

like why didn't we elect him the first time anyway you know i gotta say that's well this isn't the time for it i've uh i did not vote for him you know i was i didn't either yeah and i was i was afraid that he was unelectable now that was also though shoot this is gonna really oh man my memory is going to betray me when did schubert dip come out but i did vote for warren right that would have been the same that would have been the same primary so i think so i think yeah i think so

then Hillary in the general so it's not like I totally hate my vote there yeah but if I had voted for Hillary in the primary potentially and then seeing that Bernie Sanders I think there might have been some ageism mixed in there with him for me and also the fact that unfortunately some of Bernie's supporters weren't doing themselves a lot of favors during that time sure the

Bernie bros as it were I guess my point is that this is I think really good advice from Rachel and Matt which is if you're feeling powerless transfer that into doing something, you'll feel less powerless, I think. It's the backbone of the party and essential to turning out the vote and strengthening the party platform. Wondering if now is the time to make a change for yourself? AA, Al-Anon, and other 12-step programs can be a beacon of light. Community will be everything the next couple of years, and there are so many ways to be involved. Quote, we must be careful not to drift into worry, remorse, or morbid reflection, for that would diminish our usefulness to others end quote i believe that was something i said on the show once i'm guessing that's a quote from me um because that's how i talk usually very in a very meaningful and grammatically correct way luke a whip is an automobile that's me quoting myself from earlier we must be careful to always work on our whip appeal so as not to diminish our usefulness to others uh be good to yourselves tens and cobros we love you uh rachel and matt we love you too and that's some really some really nice advice and some good thoughts on this Monday about about how we're all feeling and things we can do to maybe feel five percent less terrible about everything thank you very much for

supporting TBTL 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 Andrew a email or v-mail before we skeedaddle on this

monday yeah but before i do that i want to send you tomorrow's dazzling donors my caps lock was on so you're gonna be getting an email here in a second that's gonna be yelling very shouty okay

thank you for preparing me for that i will not take it the wrong way but in the meantime um this

is a voicemail uh that you and i received i do not remember when or why we were talking specifically about garlic but i guess this is something that comes up on the show from time to time right Because your store-bought garlic situation?

Yeah, because I feel like I've kind of found the perfect—I am trying to cook more. In fact, that's another thing I'm really happy about being home. I haven't—I realized before I left on this epic journey, I was cooking pretty much every night at my house, or at least, you know, creating some sort of food thing for myself, and I was feeling good about that. And I've just been on this, like, run of just, like, questionable, like, hotel, you know, like, bar food. but like these hotels like actually i stayed at the lake let me just shout out the courtyard by marriott in middleton wisconsin it's in a generally kind of slightly depressing area in that it's across from a costco there's like nothing it doesn't feel very walkable it's in a kind of an odd little place the hotel itself was the nicest staff and most professional hotel staff i maybe i've ever stayed at in my life including very fancy hotels and they had the craziest pool i was using the treadmill and which was adjacent to the pool it had like it was like a water park it was like a great wolf lodge in there if you're looking for a staycation in wisconsin and you don't want to go to the dells and deal with all of that go to this friggin courtyard by marriott but anyway uh but i've been eating a lot of prepared food and microwavable things out of the little like store at the marriott i'm very excited to start cooking again but one of the things that i've been trying to figure out is the garlic dilemma like jar lick as it's called is frowned upon usually by people that that really know their cooking including my girlfriend but i also find the process of like taking an actual like head of garlic it's got all that papery stuff on it i've never mastered the like quick and easy way to go from i'm holding a thing of garlic to like i have minced garlic in front of me it's like pulling off what seems like this endless amount of the papery outside and then just like dealing with it i just don't have a good system and one thing that i've really gotten into now is buying pre-peeled garlic this is why we were talking about it so not pre-minced

like pre-minced having a jar but like pre-peeled but then it also in a jar though right and staying

in a jar in like a little vacuum sealed plastic and it so it i think has a pretty decent in fact when i got home last night and i opened the fridge and surveyed the many things that need to be tossed the garlic did not need to be tossed whereas like normally that would have sprouted but it's so yeah so it's it's pre-peeled but it's not chopped up and it's in a little like vacuum packed thing and i think this is a great solution at least it it saves me probably 30 to 40 percent of the hassle of regular garlic but without it being fully jar licked i will say this you were

mentioning all the things that you have been eating on the road and you forgot

one thing oh my god i can't wait for my shipment but uh jack in honolulu listener jack wanted to

weigh in on the garlic situation hey luke hey andrew this is listener jack in honolulu calling about your recent discussion of cooking with garlic and using pre-chopped jarred garlic or pre-peeled garlic etc the correct answer is whatever gets you to cook more and whatever makes your time cooking more fun uh is what you should be using and it's fantastic that's a very I do love garlic.

