Muse

The staff and I went out to go see Minions, Rise of Gru, and I just have to say, it is fascinating to learn the history of how Gru rose to power. If you don't know Minions, they're these little yellow guys, denim overalls, they speak in a kind of gibberish language, Yabba Babbo, Dabby Bebo, Bonanna. minions is a prequel to the despicable me franchise rise of grew is a sequel to that prequel essentially the minions will seek out the most despicable person they can find in this case grew and just got us to thinking who in our society would have minions if they were real and are they real and where can i find them and how despicable do i have to be to get some well i'll say on our show we will be answering all those questions and more i will be attempting all manner of heinous acts in order to court the millions will i be successful find out when this When your life returns, stay with us. TBTL.

One thing, I have no shame before another mortal. All my shame is between myself and Christ. I never drop my eyes to another human being.

It's like the most requested thing when I ask my Facebook what you guys want to see for me. It's like, get drunk, get drunk, get drunk, and there's a time and a place for it. And guess what? That place is now, and that time is now.

Do I wish our fans were a little more hip? Yes. Do I wish they were a tad more on top of their hygiene? Absolutely. Do they have a confused look in their eyes like a dog that's heard a strange sound? Yeah. But strap that dog to a sled and, baby, you'll be flying across the tundra.

All right, hello, good morning, and welcome everyone to a Monday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. Why now? What are they doing?

And how can you steer clear of it all?

My name is Luke Burbank. I'm your host.

Carol, hold my calls.

Coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio perched high above the mighty Columbia, where it's a beautiful July day. Oh, Ma, Pa, it's just beautiful. Came off of an absolutely spectacular weekend with my family out here, where it was also, the weather was really great. We had, I guess what we were calling Sibfest 25, All seven Burbank siblings together in one place. No children, no significant others, just hanging out, looking at photos, sitting in the hot tub. Just, it was a magical time. It's a kind of magic. I'm still, I'm honestly still kind of on a bit of an emotional high from the whole thing. Which puts me in a great place to bring you episode 4509 in a collector series. Let the fun begin. I'm feeling recharged, rejuvenated, rested, loved, and ready to bring you this episode of the show. Now, am I ready for something that is happening exactly one week from today? Like one week from pretty much right now, and that is the TBTL-a-thon, live from Friendship, Wisconsin. I'm so excited about this show. Andrew and I logged on a good while ago, actually, this morning to start the project of soundchecking. And, of course, we then spent a good amount of time just talking about hundreds, if not thousands, of details that still need to be nailed down before next week's TBTL-a-thon. Yes, we will be live in Friendship, Wisconsin, broadcasting from Main Street. And, ideally, taking your phone calls, Zooming with you on Wednesday night, and just having a wonderful time together. um that is if the equipment makes it to wisconsin if we make it to wisconsin if everything works out but uh you know i feel hopeful about these things as does this guy i think he could have been at sib fest 25 he is he's like a brother to me what's that what's that brother he is andrew walsh he's the longest running cobro of the show maybe best known for his tall ships and he is

joining us right now good morning good morning luke i have well this is sort of history in the making here oh yeah not to build it up too much calm down jay-z i think i have for the first time ever in this show an announcement apology and request all combined into one and i'm sitting here trying to announce apology quest i don't know how to put all those words together but it's An announcement, an apology, and a request all at the same time. I don't think you guys have done that before. Did you do that in the radio days?

I think there was an FCC rule against it.

That makes sense.

I think it's called the triple dip. And when they outlawed payola and plugola, a lot of people didn't pay attention, but the triple dip was also banned.

That's right. I'm remembering that now. In fact, I think you guys even talked about it because Jen wanted to do it. And you were. No, no. It was vice versa. You wanted to do it. But Jen was like, no, Jen, always a stickler for the FCC rules. Yes. The triple dip act of 1996, I want to say that. Yeah. Exolidation. Yes, I believe it revised something that had been in.

Smoot-Hawley. It amended it.

It also allowed radio stations to buy more billboards in each market than originally was allowed, I believe. Yep. Anyway, it's all complicated, but here's the deal.

The Marconi provision.

Should we keep going? I could. Smoot-Hawley was a reach because I believe that's tariff related.

I was hoping I'd go through my entire life without ever hearing about Smoot-Hawley, and And I think because of our current political climate now, it gets referenced. Yeah, it was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. I would have been fine never knowing those words.

Yeah, although as far as acts are concerned, it's pretty cute, Smoot-Hawley. You know what I mean? It doesn't sound threatening to me. Listen, on Friday, I had one job in the TBTL newsletter, And that was to let everybody know the details of the TBTL picnic that will be happening at the end of the Thon on July 25th in Friendship, Wisconsin. Yes, sir. I put all the details in there. We're going to be meeting up at a park. In fact, I should have the name of that park in front of me right now.

And I did. I don't know if we've ever gotten actually confirmation on the name because we had TBTL employee numero uno, John Sklaroff, on the ground there. reporting for us, but I think it was a little unclear, the name. It was like, there was one name at the parking area. There was another thing at the pavilion. I'd just say drive to Friendship Wisconsin and ask them where the podcast picnic is happening. I guess, I'm guessing it's going to be the only one.

Just show up and just start shouting. Not unlike Bob and What About Bob. Instead of yelling Dr. Leo Marvin in the center of town, just yell, where's the picnic? Where's the picnic? It's Castle Rock County Park Shelter. All of the details of this were in the newsletter this Friday. If you did not receive it, I can happily resend it to you, and we will also get some of this information. Actually, it's on the website right now. And the thing that I forgot to do, and this is where the apology comes in, is I got to the end of the email, and I'm kind of like, okay, it's Friday, July 25th, 5 p.m. It's at the Castle Rock County Park Shelter. John made a cute little map that helps everybody find it. Apparently, it's very easy to find once you're in the area, and especially once you're in the park, you should find us no problem. We have a little shelter there, so even if it's raining, everything was perfect, but I got to the end of this email, and it seemed short to me. And I'm like, what am I forgetting? I think I literally even wrote in here, I think I'm forgetting something, but we'll have, you know, keep your eyes peeled for follow-ups. John had sent me an RSVP form. There's a weird place for me to pause. A jot form? A jot form. You're familiar with the language. We've got a jot form.

It's one of the many things that you and John constantly reference that I could, if you, and this would be the weirdest hostage situation of all time. If you put a gun to my head and said, make a jot for him, I would go, I don't know how to do that. But I know Andrew and John talk about it a lot. Oh, my God.

I don't want to get us too off track, but I went to pet that dog on Friday. We'll talk more about that later. I mean, honestly, that's big news in our world, okay? You're not getting us off topic. You need to be getting us on topic for once. But there were just a couple of neighbors there petting this puppy. And one of them, I can't remember what the point of her story was. That's no offense, but she said she mentioned something about Yammer, which was a online tool that I had to use when I was producing for Ross Reynolds.

I remember Yammer.

Apparently it's not called Yammer anymore, but it was like an internal Twitter. It was like a private, internal, sort of almost micro-blogging platform so you could communicate with your team. But I remember when I got that job, or I guess when I was volunteering at KOW on the conversation, I think Ross loved playing around with new and emerging technologies. And there were three, he was like, put the ideas in the, not Reddit, I can't remember what it was. Oh, Delicious. I think we still remember D-E-D-L-I.

I think Delicious, I do remember that. I feel like that might have come after my time there.

