Muse

All right. Let's talk movies. We've got a big one here. Springsteen, Deliver Me From Nowhere, directed by Scott Cooper, starring Paul Walker Hauser, Jeremy Allen White. A lot of three, a lot of three namers here. And Stephen Graham. Synipsis, Synopsis, sorry, Bruce Springsteen. This is a Bruce Springsteen movie crafting his 1982 album, Nebraska, which emerged as he recorded Born in the USA with the E Street Band and based on Warren Zane's book. What did you think of Springsteen, Deliver Me From Nowhere?

Yeah, this is, I don't like to do these on the show. It's basically a documentary rather than a movie. So it's the kind of thing that really should be a different show. Okay, we don't have to review it. It's a music documentary.

You do not want to review it?

I don't know. Four bags of popcorn. Okay.

TBTL! Hey, Isaac. Can we listen to TBTL?

No. Yeah, yeah.

You want to listen to TBTL?

Yeah. I'd be on the bathroom pee-peeing, and he'd be standing right there pee-peeing. It was hilarious, and we were both pee-peeing at the same time. It's fun. R&R!

Just like the drop says, I cannot contain my joy. I don't think I've ever related to a drop so much right now.

Oh, that's hella beautiful, though! Oh, that's magical, though! Oh, that's so splendid! Oh, this is really the happiest place on Earth, though! Hey, you either get it or you don't. I don't, but I am so excited to be a part of it.

All right, hello, good morning, and welcome, everybody, to a Wednesday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. Oh, when the adventure begins again. My name's Luke Burbank. I'm your host. I just want you to be normal, and clearly you're not. Coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio perched high above the mighty Columbia here, On another, I'm going to, you know what, I'm going to name it and claim it. I'm going to say another beautiful October day. It's trucktober. I guess, supposedly, right now it's actually very nice out. Hoping this afternoon to get out and do some fall lawn mowing.

Wanted to add a few comments regarding your mole situation.

I noticed yesterday, my neighbor, this is what happens when you live, you know, out in ex-urban America. It's a lot of pressure to keep your lawn and your property kind of ship shape. I thought we were done mowing the lawns for the year, and then I look over and I see Bob. Bob's out there on his riding mower, and then it's like, well, the gantlet has been thrown down. Now, I've got to get out on my riding mower today and see if I can kind of trim things up, weather permitting. Regardless of the weather, we are ready to bring you episode 4,581 in a collector series. Let the fun begin. The students at the University of California at Berkeley decided to do some pretty savage burn. I mean, actually not the students. The university just occurred to me. The students are one thing. This was officially sanctioned by the university this past weekend of some pretty funny trolling of the football coach, Bill Belichick, when he brought his North Carolina Tar Heels out to Berkeley to play football.

How funny is that? That's pretty funny.

It was pretty funny, honestly. I know it seems unsafe to have people as smart as the student body and I guess administration at Cal Berkeley. It's unfair for them to be this smart and also this devious when trying to troll Bill Belichick. Also, I may have fallen back in love with an internet platform. Welcome to the internet. That I initially fell in love with and then kind of forgot to be in love with and now maybe have rekindled the fires of love. So we'll talk about what's going on with me and Blue Sky. And speaking of the internet, let's talk to this guy, longest running co-bro of the show. He's got like every meme ever produced on the internet. He can knock us out with his memes. Maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. He's Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

Good morning, Luke. I couldn't do it. I tried to get off this email to John before I had to start talking on the show.

Our co-worker, TBTL employee numero uno, John Straff.

You and I were just in a pretty important, I would say, well, heated, certainly.

I have AI do a summary of everything that we say. It's all transcribed and also what the sort of emotional temperature was. It just told me it was heated.

Yeah. Hold on a second here. Grok, who was right in that argument?

No, you and I were just talking about some, let's just say creative elements. Had a creative meeting here. And I was like, okay, this is good. We have a plan. And I thought I could maybe while you did the intro to the show, I could summarize our plan, send some very quick graphic design ideas as attachments to John, lay out the plan, and just be done with this so that I don't have a hanging chad of an email in front of me this entire show. But I couldn't do it. So what I'm going to do here, Luke. I know that feeling. Would you like me to tap that?

I've got another five minutes on lawns.

I need about 15 to 20 minutes to finish this email. Do you have that? Can I just leave my mic?

Well, it's lawns. It's gravel. It's gravel driveways. It's people. That's my other big problem these days, Andrew. It involves my gravel driveway.

Well, let's get off of gravel for a second and stay on the grass, if you will. Because, I mean, I wasn't even sure if I wanted to bite on this because I don't know how much time we want to dedicate to this topic. But it actually does hit home for me what you were just saying. And I noticed a few weeks ago, I'm like, oh, you know, I was thinking that lawn mowing season is over. Like, I love the spring. It's so green and lush. It's just so wonderful. And you're like, it's going to stay like this all year. And then by midsummer, everything is just like kind of desert bone dry and brown in my yard, unfortunately. I don't love that. But you still got to go out there and like kind of mow down weeds every now and then and that kind of stuff. But then here it is. It's, you know, near it. It's almost November, Luke, if you can believe it. And I'm looking outside, and the grass isn't just green again, but it's a bit unruly around some of our downspout. It's really that thick, healthy-looking fat blades of grass, which I love. That's what I'm saying. But it also is looking a little bit ratty. And I thought, do I have to get out the lawnmower one more time? And then I dismissed it. I was like, no, I don't. It's winter, Andrew, now. But now you're talking about getting out your lawnmower, and I'm feeling shame, and maybe I need to do it.

It's very satisfying to mow the lawn this time of year because you're right. the grass is green again there is that kind of there's that very sad point in like august where you're just mowing the dandelions the lawn is totally dead why don't they make the whole lawn out of dandelions but dandelions have somehow figured out how to hydrate even when there's no precipitation but like it's so that it's kind of not i mean you know it's just like your dead brown lawn looks a little more uniform if you're out there mowing the dandelions but now we're back to where the lawn is actually green. And so if I mow it, uh, it's not growing very fast. It's just a few little scraggly. It's like my actual hair. It's kind of some, some scragglers, but, um, it will be satisfying if I get it all kind of, uh, evened out because it's nice that the grass is actually green. This is another thing that I'm not going to do this. Don't worry. I'm saying that to the listeners because I know, I know that, uh, in polite company amongst those who read the New Yorker and, um, listen to the right kind of music. We don't promote lawns anymore. We're not supposed to be watering our lawns. I know that's, that's, that's day class a, um, but we should all be zero scaping everything in our life. But I have to say, I'm a little jealous of some people in my neighborhood who clearly water their lawns because it does look pretty nice in the summertime of a lush green lawn. Still. I'm not, I'm not quite there with it, but I am definitely when this thing is all trimmed up uh later this afternoon it will be satisfying to have a nice green lawn that's also well maintained because there's just a certain there's two windows of time for that to

happen in my life what you just said sort of reminds me of maybe a bastardized version sorry for the language version of something that you used to say way back in the day when tbtl was new like one of your uh i think luke isms sort of that you would sort of preach my famous lukeism And this is not quite exactly what you were saying, but when you were talking about watering the lawn, and we know that we're not supposed to do it for responsible reasons, as good caretakers of this blue and green marble I like to call earth. But also there's the cultural shame that goes along with it. And when you said that, I have to say that inside me there are two wolves, and one of them thinks that if the neighbors could never see me watering the lawn, I might be way more tempted to do it. And I'm thinking here, and this goes back to your Luke-ism from way back in 2008, that a little bit of shame is good. A little bit of shame actually keeps me in check here. Because I do think that I'm pretty good these days in a way that I used to not even consider it that much. I think being around people who have an aversion to buying too much plastic has really kind of driven it home for me a little bit. like I don't

think about I never used to think about oh I'll just buy these plastic bags and now every time I pull out another Ziploc bag to maybe put a half a can of cat food in it or something I'm like well will I be able to reuse this bag later or do I have to throw it away because it's cat food probably throw it away and so like I'm actually thinking about single-use plastic way more than I ever did and it's not because I sat down and made a decision to do that it's just because the people around me are that way and so it's got me thinking that and that's sort of the same with watering the lawn I'm like, I would love to have a lush green lawn all throughout the summer.