Can you pause this? That's a really nice answer. That's the kind of opposite of the like, you're doing it wrong. You know? Yeah, I agree. It's like do whatever gets you having a good time and making food that you enjoy. And if that's garlic, great. And if it's something else, great too. That's a nice approach.

Stop the garlic hate. But I do love garlic and I'm fascinated by it. So I thought I'd talk a little bit more about garlic. Garlic has a defense mechanism. So inside, it's kind of like a two-part epoxy system. So when you break the cellular walls of the inside of garlic, it kind of creates a new compound. Those two parts mix and it creates a compound called allicin. And allicin is a sulfurous volatile compound that gives garlic its delicious flavor and its aroma and everything that we love about fresh garlic. So when you use pre-chopped jarred garlic, they cut it a long time ago. All that allicin, because it's volatile, has already evaporated and gone off by the time it gets to you. So that's why it doesn't have any of the same flavors or effects that fresh garlic has. Pre-peeled garlic is a little bit different. To make pre-peeled garlic, the companies boil it for 10 or 15 seconds so they can make it easier to peel at a mass scale. And that takes away some of the ability to make allicin, but obviously they haven't broken those chemicals or they haven't broken those cell walls, so it still has a lot of potential to make allicin. so it's still a lot better than pre-chopped garlic but it's never going to be as good as fresh garlic which still has its full chemical ability to make allison um so just uh way more information than you need about garlic there and uh power up i heard some of that i gotta say i

was looking around for a midi version of elvis costello's allison literally every time he said it i was allison i found one but then it wanted to charge me a few euros for it or something i I was like, I don't think I can do this on the fly. We're already getting pulled over Babyface. We could just get pulled over Elvis, I guess. Oh, my God. I'm now getting some warning that is literally in Cyrillic. And I'm like, no, I am not going to mess around with any of that.

I wonder if that term, Allison, also is related to alien, although those are slightly different words. But there are certain, aren't onions and certain things in the alien family? Although alien and Allison are not the same word.

I think you have told me that before because we came up with a great show title like Alien Ant Farm or something along those lines Resident Alien or something like that I'm not exactly sure

I was listening very closely and my sense of what Jack was saying well this is what I find interesting he said that garlic has a defense mechanism so in other words I guess a lot of plants will evolve something that the idea is that the garlic does not well I guess the garlic does not want to be eaten by animals And so the defense mechanism would be When you're let's say chewing it If you were like a you know some sort of animal Roaming around and you dig up some garlic And you start eating it It has you know the allicin this reaction Between when you start to break up The cellular wall of the garlic But here's the thing I find the defense mechanism delicious This is bad planning on garlic's part It's not like you start eating garlic And it turns into like a rotten egg It turns into garlic Which we love So if that's the defense mechanism I find that an interesting defense mechanism

We named episode number 2937 Alien Resurrection This was back from 2019 So I like that, but that clears up a resident alien For today's show But you know what I mean

What I take from Jack's thing Is that the very act Of breaking up the garlic, chopping it up You're releasing this thing that he's calling a defense mechanism But then this is the other part i don't understand there are certain fruits like apples my understanding of it is that apples have evolved to basically be enticing for animals to eat so that an animal would eat seeds eat an apple and then poop out the seeds somewhere else therefore propagating the plant so like the entire sort of thing that we eat from the apple is really just like a big kind of calorically dense enticement to an animal to ingest the seeds of the apple and then go poop them out somewhere. So in that case apples are like, hey looking for a good time, sailor? They want you to come over and eat them and then poop them out somewhere else. But does garlic

not want that? Maybe because it's a, what is the word? Grows in the ground. Perennial? Yeah. Or maybe because of how

it grows like, you know, underground.