Probably, but it was like, you started by putting your pitches in delicious, and then we would go through them, and then you would, as you would prep, like, Ross, not you, Ross would be like, put it in Yammer, did you Yammer? There was so much talk of, like, did you Yammer? And then there was a third one, it's like, yes, I delicioused it, and. yammered it and i wish i could remember the third one it was bananas all of that is to say oh that

was the name of the program yeah i know you i know you delicious it and you yammered it did

you bananas it yeah right did you did you bananas it yet uh all of that comes back to say i forgot to include the little rsvp mention in the uh in the newsletter this week so we want to get a sense of how many people are going to be coming to this picnic i literally don't know if it's just going to be you me john and one listener who got lost on the way to the billboard i don't know if it's going to be 700 people i'm guessing it's not going to be 700 people but i'd say it's it's north of five south of 700 somewhere in that range but we need to know how many kind of burgers and dogs and veggie things we're going to be providing like just a general picnic fair or whatever so we'd like to know if you're coming go to tbtl.net and click the little link at the top of the page

yes please do it'll help us uh know how to plan properly i i i involuntarily uttered an oh dude when you were talking about burgers and dogs because i realized i mean it would this would be the silliest way for us to get the foodstuffs to friendship wisconsin but i've got a lot of leftovers here from sib fest 25 because i just like on friday i just sort of went into a bit of a fugue state at both costco and trader joe's like i didn't i kept trying to make lists so that i would kind of efficiently and correctly get provisions but then I just panicked and just started buying large amounts of kind of everything so that you know we'd have enough food for Friday night and Saturday and everything and it turned out we had plenty of food because of course my siblings are all um like food people themselves and like you know particularly my sister Liz like grows all kinds of veggies and stuff as does my sister Sarah so like everybody brought food so there was actually too much food so i am now the proud owner of like pounds of like organic hamburger that i don't think i'm really going to eat and chicken apple cerno sausage things etc etc if you want to come by andrew i've got all manner of cased meats that you could stand over the sink

and eat we got a lot of it going on here i will say that like kind of the post-party leftovers are one of the perks of like when genevieve has a summer party or whatever and i'm like cleaning up and it's like 4 a.m. and you're just kind of like, well, this hot dog needs a home and it's my belly. And you're just kind of like cleaning up and you just kind of, and then like for the, you know, days and it sounds like for you maybe potentially weeks afterwards, you can just sort of say like, well, we got to eat this, I don't know what you like, potato salad or whatever it is. And you're kind of like, you kind of got to get rid of it, but it's not usually what you'd be eating on a Wednesday. Right, like I've got to eat

the rest of Liz's birthday cake that Sarah made. I have no choice but to have this Monday morning with my coffee.

Yeah, right. Ooh, did you? No, that doesn't seem like you. I can't see you eating cake in the morning. Did you?

No, I didn't. That was more of a fanciful idea, but we did have a delicious birthday cake. Because Friday was my sister Liz's actual birthday, and I not subcontracted so much as, what is the word, offloaded the responsibility of the cake to my sister Sarah, who made this incredible, I forget what it was even called, but it had strawberry in it, and it was very delicious. I feel like cake has come a long way since I was a kid. When I was a kid, birthday cake was pretty much like a Betty Crocker mix. It would be yellow. It would have chocolate frosting. And by the way, I'm not complaining about that cake. I loved that cake when I was a kid. But nowadays, I don't know the last time I saw a cake like that out, you know, for a birthday. It's like everything has really kind of gotten an upgrade.

You know, Genevieve and her friend Jessica, they went to college together. They were roommates in college and post-college. I think they lived together maybe longer than Genevieve and I have lived together. That can't be true. A couple of Wellesley grads? A couple of Wellesley women. Don't call them girls. Made a mistake before. I just said grads. I didn't even gender it. No, no. I'm not saying you. I just used to always say Wellesley girls, and they're like, Wellesley women. Oh, yeah. That doesn't sound like a good idea at all. No, that was not me. That was not me reprimanding you. That was me saying out loud what I always have to remember.

Well, you, yeah.

And I'm not somebody who goes around calling women girls. In fact, that's very counter to how I think about things. But I just remember back in the day we would say, Wellesley girls, Wellesley women. Anyway, all of that is to say, so they're very, very close friends who love cake. And they have an expression, though, that fancy cakes lie. Now, I'm not saying that all fancy cake is bad. But especially if you go to the grocery store, or maybe like an up, not just a grocery store, but maybe like a higher-end grocery store or some place, and you're looking in like one of those glass refrigerated cases or whatever, or cooled cases, and you just see like they're so extravagant and they're like works of architecture as well. And there's like these cakes, they lie. They lie. You get yourself a sheet cake, it's going to be so much better.

these it's too much lipstick not enough pig they didn't say that i i said that i know what you

mean because the art of baking i know we have listeners who you know uh have different kinds of shops where they do really artisanal stuff and i mean it's it's an amazing talent to to be a baker or a cake maker or whatever but yeah what happens with some of these things is it's like you have to constantly kind of push the envelope and this is like what's happened with donuts and and sort in my experience which is like in fact i was eating donuts with bridget everett in uh manhattan kansas at varsity donuts there which is also kind of a locale for the tv show it's a place where the characters end up going a lot and we had some some very yummy donuts but we she and i were talking about the fact that like we're both fans of like a donut that let's be honest tastes like a donut like it's like but i think sometimes when people are making something like let's say you make donuts all day long at some point you're like another maple bar what if we put some cardamom in this and what if we made it let you know and that's just the natural i guess you could say evolution of things but sometimes it can evolve away from the original principle which is kind

of the thing that we all like as the consumer yeah chris fleming has that really good bit about his sister coming over with um maybe i'll try to play that as open oh that's great yeah that's a great bit but i'm that way with ice cream too like so many ice cream shops in the trendy neighborhoods of seattle it's not like you're not just going to go in and get like bass and i have

a scoop a scoop of strawberry ice cream please it's like no you cannot strawberry ice cream do

you mean a strawberry reduced kiwi with um basil you mean oh gotta get the basil strawberry right like no i don't mean that i just want to move back to ohio okay speaking of artisanal food

andrew i got to tell you a couple things about this weekend that i had you know i was very stressed i wouldn't say very stressed i was somewhat stressed last week particularly on the friday show because i had all my siblings coming over and i wanted to try to get everything perfectly set up and whatever and you know i've got most of the way there and of course my siblings are all super sweet and supportive so like they wouldn't have even cared like that i was mowing the lawn at seven in the morning like none of that really mattered most of that was for me and my insecurity but um it was a really really fun weekend i did finally become a pizza oven guy and i went from like having pretty much zero thoughts about cooking pizza to it now consuming my every waking thought from since saturday night andrew i am now obsessed with figuring out i know this is so uninteresting and basic b of me but like i got this uni pizza oven that you know uses propane and we bought some uh you know some sort of pre-made pizza dough and uh and sort of made a bunch of these pizzas and i was refining the process as it was going on trying to figure out how to get the crust crispy which is it's there's just you know there's a little more to it than i thought and uh and i was experimenting with like heating the thing up and then turning it off so that when we first put the dough down on the pizza stone which is in the oven it sort of cooks the dough and then you turn on the like the gas you know the flames so that then that starts cooking the cheese and the toppings we tried when we par baked the crust so basically cooked the crust by itself in the pizza oven that seemed to be the best that was that was iteration four of the process the fourth pizza that i made and i think that was probably the best one actually in terms of getting the crust fully cooked and even a little bit crispy it was like cook the crust a little bit then put all the stuff on it then put it back in but like i am i'm not a detail-oriented guy and i'm not somebody who has any kind of particular food that i can make really well because i have a system for it but i i all of a sudden understood what the obsession is around trying to figure out how to cook a really good pizza in your pizza oven am i daft i could have

sworn you were a pizza oven guy back in mount baker you didn't have a pizza did you just

fantasize about having a pizza yes i fantasized about building a pizza okay you know what i think

i stood in your backyard and you and i probably told you an area where the pizza oven was going

to go and i was gonna be right next to my bowling alley i bought luke if this were the newlywed

game and you and i were newlyweds i would have i would have sworn that you had a pizza oven in your backyard but that is just the power of imagination i was obsessed for a while with

the idea of building a pizza oven either out of like brick or you know like sort of concrete in the way that you see some of these projects online and i i i never actually bought the supplies but i bought a few sets of plans and what i realized was it was actually way more complicated than i thought also i ended up selling that house uh not at a loss but at an amount of money that definitely would not have been increased by the presence of a pizza oven i had just built so that That was actually kind of.