I see you as being a – again, taking out the politics of it, if you will. I see you as being a guy who could really enjoy some nice 5 p.m. lawn watering. Oh, my God. Are you kidding me? Kind of just hosing down the grass.

Oh, you're doing it by hand. I'm picturing that. I don't know. What about one of those water sprinklers from our youth that waves back and forth? God.

Was there anything better than jumping through that sprinkler as a kid?

Slipping, landing on your ass.

I actually bought some sprinklers that are much less fun, but now what they sell are these ones that have all—you can change all the pattern on them. They're basically like a kind of a rectangular block, and you spike them into the ground, and they're very adjustable, so you can have them just hit this very specific little areas of grass. But those are nowhere near as fun.

So you have experimented with a little lawn watering.

Well, I bought them, but I didn't actually—I never deployed them. To be honest with you, I didn't deploy them for a couple of reasons One, I do have questions about if it's the ethically correct choice to water our lawn in the summer And then the second was, the timer that I bought with it was so complicated Because what I wanted to do, I think I was going out of town I wanted to set up something where there would be a minimal amount of lawn watering But it would be on a very specific timer and it would be like at night Because that's when you're supposed to do it so there's less evaporation, etc And the neighbors don't see exactly my very very judgmental neighbors including including bob over there um but they're but like yeah the the sprinkler that you're describing that we all had as a kid was just i mean that's one of the pure joys of childhood is is jumping through that sprinkler dealing with that sprinkler um i also i'm on a well so does that impact the morality of me watering my lawn that's a good question that i don't have an answer to i'm not pulling i mean i'm pulling water out of the earth i'm pulling water out of this aquifer um i have absolutely no idea how this well works by the way i've never lived at a house that was on a well before here's what i know about it there's some kind of pump in the basement i think there's some kind of a thing somewhere that's extracting the water from the well in my where i park my car in my little driveway area more i want to get into gravel talk in a minute because that may actually impact speaking of carbon footprints andrew it may be the thing that finally gets me off of amazon.com Oh, that's a good tease I was like, I don't think you can pull off a gravel tease

But you did

I just did it, buddy But anyway, the well is so mysterious to me Oh, there's a big square, kind of flat metal cover That's in my driveway that is sitting over what I think is maybe the well

You gotta go down there, Luke

I've never even pulled that cover up That's how afraid of the well situation I am

That's because we grew up in the 80s we were so afraid of wells and i grew up in the country where there were actually like the kind of wells that you would see and like baby jessicas would fall in exactly like if i fall in the well

it's not gonna no one cares local podcaster falls in well local adult podcaster falls that's not a sympathetic story baby jessica down the well now we've got a media story and we're getting her out local moron falls down that's exactly local moron gets what he deserves would be the story when I fall down my well. But it is crazy. Then you'd be writing one of your patented letters to the editor. Exactly. I honestly have kind of no idea how it works. I do also like it in a way, because in my darker moments, if I'm being totally honest, as the world sort of burns around us, I do sometimes have the thought, could this house be off-grid? And the answer is yes, it absolutely could, because I'm on a well. And there's a lot of natural light here And I would need to set up a sufficient solar array And then a charging system But I mean this entire house It wouldn't need to draw anything From any municipalities

So here's a serious question This well It's just your personal well It's not a well that is used by you And your neighbors

I think the well is mine I'm sure the aquifer that it taps into Is probably shared But this is what I'm saying, Andrew. I don't want to ask any questions. I don't know if, like, if I take too long of a shower, am I hogging some of Brian's water? I don't know about it.

i don't want to know about you don't want to know you don't want to tape a flashlight to like a makeshift hard hat that you find somewhere get a rope climb down that well see what's up

i absolutely not i mean this is i'm a relatively curious person and andrew i'm telling you there is this metal box that has been i've been parking my car every night that i parked this my car which has been now multiple years i pull in and i go am i going to hit the box then i gotta ease my way up to it and then i stop right before i hit the box and i get out and all of this interaction with this thing i have never thought i should lift this up and look at even what is inside it

you should do that i want to know will you do that later and take a photo you know what maybe

i will just for you and what if there's somebody down there listeners like what if you have a well dweller what if that's where the sniffer is he's been down there he's been down there waiting um you know i mean again i don't i will i will do that today i will try to lift the lid off this thing and also i don't know how heavy the lid is it's metal but i i don't know what what i really don't know what is down there and it's appropriate now that it's halloween it's spooking season there could be some sort of leprechaun type you know kind of leprechaun of the of the lep in the hood here to do no good style that lives down there i wouldn't rule it out but all that is to say i do have these moments of thinking well if we if if this you know if we go to absolute hell in a handbasket i could this house i could use solar there's plenty of actually room for me to grow food i mean the problem is if we get into one of those you know the last of us situations i have no ability to defend this house like i don't own any guns i don't plan on owning any like a sword do i have any swords there may be one weird loader sword that my dad made lying around

use that well at least find it i'm not saying it's going to come to that but you should at least know where it is like a fire extinguisher it would be no good for me to create a little

village here of like sustainability and get becca up here and get addy over here and we have a little homestead if i can't if i can't defend it and i also don't know how the well works

Also, I do feel like Becca could defend it.

Much more than I could. Yes. And I don't think that's even up for debate.

Yeah. So you have that going for you. Yeah, you're definitely, I really think that that episode three of The Last of Us really wormed its way into your consciousness.

It did. Yeah. Famously, the Nick Offerman one, right? Yeah. Where he and his, I guess you could say partner, form a life together. Yeah. By the way, the guy from The White Lotus, right?

Oh, that's right. I didn't realize it the whole time. That was a huge revelation to me on the podcast when we were talking about it later. So, yeah, one of the best episodes. It's almost like a bottle episode of that show. You can watch episode three and not anything else in that series and still be very satisfied. It's one of the most emotional and just well-made hours of TV I've ever seen. Now, I do feel like we are sort of stalling here. Now I want to know how gravel might get you to leave Amazon.com.

Well, so the driveway, so my house is at the end of the county road, which kind of makes it sound more remote.

I love that Springsteen record.

Uh-huh, yeah. It's all detailed in the new movie, Springsteen, Deliver Me From Gravel. I do think the premise of that movie, I know that you're not a fan of those kind of biopics, whether it's the Bob Dylan one that came out or the ones where it's just kind of a sort of a, it's an impression competition. Like, how much can we can we find an actor who can do a pretty solid impression of this of this famous singer and then kind of do a glossy look at, like, how they rose to the prominence or whatever?

It's so serious. I've seen this trailer a couple of times now in the theater. It is just so not for me.

well the um you know the guy who directed it uh he made oh you know what he made that i actually liked he made wild heart that jeff bridges kind of movie where jeff bridges plays a kind of a country music singer who's you know dealing with it and that's not a biopic i've heard of that

that's back is that like 20 years old or something is that back in the day or sadly it's pretty old

now i actually saw jeff bridges touring with the music from wild heart oh at the chateau I would say that would have been maybe seven, eight years ago. So that's maybe where I'd put that movie. It had a really good soundtrack. I enjoyed that film, but, um, but, uh, the, the premise of that movie actually doesn't seem to me like to be the worst, because I guess what they're sort of saying is like after Bruce Springsteen, we're getting back to gravel in a minute. Don't worry. Um, after Bruce Springsteen released born in the USA and, and, you know, had these massive hits and was all of a sudden this just like huge figure in figure in American music. He wanted his next album to just be Not that And so that album Nebraska That he recorded I believe if I have the story right He recorded it just like in a house Or something in New Jersey Onto like a reel to reel And then he literally had it on a cassette tape And then he went to the label And played them the cassette tape And said like this is the album And they were super bummed Because they were like We want another born in the USA And he was like, I'm just going to kind of do this like me and this guitar and meet me tonight in Atlantic City kind of vibe. And so that's what the whole movie is about, is about basically him telling the record label, this is the record I'm putting out and the controversy that that caused. Now, again, I don't know if the movie is good or not, but I do like that it's kind of at least, I like the idea that it's confined to a very specific period of time in his life. Instead of a like, he's a young boy And then he grows up And then he becomes, you know what I mean Somehow it being a more Focused thing kind of makes me I'm probably not going to see it But I'm 5% more likely to see it because of what They decided to do with the movie

