Muse

My name is Pat. I'm from Michigan and I have 32 teeth. Cool, okay. Just a reminder everyone, the check-in question is, what's your favorite color? How about next? I'm Baird. I have 32 teeth and my favorite color is blue. So, okay, and the middle question is, where are you from? None of the questions are, how many teeth do you have? That was what I was picking for my fun fact. I can see how that was confusing. There's also no fun fact. What about favorite color? Can we say our favorite color? Yeah, that's what we're, yeah, do say your favorite color. But if in order to honestly answer that question we do need to answer the teeth question this isn't a test just like introduce yourself okay i have 31 teeth i think the question was how many teeth would you like

T-B-T-L Guess what day it is Guess what day it is It's Friday, Friday Gotta get down on Friday Everybody's looking forward to the weekend Here's the 1-0 Swung on, there it goes Deep left center, that ball is high It is far, it is gone

But caught

It's embarrassing and it's gross

but at least it's kind of funny you know a lot of people may not know this but i happen to be

quite famous i've only ever said i love you to two men my entire life stone cold steve austin and a guy in a dark club who i mistook for stone cold steve austin with you again all i know is this violates every canon of respectable broadcasting

well all right hello good morning and welcome everyone to a friday edition of tbtl the show that just might be too beautiful to live the word that comes to mind is ludicrous my name is luke burbank i am your host i'm a professional look it up in the book coming to you once again from chicago illinois and the shores of beautiful but frigid lake michigan where we have arrived friends at episode 4643 in a collector series let the fun begin much to talk about on this friday including the uh hasty return to earth of some astronauts that were up at the space station i believe and who had to come back early because one of them was not feeling great and nasa is being they're going to great lengths to make sure that we can't figure out which astronaut was having tummy trouble voters cannot travel through the vacuum of space uh so we will get into that plus we'll talk about big weekend plans uh with this guy the longest running cobro of the show maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ship you face who are you facing he's andrew walsh

and he's joining me right now good morning my friend good morning luke it happened to me last night this is i think probably good news for you bad news for the listeners or some section of the listeners but uh mark it it was january 15th yesterday last night when i started to get back into baseball podcasts of course when the season ended and the postseason ended in october i just sort of moved on from baseball for a while but i don't know what happened i think a couple of days ago i saw some sort of a post on social media about how the kansas city royals are bringing in their fences this year something that the seattle mariners did about i don't know 10 15 years ago and i was reading about what that could mean for the players on the royals not even the main team i root for keep in mind a team in a different part of the country and i'm reading about like oh well what will this mean for the various hitters in the uh on the royals and then i don't know something just broke and then i started listening to a royals podcast and then i started catching up on the last few days of mariners related podcasts and now here we are in mid-january and i'm jonesing i'm itching for baseball we the problem is everybody's already talking about the 2020 season like it's it's definitely going to be shortened if it happens at all because everybody's already preparing for a labor strike did you know that this is the first

time here i'm not listening to baseball podcasts in the dead of winter so i didn't know that so that would be just our luck wouldn't it that we on paper look like we're gonna have a pretty good team the seattle mariners and of course it would be a season where we don't even get to play the

whole season yes now this is 2027 we're talking about so everybody feels like okay so so 2026 2026 yeah but like people are talking along the lines of like uh contract agreements like is this going to change how the mariners are going to approach off seasons and two-year contracts if It's kind of a given that the second year is not going to be a full season of baseball and like on two different.

podcasts like covering different teams this was at least part of the conversation a consideration and it's it's amazing to be you know listening to these you know shows in literally mid-january of 2026 and already like prognosticating what might happen in these two seasons from now given that there's probably going to be some sort of a shortened season i'm trying to remember when When was the last time there was a strike? That was, I feel like it was before. I was very into baseball, and I've been watching the Mariners for 15 years or something now, right?

Yeah, I forget. There was one a while ago. When I was a kid, I remember the NFL went on strike. And I remember watching the replacement Seahawks.

The replacement Seahawks. Oh, I didn't know they did that. They kept the game going with scabs? Yes, they played NFL football with guys that nobody recognized.

that's interesting how did that go well i was a kid so i didn't really know any better so i was like yeah they're wearing seahawks uniforms they're running around i'm in for it sure okay but um but yeah like nowadays i don't think i'd be that interested in watching a bunch of guys who couldn't make the seahawks but you know we're willing to cross the picket

lines yeah right right yeah i don't know how i'd handle that now the reason i bring this up is actually though um not related to anything i said i got a little bit sidetracked there What I wanted to tell you, and this is related to something that's going to be very important to you, I think, and literally none of the listeners, but you and I are on a sports text chain with our friends called the Fun-Loving Criminals. You know that. Most of our listeners know that by this point. Last year, for part of the season, we had a player named, I want to say Donovan Mitchell, not Donovan Mitchell. Who was our Donovan last year? Donovan Solano. Donovan Solano. So my apologies. I was blanking on that. And because of that and because of my love or at least former love of the musician Donovan, it led to a lot of good Donovan related spoofs, wordplay, images, memes created by yours truly. That's me. And the problem was Donovan was not a very good baseball player in that particular moment. And so we shipped him off somewhere. And I don't know where he is now. But now the big talk in Mariners Nation is if we land another star player, Brendan Donovan, from the St. Louis Cardinals. And I didn't put this on the main chain last night because I figured you guys are not, you have no idea what's going on. You're not thinking about baseball. You're thinking about football right now. But I did reach out to our friend Durs and said, you know, that if we land Brendan Donovan, it means we are we have a new lease on life when it comes to Donovan related humor on the text chain. That's not nothing. That is that is a that is a that is a little ray of sunshine for me on a gloomy January day.