of bullet dodged but so i've never had a pizza oven but i was trying to figure out i sent out an email a couple of weeks ago to my sibs that was like it was very like camp director it was like okay here's the plan friday night here's what we're doing for dinner uh saturday morning this is breakfast saturday midday this is the activity sunday night pizza oven uh or saturday night pizza oven then it was a sunday morning coffee unstructured time it's like a little over

Are your siblings like that? Because I got to say, when I saw on the show sheet, I mean, we always talk about our lives. And so, you know, if I had a weekend like this, I would talk about it as well. But it was funny that you had called, what did you call it? You said Sibfest 25. And I'm like, you do have this tendency to like sort of like enshrine things and title them everything. And then this breakdown that you have, like I'm obviously very much the opposite of that. Like scheduled unstructured time is like not my move. how you have a lot of siblings with varied personalities like do most of your siblings also sort of lean in towards this sort of showmanship well first of all that hurts you want showmanship you got you want showmanship i don't know maybe that's the wrong word i didn't mean that as an insult i don't know what to call it though but this structure well there was two

reasons there's two reasons for the email one i wanted to lock everybody in i mean we were already locked in we'd all agreed this was the weekend we were going to get together but i also just wanted to like it was kind of a like a little bit of a like one additional thing to say like hey this is really happening we've really got a plan in place and then i also said in the email look none of this stuff is written none of the schedule is written in stone we can do whatever seems fun i just wanted i wanted there to be potentially some structure around the weekend so we just we it's almost like it's like uh learning this is a very weird analogy but it's sort of like like learning a comedy routine or something or memorizing something so that you can then kind of go off script throw it out whatever but it's nice to have a plan in the back of your mind what i i want i didn't want it to feel like the only plan for the weekend was everyone show up and then we'll just sit around that felt almost like a weird different kind of pressure to me like maybe we'll run out of things to talk about maybe we'll you know some people will be bored maybe some people will feel sleepy i don't know i just thought it would be nice for it to feel like there was thought going into this and the the feedback i got from my siblings because this is also really not in my personality like i'm the oldest of seven but i'm not a particularly good older brother in terms of like i don't know remembering the birthdays of my nieces and nephews or even of my siblings and stuff like you know i i tend to be because of i don't know just life and my personality i can sort of think i can be a little checked out of things and so uh what the feedback from my siblings was like they were kind of stoked on the fact that i like sent this email out because it showed effort on my part i guess if i'm going to be totally honest about it um and and the reason that i'm like enshrining it like you said in like sib fest 25 is because i'm trying to start a thing with this that we do this every year so i'm trying to and my sister rachel made coasters with each of our names and where we were in the birth order which was uh which was really sweet so we all have like a coaster with our name in it at sim fest 25 so like you know now there's like merch

so that's true and then that was my thing and i i now i i feel a little bit bad like i i meant i did not mean that as a criticism other than it being such a disparity between your and my personality and i just wasn't sure if because i know some of your brothers but i don't know or i i think i've met all of your siblings at some point but i know i know your siblings well You're going to be at SimFest 26, right? Yeah, sounds like it. I'm there for the hot tubbing. But no, I just wasn't sure if, like, if, and again, there's so many different factors. There's age and place in life, whatever. But I'm just wondering, like, and I don't want to call out anybody here because now I'm nervous that it sounds like an insult. But like if another sibling were doing, if almost all of your siblings were doing this, would there be kind of an instinct or tendency to do it in this way that is sort of like kind of like kind of like event oriented and also sort of itemized?

I think going forward, we don't actually even need as much structure as I was creating. It's just that it had never happened before. And I kind of didn't, I just thought, like I said, I thought, well, if we have a plan, we can always throw the plan out, but then we, but we will have the plan. Also, it just helped me organize my mind around the weekend. And we ended up not doing like a lot of the plan and doing some other things, et cetera. It just, it never felt like we were kind of like bored or wondering what to do next. But I liked the fact that there was a plan that we could fall back on. now i'm guessing that going forward we don't need to do that as much we now know what it looks like a weekend of just us seven burbank siblings getting together and hanging out and what it looks like is it's a lot of fun and i don't think i don't think we have to over plan it um going forward i think we can just kind of like let it unfold naturally but i didn't know exactly what to expect let me tell you one thing though that happened on saturday night that i swear to god i it felt like the it felt like kismet that i almost sort of couldn't believe which was after a fun day of of um hanging out we went down to the mcminimans down in kalama and we had some lunch and sat by the river and then we came back and then we did we did pizzas which again it was so much fun like i i totally understand how people get kind of geek out on this thing now like i'm looking at the pizza oven right now andrew and i'm like i'm actually going to portland tonight but i'm like if i get back early enough could i make myself another i have one pizza i have one pizza dough left in the freezer it's like i'm just like constantly thinking of how could i make this pizza a little bit better than the last one that i made i love

that and i love the fact i know that this is a different version of what you were dreaming about in Mount Baker but I love the fact that this is almost sort of 15 years in the making and I love the idea as adults I think we really need to embrace the moments where we have a new toy that we're excited about that we're actually excited about because like we we have you know we have access to almost anything you know depending on how expensive it is you know what I mean like yeah I could buy myself a little like I don't know like what do you call it Nintendo Switch or something but I'm kind of like I don't want to like spend money on that because I have a feeling like the after after an hour of play i might like start to be like i don't know this was more of a midlife crisis thing than anything you know what i mean like yeah yeah but you got yourself something and the fact that you're thinking about it when you're not using it like i can really relate to

that and i love that yeah like the moment when it's funny my sister liz was um well i mean it was a family project so liz was on the case my sister hannah was on the case i feel like sam and dave were really more just kind of like uh talking about the mariners in the background by the way we did end up having the mariners games on pretty much throughout the weekend even though i said that we weren't but when you're when you're sweeping the best team in baseball i mean you got

to watch a little bit of that it was also on it like kind of well i wonder if it worked better or worse for you but like they were very strange times you know because they weren't at home they were in the midwest and they were day games so like that was saturday i was like you guys were probably kind of haven't i don't know where you were in your schedule but like you know i mean you're probably hanging out it's the middle of the day you can sort of have it on it's not like i don't know i feel like a night game you might be more drawn towards like oh maybe some people are having some beers and the game can become too much of a presence but i sort of feel like these yeah it was you might have been able to navigate no you're exactly right it was and also