That's the move now though, right Isn't that like Isn't that what the Bob Dylan one was too You know what, I don't know, I haven't seen it I don't know if that was a specific album or not But everybody said, well it's not your typical Biopic because it's just a specific period of his life you know and i oh and i you saw the elvis one i don't know was the elvis one more of a a look back at the entire fever dream that was an entire i enjoyed the elvis one

because i saw it on a saturday morning at like at the sony headquarters in manhattan in a private screening room that was for me because we were interviewing baz lerman about it and and austin butler the guy who played elvis so like and i think i was pretty hung over so i was in a weirdly like i was in a very i was in a very open i was in a frame of mind that allowed me to really get kind of like sucked in by the movie if that makes sense oh that's good so you weren't distracted by all this that's good no this was all working for me like i kind of was i think it was a little woozy basically and so the movie i found the movie to be really enjoyable but i would also totally understand other people who thought the movie was just kind of it's Baz Luhrmann so you know it's going to be like over the top they're going to take a lot of artistic license I hear that Austin Butler who by the way was lovely when I interviewed him I heard that he continued talking in Elvis's voice for like two years which no one could quite figure out oh my god like it's a character bro but um actually you know what Austin Butler's really good in is um Once Upon a Time in

hollywood oh i didn't realize he's one of the manson kids oh he is oh and there's this great

scene where he shows up uh they show up basically to i guess it's rob or something um uh have brad pitt's character and brad pitt is just high as a kite he's in his house and these like three kind of manson types show up and one of them is austin butler the other one is mikey the the woman who just won the Oscar for Honora, Mikey Lee? I'm out of my

element, I gotta be honest with you. I'd love to help you here.

The actress, anyway, and it's just like a very, there's this very charged scene where they've got, he's got, Austin Butler's character's got a big gun pointed at Brad Pitt, and Brad Pitt is so high, he doesn't know if they're real, and he goes, are you guys real? And Austin Butler goes, I'm as real as a donut. It's like a great line.

That doesn't answer the question for me. I know. I love it. It's a great scene.

It really makes it even more difficult to tell if you're real or not. My Austin Butler impression needs some work. But OK, so if we can get back to Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, which is a Lucinda Williams record that I would highly recommend, whether or not you are into the Bruce Springsteen album, Nebraska, you should get into the Lucinda Williams record, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. So the driveway to get down to my house is not paved. i could do that if i wanted to but but speaking of moves that are frowned upon we are not trying to create more impervious surface in this world if we can we're not trying to pave paradise and put up a parking lot so i just had this when i moved in it just had this like kind of a bunch it was dirt with a bunch of like scrubby leftover gravel that had mostly just kind of washed away and it looked kind of bad and there was lots of weeds and things growing up in the driveway but they're very hard to deal with because they're you know it's rocks and stuff it was like a it was just like a very kind of um and it didn't look particularly finished and so my neighbor the other side brian he had new gravel put down at his house and i used to always see him out like i would joke on the show that like his number one hobby is like maintaining his gravel like he has a tractor and he's always out pulling dragging this like heavy giant kind of metal grate over his gravel to get it so that it's all nice.

And I just thought, like, to me, I felt a little bit like we might need to get a hobby, Brian. That is his hobby. Well, Andrew or Andrew, whichever you're using.

I like Andrew, honestly, if we could go with that for at least a half hour, see how it feels.

I was out of my element, Donnie. I had no idea just how real the gravel raking and dragging lifestyle would become. because my fix for my scrubby driveway was to hire these folks to come out and put down a fresh new layer of gravel and they do a whole thing where like the stuff at the bottom is one kind of you know rock that compacts better and then they and they do a different kind of rock over the top of that and then they kind of tamp it all down a little bit um and when they finished and i came home it looked really nice but also it's very it's still very fluffy like i don't know if it just needs to compact over time if it needs more rain but it is the kind of thing that for some reason certain vehicles uh namely trucks and vans that i think maybe use rear wheel drive cannot get out of my driveway without absolutely peeling out and making these crazy not just divots but long like foot deep scars into the gravel right now my car does not do this for some reason my car maybe i don't know has to do with weight distribution i have never had a problem my car does not peel out in my driveway it's mostly the trucks that are coming to do work

at your house or whatever which are probably like heavier trucks with rear it's odd it's actually not

always it's it's it is more likely to be like a ford ranger truck that has an empty bed or like a rented as was the case the other day like one of those like a sprinter van that doesn't have a lot of pay like a lot and i think what it is is if it's a kind a certain kind of truck that uses real rear wheel drive but doesn't have enough weight in it the back wheels because i now watch this happen on the regular they just get stuck for some reason and the only way that they can finally get out of my driveway is to just like peel out for like minutes on end, create these giant grooves where the tires were, and then finally get just enough grip to get out of my driveway. And then I come home or I come out of the studio and I have to get a rake. I have to rake my gravel and try to fill in all of these divots. And so what I've noticed the other day what happened was i ordered something yes from amazon and because the amazon distribution is so weird and kind of like by that i mean it's not always just like an amazon um it's not always like an amazon branded van that shows up if you get something from amazon sometimes it's a person in a car that has no markings those are people that i think are sort of maybe contractors sometimes the other day it was a kid this is i was in my house of course probably watching the baseball game or something and i just hear someone peeling out of my driveway and then i hear this beep beep beep beep and then more peeling out and then beep beep beep and i kind of come out to my door and i i look up and i see that this kid is in a it's like a rented budget Sprinter van And I come out and I go hey are you having a tough Time getting out because this kid is just like The tires of his van Are like half of the tire Is now sunk down into the gravel Like it's getting worse it's not like He's peeling out and he's not actually like Making progress he's getting more stuck In the driveway And he's this kid he's probably like 25 With this flowing mane of bright Red hair and I go Hey can I help you And he rolls down his window and goes, what, man? I go, are you stuck? He goes, no, I got it, man. I go, okay, are you delivering something? He goes, yeah, I just did. And I looked down and he had delivered this tiny bag from Amazon. Can't even remember what it was. Oh, you know what it was? It was for my guest bathroom upstairs. It was guest toothbrushes. So basically single-use toothbrushes. So if people come over and they forgot their toothbrush, They can use one of these, but they're all sealed in paper individually. I went to Target, by the way, to try to get these. I didn't want to order them from the Internet, but this is the problem. You go to Target, and they don't sell this kind of stuff, and the only place that sells this is like Amazon now.

So to deliver this little bag that had like 20 of these wrapped bamboo single-use toothbrushes, it somehow ends up in this budget Sprinter van that's now peeling out of my driveway, And I was like, are you delivering something? He goes, yeah, I did. It's on your porch. And I look over. I was like, oh, OK. And I said, yeah, you know, a lot of people get stuck in the driveway.

you might want to just kind of like go low and slow and get it, go over to that part of the driveway and then just get some momentum and then just drive out. Like what people always try to do is they're just flooring it and they're just spinning out and getting nowhere. What they need to do is like gets, it's like driving in the snow. You need to get some momentum. You kind of move, not super fast, but, but keep your continuous momentum. And then you can just kind of glide on top of the gravel and get out of the driveway. And he was like, okay. And he was like, all right, thanks man. I was like, Hey, no problem. And I go back inside my house and Andrew, I am not kidding. For 20 minutes I just keep hearing And then The sound of like spitting tires I just keep thinking There's no way this kid is still stuck in the driveway On the other hand I don't want to be one of those weird homeowners Who's just like watching someone Who's having a hard day You know like I don't want I didn't want him feeling like I was judging him Or I was like observing him Because that's the kind of thing that also is stressful for him Like you know You're having problems you're at someone's house you don't really know how to fix it they're now just watching you you're breaking out in a sweat although that was a thing this kid seemed really unbothered I come back out he has now created so many massive divots in every part of my driveway where he's like backed into a certain point and then gotten stuck and then spun out and then moved I am not exaggerating when I say he did this for 15 minutes I come back out of the house And I just walk up the stairs And I'm trying to say this in a non-judgy way Because I'm really not trying to be hard on the kid But I said, hey, do you want me to just go ahead Do you want me to get you out Because I kind of have some experience with this

You're suggesting take the wheel

I'm suggesting that I take the wheel To just back his van Because I know exactly what he needs to do And then just get his van Out of the driveway so that it's at the start of the road And then, you know, if this is stressing him out Like, I live here, I use this driveway every day I know how to do this, would you like me to just get you out of here and he's like oh no man I got it I've got it and I'm thinking but you don't got it at all you really don't got it so I was like okay alright man and he goes thanks man appreciate ya but he just was like I guess I wanted him to be a little more stressed when I came back out he had really powerful Spicoli vibes I admire that he's catching some tasty waves

give me a tiny bit of that give me just a

thimble of that yeah that's a good point he had maybe too much of it but you and I could probably use a little more of that or whatever So I go back to my house, and again, no exaggeration, it's probably at least five, if not ten more minutes when I'm just hearing this incessant sound of the backing up and the whatever, and I just, all I can think is like, God, there's going to be a lot of raking tomorrow. And then, so finally he does manage to get out of there.

