Muse

Hi! Oh, my God! How's your first red carpet? I can't believe they put you all the way out here for this. Hey, hey, hey, hey. Nice to meet you. I'm Chase Dream's manager. Yeah, now, we met last week. We had a full meal together. Oh, gay brother and girl sister. Oh, you guys aren't getting married, are you? Because that would be bad optics for this guy right here. Although, love is love is love is love, as Linda Manuel once said. It's Lin-Manuel Miranda. Lin-Manuel? Who's Linda Manuel, then? all that. And why do I represent her? TBTL! She's buying, right? Because I will be ordering a bowl of soup as an appetizer, not a cup. Chuck, I know people say I'll fill up, but you have no idea how my body processes soup. I love pickles. It's my heritage.

I love a pickle. It's embarrassing and it's gross, but at least it's kind of

funny. There you have it. A practical example of modern communication. How'd it go? Well, he's going to acknowledge me on Instagram. So I guess you could say it was one of the best conversations of my entire life. You know, it's just living truthfully in imaginary circumstances. So if you're out there, come find me. All right. Hello. Good

morning and welcome everyone to a Thursday edition of TVTL, the show that just might be

too beautiful to live. Isn't that for techno geeks with spreadsheets? My name is Luke Burbank. I'm

your host they just want you to be normal and clearly you're not coming to you from the madrona hill studio perched high above the mighty and frigid columbia it's a cold day here in southern washington i can look across the columbia river over to oregon and i can see that there is snow up on the hills all the places that they just deforested are now covered in snow snow snow and more snow and you've got a really nasty mixture uh it's episode 4667 in a collector series let the fun begin and speaking of the natural world and the mighty columbia yesterday i interrupted the show rudely some would say unprofessionally others have said although i've blocked them on the various platforms because out there in the mighty columbia there was something going on that i had never seen before which was first i just thought there was some kind of odd wave pattern Like the wind was hitting the water in an odd way But it was It was inexplicable And so I broke out the binoculars I interrupted the dazzling donor messages To break out the binoculars And look out onto the river And what I thought I saw was a pod of like black Like dolphins Swimming around Chasing fish What is that? I'm like I don't know The internet didn't seem to give me any reason to believe That what I was seeing was actually the case Anyway, I've been reaching out to some well-placed people here in southern Washington. We've got some clarity on what we think was happening yesterday. Also, last night I watched that French movie that Andrew recommended called Happiness, and I got thoughts on it, so we'll talk about that. Oh, and let's see. You know what? I was about to promote another story, but my friends, here 4,667 episodes in, I'm finally learning that if in my mind I already know we're not going to get to the story, There's no reason to dangle it in front of all of your ears and then not get to it. So let's focus on something that we will get to, and that is the Blur's Days, because it's a Thursday.

Blur's Day today.

We'll definitely get to those, and we'll definitely get to this guy, the longest-running co-bro of the show. Oh, my God. He unmuted. 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. Do you think that these Seahawks will end up going to the White House? Well, then you better come up with tomorrow's show sheet, brother You get to find a story for tomorrow That's your job now

Do the listeners know why I am laughing so hard at my little spoofy spoof there?

Hold on, you know what? I need to just chill out, Mon Okay, I'm better Explain your funny spoof

No, no, no, that's the story that you skipped on the show sheet

Well, I had already promoted so much stuff. Nah, I mean, yeah, whatever. Let's just do it. Let's just do it right now. Let's do it right now, Andrew. This is like me making you smoke the entire pack of cigarettes.

No, we'll do. Oh, God, that sounds great. We'll smoke the entire story right now, buddy. I actually do want to say I'm not 100% sure of your framing of it, to be honest with you. So both I'm forcing the issue and I'm attacking you right at the top of the show, just like the hot talk radio. But I will say that the reason I found some interest in this story was I saw a post from somebody that I follow and generally like and trust on Blue Sky yesterday, and it was like a screen cap that looked kind of like an official news-breaking screen cap. of some sort, but like something you might see on Instagram or something, like a tile that somebody made with some text that looked professional enough that said, Seahawks refuse invitation to White House. And then I saw that passed around, and then I was like, oh, this is great, and I even liked it. And then I was like, wait a second, where's the story, though? And then as soon as I, and this all happened within 30 seconds of me eating soup, and it was like, no, this has not been verified.

I have no idea how your body processes you. And honestly, I don't want to know.

But I really did think it was an interesting example of people seeing something. Of your media illiteracy?

No, no. You liked it. It was a pretend story. That was a 5% media illiterate of you.

Well, yes, but I unliked it within 30 seconds.