like we never really had the sound on so it didn't it wasn't like it was just kind of like in the background and if somebody wanted to look at it they could and if they didn't they didn't have to It didn't take over the weekend or anything, thankfully. But Saturday night, so we've had this whole long, fun day. Saturday night now, we're all, by the way, this hot tub that I bought and had put in, I think it technically holds like four people or something. So there's seven of us. And I was really obsessed with getting all seven people in the hot tub as some sort of a stunt. Like, you know, they used to like see how many kids they could get into like a V-dub bug or something like that. like almost as yeah just like a stunt thing like all of the Burbank siblings in this hot tub that is not made for this many people and we're so we're sitting in there actually I was in the kitchen getting something and I just hear one of my siblings it's now Saturday night it's dark it's warm it's almost a full moon the stars are out we're sitting in the hot tub we're listening to music and I just hear someone yell fireworks and I'm like huh and they come outside And it turns out that down on the columbia river right around the bend from us where the town of rainier oregon resides I don't know if it was like I don't even know what it's called. I'm gonna just call it rainier days This is my theory. I haven't done any research on this, but I have a feeling that there's some sort of a community Day that happens down in this town And it it all sort of finishes with a fireworks show Now why they don't do that on the fourth or fifth of july or whatever it was I don't exactly know because that just happened but it was so awesome it was first of all a huge ass fireworks show i mean i will say this i give it up to red america on the fireworks side of things because becca and i went to see the fireworks in portland on actual 4th of july at the blues fest they were fine they were not hint of basil and mint along that was way too much cardamom for me way too much chicory for my liking um it they were fine but they were you know i mean part of it i think has to do with the willamette river is not huge so i think there's probably all kinds of like rules and limitations etc it was fine it was nice this was this was huge like these things were go and it was it took i swear it seems like it lasted for 20 minutes which doesn't sound like a long time unless you imagine like fireworks going off continuously

for it's probably less than that but i was very pleasantly surprised at how long it went on we've got our music playing we're in a hot tub all seven siblings we're watching like a private fireworks show we also didn't have to hear their music because they were probably playing lee greenwood or some shit we're hearing our music we're hearing the the then dixie chicks cowboy take me away which everyone's then singing like it was it it really came together we may have to cancel sib fest going forward because i don't know if it can really beat that moment like that

might have been the apotheosis of this whole thing you know i had almost the exact same fireworks moment a couple of weeks did i tell you about this no i'm gonna spoil it here and just tell you this could not be more opposite of your experience so i i mean i loved it but again leaning did i not tell you this leaning into mr north aurora as i'm as i'm still campaigning to do yeah you've got

pitbull's got mr worldwide trademark you've got mr north aurora so on i guess the fourth of july

was a friday right and our friends had a little you know i don't know if you know about this but a group of friends who all live up here in north seattle your your friends as well um they have like they i can't remember oh i think they call it the sweet cream crawl and they've been doing this for years now and i will sometimes join to varying degrees of this oh this is that walk Yeah, they start at Camaro Kev's place and Anita's, and then they kind of like, and then they stop at, and it's a long walk. I think it's like eight miles. No, it's a little bit much. Maybe it's five. And then they come to our house, and then whatever. We just stop at like various friends' houses along the ways, and then we usually end up at our buddy Roden's house where we have like a barbecue or whatever. This year, I don't think, I did not join for the walk at all this year. I had like, I was taking care of some stuff in the yard, and I was at home making some salad and stuff. I was just this year. I was like, you know what? It's too hot for this walk for me. I'll just meet you guys at the barbecue later, which I did. And it was actually an amazing time. That was on Friday the 4th. Vives and I come home. We probably get home around midnight. Genevieve has to get up in a mere like three hours for her travel. She was leaving on a jet plane the next day. So she comes home and beelines it to bed right away. it's like 12 15 on the ride home i should mention this as the as the um lift driver is giving us a ride in now we're off of aurora now in our little neighborhood or a few blocks in and there seems to be a bunch of garbage in the middle of an intersection and some people kind of running away from it and then as we get closer we realize oh these are these are fireworks people are just blowing off fireworks in the middle of this intersection of aurora avenue not of aurora about a block off of Aurora Avenue and maybe about two or three blocks from our house, okay? So it's one of these little neighborhood streets. But again, it's these streets where it's just, it was very lawless, basically. And we just drive past it. We're like, what is that? And the driver's like, fireworks. We're like, oh. So then we're at home. Genevieve goes to bed. I'm downstairs. I'm in my office. And I think I was about to digitize some VHS tapes, as one does on the 4th. And then I start hearing these rogue fireworks go off. And I'm like, what am I doing in here? So I grab myself a Tecate and a joint, and I go outside. You and your walking beers, I love this for you. And I just stand in the middle of the street smoking this joint, drinking this can of beer, just watching two blocks down some sort of, is rapscallion the right word? Some sort of law-breaking group of people who were just like-

Extra legal firework display.

And just the most trashy version of what you had. And and I'm watching these figures and there's like they're under a streetlight and I can't see them. I can just see them. And again, they're maybe about two blocks away. I'm guessing they can see me under the streetlight, too. Like, but we're all just like silhouettes. And I will watch these silhouettes run to the middle of the intersection. And I can tell that the I can't tell I can't I'm not close enough to see exactly what they're doing. But I know that the longer they're in the middle of the intersection, the better the fireworks are about to be. And by the way, I would like to point out, I know that there are plenty of people in this neighborhood who are probably furious at these people for doing it. I know that people are concerned about pets or whatever. I would like to mention, I did not take part in this myself, but if it's going to happen, I'm going to watch. And so I had this weird, like, from like 1230 to one in the morning, I just had this weird, absolute dirtbag fire show going on a block off of Aurora in the middle of the night. and god did i love it it was fantastic very different though from what what you were but

still scratching the same itch in a way the excitement of fireworks that you're not even expecting or dealing with that happened to becca and i in italy last summer we were in sorrento and the same thing we had rented this airbnb which turned out to be this like kind of crazy sort of castle thing that the person who owned it was

even there so we kind of had a run of the place it was pretty magical and then to top that all off there just was this massive fireworks show both nights that we were there and it just like and again offering all of the disclaimers and caveats that i know that fireworks really really stress pets out and i know that we have a lot of listeners who are who who have a really dim view of fireworks and also there's the whole you know people getting injured part like i I totally recognize that fireworks are a lousy idea, but I will say that once they're happening and I'm near them or far from them as I was over the weekend, but within clear sight of them, I do find them to be quite exciting to look at.

I know it is funny how it's funny how we have to sort of apologize for liking fireworks. Don't get me wrong. Like, I do understand and I understand the people who don't like them really, really, really don't like them. And they do affect pets.

It feels like it's, yeah, it feels like a threat to the animals in their life that they love and maybe even themselves, depending on what their sort of situation is.

But we did seem to go from a time where it was kind of like, oh, yeah, we all like fireworks. Like, that's basically the end of the story, too. Not just apologizing for blowing off fireworks, because I haven't blown off fireworks in 20 years, you know? Exactly. You and I have done literally nothing wrong other than maybe not protest fireworks, you know what I mean? Yet we have to almost apologize for admitting that we enjoy something that for years and years and years everybody has – like, well, there's a reason why they're advertising fireworks night at T-Mobile Park, right? Like, people like fireworks. And again, the rogue fireworks in the middle of a neighborhood, I can't justify people doing that. And again, I would not do that. And if I were doing that, I'd feel terrible. I'd feel guilty if I were – I'd be scared that I would be, like, getting in trouble if I were blowing off fireworks in the middle of a neighborhood. I'm not doing it.

Yeah, it's definitely not legal anywhere in Seattle these days to do fireworks. Oh, goodness.

I would assume not. I mean, you would need a special permit for an actual show or something, I'm sure.

Do you think those guys had a permit?

I'm guessing, well, I think they might have because at one point a car roared off of Aurora and then did a loop-de-loop around the intersection where they were doing it. I'm guessing that that hot rod was dropping off the permit paper. Right, to finalize the city it signed up on. That's probably why they were in such a hurry to get there and then peel away.

Yeah, yeah. We got the permit, you guys.

We got the permit! Lenny's on his way over with the permit. Exactly. And so anyway, I don't need people to email in explaining why fireworks are disturbing to them. I do understand it. But it is interesting that, like, we have to, like, sort of caveat even just we have to apologize just for saying, like, I personally enjoy them. Right.