The sun is setting, the coyotes are howling against a full moon, and he finally gets out of there.

I mean, yeah, but my thought in all of that was, this might actually be, for me, the most compelling reason to stop ordering so much crap online, is that I don't need a bunch of people. Now, here's the other thing that I will say. The professional Amazon drivers, do you know what they do with their blue Amazon vans? Pull in the street. Yeah, they park. They have been trained, or they have figured it out because they've just done this enough. they all so it says end of county road and it's all paved and then it stops being paved and it goes into this gravel situation that's my house any of these the i don't want to say real that's mean but just the people that are like i guess probably amazon full-time employees or at least are driving an amazon truck they stop at the top of the road they jump out they bring the thing down it adds about 50 feet to the walk or something and they never get stuck they know what they're doing but the thing is because again the amazon distribution chain is so i do not understand it i do not understand why it is sometimes a person in their own vehicle why it is sometimes a person this guy appears to have rented a sprinter van because it said budget on the side of it so did amazon rent him that van did he rent it so he can do this route but because i don't always know who's going to be delivering it there there's a decent possibility that they're going to drive down too far into the driveway they're going to get their particular vehicle stuck and then i'm going to be raking tomorrow is there any chance that he's an accountant and he's

just really into budgets and this just his own personal van and he's just decorated it with the word budget like one might chris piccoli's budgeting that's right i uh i had i had a similar van that said air supply along the side of it um yeah that is interesting well yeah that

that's a compelling argument though yeah it's good because it has me thinking again this is Unfortunately, for me to modify my behaviors, it's rarely out of altruism.

No, it's got to affect you.

It's got to be because I'm annoyed at raking my gravel, and now it's like – but again, this is – some of it also is where I live.

I'm interested in – I am interested in knowing gravel solutions. By the way, the name of the show today is definitely going to be The Road Less Graveled.

That's pretty good.

I'm really interested in knowing if this is a common problem with common solutions. Yes. I feel like you're the type of guy who's looked at the internet, like how to keep my gravel from spinning out or what have you. I haven't yet. I need to. Because you're not on a super – tell me if I'm wrong. This is a question in the form of a common. It's not like a super high-grade hill or something. It's not steep. It's not steep, right? It's not crazy steep. Yeah, yeah.

It's just a little incline maybe, right? I do think this is just an issue with this kind of a thing because, again, I see my neighbor out there maintaining his gravel on the regular. I think it's just a lifelong passion for evening out your gravel after people drive on it and divot it up if they're driving the wrong kind of vehicle or if they don't know what they're doing. I bet that it compacts over time. You know, really what I could do is I could just reach out to Brian and ask him, hey, what's the deal with this? But again, I think I know the answer because I see him out there regularly dragging his big, I don't know, like, I don't even know what you would call it. But it's like he puts it behind his tractor, and it's a big kind of almost like imagine like cyclone fencing. It's almost like fencing, but heavier, and it just sits on the ground, and it gets dragged around behind his tractor, and it evens everything out.

I feel like I can totally picture that, but I don't know why, if that makes sense to you. Oh, you know what? Maybe I can picture it because I grew up in the country, and the way they maintained the roads. In fact, wow, I'm just getting kind of a blast from the past here. This isn't something I've thought about a lot as an adult, but we grew up, I'll just say it now, on Crocker Road in Valley City, Ohio. Don't dox me. Please. And they were country roads where I grew up. And so I'm trying to think, it couldn't have been every summer. It sort of felt like that. But maybe every couple of summers, they would come along, and they would re-tar the road. And then a truck would just come and just dump gravel on top of the wet tar, basically. I think that's called chip sealing. I could see it. I don't know.

Because my road was recently chip sealed.

And did you have that smell of cooking tar in the air for several days while it was happening? that wow what a childhood memory that you just uh surfaced for me but yeah that was a big part of kind of growing up when the trucks were out there and maybe that's where i used to see those things come along and sort of like even it out by just dragging something behind it yeah exactly so i i

am going to i'm going to ask myself next time i'm ordering something because i'm having a whim is is this thing worth me having to be out in my driveway with a rake tomorrow trying to fix all of the divots from the delivery of this thing or could I just go to town and get it now that's the that's the other problem like I said is it has to do with where I live because when I realized that I needed these uh or I didn't need but I wanted to have these toothbrushes um I I went to town I put it on a list I was in town and I was like let me go get some of these and they don't this is not a thing that you can just buy in a regular store anymore I think because of the Amazon-ification of life. I think, unfortunately, a lot of places don't sell a lot of the stuff they used to sell because it is easy to get online. If I lived in Portland, I could probably find a place that had this stuff. But it's a vicious cycle out here. There's a lot of stuff that doesn't... You can't buy out here, so then you buy it online, which means there's no chance of ever being able to buy it out here.

I mean, it's absolutely a vicious cycle and it drives me bananas and we i mean people had warned us about this 30 years ago and we've seen it slowly happen but i think the um this sort of scent shop i don't even know what you call it the kind of the holistic crystal and candle and scent shop that used to be right by our house the zenith supply which i think was around maybe when you were a kid too right yeah yeah like that i remember going to zenith supply before we even lived in the roosevelt neighborhood and that's what introduced me to the roosevelt neighborhood because genevieve and i got into candle making and that was a place where you could go to buy bulk wax you know like chipped wax yeah right on roosevelt was almost later on we'd move to that neighborhood and it was almost across the street from where we lived just telling everybody all of my addresses now don't dox their old rental across from zenith supply not look up 7304 crocker road um i still remember my old address do you remember all your old addresses i don't remember them all i remember that one though i don't

I'll tell you who does The internet And sometimes when I buy something on the internet They'll send it to 6th Street in Brooklyn Where I used to live I had a rug that got sent to Brooklyn Not too long ago Because it just was in there

That almost happened to me yesterday When I was buying some of Martin Starr's gummy candies Luke I don't know what happened to me yesterday From Party Down? Yeah Wait a minute. Okay, gravel talk is officially over. Martin Starr gummy talk is officially beginning.

I'll just wrap this up with the Zenith Supply thing by just saying that, like, loved Zenith Supply. That was the only place I could think of to go to get this niche thing, which was candle wax and scent and the candle wicks and all of that stuff. But the Zenith Supply could not stay open because of the competition of everybody just going online to buy that stuff. So they closed down, and then what did Genevieve have to do? She had to go to Amazon to buy the wax. Now she wouldn't. We've totally pulled out of Amazon. But it's so much harder. How has that been in your life, by the way? So far for me, it hasn't affected me too much. We lost Amazon Prime, the TV service. So Thursday Night Football isn't as easy to watch if I were interested in that.

Forget watching Jack Reacher.