Now, here's my question. Did you save all of your Donovan related memes that you made? And do you have a special file for them? And what is the folder called?

you gotta have memes ready you gotta hit them with the memes no unfortunately every meme known to man the only meme that I actually remember making actually had Donovan Solano's face on it it was a remastering of the famous photo from the Donovan record a gift from a flower to a garden only I replaced Donovan Lech's face with Donovan Solano's face some of my best work honestly it was pretty smooth I don't feel like that particular image would shift over to the Brendan Donovan era. And God, let us hope we actually have a Brendan Donovan era. But I feel like I can create something new for y'all.

Yeah, I don't think I even... It's funny, the amount that you think about Donovan the singer versus the amount that I think about Donovan the singer on a regular basis, there's a fairly wide gap in how much... So when you put that Donovan Solano meme out with the cover of that Donovan record, I had no earthly idea what you were referring to until you explained it to me. Because you were sort of like assuming that everybody knows what the cover of, what is it, From the Earth to a Flower? You're just playing dumb now. It's obviously called A Gift from a Flower to a Garden. You know, I think that you're assuming that everyone just knows what that album looks like, just, you know, sort of immediately, and that is not the case. So what you need to do, if we do get Brendan Donovan and you're going to send more Donovan memes, I need you to give me like a heads up, like incoming. This is going to be related to the fact that this guy has the same name as the singer Donovan.

I remember your actual reaction to that when I sent that to the text chain was, this is the best thing ever. We have to talk about this on the show so that it can be a show pick on Monday. I remember that. So don't pretend like you aren't following along with.

my just fire Donovan tweets. I'm a little bit distracted here because you told me I have to give you a heads up when I'm going to send you another Donovan picture. If it's a joke that's

premised on me knowing about Donovan, give me a heads up so I can do a little research before it arrives in my inbox, and then I'll be able to enjoy it fully. Okay, well

I'm just sending you, just in case we do end up signing Donovan, Brendan Donovan in this case, I'm right now sending you a fantastic photo of the singer donovan that you can use and memify uh later on this year it's donovan holding a tiny little disco ball in both of his hands which are like outstretched in front of him and he's cupping it like it's a it's like it's a delicate delicate jewel or the the soul of marcellus wallace or something you know i can really see ione sky in him yeah i can't picture her face and you know me i'm bad with faces but let me look her up well that's his daughter yeah

And she played on Arrested Development. She plays, I think it's like Anne Veal's parents.

She's Anne Veal's mom, maybe.

Her?

Yes, exactly. You got to lock that down. Yeah, I do. Yeah, now that you say that, I'm not great with face stuff. But yeah, I can see a little bit of family resemblance there.

And this is a fun fact, a fun TBTL-related fact. I believe Ioni Skye is married to the singer Ben Lee. Exactly. Ben Lee, who performs the song Catch My Disease, which is the theme song of TBTL all these years later. That is absolutely correct, and I believe they are still married. How is it that that's not, the fact that we're using that song, how is that not getting us pulled down in Romania? But if I play two seconds of Beyonce, we get pulled down.

I think, honestly, I do think it's because it's not that much in the clear. Because we really don't play that song in a way that I think the internet spiders and robots can detect because we use it as background music, and we, you know what I mean? And it's only kind of in the clear for a couple of seconds with that drum beat or whatever.

We do also sort of have Ben Lee's tacit permission. He's been on the program. He's well aware of the fact that we're using his song as our theme song.

He is, or he was at some point. I don't know that. That wouldn't do us a lot of good if a label came after us. Because, you know, I don't know that he's the one who doles out permissions on all of that stuff. I'm looking to see if they're still married. I think they are still. Yeah, they are still married.

Yeah, nobody tell the record label that we've been using Catch My Disease for 17 to 18 years. Nobody tell anybody anything, in fact. Everybody just be cool, okay? Just be cool. Be cool, and also stop emailing me about backing your truck up. I mean, boy, did I touch a nerve with that one, Andrew. And when you were away, that was when I really laid into it, because I did have one listener that emailed in to support me, and so I read that email. And boy, did I rile up the backwards Parkers, the back-in Parker people.

I have been seeing some of that, and it's kind of funny because you raised that briefly on the show last week with me. Yeah, and you wanted no part of it. And I remember saying, I'm like, I don't want to argue with you about this, but just a reminder to the listeners that not everything Luke says am I tacitly co-signing. That is not an opinion that I co-signed, but I also didn't argue the other point. I just didn't care enough to, but it's definitely not a feeling that I have, generally speaking. I don't think about it. But one thing that surprised me in checking my email the past couple of days, now you had both the co-bro Sklaroff, what do you call TBTL's employee numero uno. Employee numero uno and my brother. And your brother. Now it sounds like you, and I could be wrong about this, but based on feedback that I'm seeing and seeing from afar, by the way, which is so wonderful, none of them are addressed to me. but it does seem like all three of you might have been on the same page with this because it seems like everybody's taking heat except for me yeah no they were generally agreeing with what happens

when you're gone is i become officially the big dog of the show so if i have on john or david they tend to agree with me support my my various beliefs and points and so they were again and i was framing it in opposition to you because honestly like you're afraid to take a principled stand on things like this uh but they were basically agreeing with me and then we were actually talking about this probably also got the listeners mad i feel like there is a certain like area that's adjacent to like a suburb so like an area that's adjacent to a city where you start to get a proliferance of really large trucks that aren't being used necessarily for like truck jobs they're being used to take people to volleyball practice and it's not usually in the like the downtown core of a city because it's hard to park a big truck there it's kind of a hassle and it's not out in the rurals like where i live where there are a lot of big trucks and they're mostly being used to do big truck things there's this kind of area where there's enough room to spread out you've got you know three car garage you've got room to have a big old truck but you probably still work at microsoft or something you still got like a city job and so you just drive this big truck uh to and from your city job or whatever so we

I was getting into all kinds of speculation, all kinds of unhinged speculation about neighborhoods and who drives what. So, yeah, there was a lot going on in the show while you were gone that did tick the listeners off, and you missed all of those strays. I'm happy to report.