Yeah. Like, the question is, if someone is shooting, because I'm with you, like, I haven't lit off. I don't know the last time I lit off any fireworks, actually. It's been a while. but like is it also are we also somehow culpable if we look at fireworks someone else is doing fireworks is it now the preferred in like the polite class is it the preferred action to shield one's eyes from fireworks so as to not engage in the project in any way shape or form

I think the same thing about like sort of the blue angels right it's kind of like you know for a while there a lot of people were using this term and Genevieve was using it a lot virtue signaling right Like, if a blue angel roars over my head, that is going to give me a feeling inside that is, I don't know what the word for, but joyful is near it. You know what I mean? Like, it's going to make me feel something that I consider positive. Right. But if I go around saying, well, you know, it's really not right. It's really not right to do that. I feel like that is the, and same with fireworks as well. Like, if I'm going, well, it's really not right to do it. But I'm secretly kind of like, please blow off some fireworks near me. I feel like that's literally the definition of virtue signaling. So I just want to be honest about it. Like, I understand why people are upset by them. I don't do anything to encourage or actually light the fuses myself. But I also don't want to be like, well, I'm supposed to say I hate this.

Right. Well, you know, it's funny. You're talking about the Blue Angels and stuff. And over the weekend There was a point at which You know A couple of big military helicopters Came Down the river And I could hear them I was in the house doing something This is my siblings were still here I was in the house doing something You can just hear the low Like there's like a normal helicopter sound That I'm pretty used to That you don't actually hear Until it's pretty close And then there's the military helicopter Which is It's like this And you just feel it in your chest when it's further away this is because i'm out here all the time i now have can identify the helicopters based on how my chest feels and i was like okay there's gonna be a military helicopter and and sure enough it was i think it was probably a chinook i'm not good with the names for the

record but i think it was a chinook two uh propellers i think that's a huey oh okay i oh gosh this is yeah what i'm sorry I'm gonna look really dumb, but this wasn't the dual propeller one. Those are all so freaking so cool. Those don't even look like they should work. How are there two propellers and they look like they're going opposite directions? I know they're not. Anyway, I think this was maybe an Apache, a couple of Apache, but I was out there with my brother. I think I was out there with David. It was either David or Sam. And I was just like, listen, I hate the military industrial complex. I do not support this. I am, I'm, I'm horrified at what America has done militaristically around the world and continue to do, et cetera, et cetera.

Including here in the United States now. Yeah, increasingly so. Yes, yes.

I mean, and yet, I cannot deny that it fills me with a certain amount of awe from a purely aeronautics standpoint of this thing that's happening in front of us that we're looking at. And this one was one of those ones where, like, it didn't even have doors. And there's everybody was like, you could see. I was tempted to wave at them and I didn't Because that was for me too much I'm not going to wave at the soldiers You didn't salute I got down, I kneeled Wait, first I burned A Kaepernick jersey Then I kneeled I literally was like I don't know if I've actually seen this version Before where there are no doors And you can literally See the guys In the soldiers I actually don't know what their gender was you could see the soldiers in the helicopter. They're obviously strapped in, but the doors open, and some of them are freaking hanging out of the

helicopter. I was going to say, they were hanging out saying, have you seen my surfboard? It was a good surfboard. That lot of that.

Was that an Apocalypse Now reference?

Yeah, I'm sure I nailed it. I can't wait to find out what the actual quote is, because I'm sure that

You're going to let them take a surfboard from our

house? Our house?

But they were like kind of like a couple of like legs dangling out and the whole thing and it was like you could i couldn't literally i couldn't quite see the whites of their eyes but i could make them out in human form and a little part of me wanted to wave and i did not i don't even think if i was alone i would have waved because that does feel to me like i'm somehow i'm that's that's too much support coming from me for what i'm comfortable with but again i'm looking at it And I am like, holy smokes, this thing is cool. Yeah. The fact that these helicopters, not that they exist, I should say, but that they operate the way they do, again, from a flight standpoint, is impressive to me.

I mean, you're hanging out. Like, I just never understood that meant, you know me, I'm just so absolutely terrified of heights. The idea of dangling a leg out the open door of a helicopter over the Columbia River. Like, just shoot me. Ha! Like, don't even take me up. Like, just take me behind the shed like a broken horse.

I wonder how I would react to that. By the way, I want to say also, I think my sister Hannah and my sister Rachel were maybe out there, too. And I mention this because of the sibs, well, David will hear this, and Hannah will definitely hear this. I think that the rest of my other siblings hearing this is probably pretty unlikely. I kept telling my sister Liz that she's been referenced on the show a lot. And I would jokingly say, well, you wouldn't know this because you don't listen, which sent her into an entire, like, apology spiral about not listening. meanwhile this is a person who's raising two teenagers maintaining this like huge multi-acre property she and her husband live on with all these gardens and stuff also is a teacher at a school with a full course load you know like has a lot going on and was like okay i'm gonna start listening i was like please don't start listening that was not the point of that yeah yeah point of that story was i'm impressed with your gardening but um anyway i wanted because one of my siblings i don't know if it was i can't remember if it was hannah or rachel just said like i would be so afraid to fly in a helicopter and it had me wondering like would i be first of all i don't think i've no that's not true i have flown in a helicopter once it was in las vegas i was peaking on mushrooms um which was kind of awesome honestly it like kind of worked out perfectly but that flight was all of maybe two minutes going up over the strip and then back down if i was offered a chance maybe for like a sunday morning piece or something to fly in one of those helicopters and like dangle my legs out would i do it i i say that i would like here in the safety of the madrona hill studio but i also got really afraid climbing that tree uh a few years back so you know yeah but you were a couple hundred feet up so i don't know i mean it seems like it would be if i that whole tree climbing thing really it really changed my feelings about heights because my thoughts had always been because i'd never been up really high but feeling really exposed like i was we went down to silver falls we were shooting this for cbs sunday morning we were climbing this tree it was probably 300 feet to the top of it and i'm on this rope and i don't know a couple hundred feet up i just look down it's just 200 feet to the forest floor and the only thing keeping me alive is this rope i thought tree climbing was going to be like we're in the branches we're scurrying up and we're roped in

no this was just the rope i mean it might as well just be the face of a rock like it just happened

to be a tree that's a really good that's a really good comparison and my thought previous to this had always been if i know that i have a harness and a safety rope on i would never be afraid of anything like i could window wash a high rise i could you know hang out of a helicopter like my thought was always if you have the safety harness on and the safety rope why would you ever be afraid? Because you have the safety harness on. And then there I was with a safety harness on, terrified. Like sometimes the brain does not care that you have a safety harness on because the brain is interpreting the visual information of what's going on. So that really kind of did a mind tweak for me where I, before that I would have said, oh, no problemo. I'll hang out of a helicopter as long as I've got the harness on. I don't know. I don't know what my

reaction would be now yeah and i mean the fear of heights is not rational because you know this ties into that story i don't know if you happen to see this but um here at the space needle in seattle they installed like a glass floor when they did this huge renovation like five ten years ago or something and um that's a big like thrill for people now walk up at the space needle which was already a breathtaking and for me anxiety producing experience just being up that high and being able to kind of look out. I was already nervous with that scenario. Well, now they have this area where the floor is actually made of glass and you can walk out onto it. Earlier, I guess, late last week or something, there was some story about how people were seeing cracks in the glass because some video went viral. But I mean, if you think about it, it's like they explained it. I actually thought this was the perfect analogy. It's kind of like, you know, we have this glass floor and it's got these layers. And basically it's like the screen protector on the phone. cracked you know i mean it's just like this layer that's on top that is like the scuff layer that people walk on it will be replaced from time to time i'm assuming anyway that's the thing that cracked but either way when you're walking out on a piece of glass and looking i don't know how

high the the space needle is 500 feet but i don't know that for a fact that's just from being a kid i remember it being i thought roughly 500 feet that's you know what's funny is i use the height of the Space Needle, or what it feels like to be on top of the Space Needle, to orient myself around height all the time. That's interesting. If somebody says, oh, it's 500 feet, I imagine being, because I think the Space Needle, I grew up in Seattle, was the first tall thing I was ever on. You know, as like a school kid, you go up there, and so I've always, but I don't even know, is it around 500 feet? By the way, if you put how tall... 605, by the way. Okay, 605. If you put how tall into Google, how tall is Donald Trump? How tall is Sabrina Carpenter? How tall is Ace from Love Island? How tall is Huda from Love Island? And then how tall is Tom Cruise from Love Island? From Love Island.