Oh, you unliked it too.

Okay. I'm sitting there.

I didn't know about the unliking it. Well, I did mention that. You got me on my heels. You really came at me this morning.

got to be able to finish this. I'm sitting there. I'm reading my Blue Sky. I see the post. I'm like, oh, that's great. I hit like. But then I'm like, where's the story from? What are the details? I immediately Google it. Google says, no, no invitation has been sent. This all started with some person who just stated it on Instagram or Blue Sky. And then it became a story. People started making badges of the story and passing it around. So I immediately unliked it and then liked somebody who said we should fact check this first and so i'd been sort of following it i'm like where's this story from and it seems to be the original story of like the seahawks actually turning down an invitation seems to have just been made up they tracked it back to one guy who just said it and a whole bunch of people wanted to hear that news and just ran with it

yeah the um seattle times has been trying to get a comment from the white house apparently By the way, I'm learning that the Seattle Times still has a D.C. correspondent, or maybe recently hired one, Anamita Kaur, writing in your Seattle Times, Andrew, that basically the headline is Seahawks haven't received a White House invitation, which is different, of course, than Seahawks turned down White House invitation. And the Times reporter has been trying to get a response from the White House. The White House will not respond to this. Um, there, so, I mean, here's what I think is really going on. I think that the, that the, the White House, this, they also, by the way, uh, like the president apparently rescinded an invite to the Eagles back in 2018. So we're going way back now, first term after their Superbowl win, because members of the team, some members had announced they would skip the visit. And so then extremely secure, extremely mature person, current president, Donald J. Trump than just said, well, then you're not invited because some of you don't want to come here. So then fine, I won't even not even invited. And apparently it's created now this. I sort of have really actually stopped tracking this because of the fact that I haven't had a team, you know, that's been in that's won the championship in a while, the team that I follow closely like the Seahawks. So I haven't been clocking how many teams end up going to the White House now when they win. Of course, it was a long running tradition, regardless of the particular party of the person in office it was just kind of a thing it was just kind of one of those ceremonial perfunctory kind of things and of course nothing is like that anymore so my sense is that the white house is not going to invite the seahawks because the president is worried that some of the seahawks will decide not to go and his fragile ego will not be able to handle that is where i think we're at with this but all of this is a giant relief to me honestly because if the white house were to invite them and then some of them were to go then i would have to have feelings about the

some of them that went, which I don't want to have. Yeah. Now, I'm with you that I'm guessing that the White House or Trump will see the writing on the wall and probably assume that the Seahawks don't want to come. But you mentioned the 2018 Eagles not going to the White House, but the 2025 Eagles did go to the White House. And I'm pretty sure almost everybody showed up for that. So I don't kind of know what. Yeah. So I think my guess is whoever is making this decision from the White House's perspective is trying to get a beat on whether or not people will show up. Because obviously, and I'll never stop highlighting this, that the Dodgers went there happily and celebrated with him.

I'm trying to remember, are you pro or anti-Dodgers?

You know what? It's complicated because there's an amount of dislike and then there's an amount of hate. And it's kind of hard to say. But anyway, so my hope is that the invitation never comes. I mean, my hope would be that the invitation comes and all of the Seahawks are just like, no way, bro. That would be awesome. But my guess is I'm guessing with you that the invitation will never come, but I guess we just don't know yet. It's interesting.

two, which sport, and this is where I'm going to get into some absolutely gross, and I mean emphasis on the gross generalizations, Andrew, but they're also based on some amount of time for me spending around pro athletes of all three sports. In which team sport would you think there would be the greatest likelihood that the team might say, no thanks, would it be baseball, basketball, or football? I can tell you right now, it's not baseball. it's yeah baseball are the dumbest athletes without a doubt without a doubt i would say football players are the smartest athletes because the complexity of the game is wild but basketball has long been considered i guess the most quote-unquote woke you know and even the nba is a little bit less punishingly sort of controlling around what its athletes do so i feel like on i mean i'm obviously equating intelligence with not wanting to go to the white house for the record yes but like i just think football players whatever like this idea that football players are lunkheads is so wildly off if you've spent one second trying to understand an nfl play yeah right i think it's harder than like like a write in an economics paper or something so i guess i would say maybe basketball play an nba team just because it's a little bit more it's just it's a league where players did kneel and we're not did not face consequences you know during the day and stuff like that whereas obviously the nfl came down on kaepernick i don't again what i can say is it ain't baseball it ain't baseball yeah no absolutely the mariners

that that was a real that was a real concern for me because the mariners real concern going into

this season brother yeah because i wouldn't be shocked if we if we got to the world series yeah

we'll see um so anyway well there i got to do my i got to do my story now what's going on with i when you went when you kind of uh played that drop about that's a tuna bro it never occurred to me how life has how your life or the life of the show has bent around that piece of tape that we love from 10 years ago of two men unpack that two men trying to figure out what kind of a fish or megafauna they're seeing in the water. I believe it was a sunfish. That ended up being a sunfish. But here we are. You're having your own that's a tuna bro moment with the life in the river below you.