Well, I will say this. My hands are not clean when it comes to making assumptions about the oversized trucks and SUVs parked in small city lots because that is something that does hit close to home for me because I drive, you know, a small little Volkswagen Golf and it drives – even leaving aside the fact that people who drive SUVs will just park right in a space that is clearly reserved for a compact car. Like I've been that's been irritating me for years and years. I don't know if you recall. I actually almost got into it, like almost like I don't know physically is the right word, but like certainly face to face with a guy in Los Angeles outside the Ikea. I can't remember where bank is. It was probably Burbank now that you said that. I don't know if I would have been able to pull that, but that's probably the Ikea we would have gone to. And we were parked in a parking garage and we were in a compact car spot. and we came back out to our car a big suv was parked next to us i consider all suvs to be big so i don't know just an suv was parked next to us in another compact spot and this was especially rare for me at the time i think i got a little bit more lippy as years went on but i said as veves and i were unloading our or loading our goods into our car the people who were driving the suv approached their car they were done shopping too and i said huh an suv is a compact car huh the guy's like what'd you say what'd you say to me what'd you say to me and I don't I I certainly did not uh I might have said it again or something but then we drove away I didn't really I'm sure I were you in the car already and you were in your car I don't think so I think I said it when we I was standing at the trunk and I'm trying to even remember what car I would have been driving at the time it's all a little bit fuzzy this was like in LA so like 10 years ago or so so um yeah that that is something that drives me crazy but even leaving aside the whole compact car thing there are just like when i go to places like the qfc the grocery store that i go to it's in the city and the parking spaces are more narrow than they might be elsewhere and then somebody comes in with their giant truck and doesn't even try to stay in one spot or stay

between the lines that move too which is the like i'm gonna actually intentionally take up two spaces which just seems quite rude to me yeah do you know that i didn't realize until way too late into my adulthood that when it said compact on a parking spot that was to basically indicate to you only park here if your car is relatively small like i did not understand that that's what that was trying to establish and i really just thought i mean this is so thoughtless of me but i just thought well if my car can fit within the you know within the lines then it's fine except if it's right at its limit it's right at the line then you're still screwing people over because other people can't open their doors etc i just thought well i i remember thinking well why do they say compact on this i can park my toyota forerunner here just fine in the compact but i didn't even i didn't even realize how rude i was being well i do think that that is one of the things and i'm

trying to be a little bit more chill because i feel like i was we have a voicemail here that is I haven't even previewed it yet, but it's somebody reacting to what I was saying about people kind of in the area that we live now, the Pacific Northwest. I sort of notice a lack of physical awareness, and people seem to be sort of just kind of in their own little worlds and not really noticing if they're blocking a sidewalk or an escalator or whatever. And you and I talked about that, and I tried to be respectful, but clearly it's a frustration of mine. And I have a voicemail here from somebody, and it just says inconsiderate people or something. And I don't know if that is – I feel like I have not taken enough slings and arrows. Believe it or not, Luke, going back to like you taking slings and arrows, sometimes when I say something that I'm embarrassed about or I can see the argument against me, I kind of brace for a bunch of emails and people saying, well, you didn't think about it this way. And then when they don't come, I'm sort of left with this sort of – I don't know, like phantom complaints against myself.

In the immortal words of Bruce Springsteen, you're down like a dog that's been beat too much, and you spend half your life just to cover it up. That's exactly what I was going to say as somebody who—

Born in the USA. Born in the USA. Yeah, so thank you for powering out of that there. So anyway, yeah, I don't want to go on another rant today about how people don't care or whatever, but it is interesting to know that some people might just like—and maybe that kind of ties into it, a little bit of that regional theory I have a little bit, that people are just like, I don't know, I fit here. I don't think people are going around, especially in this part of the country, trying to be rude. I just think it's the, you know, it kind of goes to the driving slow and the passing lanes and stuff. too it's just like i just think that people around here just don't think about it as much or and so maybe people are just seeing compact like you and are like innocently just like oh well if if i fit what do they say about cats if it fits i sits uh-huh well that's the thing i would not

necessarily even totally believe you on this thing about like people in the northwest not knowing where they are in space except your argument is that when you went back to ohio and you went to a costco right or something like yeah it was literally you noted people were behaving differently You had a sort of a side-by-side comparison because otherwise I might dismiss what you're saying as this kind of general thing that everyone has when they're anywhere, which is everyone is bad drivers here except for me. Like if you're doing stand-up comedy and you want to immediately connect with the locals and you're in some town, just talk about like get a load of these Chicago drivers, you know, because everyone will laugh knowingly. Like, I feel like everyone thinks that the place they live in has the worst drivers, except they're a good driver. And I could see that also being the sense of, like, people standing, you know, and blocking things. Except, again, you're saying that you actually noticed a tangible, a measurable difference when you were in Ohio.