Boy, now I'm clicking through all these beautiful photos of the Space Needle. I love the Space Needle so much. I love the design of it. I love this history. I love what it's... Anyway. Is it Googie? That's a really good question because it kind of is that era, right? What I think of kind of space age architecture, that era of the 1960s.

Kind of the curvature of the, like, support section below, like, I wonder how they would exactly classify it.

But anyway, so people saw this crack, and they were freaking out about it. But, of course, it's all in your head, you know? I mean, especially, and, like, the spokespeople came out and said we could literally have the entire, like, starting lineup. Not starting lineup. What do you call everybody who's activated to play in a football game? You could have, like... The roster? Yeah, I guess the roster, except that includes people. The active roster? Yeah, I guess the active roster. I don't know how they put it, but they basically said we could have all the Seahawk players here jumping up and down at the same time, and this thing would still be strong. The state of the glass floor of the Space Needle is strong, yet some people get up there, and they were talking in the story about how some people get up there, and even without the cracks, they look down, and their instinct is just to go down to all fours. it's like this weird thing when you're scared of heights and i had that on the roof of your of your old house when we were watching the blue angels and like there was something about it where i was like i was fine i was fine i was fine then suddenly i was like i need my hands and legs i was crawling by the end and that's sort of a universal reaction and it doesn't make any sense like you said you're intellectually saying i'm harnessed in i could do anything but it kind of doesn't matter you could you could say i'm totally safe what is the glass floor is not any less safe than me being on whatever the this observation deck or i was even just going to say in a regular like let's say tall office building that is sure you know much taller than the space needle yeah exactly it could be and but i'm just not seeing it or like i was nervous going up in the elevator before it was more of a glass elevator and it was because i could kind of see us going up but if you put me in an elevator and don't give it any window Thank you. I'm just like, I don't know, I'm in this little room and it's taking me up. You know what I mean? It's like none of it is rational.

Yeah, it's totally about your perception. I wonder if the person who was tasked with kind of letting everyone know that the floor of the Space Needle is still safe, the glass part, which, by the way, I have walked on, and it's pretty intense.

Oh, I didn't know that you'd been up there since.

I went up there with my half-brother from who was not invited. I guess he was invited to Sibfest, although it would have been an interesting weekend. Because, of course, I never met my biological father, and he had another child later after my mom got pregnant with me. That guy is named Adam. He lives in Philadelphia. Really cool dude, actually. We've met, I don't know, a handful of times. He and his, I think, now wife were out in Seattle, and so I was kind of taking them around. And we went up there, and we walked on that glass floor thing. I was kind of surprised at how actually effective it was at making you feel like you're looking straight down at the ground. It wasn't just a gimmick. It was like, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, this feels like something to not have anything solid underneath you. I definitely was thinking, Andrew, it would not be an enjoyable experience for you at all. I don't even like thinking about it. I'm serious. I'm wondering if the person who was tasked with letting everyone know that it's still safe is this guy. one of the guys from that taco time podcast that i got kind of obsessed with a while ago and i was even a guest on i think a couple of years back there was that great piece in was it seattle weekly about basically the taco time podcast and also the sort of the the taco time northwest versus like taco time international or something which is this difference between taco time franchises that only matters to people like me who are kind of obsessed with taco time by the i figured out that i can i haven't done it yet but i can if i want to door dash taco time to my house andrew and that that's a dangerous piece of information for me i wish i didn't know that but um uh one of those uh guys that's on that taco time podcast is one of the pr people for

the space needle this is i think a colleague though this is a woman who like kind of was on all the tv shows and she was kind of and either she was making the rounds or she released some sort of information she's the one who had the quote about like the people jumping oh the screen and all of that um i want to address something here we've already talked a lot about our burger challenge that we had our challenge eating in under a minute so let me um i think everybody knows i'm talking about enough to set it up too much you and i both tried to see if we could do this tiktok challenge of eating a whopper in under a minute we've talked a lot about that on the show it's on our instagram page right now and you can watch us both do it and we synced it up so it looks like we're doing it at the same time even though we didn't actually do it at the same time all that is to say uh originally a bunch of tbtl listeners uh saw that video and they were like they had heard it on the podcast first and we're happy to get the visuals on it and you get the usual sort of like um friendly comments of people like just talking about like i can't believe the guys did it or whatever you know you're kind of already all speaking the same language because we're all involved in this weird podcast experiment together but now it's reaching a lot of people who have no idea what a tbtl is and i get notifications on my phone all the time because i i'll be honest we put a little boost behind it you know you can kind of boost these things a little bit to reach larger audiences maybe uh bring a little bit more exposure to the podcast through this through this instagram story and now this weekend and i gotta say like i just gotta tell myself like these aren't our people and this is the internet but it's just like more and more getting mean comments just more and more people everybody's like oh my god i could do it in 30 seconds oh my god i could do two like everybody genevieve's like i could do it i just don't want to it doesn't think she can do it everybody luke everybody and then the latest one we got today was oh come on girls you could do better than that like it's really genevieve which you know using like calling somebody a girl as an insult is like obviously one of my fellow wellesley girl yeah right exactly i was just like oh my god we are reaching people who think calling me a girl

is an insult like that's that you are so you are you you so you don't get this show you definitely yes we are very in touch with our feminine energy but it's just so funny that's why everybody thinks

they and like everybody thinks they can do it and not only does everybody think they can do it everybody thinks they can do it even faster people are omg i'm looking for the comments now but we

don't need them this is like so funny to me because i've been having i've been having a kind of an experience with this because it's still coming up pretty frequently on my tiktok which would be people doing this big mac challenge and the more people i've watched trying to do it actually the more proud i am of us because

Because it is, if you're not talking about like a professional speed eater, and when I say professional, it's just like somebody who is making it really a big part of their life to try to like eat things really fast or like, you know, eat large quantities of stuff. Like, unless you're one of those people, most regular people actually don't finish this thing in a minute. Like, it is very deceptive because it looks like it would be easy. again becca who has not had a big mac maybe in her life certainly not in the last 20 years was like oh i think i could do it i was like you couldn't eat a big mac if i gave you a day

i mean are you out of your mind there's something about seeing other people do it that we all think

i could do that you know they don't understand if you haven't tried it we don't understand is that the chewing of it and the swallowing of it is the trick. It's not, can you fit the contents of a Big Mac into your mouth in one minute? It's, can you chew it and swallow it by then? And that is what always hangs people up. And what happens, and I've now watched countless videos on it, is people will often take a couple of humongous bites, and then it'll be like, half of the Big Mac will be gone, and you're like, oh man, they're in great shape. And then they're just chewing for what looks like an endless amount of time. It's like, why are you chewing so much? It's like, well, because we as humans, generally speaking, have to masticate our food so that we can get it down our throat. And in fact, the only reason I think I was able to do it in a minute was because I took a swallow that honestly could have choked me out. I took a swallow that was not properly chewed. And that was the only thing that allowed me to actually get in in under one minute. Because if I would have chewed that four more times, I would have been at a minute five or something, which is what I what my body wanted to do. But my brain said, nope, let's risk it. But it is it's really funny that because the more people I've watched not succeeding at it, the better I felt about our performance. So take that, haters.