or something i don't know maybe yeah and it can just kind of continue to sprout by the way have you ever done that have you ever just taken you said you sometimes your garlic if it sits there too long will start to sprout i know that i've taken little bulbs before and put them in little um little like flower pots or whatever inside on my windowsill and it actually grows quite a bit genevieve put some out in the garden last year i don't know whatever became of it i don't know that the maybe seattle temperatures are great for garlic growing but it is i mean you have a little bit of land it's so when you see life happening in your kitchen sometimes like well what if i just put that in some dirt let's see what happens you ever do that i haven't but this is going to be my

spring of doing a lot of stuff like that like i think i'm going to build a little like herb garden box for the inside of the house i'm most of my grocery budget not really but a lot of my grocery budget seems to be herbs like buying fresh dill and rosemary and things like that things that you can very much grow on your own yeah and it's like sometimes it's not cheap like a little thing of dill i'm gonna say is like three or four bucks and like i'm gonna use that entire amount of dill if i'm making like a like a tartar sauce for like a salmon patty or something there's no like using half of it like i'm really you know and so then like i'm buying two of them it's six bucks it's like you know considering how easy it is to grow that stuff so i'm gonna that's one of my projects for for the spring what i thought you were going to ask is if i ever just take like a clove of garlic that's peeled and just pop it in my mouth oh why would i ask that well people i see people doing that i see people online doing that on the street not walking thankfully not walking down the street but i i mean uh speaking of tiktok back when tiktok was good there was this thing i think it was called like the georgian breakfast and i don't or balkan breakfast not georgian balkan breakfast and i don't know how this guy got started but the sense of it was that in the balkans in some part of the balkan region this is a this is a regular way that people might be like having their lunch or their breakfast or whatever and it's just like a bunch of kind of sort of seemingly odd and disparate like crunchy vegetable things and then like a loaf of bread and they're like eating like a big bite of a cucumber and then like a tearing off a hunk of the bread and then like two cloves of garlic raw, but it's like, it has an ASMR quality when the guy, by the way, he's, I don't think he's even speaking English. He's just like eating this assortment of kind of oddish things. I mean, they're all just pretty much vegetables. So it's not like it's gross. It's just like, and then he's just like kind of just chomping down on it. And this became something with hundreds of thousands of views for some reason. But anyway, he'll eat a clove or two of garlic. My fear is my breath would never recover for the rest of my life. If I

ate an uncooked clove of garlic you don't even look at garlic in the middle of the day you're

like that will stick to me and i get i am pretty paranoid about that stuff and i i you know i am um i'm so grateful that i get to work on the live wire radio show and all of the people that put in so much time and energy to making it happen i don't want to be um ungrateful but i can never eat any of the food before the show because it's always from like the jarlic hut it's always like just piles of very delicious smelling food that's all extremely garlic forward and i'm like one i'm probably a little nervous anyway but two i'm just kind of like i'm not that's i'm not going to be the guy on stage who's interviewing people who's just like just had a huge thing of hummus and it's like just fire breathing on the guests you know what i had a realization the other day you know

how i've told you i've been and i don't even know where it is right now but i've been struggling with my sense of smell recently because I think it's because of this medication. I don't know. It sort of comes and goes and also it's been going on for so long now that I can't tell if I've just gotten used to it.

What was coffee smelling like for you?

Like coffee sometimes from far away. Like if I was on a different floor of the house and the coffee was brewing and it sort of wafted through the air, it would almost have a cabbage-y smell to it. A lot of the stuff I noticed was more synthetic scents like air fresheners and stuff would have, like maybe other people go through their whole life like this. I've always liked a synthetic scent, like a very smelly laundry detergent, like a traditional one. I like that kind of stuff. It kind of calms me and makes me, you know, maybe it's from childhood or something. But a lot of the synthetic scents in my life started to smell very chemically and almost like a burny chemically thing or an acidic chemically thing. but so I always was associating it with those synthetic scents but I had a realization a week or two ago as I was cutting up a cucumber and I was putting on my salad and I thought oh yeah these they finally got their cucumber situation straight and when I say they I was talking about the world because there was a period about I don't know maybe two or three months ago where I was convinced that there was something going on with the world's um cucumber they were