Certainly there, yeah. But it wasn't, like, something I grew up thinking about. It was like kind of living here for a long time and getting kind of increasingly frustrated with people both in driving and on sidewalks and just – and then like I said, all the things I listed before. And the thing is like I don't know if I fully agree – like so when I lived in New England and Massachusetts would come up a lot, like the thing about drivers in Massachusetts, people would talk about it, but it had nothing to do with what we're talking about here in the Pacific Northwest. was very different like the the thing about drivers in massachusetts is they're very aggressive and you would never putter around in the left-hand lane because you would get honked at and that we would call them mass holes like because like so like i do feel like different regions you might talk about the style of driving and complain about it but they do seem different if you're talking about them at all i don't really remember ohio it being a huge point of conversation um but and then in LA it's a totally different thing right it's like traffic and and and actually when I was in Vegas I kind of noticed that people are drive a little bit more wild in Vegas have you noticed that you mean like when you guys were taking a like a cab or something or an uber from yeah to another yeah both in cars we were in and behavior that I happened to notice although I wasn't driving so but I just happened to notice I was like the first car we got in was like really zipping around and like kind of like you know cut you know kind of cutting in and out of traffic But it sort of seemed like that was kind of the culture. Like nobody seemed like upset by that. It was more of an aggressive driving style. But I was there for two days. I don't claim to be an expert.

What always throws me off about Vegas is, of course, the fact that everything is out of proportion. So you look at a casino and it looks like it's one block away and it's actually 33 miles.

Right. And no easy way to get there because it's not like really walkable in the traditional sense of basic sidewalks.

So then you like go get a cab and just like walking down to where the cabs are is its whole own journey. And then you get there and then you're trying to go to the next door casino. And for some reason, the cab goes out on a freeway and goes like to Summerlin or something and then comes back and drops you off at the casino that's next door to the one you were just standing at.

It's a very non-intuitive place. Exactly. Right. Right. And it reminded me a little bit, I mean, very different because that's a place that is dealing with huge groups of tourists and everything. And there are ways to get around, obviously, and they want foot traffic in certain areas. But it's like when I would visit Arizona to see my mom, but I would, you know, like maybe I was just, I don't think I usually rented cars when I would do that trip. I did sometimes, but I prefer just to take Ubers and Lyfts. honestly in a place like phoenix like ubers and lyfts are so affordable i think you save money and it's so much easier for me not to deal with a rental car i think i don't know i you you and genevieve are both people who i think like to have a car when you arrive at a place i don't know if i'm describing you inaccurately there but i think you like renting cars whereas if everything were equal for me i'd almost always rather have somebody drive me around if it's going to come out would you say are you in the same boat or no it depends on where i'm at so like obviously

like like a new york city i'm not going to rent a car and believe it or not probably not in los angeles um unless i'm going well outside the city or something um because of just the parking and the hassle factor of it and all of that but um but i do like i like having a car like being able to throw my luggage in there sometimes if i get home from a long trip like a work trip where it's been two or three weeks and I haven't driven a car it's very fun for me to get back in my car at the Portland airport and start driving home I feel this sense of like agency that I've been feeling deprived of I didn't even realize it because I've just been sitting in the back of Lyfts and Ubers and Waymos for the last couple of weeks and now the fact that I am driving this vehicle and I can go anywhere I want with it And I don't have to call someone to pick me up and drive me around.

I actually enjoy that experience. You know what we did? And I feel, if anybody's keeping notes, I feel like I was starting to make a point before that I've abandoned. But don't worry. I was probably just talking to hear myself talk. I don't think it's important. But I will say this. Genevieve had a little hack. I don't even think this is a hack. This is just taking advantage of the services around you. But we did something different in going to the airport this time. So usually if we're going to the airport on a trip, especially if I'm traveling with Genevieve, we take the train down there. And it's a pretty long train ride from where we live. You've got to schedule in an extra hour of travel to get on the train, to take it all the way down to the airport, then to board your flight and everything. That's pretty significant. And I don't mind it as much on the way out of town. But God, it's a real bummer on the way back because you're like, you've already been traveling, your flight lands, and you're like, now another hour on the train and then have to figure out how we get back from the train stop because it's not especially easy. It's like a one, just over a mile walk, which is something you don't want to do with your luggage. They call that the just over a one mile problem.

That's exactly right. The last just over a one mile problem.

That's right. But we were prepared to do that this time around, you know, it was just a quick vacation. And Genevieve also, Genevieve planned everything. We wouldn't have been going to Vegas if it weren't for all of her planning on this and her idea to do it. So, you know, if she wanted to take the train, that's cool with me. But I did say just double check because we're leaving on a Saturday. And sometimes weekends is when they do construction on the light rail lines. And since we don't have duplicate lines or anything, when they're doing construction, all the city does is sets up an alternate bus route. So they'll stop service at, let's say, Capitol Hill. And then the next three stops are closed. Now, if you're already on the train, they'll shuffle you over to a shuttle, which is basically a bus that is going to take you to the next operating train stop, basically, maybe skip. and so Genevieve looked it up and she's like you're right there's construction this weekend which means we already had an hour-long trip to the airport but then we're gonna have to get off at some point take the bus a couple of stops get back on the train but we also didn't really want to take a car because and again I know this sounds cheap but like it's really expensive to take an uber or a lyft to the airport from where we live it's like a hundred bucks it's a hundred dollars pre-tip yeah and so Genevieve is like we'll just take the train I'm like that's fine like absolutely whatever you want to do is fine with me but then Genevieve's like wait a second I found a place where we can park it's not the official parking spot of of the airport but like one of those places

off campus off airport campus somewhere in the greater SeaTac slash Des Moines area yes exactly