Well, there actually are several things on Amazon Prime that I miss. Patriot, if I wanted to go back and rewatch that. Oh, that was on Amazon Prime? Yeah. And anyway, so far it hasn't hit super hard except for when I have moments like this when I think, well, where am I going to get this thing? And I actually just went online. I'm like, if I had to go into Seattle right now, which I'm sure has shops that sell this kind of thing somewhere, where would I go to get these bamboo individually wrapped toothbrushes? And it's just like it's just not that easy. It's a lot more work to find that. And this is with me living in the city where you have stuff like that. You know, I kind of enjoyed going to that nice home goods store to buy some spatulas. I think if I had needed a spatula a couple of, you know, a year ago, I would have just not even thought twice about buying it on Amazon Prime. But instead I enjoyed or on Amazon, I guess. But I enjoyed finding the store in Ballard, going in, picking it out, holding the spatulas and then chatting with the woman who runs the store as I was buying them. Like that was all a good experience. So I kind of like the fact that I'm forced to do that. But not everything is easy to find, like a spatula. So that's where that is. Now, do you want to talk about Martin Starr?

I sure do. Now, for people that don't know, he was in Silicon Valley. He was in Party Down. I've interviewed him before actually on Livewire. I did not know he was playing in the—is this edibles when you say gummies? It's assumed that they have THC in them? No, no, no.

Genevieve said the same thing. No, no, no. They're not gummies. I don't think you can buy that online. I'm pretty sure that would be illegal. No, it was interesting. I guess this is where you just never know when your message as a guest on a podcast is going to break through because there are so many things that I hear on podcasts. So-and-so is on a show because they have a new TV show or they have a product to sell or they have a new podcast. And 99 times out of 100, I'm not really following up on whatever that is. I'm just enjoying the episode. But a couple of nights ago, I was listening to the new comedy, Bang Bang. Martin Starr was on. He has some new project that he was talking about. He's also on Tulsa King, by the way. Wow. Yeah, I don't know how big of a role.

By the way, this is Martin Starr, if you're wondering.

This is so confusing, Ron. Yeah, that's him, exactly. He's the long-haired, bearded guy in Party Now. I think he has long hair in Party Now. Maybe not. Certainly he has long hair in Silicon Valley. You might have seen him in other things. But he gets on the topic of him having this gummy candy that he sells now that I think is called, you'd hate the name of it. Yeah, Sweet Stash. Here's my Sweet Stash. Let's freaking party. Not exactly my kind of humor or vibe. But the thing is, I heard him talking about it on the show, and I was like, oh, that's interesting, whatever. And I didn't really think too much more about it until later I was telling Genevieve about it. I'm like, do you know that Martin Starr is selling candy now? He's like, candy. This might have actually even been on our podcast last night. I think it was. it was a total aside like kind of like this is and i'm like yeah martin star is just selling candy she's like why i'm like i don't know he says they're better than other gummy candies like she's like okay and then we wrap up the show and then later on that night i'm like i wonder how much those gummy candies are just like just curious i just went to the website to see what it looked like type in martin star gummy candies like yeah whatever it's like 20 bucks for like five bags like i think smallish bags or whatever i'm like that's probably too much for candy i'm not even a candy guy luke i do like if i'm gonna if i'm gonna fall to the temptation of candy it probably is a candy like that i do like gummy bears a lot but it was honestly just hearing it randomly on a podcast and then telling somebody about it and then later on being like i'm a 20 dollar an air i'll just buy some of these candies and i just did it maybe i just needed to pick me up at night and now i'm waiting for my candy to show up they've got something on their website

that says Tasting Notes, and it's got sort of a piano. Oh, yeah. Does it make sound? And the piano is different. If I click on it, I'm going to click on Green Grape. It says tap the keys to taste the notes. Is this going to actually play music for me? I hope so. No, it just says zap of green delight. Oh, that's a bummer. Ricochets with juicy bites. Coast into a hum. I thought this was going to be...

to be like a make a little piano sound me too i was on the site did you go with blue jazz berry

did you go with prickly pear what'd you go with when it went to the actual like shop tab it looked like there's only i think they're just i think they're just selling one bag with multi-flavor am i wrong about that i thought no it didn't look like i had very many options i'm like i'll just try whatever and it was such a strange thing like i hovered for a second and also i remember when And I was very late to online shopping because I was so paranoid about it for some reason. Like, it's going to go to the wrong place. I won't be able to return things, whatever. It just took me a long time to get there. And I remember talking to you on the show a long time ago and being like, I just don't have to find my credit card. I got to type in all the numbers or whatever. And they've eliminated that a long time ago, obviously, but I was a little late to the game. And they just make it so damn easy now that it's like you're just buying it before you're even realizing what you're doing, which is like one of the smartest innovations in commerce, I think, in a long time. It's just like making it so easy. Like you can just have a notion and then suddenly spend, you know, with shipping, $27 on candy that you've never even had before coming to your house. You're just like, eh, why not? I need a little endorphin rush right now, you know? And so I just bought it without thinking.

That's definitely how Instagram has me now. Like, how do you think I have that? why do you think i have that um winnie the pooh sweater oh yeah i was trying to that i was trying to will into being a a lucky mariners thing because i could just go like hmm this is i think this is kind of cute and then hit yeah i'll buy it and then it's just like okay thanks yeah like i think that's shopify maybe or i don't even know what or shop there's one that's just called shop maybe it's shop yeah but it's yeah it's it's um it's absolutely frictionless and uh and there is i mean i'm not saying anything particularly insightful here but it is it is amazing the way the human brain works and how like the fact that i don't have to decide three times if i want to buy this sweater that may or may not be a good idea the fact that i only i have the impulse one time and i hit buy that's probably the difference between selling that sweater to me and not if i had to say yes three different times or even enter my information i mean that's like that's like a five-day waiting period on a gun purchase in the words of homer simpson but then i won't be mad anymore but i'm angry now yeah exactly but i'm having this thought about this sweater now

and not in 45 seconds now i just i i not to be super obsessive about this but i just really wanted to see like if i wanted these toothbrushes but i didn't want to buy them online and i'm here in seattle i did find a place that is called public and it's a home goods store but it is out in west seattle so it'd be about a 40 minute how long does it take me to get to west seattle i'm pretty far up north you know depending on the time of day it could take you know upwards of 40 minutes or more to go get these toothbrushes in a part of town oh this is an interesting by the way this

public i'm looking it up now too it looks a lot like there's a there was a place around the corner from where I used to live in Portland that did something like this, too, where it's basically, like, it's just refills.

Oh, you can also, like, yeah, refill your, yeah, your cleaning supplies.

You know, your soaps, your, like, all of this stuff that we, you know, a lot of people tend to buy already packaged with a bunch of, you know, waste, etc. This is, like, you come in there, and you basically, like, it's, you bring in your own, I think you bring in your own, like, receptacle, and then they just fill it up for you with all kinds of different things like that. um and uh yeah i would absolutely patronize this place yeah it looks actually really awesome

but even for me like west seattle that's kind of a you know and i know that i always make jokes about me not wanting to to leave the basement but i mean that's quite a hike for you know a quick a quick thing that you could just order in two clicks online and it's going to be stuck in your driveway and the next day well exactly the problem is what takes more time going to west seattle

or raking your gravel well then you have the gravel raking so there uh-huh that's a think about so anyway anything that kind of pumps the brakes on my although i've i have really noticed that my online consumption has dropped off rapidly in the last few months yeah and i think it's because the place here is is mostly done i mean there's there's always something to do but like I do actually think that my like rapid acquisition of things was a little bit because I really did need stuff like so we you know put in this little small bathroom upstairs so that people that were staying over don't have to come all the way downstairs to use the bathroom in the middle of the night so it's like okay you put this bathroom in and then we put these shelves in the bathroom and then it's like well something needs to go on the shelves well how about a couple of little you know a cup for toothbrushes and then a cup that you can use remember we were talking about this the other day a cup you can use for like rinsing out the toothpaste or whatever yeah so then you got to put those on there you know and then you got to like so But so that was every single part of my house was like, oh, we got this done. And now it's like, well, you also need to kind of put in the things that go in this room or I don't know. There just was a lot of acquisition that I was doing because I legitimately did not have the thing that I needed. But I have kind of reached the point where I've got most of the stuff that I need in this house. And I've actually this is encouraging for me. It has it has led to a reduction in me buying things, which is kind of encouraging because if it hadn't, it would mean that I literally I very much have a problem with this. and it's not related to you know you talk about like hoarding or something that's a mental condition that is not related to how much stuff you need it's something different and i kind of think i was some of it was me probably trying to emotionally regulate myself but it looks like a lot of it was actually i just didn't have that stuff and now i have that stuff and i'm not buying i'm not buying more stuff just to buy it so that's kind of i feel a little bit good about that