going slimy in like two seconds oh well no that isn't what i was going to say because maybe there was something going on but like i had gotten a cucumber from like i think maybe like a safeway store or something and it just smelled funny to me and i was like they're kind of strange not terrible but not like and i love cucumbers i eat a lot of cucumbers and so it's a smell that i'm pretty familiar with and a very um i would say mild smell too a cucumber smell um and then and then i got another one from like sprouts which is like more of a you know produce forward grocery store around here and I remember thinking oh this one has got that smell too and I think I had like three or four cucumbers I was like wow something must be going on with the world's cucumber population as opposed to your nose and then and then I started to realize other things were smelling and I think cucumbers were the first thing that hit my nose in a funny way and I thought that cucumbers it was the cucunary in the coal mine you're you're getting me to change the show title aren't you um but it turns out that no no no it was my nose not the world's cucumbers that were smelling funny well this is

what i've been dealing with over here andrew for a while i would buy the really i never know what size of cucumber i'm like in the mood for it's always a game time decision and for some reason like if i'm in trader joe's and they have those little ones yeah you know the kind of like they're like a little bigger than like your thumb or whatever but they're like kind of mini yeah cucumbers and i don't know why i find those appealing but sometimes i do i just like well that seems refreshing and like i'll just i don't know take one and put some salt on it have a balkan breakfast or whatever but like i feel like those ones go slimy so fast like i would get them home i would put them in the crisper and i would like maybe have maybe get one of them you know consumed before the rest of them just went totally like inedibly gross and slimy now i'm kind of only buying the ones that are in the like plastic wrap because i feel like that helps you know the longer ones that are... I've never seen them in

plastic wrap. Really? In the produce

section... Like shrink-wrapped. Every

grocery store I just go to, you just have a bunch of bulk cucumber. And I don't even mean fancy. You just go to the produce section. These ones might

be like English cucumber. Oh, you're getting English.

Okay, yeah, yeah. For me, I'm just getting the standard kind of cucumber. I will say this, though. I do not abide by the too large of a cucumber. Just standard cucumber size, standard cucumber variety. But like you were mentioning earlier wait this might have been in the no point but this idea of um i think maybe we're talking about the the new shape of baseball bats in some corners but anyway you had said like or we're talking about pitchers or something it doesn't really matter but like this idea that like some like chickens and turkeys that you get at the store now they're like too big like what are we doing to these things and i feel like produce goes the same way this is what i want to talk about with large fruit the other day on the show like i'm not into like super large produce Can we stop, like, filling these things up with whatever hormones are making the cucumbers too big? Because they're not better. The bigger the cucumber, the more, like, the center. The harder they fall. Yes. And, like, the – no, but, like, the inside is too seedy and too liquidy and stuff. Like, it's like these huge cucumbers. What is the point?

What is your typical, like, preparation? You said you throw it on a salad. Do you ever just, like, dice them up?

I put them on my eyes.

I lay down. Well, that's why you look so young. And I put them on my eyes. I do a whole avocado mask, and the eye part is the cukes.

I think the majority of the time that I'm cutting up a cucumber, I'm putting it on a salad, and it depends if you really want to get into detail here. If I'm making the salad for me and Genevieve, I am cutting them as thin as possible, because Genevieve is not as much of a cuke fan as I am, so she likes them really. I try to, what's that special device that you have that slices things incredibly? We have one, too. It's like a- A mandolin? Yeah, mandolin. I don't use that, but I try to just cut them as thin as possible for her.

You try to go basically Paul Sorvino in Goodfellas with the garlic and the razor blade.

But I realized that I was doing that for my own salads. I'm like, wait, this isn't how I like them. I like a chunky little cucumber, so I'll cut them in my salad into halves or quarters, kind of chunky. But then also you and I have bonded over this recently. I like to cut, I don't know what, an eighth-inch thick or quarter-inch thick cucumber coin, coin hit that with a little bit of salt and pepper bob's your uncle absolutely i've been doing uh

making my a little like a brew of of like um sesame oil and soy sauce and i've you know and like make a little kind of an asian cucumber salad thing yeah so easy to do you just you know cut up some cucumber throat in a bowl and then just like that's the thing that i'm starting to learn is just like making sauces just to taste like just being like okay it needs more of this It needs to, like, a little bit sweet. Let's get some acid to balance it, whatever. And then you just, like, do a bowl of that, and then it just only gets better over time because it's just marinating more and more.