it was actually underneath lovers a store for lovers um but we found a place called what was it was a funny name, Parkin' Jet, and it was $50 for however many nights we had to park our car there, two or three nights. And so we got in our own car, drove down to Parkin' Jet, and they jetted us to the airport pretty dang quickly. It was a very smooth experience. And so instead of spending $200 on lifts or two and a half hours round trip on trains, it was like a $50 solution that worked really well and i know it's like such an obvious thing but like i just get stuck in my habits and think about well this is the way i go to the airport and now this is sort of like opened

up a whole new world to me i think that master park down there they'll actually like if you if you upgrade they will literally like wash your car and vacuum it out so you want your car back

yeah isn't that smart yes i wonder how much that goes for our car needs some cleaning man some real

detailing that's one of those things that like changes my overall experience of the world so dramatically and yet i don't do it enough which is to run my car through the car wash and then vacuum it out like my emotional well-being is directly related to how messy my car is uh-huh yes and i just drive around most of the time feeling bad because it's like there's yes a

bunch of you know just a bunch of crap in there and this is this is the i've been talking a lot about this with hannah on the spotless podcast i this is the time of year and you know i don't i try not to complain about winters too much here because i i don't mind them but the one thing is as somebody who doesn't have like a garage or a garage that i can pull my car into in fact i literally was telling genevieve this on the drive home from that park and jet i was just saying that like the one time that i'm sort of envious of more like kind of suburban living where you might have a house with like a two-car garage and you only have one car or whatever and you can pull in the middle of it and have a bunch of space around you like that's how I grew up with like kind of these big garages.

right where it didn't matter if it was winter you could still go in there and vacuum the car out and do all kinds of cleaning but me like we get to this time of year and it's constantly wet and i think our car has some sort of a seal problem as in we have a seal a loose seal in the back seat that keeps barking at us no mother boy for years and years i've known that we have some sort of a seal problem in our car when condensation will build on the inside of the windows and everything which is obviously not right and somehow it's there's something that is getting onto the seat and it's not wet when I sit down on the seat but there's this big water stain that has been accumulating on our cloth driver's side seat and every time I get in my car Luke I feel I feel really bad like I feel bad about myself I feel bad about like everything you just said and of course it's winter so like we've been tracking in leaves and dirt and like it's just like the car about this time mid-January is as messy as it ever gets but I don't want to go out there with like all of my equipment of like my shop vac and and or even my portable vacuum and a bunch of bottles of cleaner and everything like this weather is terrible to do it and so I'm doing nothing about it but you mentioned your mental health like that is no joke like when I get in my car right now I get a bad feeling yeah um do you have one of those uh steam cleaners not a steam cleaner but like an extraction cleaner that sort of shoots the liquid out and then and then sucks it back up like is that what you're talking about yeah i guess maybe not steam i

bought like a bissel yeah yeah i mean it's yeah and that thing has changed my life i'm like looking for things to clean in my house with that thing it is so satisfying uh-huh is that relatively new yeah i think well in the last year or so uh-huh it's green it has a little reservoir yep literally the little solution or something little handle you can carry it like it has absolutely changed my life for like upholstery and stuff and like i had that in this in the madrona hill studio i had this there was a giant coffee stain on the carpet for like where i dropped a full entire cup of coffee once and that we want to talk about a bad feeling yeah that just made me every time i would see it i just felt like my life was not going well and then i got that bissel thing and i got down there and it's totally i completely removed it it was very very satisfying i love that i'm kind of

surprised we didn't talk about that i have i have one of those things too i don't use it probably as much as i should i was using it on on carp on the carpet i i gotta say in fact i wonder that might have been a gift genevieve got me one year and i really liked it but i didn't realize how much work it was going to be to get down on my hands and knees and do a whole area rug with it you know i yeah and so i love it for like you said like i can't wait for the weather to get nice It does take a power cord, so I'll plug it into an outdoor socket or whatever and really kind of take care of the car. I cannot wait, but I don't want to do that, like I was saying, in this rainy weather or whatever. It just seems self-defeating. But anyway, I love it for the car. It does a really good job, but I think we originally got it because maybe one of our area rugs was getting kind of grimy, and it did a nice job. But you have to get on your hands and knees for a long time to do a whole rug, right? Like, it's like, I don't know, 45 minutes or so.

I told you about my carpeting problems, right? Which is that I had new carpet put in in the upstairs of my house and on the stairs. And it's white. I don't know what I was thinking. And it always looks dingy. And I kind of feel like it was irresponsible of them to sell me white carpet. I feel like they should have said, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on, buddy. That's a terrible idea, and here's why. Like, they just acted like this was totally a fine decision on my part. And every single time I walk up and down the stairs, I regret deeply the decision to buy white carpet. You think there should be a seven-day waiting period of buying white carpets? It's probably easier to buy a gun. Or, wait, actually, speaking of, I think my internet gun is on its way to my house. I've been meaning to ask. I can't believe how long of a delivery this has been. Well, I mean, I am buying a .22 caliber gun online.

I guess so. So I don't think it should take a while 22 caliber, but I've been meaning to ask about that. Yeah, that's been in my head a little bit. I'm really interested in hearing. I think it's going to be kind of a janky pellet gun and the people who sell the 22s are mad that they're being kind of ripped off.

That's what I'm expecting. That was $25. So, I mean, what could they possibly be sending me that costs them somehow less than $25 to manufacture? All right, let's thank some donors. These are the wonderful, generous folks who are voluntarily donating to TBTL to make this a thing that is our job and is John Sklaroff's job, and we really, really appreciate that. We would not be here without folks like Jody Patterson of beautiful Bothell, Washington.

Jody, thank you. Thank you, Jodes. Also, thanks to...

How would you go with this first name, Andrew? Let me look at the list here. Jean? Or no. Maybe George? I'm sorry, that's an R there. My eyesight is not great. I guess George, yeah.