yeah i actually feel somewhat weird about buying those candies i know it's silly it's not a big deal but weird in a bad way just sort of like it was something that i literally forgot about until i got a update and by the way i was not under the influence but it was just such a spur of the moment thing and then i woke up this morning and i got a note that said oh your package is on the way oh you know what else it was and again like i'm not trying to be holier than thou but it said your package is on the way from amazon shipping services or whatever and i'm like okay so that's who they use they use like the amazon shipping service so i didn't buy it through amazon but it's still you know but again like i can't stop the world like we're just we weren't talking on the show about it but we were talking off air about uh i think it was on monday there was that huge aws like compromise or whatever and that's amazon too right that got its tentacles and a lot of things that's the thing like and so we had concerns about whether or not i'd be able to we'd be able to record the show using the computer system we use and then if we were would we be able to upload it to the two different places where we need to upload the show our website on squarespace and and libsyn to get it to everybody's feeds everything worked out well but every website had this thing like because of the aws outage like things might not be working properly and it's like what is that that's amazon so when i when i tell you i just i guess i feel i want a little bit of context where that when i see that martin star isn't driving these candies to me directly or using the u.s postal service like i understand it it's like it's business they've made it the easiest and most affordable way for small companies like him to ship their goods it's just i can't fully go monk like here not monk the character but like a monk that is because of your ocd no i can i can do that but i but i can't like you know shed monastic you cannot yes i can't become monastic and shed all my uh earthly desires or whatever um because somehow they're connected to amazon i'm not trying to be a freak about it but it did kind of bum me out like if i'm trying to live a lifestyle that is like oh i don't shop on amazon but then it's like okay i'll buy these probably overpriced candies from a startup by a moderately famous man just to kind of make Genevieve laugh, that's fine. But then when you're just like, hey, a note from Amazon, your order's on the way, and you're like, oh, come on, man.

I could see that, because you guys have really adjusted your lifestyle and chosen to forego a convenience that is Amazon. And so then when you find out, I was buying some tamales the other day. Like frozen? Like, fresh-made tamales off the side of the road. Oh, wow. That sounds good. Yeah. Becca and I were in Salem, and we were driving out, and there were just some people that had set up a stand. And I was like, I could really go for some tamales. Hell, yeah. So they were like, I mean, whatever. This doesn't need to deteriorate into a conversation about immigration. But what I can tell you is that the idea, like, after interacting with these folks that were selling the tamales, where there was kind of a limited English but my limited Spanish, and we kind of got it done. First of all, how amazing these tamales were and also how unbelievably awesome these folks were to deal with. The idea that there would be anybody who would see somebody who speaks Spanish as their native language or appears to have come from maybe Latin America, that they would see those folks as a major threat to the fabric of America is just, it makes me so viscerally mad.

And it doesn't even matter what their particular immigration status is. Those people that you interacted with, they now have to be afraid that at any moment they or their children could be attacked by masked thugs and taken to the ground and assumed absolute guilt.

these folks selling these tamales is like a very brave thing because they're sitting there and if somebody from ice drives by and wants to just like grab them up and they don't have their papers with them i mean they could be they could be detained deported held somewhere i mean it's it's crazy to think about you know just this world that we're living in in this country that we're living in right now but all that is to say i got out and i was asking about the tamales and i asked if they had any that um uh are that don't have meat in them and she said yes but well she goes well we have these jalapeno and um and cheese ones i was like oh that's perfect she goes but the masa because you know the masa is the thing that goes around it's kind of the corn part of a tamale yeah she was like the masa is mixed with the masa that has meat which first of all i was like appreciated that she went to that granular level and you're fine with that of course yeah i was like hey no problem you know like i'm i try to not eat a ton of meat but also i'm not going to turn down a jalapeno and cheese tamale because the masa has touched masa that's touched meat and um i bought six of them for 20 bucks and when i tell you those were the best tamales i've probably ever had in my life oh my god so that's the analogy is like you're ordering your candies and it there's amazon is touching it but that's like the meat masa touching my vegetarian we can't get that we got to do our best and then you know understand that we live in the real world yeah and you paid with bitcoin i did yeah that's all they accepted it was oh i meant to tell you they were crypto It was a crypto bro and a crypto gal.

Crypto tamales.

Yes.

Thank you, baby.

All right. We've got to thank some donors. These folks are donating to our little podcast. And it's how this can exist five days a week. And we are very, very grateful, particularly in these turbulent times when things feel very unsteady. The steady support of our donors means the world to us. It really does. I've got to get my tamale money from somewhere. And I'm getting some of it today from Jake Bowman in Tacoma, Washington. It's our buddy Stay-at-Home Pops, Jake.

Stay-at-Home Pops.

That's right. Jake has run a blog over the years kind of focused on men who stay home and take care of the family unit, hence stay-at-home pops. And maybe a sports fandom for Seattle sports that exceeds even mine. Jake and I will text sometimes about our teams, and he is a person that I can really turn to who I know is feeling this sports stuff as deeply as I am about the Mariners and the Seahawks and the Huskies and all of that. So thank you for all of your support over the years, Jake. And thanks also, Amanda. Thanks to Jen Cohen, who's in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Thank you, Jen. Or as they would call it there, or as my family would call it, Churry Hill, New Jersey. Churry? Churry? Churry. Oh, some fresh churries from Churry Hill, New Jersey? Sounds good. Thanks to Connie Evans, who's in Decatur, Georgia. Hey. Why do I know about Decatur, Georgia? That's not where Genevieve is from.

It's not where she's from.

Is it a suburb of Dunwoody?

It's Gateway to Dunwoody. I'm not sure. How far is Decatur? is, I don't know, don't quiz me. I feel like, I'm embarrassed because I feel like I should know since Genevieve's from that area, but I know so little about the general Atlanta area.

It looks like it's not that far from Atlanta.

Yeah, it's like part of the, would it be part of the Atlanta metropolitan area?

Yeah, I would say that it's part, it looks like it's part of DeKalb County. DeKalb? I would never name a county DeKalb because it's so hard for me to say. It's DeKalb, right? You just ignore the L? It's DeKalb. DeKalb or DeKalb? DeKalb?

I think, but again, think about who you're talking to. I put L's in everything.

So they call it DeKalb there? Do they call it, is the subway stop in New York DeKalb? Because there's a... Okay. I knew it was going to happen at some point. We're going to talk about the band Soul Coughing. Okay. Soul Coughing has a band called, a song called The Brooklynites. There was a period of my life, Andrew, I'm not proud of it, where I listened to a fair amount of Soul Coughing.

It was a short period of my life, but intense, that I listened to Soul Coughing as well.

I really like that song, Circles, but there is a part of this song, The Brooklynites, where he just starts, I think, is it M. Doty, is that the guy? I don't remember that. The Soul Coughing lead guy? I don't know.

I think I only had Ruby Vroom. I'm looking at the records. I think Ruby Vroom might have been the record I had. I don't know, man.

So he just starts, in his inimitable way, naming subway stops in Brooklyn. And I think he says DeKalb. Okay. And so I think I always thought that the Brooklyn pronunciation is DeKalb, which then, in fact, impacts my way of how do we say it in the county in Georgia, which I think you're right, probably DeKalb. I think DeKalb, but I just want you to know, and I want all the listeners.

to know, especially my family who is in Georgia and listens. You know, Genevieve's family, who I consider my family, might be listening to this. Not anymore. I assume listening to this. Aren't listening or not my family anymore? After you've just

absolutely pwned your pronunciation of the county that they grew up in. Of DeKalb? Of DeKalb? DeKalb? Yes. DeKalb is coming from inside the house. I'm sorry, Zachary. Can you still be my brother-in-law? I'm going to see. Would you allow this, Andrew? I know today is... This is what happens when we don't have the Mariners to talk about. I was going to

say in the middle of gravel talk no offense i was wondering if the people who were complaining about uh baseball talk are are are you happy are you happy guys we're talking about lawn maintenance and breaking gravel this is how you pronounce it to cab to call to call um i wanted to see if i

could find this soul coughing song because i want to hear how he says how he says that uh oh super Bon Bon. That was a big song for them. I wanted to try to find this song that was so you know how I know about the song The Brooklynites by Sol Kaufman? It's because it was off of the soundtrack of one of those like Paul Oster films that he was making a bunch of. Do you remember when he made like Smoke that was like starring Harvey Keitel and then he made it

Paul Oster the author?