Yeah, yeah. No, that sounds good. You know, I've been looking for a good, I'll go on.

and look for those ingredients because I don't I I'm always looking for a good sort of like summer vegetable side sort of and I have this like corn and black bean salad that I swear by I've been making it for years and years now but that's kind of my go-to and I have maybe one or two others but like especially for pop-up if I want to take like some veggies in or something it'd be nice not to just bring like sliced up cucumbers it'd be nice to have more of a a cucumber salad kind of thing But a lot of some of those, like my mom made one growing up that was more like kind of mayo based or something or some sort of.

I've got an upcoming story at the Mayo Museum. Yeah, that's right. It's going to be a long weekend. In your wheelhouse. The international mayo contest where I have to taste 30 kinds of. That's, you know, I do like I do like mayonnaise. You are on the record as being suspicious of the product other than very specific circumstances. I am I'm pro mayo, but I will tell you this. i do not like the when i do not like mayo when they get off of just whatever like the best foods taste like like the very down the middle like american mayonnaise that i'm used to like i don't like that kewpie stuff i don't like dukes i definitely don't like do not like sir kensington's vegan mayo like mayo is one of those things that if you you try to get creative with it it is definitely not for me i'm just like give me give me some good old-fashioned best foods mayo i'll

spread that on the sandwich and i'm good to go that's interesting because for me like i grew up never touching anything that was mayo or mayo related and i hated mayo but then as you know luke um in the past like i don't know 20 years or whatever is more than in my adulthood i started like i was like no i don't i would order a sandwich i'd say hold the mayo hold the mayo But then like a sandwich would be like, yeah, but we have like an herb aioli, an herb aioli or whatever. I'm like, well, herb aioli, I like herbs. Like, okay, you can just leave that on, you know. And then I started, and that sort of was the nose under the tent a little bit. Is it the camel's nose under the tent or is it the tent's nose under the camel? I can't remember. It's camel's nose. Okay. So, and now, like, if I'm ordering a sandwich, because I'm already telling them to hold the cheese, it's just probably easier for me not to say hold the mayo too. as long as it's not too glopped on there. But I guess the only reason I bring that up is because it's almost the opposite of what you're saying. Like it was the more like not down the middle, not your Hellman's, but more of a like sort of a, well, like kind of the fancy ketchup of mayonnaise that you were describing earlier that sort of like got me to start looking the other way.

Speaking of garlic aioli, and then we should probably skedaddle. I was in the Madison, Wisconsin airport yesterday and I was hungry. this is where i ended up eating cheese curds and watching the mariners on your mlb.com dime but first i was like there was a sandwich shop and uh like it said literally in huge letters it says made to order and then right below that is the guy who's working at the sandwich shop at the register and i come in and they've got like four or five sandwiches listed and i was going to try to i wanted to have him make me a sandwich that was to order because you know i don't eat a lot of meat so i was gonna have a make me something with a bunch of veggies and some cheese and some mayo and all that and one of the things was that they didn't even have a sandwich like that but everything had garlic aioli on it but i didn't want garlic aioli i wanted regular mayo so i went i'm just i mean i can't overstate how big the made to order sign is and i was like so can i do one of these can i do a mate a make or a made to order sandwich and he looked to be like i was so insane and i was like because i go like that turkey sandwich i go could i get that without the turkey and could i add some other veggies to it and he goes yeah we can't do that and i was like was you have to order a joke did like a comedian write this you know like for real like what is the i i don't know i mean it was very like so i think the deal was that they had like four pre-made sandwiches or something that were totally not made to order that they would couldn't deviate from i was like do you have pickles he was like yeah we don't have pickles i was like could you put lettuce and then i just kind of got a little bit like not frustrated but i was like okay this is not the place for me but and i then i said to him i don't know if this was a jerk move i tried to have a big smile on my face because it's not this guy's fault yeah yeah yeah he just works there and i didn't want to give him any grief but i was like you gotta ask you gotta i did i go i go i go they really i go they're really throwing you under the bus with this big and it's by the way it's not a banner that like it's not like a cheesy banner that they hung up it's giant like letters that are attached to the area it's very permanent above where this guy works i said they're really throwing you under the bus with this made to order sign and he goes yeah and then and then i went over to the adjacent place and got some cheese curds but it was like this could not possibly be less made to order situation when i just all i wanted you to do I almost was, like, going to have to five easy pieces it. Yeah, right. Okay, you've got a turkey sandwich. You've got lettuce. You've got tomatoes. Now hold the turkey. Yeah. Add regular mayo. That's my Dennis Hopper impression.