We're going to thank George Lieboldt of Los Gatos, California. Nice.

Thank you, George.

George, I hope I'm saying your name correctly. Again, if you want to pay more next year, we will say it correctly. That's a service we provide here. It's a little extra. It's a little upcharge, but I think it's well worth it to get your name pronounced correctly.

If you do want to email me, andrew at tbtl.net, if we got that wrong, I think we can put a note in for next year. Assuming that you're going to continue this venture next year, which I really encourage you to do. Absolutely.

Thanks also to Denise Antonelli, who's in Parksburg, Pennsylvania. All right. I don't know if I know where Parksburg PA is.

I feel like Denise's are underrepresented in the TBTL donor list. You feel like we don't have a lot of Denise's?

I don't think we have a lot of Denise's. Maybe we have the perfect number of Denise's. Well, we have Denise Antonelli, at least, and we're thankful for that. We're also thankful for Cheryl Gordon, who's in Los Angeles, California. Hey! We have a good amount of Cheryl's. I feel like we have a healthy, we have the exact right amount of Cheryl's in the listening audience that we would hope for. We also have Evan Adams, who's in Shelton, Washington. All right. Thank you, Evan. I wonder if Evan knows my sister Hannah, who lives with her family in Shelton, Washington. I wonder if they know each other.

Is your sister on the arm wrestling circuit? Not anymore. Not since the rotator cuff injury. Okay, well, Evan is heavily into arm wrestling in that area. I think. I'm totally guessing here, but I think Evan is heavily, heavily into the arm wrestling circuit. But I don't know if they would have overlapped, because I do think Evan's only been into it for a few years now.

i told you about the time that i entered the washington state arm wrestling championship didn't i no this was my first foray into immersive journalism i was basically like an intern at kuow and something came across the fax machine which was like the washington state arm wrestling championship is going to be happening actually by the way in seatac probably not far from where your car was parked it was probably at like a parking jet at a sports bar yes and um and uh And I basically they said, if you want to come down and cover it, I said, well, can I enter it? And they said, yes. And so I did. And I recorded it. And it was it was pretty funny, actually. I mean, just the the speed at which I lost was breathtaking.

Yeah. I'm actually kind of surprised that they did let you in because I would wonder if if there is a safety concern for people who are just doing it as a lark.

yeah i mean it was i think in the if i remember right in the piece i say something like i'm trying to give give a sense of just how absolutely spectacular my loss was and it's like i'm just like listen to this and it's just it's just like a half a second just hear my arm going oh my god like i could not even create any resistance did it hurt and no but he was also in my weight class which at the time i was probably like i don't know maybe 170 pounds but this guy 100 pounds of it was just his arm his actual body was 70 pounds and then just had this massive 100 pounds of arm so even though we were in the same weight division we were not distributed the same way and it was um yeah i mean i got the desired outcome which was i was going to lose really bad it was going to be embarrassing but i was going to try to make a funny radio story about it well what was

he like because i think we all assume a sort of like a very stereotype right like big with a beard and tons of tattoos and probably like a flannel shirt with the arms ripped off uh i think it was

some real larry the cable guy energy yeah was it like that i think that that was i think the guy who beat me was you pretty much described him yeah i think that was pretty much his look his vibe

did he take off his hat put it on backwards and say it's like a switch that was when i knew i was in that's when i knew i was in the movie over the top that's right and he's arm wrestling not just for his truck but for his child as well so yeah is he arm wrestling to get his kid back i believe that is part of it. Custody. Really weird custody situation in that state. And his means of making

money to support said child. We're making money here thanks to folks like Don Taylor, who's in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Wellesley. Hey, that's where Genevieve went. Wellesley, Mass. Yes. And that's the college in Wellesley College is probably the main industry in Wellesley,

Massachusetts. Is that the big thing going on there? Gee, I can't speak to that, but that would I can't speak with any authority on that, so I'll speak anyway. But that would be my assumption. That would be my assumption. Well, Don, thank you so much.

Thanks to all of our donors for keeping TBTL in business. This is 100% listener-supported, and we are grateful. Hello, and welcome to Top Story. Did you see this very cool thing over Los Angeles and, I think, parts of California? And you could see this.

a spaceship, this space capsule re-entering the Earth's atmosphere.

No, I didn't catch any of this.

It was really, really cool-looking, actually. I was looking at some video of it. It was these astronauts that were coming back from, I think it's the International Space Station, because somebody got sick, and they had to come back a little bit early because they didn't have, I guess, the... Well, they won't tell us what the person was sick with, which I kind of feel like, if you're an astronaut, it's such an unusual thing. There's so few humans have ever gotten to be up there. I do think we should get to know what's going on with you. Like, are you having tummy troubles? Like, what's happening? Like, do you feel like these astronauts and cosmonauts, they deserve the same level of medical privacy up there that, like, a normal person would have?

Well, no, because now I assume that they're covering up some sort of space disease that they're bringing back to Earth.