I'm trying so hard not to like, again, it's like, whatever. These are like random Internet people. Who cares? But it's just like I kind of like irritating.

Somebody says reaching people outside of the TBTL fold.

What I like is John responds to every single comment. and so he just keeps on saying prove it he just keeps saying okay show it i love it which i love that so somebody writes that's not even a challenge dot dot dot dot and then so and then the response from us but via john is double double dog dare you to try it and then i did every uh i worked at a mcdonald's a big mac is three bites and that's it i roll i roll but like okay show us put it on like and it's all that i can eat a big mac in about 25 seconds uh everybody's like i can do 30 seconds or two in one minute uh and john just keeps saying do it do it do it and let's like let's see the videos let's show like show me like again i think i do the whole thing a disservice by like looking so calm while i'm doing it but like you don't understand why it's

impressive you missed it by maybe four seconds if that andrew like you really like honestly i think your performance is spectacular because you both maintained your dignity and you all you got so much closer than so many people i've seen on the internet who have done stuff like this before and like it's part of their whole thing and you did as well as many of them and i do think it's a

difference of an approach i took the biggest bites i possibly could and so then there was just a lot of downtime of me chow chewing chewing chewing and i think that's a very frustrating thing to see because everybody's like you can just chew and swallow a lot faster than that but you kind of don't understand how much bread is in the mouth at that point but i'm not even i mean i didn't even mean this as a defense of my performance but i do think i did it a disservice by seeming so calm but i think of your analogy often such a good analogy for so many things but a duck that looks really calm on the water but underneath the legs and feet are just going crazy like i feel like that's what's going on inside my mouth at the time but it just looks very calm but so i think everybody's like oh my god this is so lame i could do this in two and so it's just like i know that i shouldn't let these commenters get me but like just stop commenting and if you're so confident you can do it then do it and send us a damn video i love this side of you honestly like this whole

thing andrew i think has been has been so fun because i love your embrace of the whole thing i said this multiple times now but this is just exactly the kind of thing that you usually wouldn't go in for kind of eating in front of people and maybe looking a little bit silly etc and then also clapping back at the haters and being like show me well i'm not john is doing that but i co-sign it show us i i i what's i also co-sign it i don't know if it changes if there's three people doing it but like yeah i am a we bro sign it i like the long tail on this now what i would say is we could always talk about trying it again i personally don't think i'm going to get any faster i might get slower but you you might be able to shave a couple seconds off your time we could always we could we could we could try it again at some point in the future if you really

if you really want i'm still trying to figure out if i because when as i describe this to people

I still some people are like, well, you were at a disadvantage because of less sauce. I really think that you were at a disadvantage, but you did put barbecue on. I put some barbecue kind of lubricated. So that's sort of the question. Like, should I have put more on? Anyway, I'm I'm still willing just to take the loss and say, when I see you and other people eat it with the sauce, I feel like it's more of an I feel like it would get in my head more and I'd have to be wiping my face more. And I'm not going to eat it with that sauce because I don't like that kind of sauce. I would start gagging so there's no point in even trying that so I just don't feel like it's worth me trying it again because I just don't feel like I'm I don't even feel like I for better or for worse I didn't really truly you know do the challenge but I'm just like all these people who just like they just see something online I could do it I could do it bro eye roll bro I do this three bites bro I'm just like god

I love it I love that we're finally because you know we're just generally speaking we're in such an amniotic sack of tbtl 10 love and careful response generally speaking every once in a while somebody says something a little direct and hurtful but like we we are so rarely even making waves in the semi public eye i love the fact that we're getting some jabronis that are like think they could do it faster than we did yeah that's the other funny part is like i said this in the aftermath of of actually doing the challenge it's like is it a w is it is it a thing one should be proud of to actually like hey you know what i did i horfed down uh 500 calories of processed meat faster than uh you know somebody else did like what a strange thing for us to see as success

here's here's the one that i really like um i'm gonna read to you the comment and then i will say the account is locked so i can't look at the things they've post posted um but i'm gonna just i'm gonna read to you this uh comment and then you describe to me what you think their avatar looks like okay how do you feel about this game i feel very good okay 20 hours ago okay somebody whose username i can't even try to decipher into a word says wtf ladies took you long enough What does their avatar look like?

So it's their avatar. Is it a human form or is it some sort of a, is it non-human? It is a photograph.

It is non-human. It's a photograph.

Okay, of something.

Is it a photograph of an eagle wearing American flag sunglasses? It is a photograph of an eagle in front of an American flag. No way! I swear to God, I am not cheating. an eagle in front of an American flag I don't know if you can see this

oh my god

I mean it's an actual photo of like an eagle in a tree that happens to have a flag behind it but yeah you were right wow

and you know and we say that everyone is a unique snowflake and yet how in the world did my brain immediately know what that was going to look like my god I don't know if I've ever Not since I ate a Big Mac in under 60 seconds have I felt more proud of myself, Andrew, I'll tell you what.

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.

Hey, you mentioned before the show that we actually had an update on something that was bugging me the other day on the show. We were talking about the demise of buildings in Seattle, and you mentioned Jensen's on Greenwood. i think yep and and what a bummer it is that it was this cool you know kind of smoke shop and everything sold meat and stuff and then they you know got foreclosed on or rather just the uh you know the owner of the building decided that they didn't want to they wanted to raise the rent or whatever but now it's instead of becoming a new thriving business it's just a shuttered graffitied building which is such a worse outcome than than a local business that had been there forever and And that had me trying to remember where, what smoked meat shop in that area, I believe in North Seattle, had like a huge, like a sockeye or something, like a salmon type of fish that its jaw, my memory of it as a kid was that the jaw would go up and down. And then I think at some point the jaw stopped operating because of maybe the, you know, demise of the neighborhood or whatever. But like, I couldn't, I don't think it was Jensen's. I couldn't remember where it was.

it sounds like somebody may have thoughts on that yeah i just saw this subject line i had not opened it yet but it said salmon with moving jaw sign and this is a note from bill who says somebody has probably already emailed you guys they haven't bill you're the only person but i think that was on greenwood until recently i think around the corner from the rickshaw question mark near home and road and greenwood intersection so that is exactly where jen is so that must be it although i'm just a little confused i wonder if the sign was there but because it wasn't maybe operational when i saw it maybe i didn't take as close of a notice because i don't i don't i used to go to jensen's when it existed but i don't think i ever saw i would put your

smoked meat bona fides up against anyone's andrew well but what about my observation i one time

looked at you in the eye at a coffee shop and said excuse me sir so you're working hard you're

Battling illness. You've got a lot going on.

But anyway, so I think I would remember or would have noticed if it had a moving, I mean, moving signs. We were talking about things that make us feel like kids again, like fireworks or jets screaming overhead. I get excited about moving signs, so I feel like I would have noticed if that sign was still chomping when I was going there. But I also really have a proven track record of unobservation.

So anyway, but what's weird is, is that I'm doing like a search. I'm trying to, you know, do like an image search on the Internet. And it's very strange because I can't seem to locate that particular sign, which it feels like very much. Oh, no. Here it is, Andrew. I got eyes on it. Yeah, let me see. It was hanging beneath. So that the Jensen's sign that was like, you know, I guess you would say out in the parking lot, sort of perpendicular to Greenwood. It had a salmon, I think, hanging under it. It's hard, too, because all of this stuff is on Facebook. Do you know that I'm kind of banned from Facebook right now, Andrew? Oh, I see it. I've got it, Andrew. I've got eyes on it. Okay, great. And, yes, there it is, exactly as I remember it. Maybe this could be the show pic today or a better version of it. I'll send you the link. No, I'm a little worried.