No, we knew. You didn't have to say that, certainly. Yeah, I mean, it's like Big L's chicken. Can I get some chicken, please? No. You don't want to sell chicken here. Like, I don't understand, like, what's going on. And you're right to not want to, like, make him have to answer to that. I actually kind of like the way you constructed that a little bit. It takes the pressure off of him. But like because, you know, that's probably a very thankless job. I always think about that whenever I'm at an airport. I always think like, oh, could I get a job at the airport? Because I conceivably, you know, there's an airport and driving distance to my home. I think this is a notion I had ever since I moved out to Seattle because I didn't have a permanent job when I moved out here. And I'd be applying for a lot of different jobs in media. But I'd also sometimes see things like at the airport. I'd be like, at what point do I start applying for airport jobs? You know, just service jobs, whatever it is. And so maybe it's always been in the back of my head, like, you know, what would it be like to work at the airport, whether you're working in the food industry or working more in the airline industry or whatever it is? It seems like a fascinating place to work in a certain way. Like, airports are unlike any other place on the planet, right? Like, just like people from all over the place coming and going, blah, blah. I think it would be somewhat fascinating, but also such a grind. And I just wonder, like, what's it like getting to work every day? Do you have to go through some sort of security clearance every day? Where are you parking? Where's the employee entrance? I'm obsessed with this.

I'm sure it's the, you know, from when you leave your car, if you are driving a car, to when you're actually standing at your workstation at whatever restaurant or, you know, Hudson News or wherever you're working inside the airport. That's the part that basically, because I go through a lot of airports as it is, and I find it to be kind of a soul-crushing process. I can't imagine doing it five days a week to get to where, just to get to my job. and like I have to check myself because sometimes I will be in a line at the this totally happened to me actually at was it was it the Madison airport might it no it was LaGuardia I think I've been in a lot of airports lately but like I was in line this the quick story is I was in line in LaGuardia I have that thing clear which I know is kind of part of the problem like clear like makes the line worse for everyone else so therefore you have to buy clear so you don't

have to be in the bad line that you created soon you need to get clear plus of course because that's

right i have clear and i have tsa pre-check and i just have started using clear more because i'm paying for it and i feel like i might as well or something and but it's it's sometimes it's it's an improvement sometimes it's not like sometimes it's like in this case it was slower than the tsa pre-check line which i also have pre-check on my thing like you go up somebody with clear they're always very nice they bring you over to this like kiosk the kiosk scans your eyeballs and then you're supposed to kind of cut to the front of the line but there was something weird with this line where like we were the clear line was taking longer than the tsa pre-check line because they were letting the pre-check people go over to our whatever security guy and i found myself getting really annoyed and then having to think am i late for this flight i wasn't is this that big of an inconvenience no there's like basically no line I'm now I'm waiting four minutes instead of one minute and by any standard going through the TSA in four minutes is a great win so just because it's taking longer than I thought but the other thing is sometimes when I'm in a long line and I am frustrated and maybe I am running late and then the folks show up who work at the airport and they kind of cut to the front of the line because they're allowed to do that because like it would be insane if they had to wait also in that line and I've caught myself being like annoyed Like are you kidding me Like I'm not getting Through this line fast And then I'm just like Thinking about this person's life And like What a pain in the ass It must be to work At the airport They're very often A person of color Maybe a You know a woman Like they're a person Who I think is working Pretty hard in this world To kind of like Have a life Because things Systems are not well Set up for them typically And if the one thing is They get to go through This pat down That they have to go through Every day to get to work And they get to go ahead of me That's fine But I have to like remind myself of that because I'll just be like I can catch myself being like oh you gotta be kidding me this lady that works at the Arby's gets to cut now it's just like such a terrible I wish only there were an Arby's at the airport that's what I mean I picked the worst example of a restaurant because I'm telling you anybody who knows their stuff knows there are no Arby's in the airport I think it would be a hit