Well, I'm with you on that because—so, this thing splashes down. They will not say—it had these four—it had a cosmonaut, a couple of NASA astronauts, and then somebody from the Japanese Aerospace Agency. and so there this is four people that came back and they will not tell us who was the person who was sick or what they were sick with and one of the things they did after this thing landed in the ocean off of san diego was they took all four of them to the hospital so you wouldn't know which one who was sick so they made three of them go to the hospital they didn't need to so that it would be unclear who was the person who was not feeling well and i thought that was a weird level of of

cloak and daggerness, of secrecy. It really is. I'm blanking here. Have you ever read any Octavia Butler? No. Sci-fi writer, right? From the 50s and 60s. I like to dip my tone to that stuff from time to time, especially the classic, well-regarded stuff. But I had never read any Octavia Butler. And I did read one of her series just, I don't know, maybe it was over the summer or something like a three or four book series. I'm blanking on the name of it now, but it's basically about a space disease that is brought back and really bad things happen. I will say that these aliens, or I'm sorry, these aliens, the fact that they, I'm already calling them aliens, the fact that they sent all four of these aliens to the hospital to cover this up is a red flag. No, I mean, that is, they're really, it is really, yeah, it's not like they're just casually not releasing information. They are creating, I can't say the word,

going to great length too and then they also had a photo of all four of them individually as they were getting like pulled out of the capsule and they're all smiling and they look normal like i was trying to read the faces to see if one of them was grimacing it's just like a little bit tighter kind of pinching their butt cheeks a little bit i was trying to get a trying to get a vibe they all looked totally fine which then raised the question well was a person even that sick like why did you have to come back they all looked fine they were able to walk under their own strength nobody had anything you know protruding or hanging off of them like they all seemed basically fine um but yeah i thought that was kind of odd i feel like because the human how the human body responds to being in space is an interesting question and i feel like it should be basically it's also our well if it was the nasa astronaut it's our tax dollars at work don't we the hard-working american taxpayers get to know if one of our astronauts is having diarrhea i think

so i think so i think we should be able to get high-tech photos of said sickness oh that's rough clay's arc was the name of the the book it was a trilogy called the pattern master by the way i don't know if there's any butler heads in the audience and you can tell me the next thing i should read by her but uh uh the let's see here it deals with a colony of people have been mutated by a disease brought by astronauts back to earth from space and now not to mention that so much of

This space stuff is being run by basically like either Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. I can't see anything going wrong with that. They seem like such reliable dudes. I can't ever imagine something terrible happening due to their inattention and or greed.

Yeah, no, I'm with you on that.

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

All right, emails or V-mails before we head on out on this Friday?

Yeah, I have three audio messages here, Luke. I referred to these earlier on today's podcast and even last week, I think. So these were all sent in as voice memos to me. You can email me andrew at tbtl.net or you can call the voicemail line 206-414-8285. That's 206-414-TBTL. these three voice memos two of them come from a listener named jeffrey and the other one comes from biagio and i'm going to tell you the subject lines and you tell me which one you want to listen to okay okay one of them is labeled and again i haven't heard these so it's just based on what i think they're about cat stove and i think this is going to be related to the time that bingo almost set his tail on fire during a recording of t So I have one that says Cat Stove. I have one that says Inconsiderate People. And I have one that says Applesauce and Font Comments. Let's start with Inconsiderate People. Inconsiderate People, okay? And we are going to listen to this from Jeffrey. Again, I always get very nervous when I don't vet these things. So, Jeffrey, please, I hope you aren't using super abusive language.

Hey, Cobros. uh listener jeffrey and eugene i'm currently listening to you guys talk about the regional differences and how people are considerate of others and i wanted to weigh in with my experience i moved to eugene from the cleveland area about 30 years ago cleveland and to this day i still struggle with how inconsiderate people are out here of others around them i i experienced this in grocery stores walking around town even on hiking trails people here tend to just act as if they're the only ones using a shared resource and i've tried to make peace with it and i don't act out over it but i bristle at it um pretty much every time i experience it i feel like we're piling on. Anyways, that's my two cents.

I feel bad now. I feel like we're piling on.

I'm not going to raise this topic anymore. There's a lot of hostility coming out of the Cuyahoga Valley.

Absolutely. Directed at my people, the Pacific Northwesterners. Absolutely. I don't want to create a regional war. Can we listen to this cat stove story from Biagio? Yes. Alright, let's take a listen to this.

Hey Luke and Andrew, Biagio, Duluth 10, calling in from a catch-up I'm playing on episode 4,600. 101, I believe, if the number's accurate.

So the cool thing is we are hearing from the astronauts. Biagio is one of the people who is in space. He is the one that was sick.

Yes. And they're talking about caring for cats and how much they don't care how much we care about them and fire. Well, I have two cats at the house, and both are completely absent-minded to the wood fireplace I have at the house. They constantly sit directly underneath it, which I worry about, but then I have to put my hand underneath to make sure that it's the proper temperature. And remember that heat goes up, and actually it's relatively cold underneath the stove, and they're just getting a bit of radiant heat. It still terrifies me that I'm going to bake two cats underneath my stove. And then I also wanted to put a note on taking care of cats when they really don't want to take care of them. One of our cats gets into one of the plants and we try to be as best as we can to avoid anything toxic in the house. But every once in a while, one of them has a bloody butt. and I have to track down that cat and come after them with a wet wipe and make sure I apply it to their bottom. It's as fantastic as you'd think it would be.

That is rough stuff.

You just got to get a situation going like Bubbles and Holly, which is that Bubbles is obsessed with tossing Holly's salad, So it's a closed circuit. Everybody's running a pretty tight ship around there.