And I know that this is, even by my standards, truly terrible podcasting. Because it's like what happened was I observed something visually yesterday that is pretty much only interesting to me. It's nothing that the listeners could see. and but it was to me I don't want to say profound but it was like incredible I sit here anytime I'm doing the show from home I'm sitting here Andrew I'm talking to you and I'm staring at this river for hours on end throughout all of the seasons I'm very kind of tuned into what tends to go on and doesn't go on and so when I saw like all of the first thing that my eyes were alerted to was this again a bunch of white caps right but it wasn't windy enough for white caps so i was trying to figure out what is creating all those white caps kind of out in the middle of the river that's when i broke out the binoculars and that's when i saw these porpoise or dolphin like things swimming in like three different pods and i could tell that they had you know that kind of classic fin and you've seen that andrew like when you and v's have been out like maybe in hawaii whale watching or something or just anywhere out in the ocean particularly a little bit of a warmer place you tend to see you know like again maybe not full-on dolphins but porpoises and things like that are fairly common yeah of course and we all kind of know what that looks like how they kind of they they sort of like come out of the water just a little bit you just see their back and then their fin and then they go back in and there's a group of them so that's what i was looking at and so i was very excited by that because i've never seen it before and i thought that they were probably chasing fish and then i um but while we were talking i continued to kind of google what did i see and there was no support for there being any dolphins this far down the columbia and also even uh porpoises they supposedly don't really come down this far generally speaking well i was so amped when i got off off the air with this i was still searching around and i was telling my friend spring who lives out in this way um i was like you can't you will not believe what i saw in the columbia and she was like do you think it was a a seal and i was like i know a seal looks like it's definitely not a seal and um and then she sent me a news story about someone mistaking a seal for a dolphin and i was like i was like unless these seals learned how to swim in tight formation um like in different pods and and learned how to somehow grow a fin on their back these were i promise these were not harbor seals and so she reached out to a friend who works on the river and said oh no those are definitely harbor porpoises from basically they mostly hang out at the mouth of the columbia river where it meets the pacific oceans that'd be out near astro near, I think it's Cape Disappointment, which is this crazy, it's where the like Coast Guard, the most elite Coast Guard rescue teams train for doing like super dangerous, scary, kind of like open water stormy rescues because of the way that the Pacific Ocean and the Columbia meet,

it creates this like incredibly chaotic environment. So anyway, the harbor porpoises were chasing smelt, because it's smelt season. I don't know who dealt it, Andrew, but I know that they smelt it. And there are tons of smelt, and they will sometimes come down this far if there are a lot of smelt. And that's exactly what was happening yesterday. So again, nobody except me cares about this, but I have some confirmation, or at least some informed speculation, that i did see harbor porpoises they were all the way down here from astoria they were chasing smelt and um and i was i'm i was very excited about that yeah the fact that you describe them as as

black dolphins as well was confusing because i and i don't know i mean they that could exist but i was looking it up and it looks like there's something called black dolphins in a very different part of the world you must have totally stumbled on that as well generally gray in my

experience of seeing i don't even you know to be honest with you i don't know if i've ever seen if i've ever seen real dolphins i've seen tons of porpoises tons and tons but like if we're talking about something like flipper if we're talking about something like you see at sea world i mean i've seen them maybe in like a aquarium or whatever but like out in the world out like you know becca and i went whale watching the last time we were in hawaii and stuff uh we saw a lot of things that were dolphin-esque but i don't know if they were legit dolphins yeah i'm looking

forward to that we're going to be heading to hawaii soon and that's always a big part of our end of March so that's always the big part of our trip is the whale watching which it started with me, Genevieve and her family going on these kind of bigger kind of booze cruisy kind of boats almost like a, not a ferry but more like that with an upstairs and a downstairs you can look over the rails to now we're like we're like that

you're now under the boat, you're in scuba gear being hung from beneath the hull of the boat