I think so I mean it seems like the trend is just going in the opposite direction though right if you have Arby's on one end of the spectrum and some people would put Arby's on one end of the spectrum and a fancy restaurant on the other. I would say we're going more towards the regional famous chef, celebrity chef.

Like a terrible, pale shadow of what Wolfgang Puck could do if you were at his real restaurant. Right, exactly. It's branded as Wolfgang Puck. gang puck but it's like oh can i just say one more thing out of complete left field but like i can't remember who it was somebody that i i think i admired maybe a comedian it might have even been mulaney i think it might have been an old mulaney bit i feel like there is a trend that i find very upsetting which is people referring to the place that you get cinnamon rolls in the mall or at the airport it's cinnabon b-o-n there are a lot of people that call it cinnabon oh yeah and that really grinds my gears because if you look at the last three letters of it it's b-o-n it's not b-u-n and like again it might have i don't want to malaney's having a tough enough time as it is with everybody's life which i will also try to call into again this week but like i don't want to throw him under the bus but it was somebody that i remember thinking like oh this person has uses precision language like they're precise with their language and they're calling it Cinnabon and they were like the second person I'd heard in like a month just casually calling it Cinnabon and I was like that is not what it's called my friend it's Cinnabon but it is they're

asking for that confusion though I think what is the point of changing the m to a b unless you're supposed to be invoking some sort of bun or pastry totally and again I don't even know if I've ever bin de cinnabon so i don't even really know what it is they're slinging i know that it's some sort of cinnamony pastry right it's class it's like classic mall food but i the name does not make sense so i sort of don't blame the people who are making that mistake yes no you're right it's like

it's a weird name and it's setting some because you call it's a cinnamon bun we call it a cinnamon bun like that would be so why i don't know if they're trying to play on french like bon being maybe that you know what maybe that's good or something look this up real quick we got to get out of here but i just want to like let everybody know in case you haven't looked closely lately it's uh oh and then what was the other andrew i'm sorry i'm just full oh i know what it is

this weekend it is the french thing according to the ai overview by the way so maybe that i just

sounded like a real dumb american there okay this is my last this is my last rant and then i'll let everyone go uh there was a a pretty funny little weekend update bit that i caught on the internet you know i i don't watch of course i don't watch saturday night live live but it'll pop up in my various it's particularly tiktok and it was the weekend update the premise was it's joanne from joanne fabric uh-huh and she's showing up at the weekend update desk to basically like make a bunch of jokes about joanne fabric was of course going out of business and also kind of like have a meltdown like she appears to be drunk it was actually very well played i'm not that familiar with the cast member but this is what's crazy to me and now let me double check this

because if i go on this rant and i'm wrong by the way i was at i was at a joanne's briefly this weekend it is a i didn't know that they were still actually open but yeah they are in their death

throes and it is a well and you just very unintentionally did the thing that they had me horked up about which is it's not joanne's oh it's joanne fabric joanne fabric and so they were like and now joanne from joanne's fabric and she's like the whole bit which again i thought the bit itself was really funny she keeps talking about joanne's and the like i think it's colin jost is calling it joanne's everyone's calling it the wrong thing and it's like you wrote this whole bit you rehearsed a bit did anybody google what the name of the thing is there's no s there's no

apostrophe s it's not joanne i would argue this i would argue this like you and i talked before i don't think this was on the air before the show like jc penny is jc penny but colloquially our family called it pennies and so i think there are certain things especially with this kind of store i know this isn't a department store but that type of thing like i feel like okay if you say joanne's fabric that hits my ear really wrong it's joanne fabric or joanne fabrics no joanne fabric but fabrics is possessive but if you say if you say joanne the fabrics owns joanne if you say joann's i feel like that is like a that is just sort of a cultural shortening of the word i have no problem with if you don't have a problem with calling jc penny pennies as a sort of shortened colloquialism I would say calling it Joann's would be the same thing.