Well no I think I'm mixing. Maybe he wrote them and

someone else made them. No I kind of didn't realize said i went through a small paul oster like to call boster paul what are you doing to me i feel like am i in candid camera um i uh which is a very dated reference um i feel like you're trapping me though yeah i went through a small paul oster phase of reading his stuff but i kind of don't

have a lot of context for him so here's what i'm going to do this is off of blue in the face the movie was called blue in the face and it was like a spin somehow it was it was a miramax motion picture and i feel like it was i don't know i i may be forgetting the origin story but it was like a cd that i had maybe it was like a promotional cd that showed up at the radio station or something but i'm going to jump towards the end of the brooklynites i think this is about around the time when mike doady starts just listing subway stops and let's see if he says dekab or dekalb

okay it is on gentlemen they have black cake tell them you heard it from me the caribbean

oh no sorry that's the first oh my god that's a whole other were you familiar with that's off of the soundtrack but there's no way that you know about the work of this guy named danny hawk no i don't think so danny hawk was this performer in new york city who sort of had this moment again i'm gonna say this is 2007 when blue in the face came out so early 2000s he was this guy who was kind of like a almost like a spalding gray but for younger people is this white dude and he would sort of do these these characters and these monologues and stuff and he would just like i guess the thing that people thought was cool about him was he could really sink into character but now i'm really like most of the characters he did were non-white and he's a white guy it's like that one you just heard is called caribbean tiger oh i see i don't think danny hawk should ever be doing

anything that's called caribbean tiger stay away from patois white people okay so here we go i

I think we're now maybe, just name it. He just said Hoyt Shimmerhorn, so we know we're in the right part of the song. Let's just see.

Six Hoolam's dicey, their faces apostrophed with headphones, surround you on the corner of Baltic and Smith, and disperse in six directions, like electrons used to scream off from the apple of the atom down on the fire boulevard down on the flatwoods extension down under the manhattan bridge over fast south 3rd street avenue u Atlantic at Alice

Here it is now

DeKalb

Ah, he went DeKalb

DeKalb, yeah Did he go DeKalb or DeKalb? It sounded like DeKalb to me, but that doesn't get us any closer to, first of all, whether or not he's pronouncing it correctly for the New York stop

No, I think he's pronouncing it wrong, but he put his evil inside me The point is, this is all on M. Doty, that I don't know how to say DeKalb County

But you know who we should not be criticizing here is Connie Evans

No, none of this goes back to Connie Evans Thank you, Connie Evans Thanks also to Matthew Scott in Honolulu, Hawaii

Oh, that's our guy

Sure is

We met Matthew in Wisconsin Hung out for a while

Yeah, we did Boy, Matthew, that was really fun We got to meet Matthew And a whole bunch of other good folks there He came all the way from Hawaii, didn't he? He rode his motorcycle from Hawaii Which is astounding.

Yes, he was working on a project in the state of Minnesota. If I can, I don't want to put Matthew on blast. But he lives in Hawaii, but he was out in the Midwest doing some work. And then that got wrapped up just in time for him to motorcycle down to Wisconsin. And then we all hung out afterwards, even after the party, the barbecue. And I had a wonderful time. Yeah, it was a good time. Shout out to Matthew. Absolutely. Matthew, do you know how to pronounce DeKalb County? Please. And if you do, will you send me an update? Also, thanks to Emily Lind in Mounds View, Minnesota. Hey, Emily. You want to get a view of that mound, Andrew. I know. You got to go to Mounds View.

I don't like the way you said that for some reason. It sounded lascivious.

Really? It sounds like I was saying Mounds Vernis or something?

You got to get a view of that mound, Andrew. You got to get a view of that mound. That's what it sounded like. Hey, that's not me. That's how you sound it.

That's a very – that's you – shout out to Phyllis Fletcher. That's you doing an impression of Ronnie, the limo driver, doing an impression of me. Oh, no, don't say that. Don't say that. Thank you very much, Emily. And then thanks to Heidi San, who's in Eugene, Oregon. Thank you, Heidi, and I'm sorry about what you just heard, for real. Thank you to all of our doters. We really do appreciate you. Thanks for making this thing possible. For this to be something that can be our job, we really could not do this without you.

here i go once again with the email every week i hope that it's from a female no man it's not from

a female so gravel talk displaced our bill belichick conversation but let me just say to you andrew that if uh you mentioned that genevieve said that the two sports she follows now are the

mariners and university of north carolina football yes only because of the the haterade towards Bill Belichick over there.

It's really something else. If you want to really get read in or caught up on the Belichick stuff, I would recommend the Sports Gossip Podcast, that one that I've been talking about for a while. I think they're part of The Athletic now. It's really good. And then also Pablo Torre finds out. They've been deep diving on it, and their Friday episode last week basically got into this. So the story with the Bill Belichick thing is he started dating someone who was significantly younger than him, And it would appear that, like, that person, her name's Jordan Hudson, has a huge impact on, like, his, a lot of his sort of professional decisions and things. And a lot of those professional decisions seem to have really not quite worked out for him. Like, he went from being considered maybe the greatest football mind in the history of the sport to, like, kind of this side show, kind of this joke.

Yeah.

And one of the things that they got their hands on in the Pablo Torre finds out thing is, I guess I'm just doing this segment now, but I'll keep it super brief. they um there was this like basically bill belichick and his and his partner it would seem that they have a huge amount of like animus towards the new england patriots organization and the ownership the owner bob craft and they feel like the narrative somehow has been stolen from them about like who is responsible for the greatness of the patriots and so they apparently keep launching these television program ideas that are supposed to be them setting the record straight about what's out there, you know, which is like a real kind of like Randy and Evie Quaid Star Whackers, like whatever you got a couple that's really into like, we need to, we need to tell our story. It's almost always like, I don't know. Like, it's like, there's like a weird couple dynamic sometimes. I think when you get a couple of people together and they just fuel each other in a certain way. And so anyway, what they, what Pabla Tori finds out, got their hands on were these recorded conversations from the making of one of these tv shows and what it basically is is like bill belichick is going to have this tv show that's going to be like him talking about coaching but also him talking about his legacy with the patriots or whatever and so they hire you know the production company gets hired they're at the studio and it's time to start like shooting the show and jordan hudson his partner and a person who is not hired by the tv show or anything does not have a formal job within this experience has a lot of thoughts about the graphics it is

so hilarious it is so like graphic design is my passion she's really does not like the graphics

that are going to be on the tv show and so she's saying a lot of stuff like and they have this all it's all you know recorded and it's basically her saying to you just your heart just breaks for the people that are working on the tv show because they showed up to make a tv show with bill belichick and suddenly this person who doesn't have a formal position within the show is saying these graphics just look like something that i could make in a half hour and she goes i don't really know graphics, but I could definitely do this. I mean, I built Bill Belichick's entire website, which of course, then the Pabllo Torre people, they go and find Bill Belichick's website, which is a real graphic design is my passion, sort of a situation.

Apparently they still have the Giphy.

imprint yes on the graphics that she pulled off the internet yeah it's three like giphys of bill

belichick with the giphy watermark on them and at one point the name belichick was misspelled in the url um and it's just one of those moments where it's just like this is a person who certainly does not seem to be maybe quite as um as smart around some of these things as she as she thinks herself to be i guess and it's a complicated story because there's so much gender in it and it's like But I've really run this through my own decision. I've asked myself if, let's say, Bill Belichick were attracted to men and he had a partner who was a 25-year-old man or whatever, and this 25-year-old man were having these same conversations, I think I would find it pretty cringy.