Are you on the official Jensen's Old Fashioned Smokehouse Facebook page? Because I'm trying to hack into this thing, too.

No. Well, I'm just getting whatever a Google image search. I'm getting I'm on Flickr Andrew oh wow look at you I'm playing three dimensional Flickr right now yes but I can see oh look at this is so sad Andrew and yes the fish is on the building when they closed it says Jensen's Smokehouse thanks for 34 years closed and if you look below that reader board you see the big salmon with it looks like a jaw that could have moved up and down back

in the day and this is but the So the sign is not...

I'm going to send you this.

Yeah, I'm having trouble. So it's not hanging on the building, right? It's hanging below a freestanding sign in the parking lot.

So, you know, it looks like there's two actual buildings here. So there's like a small, like very kind of low one-story building that I think might have been the original. It says Jensen Seafood Market. That's the one that I grew up with. That has the fish on it. So the fish is attached to the roof of that building. And then next to it is a taller, looks like a slightly more recently built, still kind of old and dingy, but newer built, larger building that says Jensen Smokehouse, Smoke Salmon, retail, wholesale, custom. So my thought is they expanded over time.

It looks to me in the photo I'm looking at, which is more, I'm guessing more modern, these, you described this as two buildings, they're connected in mine. So I think this thing, oh, are they connected in the one you're looking at too? Oh, okay, gotcha. Okay, yeah, because I'm looking at a photo of that. I just don't see any hanging fish, so I don't know.

Can you see the sign that says Jensen's, and does it say thanks for 34 years closed? You have not sent me it, right? Okay, I'm going to send you. I actually just downloaded this successfully. So the thing I was going to say that has me nervous is, you know, next week, Andrew, it's going to be the TB Celethon, and what I like to do, I'm emailing you this, what I like to do is, you know, fire up the old, uh, club for Eagle soaring. I was going to get out there in Wisconsin and try to get a few miles in and kind of get the community of folks that want to maybe run or walk or just do whatever they feel like doing. But I am like legit banned from Facebook for reasons that I don't understand as a person who never uses Facebook except once a year for this. I don't know if it thinks I'm a scammer because of my fact that I will shut my account down for 11 months and then start it up or whatever but i literally am banned from i don't know if i'm gonna be able to do eagle soaring on facebook i may have to move it somewhere didn't because you've started various

accounts right i think we talked about this a little bit and i knew this i had told you that when i left facebook years and years ago now not long afterwards and honestly this sounds creepy but i'm i mean this completely above board i did think well i should at least have some sort of an account so that i can log in for reasons exactly like this i'm trying to look at the jensen's page but i can only go so far because you constantly get pop-ups that say you need to log in to do this i didn't want to be part of the facebook community anymore but i wanted just an account i could log into to browse every now and then if needed especially for work purposes so i created a fake not a fake but i just created a new gmail look

for myself brand new and then use that gmail to sign up for facebook and facebook immediately was like something's wrong here we don't trust who you are and no like i don't know if they could just tell that my email was too new that i didn't have enough history but this was years ago and facebook knew that i was trying to sign up with you know some different email address so they're pretty savvy it's weird they want you in so badly but they also want to make sure that you're actually i guess to their credit they want to make sure you're an actual person not just some bot or somebody who's got a million accounts where you can go in and say, come on ladies, I could have eaten two Big Macs in a row but yeah, so maybe you've just tried too many different email addresses and stuff. Yeah, because I also can never

remember how to get, I have all these insane logins like Eagle Soar is like a couple of them, but the soar is spelled differently because like I got shut down from, you know or I couldn't log back in, I mean yeah, it's a mess it is an absolute mess, my Facebook kind of log in profile history and maybe it just it maybe it just was you know too much weirdness but like i'm gonna have to figure this out this week before next monday so that we can because that's i i enjoy it and i think there's at least a few people who enjoy this kind of being a yearly tradition where we post some photos and all just kind of like you know hype each other up andrew i've got to quickly tell you about something though tvtl breaking news um i am uh sending you something Now, ignore my previous email of the sign.

Well, I will say, finally I got eyes on it. That is a good angle. Thank you for showing me that.

I'm sending you a much better angle, and I'm finally figuring out what the confusion has been. It's not Jensen's. It's a jib jab. Mom, it's not real. It's next to Jensen's. It's called Sandy's Seafoods Market.

Oh, it's not hanging from that sign like you thought. It's coming off the roof of the other building.

Well, I figured that much out, but I thought it was all Jensen's, if that makes sense. Yes, I see. It's not. It's a different business, at least with a different name, called Sandy's Seafood Market. Okay. But what's confusing is it's next to Jensen's, and they also sell meat or at least fish. And it's got this fish on top of it. And, you know, it's I know that this jaw could go up and down because the picture I just sent you, you can see that the thing broke. And now they've got it just like they've got it muzzled. Yeah, I'm looking at photos of its jaw won't just like hang down, kind of like a as Tracy Jordan would say, an unattended root canal. I think his dad was from funky North Philly. And I know he suffered from an unattended root canal.

I think that this thing was broken and hanging open for a long time. Because when you go to the Yelp page for this now closed down business, the big banner is three photos of it. And I can't tell. Yeah, I think I'm guessing that that all happened at the same time. That's what I was trying to figure out. And so my point is I probably have seen this fish before. I'm guessing I just forgot about it. And probably because it wasn't moving by the time that I saw it. But I am getting some views of it here. The pictures of it with it permanently open are kind of unsettling. If it's permanently open, I'm guessing. I mean, it could just be motion shots and we're seeing it in the open position. But yeah, that's right. They had that little.

The fact that they have it strapped, closed in one of the photos makes me think they had lost the ability to control the articulation.

Anyway, it's just such a bummer. Like that was our original point was like here you had these two great like old school style places where I would still be going. I would still be getting there. And they were forced out. They tried to start it like I think the the owners like sold the business because they couldn't afford the, you know, real the real estate anymore. The landlords were pushing them out. And I remember the the workers tried to kind of band together and start like a fundraising campaign so they could open it somewhere else. And I don't think that was successful. And there was just like so much love there, you know, from the people who worked there. And it's just a bummer that it's all gone. And now that building is offering absolutely nothing to society other than just being blight.

Yeah, I know. What a bad outcome. Okay, I think that is probably about enough TBTL for this Monday. Andrew, what do you think?

I think so, certainly. Certainly, certainly.

You said something earlier in the show that reminded me of something I really want to tell you about tomorrow. And it was the basic idea of something that you and I kind of— I guess maybe it was sort of how you referred to fireworks, but it was something more technology-based. It was basically something that you don't really like the fact that you sort of, you find something as compelling as you do because it goes against your general moral principles. And I am dealing with something like that that I want to tell you about tomorrow. It is actually a piece of technology that I'm, I'm not so conflicted that I didn't acquire it. Okay, so that shows a certain obvious interest, but there's a piece of technology.

that I've acquired that is making, it's so cool, it's making me furious. Well,

I guess this is a funny way to find out that pizza oven you got is a meta brand pizza oven.

From your lips to God's ears, Andrew. We'll talk about it tomorrow.

We'll talk about it tomorrow on the show, okay? Alright. In the meantime, thanks for listening, everybody. We will be back here tomorrow with more Imaginary Radio. Is tonight the Home Run Derby?

Home Run Derby is tonight, I believe.

Alright. Everybody have a great Monday. Go Cal Raleigh. Go Big Dumper. And please remember, no mountain too tall.

And good luck to all.

Power out.