So we have friends who had a cat who was a long-haired cat. And we would sometimes cat-sit this long-haired cat. And we never had to do what we heard they did sometimes, which was they had special cat wipes for this long-haired cat who sometimes wouldn't clean or wasn't able to clean her hindquarters. She was not an old cat, by the way. In fact, she passed way, way, way too soon and too young. But I was astounded to hear that they essentially had to clean what are commonly referred to as dingleberries off of their cat's patootie, what is often referred to as a patootie. And that scared me, both as a cat sitter. I never engage with it. But then when we adopted Bingo, he looked like he was a short-haired cat or a medium-haired cat at best or at longest. and then he became a long-haired cat now he's he weirdly goes back and forth during the summertime he grew this huge long mane i see photos of him from a mere couple of months ago and he looks different he grew this huge mane during the summer then lost it at the beginning of the winter which

seems isn't that the opposite of what's supposed to happen wouldn't you think but i don't know

they say you know sometimes pet fur works in a or animal fur works in in ways that you would

and expect like sometimes the fur keeps them cool i don't know what's going on we mentioned to the vet they didn't hadn't really heard of it either but when bingo started growing out his tail and it was this really long poofy tail then we started to see some uh you know he kind of his hair grew out elsewhere as well i was like no no no no no no no long-haired cats no wiping cats butts that is i just i'm not that's not how i want to spend the rest of my days and i've only got a few days left by the way i probably should have mentioned that to you um but luckily bingo is ridiculously fastidious almost to a degree where i worry that he has some sort of some sort of a condition like he um or he's deriving some erotic pleasure from the entire operation oh that doesn't bother me at all do it do it my dude his onanism is not something that you're concerned about not have you know have fun man it's a if your body is a playground play but um uh luckily he keeps himself so unbelievably clean we have not had to buy any kind of special wipes for him because

that was a real concern of mine uh do you want to play that uh final v-mail before we get out of

here sure yeah on a roll now do you mind this is going to be um jeffrey again so this is the person who just declared war on the pacific oh this is yeah the your your cleveland brother and uh let's see this one looks like it's two minutes and 22 seconds long so buckle up for this one this is applesauce and font comments and i can uh pause wherever i'll keep my hand on the pause button

if you want to break in here hey guys uh listener jeffrey in eugene calling in with comments about episode 4616 really enjoyed your talk about applesauce and fonts do you remember

was this one conversation or two i assume that jeffrey is gonna fill in some blanks for us but

i don't really recall either one of these i think i was probably talking about applesauce because of my dad and my dad yes brings over weird applesauce to my house yes and like strawberry applesauce or something yes and then i think we were probably talking maybe about the font that the state department yeah decided to stop using because it was allegedly a woke font because exactly without

Without serifs, it's too woke for Rubio. Okay, here we go.

First of all, I grew up in Ohio, and like Andrew, I had that red cinnamon-y applesauce. And the way my family made it is they would make applesauce and then melt those, we called them red hots. They were like little red cinnamon candies. Oh, yeah. And that's how the red got into the applesauce. I don't know if that's how Andrew's family made it. I don't know. And then on font talks, I used to work in IT, but I worked a lot with graphic designers. And I was taught that serif fonts worked really well when printed out on paper. And sans serifs were good fonts to use on screen. um and that may be why well it may it may explain some of the accessibility issues and why they chose that font why they chose colibri is that jeffrey scratching himself yeah like there was

a real audio shift there can you hear that we're calling that a voicemail but it's like

it's a voice memo that was emailed in yeah but yeah i'm gonna go back a little bit here we're

listen to like bingo and jeff scratching why they chose that font why they chose colibri um back in the biden days and it may also explain why colibri doesn't look good on letterhead and then my final font comment was about your uh you guys talked about courier a little bit and And one of the things that's unique about those types of fonts is they're called fixed-width fonts. So every font or every character in that typeface takes up the same amount of space as another character. So in more modern fonts, like an I would take up less space than, say, an M. But in a fixed-width font like Courier, they all take up the same amount of space, which gives them that sort of typewriter look because that's the way typewriters worked.

Yes.

Anyways, hopefully I'm not going to get sharp shot by some graphic designers on this and my information's accurate, but I thought I'd share some of that and let you know I enjoyed that chat.

Thanks. That is interesting. And I'm looking at the Courier font now. I always describe it as like sort of that typewriter-y font and I don't think I'm the only one to do that. I think that's kind of how it's described, but I'm looking at it and yeah, it is interesting. That is one of the things that gives it that typewritery look is that every thing is like equidistant right now is that a serif font it is a it has serif i thought it was a sans serif but i'm looking at it now yeah it does have it looks like the the like the letter l has a line at the bottom of it so i think that would be considered a serif right so it is a what's interesting is when you type courier font into google to learn about it it changes the entire page to courier like all the results i'm reading now oh it's like a little courier it's little trick that google does yeah um but yeah it is a slab serif that's right we learned about this it's a slab serif font so it does have a font but it's just like a straight line because

how could you make how could you have an l a lowercase l take up the same width as a w

you just put a lot of space around the l i see yeah yeah yeah that's it what so it's all like this kind of equidistant and it makes it does look very antiquated next up we're talking garamond next up we're talking garamond i love i love talking fonts i wish i knew more about design

that's what i should be doing it's not too late it's not too late i'm sure there's one of those

online master classes that you can do you know i started doing that specifically around a very specific um piece of adobe software that is for design called illustrator but i sometimes i wonder if i should just should i just sign up for like a class at the community college right around the corner from me genevieve that's how she got really into sewing you know she's really into sewing now and she's good and she's good she made my favorite shirt she made my favorite shirt too well now it's my second favorite shirt because my dad gave me a shirt that i like a lot too but don't tell her that but uh yeah she made me a shirt that like fits me perfectly and you would you would think

that it came from a store a high-end store at that yeah dude worth checking out the adult education the extension program at north seattle college i took a blues guitar class there all right in my in my 20s and look so yeah check it out blind lemon all right everybody well that's gonna do it for today's show and in fact our broadcast week thank you so much for hanging out with us we are gonna be back here on monday with more imaginary radio for you all so uh we will see you then in the meantime have a great weekend everybody stay safe uh go seahawks and

please remember no mountain too tall oh you can get lucky wall power out