I can say pretty safely I don't think this is— Yeah, it depends how the person comes off. I think you're right that we should acknowledge the inherent sexism that could accompany the story. but also it's also a generational thing it's also a confidence thing it's a cringe thing if he was with a man who was also like saw himself as a influencer and that was his background i'm an influencer and i could make these graphics better it would still be it would still be super cringy

yeah it's a it's so here's so they so unc by the way that's been real bad their football team has played very poorly and um and so this idea that bill belichick is this kind of great football mind is is now being really tested so they got to play at cal and basically and the pablo tori thing dropped on a friday and it's like the next day they're playing at cal and cal is then this is on the official scoreboard they they are putting up all of these things in the exact in the font i believe it is either the font that was being used on the belichick football show or it's the font that is used on the belichick website but they basically are trolling Bill Belichick and his partner over their font decisions on the Jumbotron in Cal which is just such a deep level of trolling it really is, that's so wonderful so that was, and I do feel like this people will be like, you know listen, it's not fair to talk about Bill Belichick's private life or whatever, I feel like it is fair game at this point, like first of all the stakes are very low, there are so many stories in the news where the stakes are very high it's people's freedom as we were talking about with ice or it's somebody a really private very painful moment for someone this to me there are fewer and fewer stories that i feel sort of morally okay with us just teeing off on and this one i do feel okay with us teeing off on yeah this

is it's it's they're not victims here precisely all right so that's now we can take that off the

board and we can get to the emails and vmails what do we have in the in the hopper well i had

You mentioned this yesterday that we got an interesting follow-up note from listener Marissa in Maryland relating to our conversation about a supposed phrase that I learned over the weekend, which I have not been able to confirm online. But I was standing outside with some folks, and it was a very sunny day, a very sunny fall day. And then the rain started falling while the sun was out. I guess some people call that a sun shower. But a woman we were with said, oh, that means a chameleon is having his wedding day. We're like, what? She's like, it's a chameleon's wedding day. It's when it's raining when the sun is out. That's an old expression from Lebanon. And I was like, oh, I had never heard of that. And I looked it up later. I told you about that on Monday's show. I looked it up later. I found a book of children's stories from Lebanon called The Chameleon's Wedding Day. I don't know if it has to do with rain during the sun, but I did find other expressions.

By the way, this is the reason that marriages amongst chameleons are plummeting. Yeah, it's really sad. One to two days a year it can happen.

It's really sad.

You've got to be ready to go as soon as that weather pattern exists. You're like, okay, we're doing it, honey.

And then the marriages often don't stay together. One of them just disappears.

That's right.

He's a chameleon.

God, he was standing right over there by that pile of rocks.

You know, I think camouflage actually worked for the first time on my eyes. The other day I was driving, and I was driving on a street that you have to drive very slow on, so there was a pedestrian walking on the sidewalk. And as I approached him, he was walking in the same direction as me, so I was approaching him from behind. I could not tell what was going on with his head. I was like, what's going on? Is it hair? Like, what's going on in that guy's hair? And then I got close, and I saw, oh, he's wearing a hat. Not on, like, my kind of, like, what I call my Castro hat. Only it was a camouflage hat in, like, kind of dark greens. And I was like, oh, that camouflage worked. I couldn't tell that that was that guy's head. I didn't know what it was. Like, good on you. Could have just hid. It was right by the disc golf park, Luke. I believe you know that area.

I know it well. I know it well. So all of that is to see. say um i was really smitten by this phrase a chameleon's wedding day for a slang term for rain during a sunny time of day and marissa sent a wikipedia link to the term sun shower and it says here that there are a lot of nicknames for this phenomenon around the world and it says a lot of them are a common theme is that clever animals and tricksters like the devil or witches are getting married although many variations on this theme exist and it has this list of what different cultures refer to as a chameleon's wedding day or a sun shower and it says there are a couple in Mexico I sent you this list too Luke maybe you can help me with it but it says in some parts of Mexico they say a doe is giving birth a doe is giving birth or two elders are getting married let's see here a monkey at the wedding is an Argentinian and a mistake you only make once the monkey at the wedding bringing a monkey to a wedding yes exactly the devil is kissing his wife apparently from the American south like in Tennessee or something along those lines liquid sunshine is what they call it in catch a can also a great song by the band len how about a jackal's wedding a jackal's wedding a lot of weddings huh fox's wedding a monkey's wedding marriage of a fox i'm kind of going through this as we're um as we're kind of uh talking on the fly here those seem to be the

a lot of it goes like it does go kind of negative sometimes like uh a feast day in hell yeah right Or the devil's fair. Right. Or a marriage in hell, they call it. Like, see, I think it's kind of interesting. I'm going to just draw like a huge inference off of this one little thing. But it's funny how you have the cultures where it's like a chameleon is getting married. A chameleon has found love. And then you have another one. It's like someone's getting married in hell. The devil has hanged his mother. Right. That's one. I'm not making this up. Yeah. No, I'm looking at it. I'm seeing that one is like that's in like what the devil is stabbing his wife with a sword. How is that easier to say than sun shower? And you see that in a lot of these German speaking countries. That's Lord. This is according to this list on Wikipedia, but it's just funny how you've got. And again, I'm being so unfair with this, but it, for some reason it kind of makes sense in my mind thinking about culturally like the, the parts of the world where they'll be looking at it, like the devil's stabbing his mother with a sword. And then the parts of the world are like a chameleon has found.

Yeah, right, right. What was the one, and maybe this is the best one to end on, Marissa said, to take your minds off of baseball, please enjoy this list of very colorful names for sun showers. I'm partial to witches are making pancakes. Oh, hell yeah. That's great. I'll use that one. I'll have a witch's pancake sometime. What's not on this list, though, is the word chameleon anywhere, so I'm still wondering what my friend was talking about. You did find that, though, you said you found one reference to that somewhere. There's a book, I believe a book of short stories from a Lebanese author that is called The Chameleon's Wedding Day or something along those lines. So I did stumble on that, but I don't know if that story has anything to do with rain or sun.

All right. I'm sure more research to come from our listeners on that one. Anything else striking your fancy before we roll on out of here?

I think that'll do it. I do think it's interesting. We can't share them all on the air, but I love the dialogue that's going on online and people texting me more of, like, favorite beer situations and more favorite popcorn situations. A lot of people co-signing your—

Oh, I got some confirmation on hardware store popcorn.

That's what I was going to say. A lot of people saying hardware store popcorn is pretty solid. And also somebody said I might be remembering not Sears, but Kmart maybe had popcorn in the store back in the day. Oh, hugely. Maybe that's what I'm thinking of. Yes.

Kmart was— In fact, you know, when I said Woolworth's, I bet you I was, I don't, I'm not confusing those two in my mind as far as like if I'm visualizing one, but I bet you I was really smelling popcorn at Kmart and not Woolworth's.

Yeah, I'm seeing somebody else said there was a store in their neck of the woods in Pennsylvania called Hills, and maybe we had those in Ohio as well. Hills, that rings a faint bell, and they had popcorn as well. But yeah, definitely like shopping popcorn is a heck of a good popcorn, yeah.

You know, the weather is really turning since we started the show. I was all excited to get out and maybe mow the lawn, but it's gotten very dark and ominous out there. So maybe I'll... Yeah, I noticed that over here, too. Maybe I'll scrap that plan and just stay indoors and make myself a big batch of cozy popcorn. I do have to go, apparently, lift the lid on my well. Yeah, you do. To satisfy your curiosity.

Or just leave it and I'll... get down there and do it myself at some point i'll do that today and then i can report back

tomorrow if there's a leprechaun down there or a ladder or anything even what it just looks like

okay i'll take a picture yeah i've been getting a lot of text messages lately from the listeners which come directly to my phone by the way um and i got a note from someone yesterday i don't have this person saved in our system so i don't know who this is but they said how wrong is it that i was listening to today's tbtl about different beers and i was getting ready to go to my kids high school volleyball game and then the listener mentioned sneaky beers and i thought well there's a good idea to make this nicer and now i'm so happy sitting with my thermos of beer at my kids high school volleyball game and i wrote back see tbtl really is changing the world as as a person

who attended hundreds if not thousands of high school volleyball games i think they should give you beer i think it should be mandatory i absolutely support that for you so all right well that does it for another day of tbtl but we're going to be right back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio so we'd hope that you can join us for that uh in the meantime everybody have a great wednesday take care of yourselves and please remember no mount too tall and good luck to Power out.