I think, to me, it's like because I grew up in the home base of Nordstrom, and I always really bristle at people calling it Nordstrom's.

Yeah, and Pike Place, Market Pike's Place. Pike's Place. That's a big thing around here.

Stuff like that.

Bartell Drugs has come up before.

I think I'm especially sensitive because of the Nordstrom's thing.

Because you don't want to drive your Volkswagen over to...

Believe me. I'm in a rigorous speech therapy program revolving on how to pronounce the VW.

vehicles that i'll just call them v-dubs for now i have an amazing no i hear you on that i just thought it was funny because like to me the pennies thing that's like a cute nickname for a place and i can't give you a different example of something else but that to me is almost like a whole other kind of category which is like a cute nickname that we'll give to a store that we all know is not the name but it's what we're calling it like pennies is a perfect example To me, just like the Saturday Night Live writers, I think no one actually looking closely to see what the name of the thing they're parodying is seemed kind of like, you know, it seemed odd to me because, you know, but I was probably the only person that.

Well, yeah, I didn't see that context. And it might be because Joanne's is Genevieve has gotten so much into sewing over the past two years that I think I hear her say Joanne's. And it's sort of like I feel like the people who go to Joanne's a lot more than you and I actually do call it Joanne somewhat colloquially and probably lovingly before this. Of course, it's not loving now. I mean, what happened to that store like so many other great American brands with this investment capital coming in, just buying the name and gutting it is just so, so, so depressing. However, I came across what I would consider to be a dazzling detail as we get out of here about Cinnabon, which did you know that it started in Federal Way in 1985 at the Sea-Tac Mall?

Wow.

Where you're going to work someday. Where I'm going to work someday. And I do wonder, now called the Commons at Federal Way. That's what, I guess, Sea-Tac Mall used to be called. Cinnabon was an offshoot of the Seattle-based Restaurants Unlimited chain. chain and um it says restaurants unlimited uh associated with one to create the perfect cinnamon roll eventually hiring uh geraldine brousseau to finalize the recipe since brousseau was famous for her baking in the seattle area i don't know if that name rings a bell for you but i didn't realize that there was such local roots here for i don't i here's here's what i think i think i

assumed it was local because i was a kid and when you're a kid and you're in the mall you don't have a sense of, like, national brands maybe, or, you know, so I think I always assumed that, but not because I knew that it started in, at the SeaTac Mall, but, by the way, when did we decide to start naming everything the Commons? Yeah, right. I know that's supposed to be classy, but it feels a little, it's kind of the, it's the rose gold fixtures of calling things things, and by that I mean like, you know, there was a huge trend in making, like, all your sconces rose gold in your bathroom that had the real edgy tile that was, like, kind of I don't know really cool pattern but like it's already firmly planted in 2022 which is I'm not saying I did the greatest job with my little remodel but I was very much trying to be a little bit less tied into the particular moment of time like I really like what you and Veeves did in your kitchen by the way we never debriefed on that oh yeah looks like it turned out really well

you know by way of Instagram yeah that's a bit of a yeah we can have a conversation about that I think the durability is going to be an issue so it's definitely a temporary we put down for folks who don't know what we're talking about we put down that temporary um flooring that's sort of like these sticky what like maybe two foot by two foot tiles or whatever it looks good but it definitely is a temporary thing uh we can talk more about that um but i was going to say regarding the um what were you saying uh rose gold yeah it sort of feels like the or the commons we called the malls it's the drake meme i didn't need to say this sorry i just had it in my head a second ago and i was trying to remember it the drake meme of just like kind of like shaking his head away at the word mall but then call it commons and he's like yeah exactly exactly exactly we'll

meet you at the commons so all right that's uh that's about enough of that that was a lot of that and we did a whole show before this that no one will ever hear sorry okay thanks for listening everybody we are going to be back here tomorrow with more of this imaginary radio for you please if you can join us in the meantime have a good monday take care of yourselves go mariners and And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

Power out.