we're like Bob Balaban in Seinfeld trying to impress Elaine. So he joins Greenpeace and he's in one of those little rubber boats with a little motor. So that's what we'll be doing. That's what you guys are in, huh? We do get in those rubber boats. Yeah, sit on the edge of the rubber. I love that. And that way, because Genevieve is super, super, super into nature and learning about the animals and everything. And I'm there and I'm like, oh, this is interesting. But also my mind will wander. I like to take photos and not even photos of the animals. You need kind of a telephoto lens. uh to take some incredible photos of that but like you know just of the surroundings and i like dipping my hand in the water i like just i i just like being out there for a couple of hours or a

few hours or whatever it is um we've got it next time beck and i are over that way that's what we've got to do because last time we were there we did the we did the whale watching thing but we were on one of those kind of yeah one of those kind of it's a boat it's got two different like floor you know two levels to it and it was to be honest it was still cool yeah that's the thing yeah yeah yeah like because we get out there and i'm like are we even gonna see anything and also we had it was rough i might have talked about this on the show i can't remember if i was doing shows from hawaii or not i think i might have mentioned this but we had like the captain who was on the mic was like this has happened to us now twice once in san antonio we did a river the san antonio like river tour they have this like kind of man-made river that snakes through san antonio and the person leading you know the person on the mic on the little boat was like people always tell me i should be a comedian and that's just one of the worst things you could hear at the beginning of a one hour excursion yeah it is people always tell me i should be a comedian

it was brutal and like second only to does anybody else smell that yep uh and so we're like

we're just like oh no and yes it was as bad as we uh were worried it would be this person was just constantly uh trying to crack all these jokes and it was just and there wasn't that many people on the boat and i i'm really uncomfortable when someone is making an obvious attempt at humor and and i don't know how to react to it like i don't i can't do the fake laugh or sometimes i do but then i hate myself for it and um and you know if there's not a lot of people to spread that burden that emotional labor it's rough yeah right this was a little better because there was a lot of people on the boat so i didn't feel like i had to laugh at him but it's just again it was painful that he like i'm like you're like a captain ron type he was like a kind of a sunburn i think he was maybe from new zealand originally or like australia he was like a kind of a sunburned guy from who had an accent who knows all about whales and knows about running the boat which that's sufficient. That's all I'm looking for in this tour.

sir um but anyway that was it was still really fun and that was with us not actually being able to get very close to the whales how close are you actually getting to those whales in that little

bob balaban mobile well pretty close there are rules about how close you can get and i think um so i don't want to make it sound like we're outside the law here no but just a smaller boat it would seem that there's got to be a little bit more really close like i have a photo of a whale breaching i told you before like when you're taking photos with your camera like if people are showing up with their actual cameras not their phone cameras whatever usually these are people and sometimes they're very annoying too uh with like you know like a telephoto lens and something that can kind of zoom in well and and have you know very you don't really need the lens to be fast in that situation but whatever um but the point is i don't have that kind of stuff i have a wide angle lens that i just like to take my weird photos with but i usually like carry it with me anyway but even with my well not really wide angle but my 55 millimeter lens which is just like it's just what the human eye sees when you say 55 it's just like that's what the human eye sees like i have this photo of these whales that look like it's zoomed in like we were so close to them but i will say i've never been on a boat where i feel like they are captain running it too much like it seems like like even this last one we went on in mexico where we were very very close to the animals before we got on it we had to sit through like i don't know a 20 minute like really janky slideshow yes with mod and the instructor had uh plastic models of the various like whales and like did a q a with us and everything like they're very into the educational experience and i believe the safety of the animals as well genevieve always picks these places i would feel pretty uncomfortable if it was like hey look how close we're getting to the animals and they have a cigarette dangling out of their no i corner their mouth and they're holding a coars light

right and i want to be clear too that our captain he was very by the rules in terms of you know like the boat and the distance and all that it wasn't like he was honestly his biggest transgression was his attempts at comedy yeah that's it wasn't anything and i and i also wouldn't want i mean Yes, I'm so in awe of these creatures that my desire to be close to them would not supersede my desire for their life to be as uninterrupted as possible. I would happily be further away from them because of the rules than closer to them and in any way ruining their day, stressing them out, freaking them out. I don't want any part of that. Now, when you say breaching, you mean fully jumping out of the water, like that thing's in the air, like it's out of the...

A whale is never fully out of the water. Well, mostly out of the water. That would be crazy. But, like, yeah, but, like, you know, breach and then blow, you know, it'll blow its water. Let me see if I can find this.

Well, right, because I always think of breaching as, like, they're jumping most of their body out of the water.

Yeah, like, you'll see a whole, you'll kind of, not all at once, but you'll see a big chunk of them kind of come up out of the water and then go back down. Then they'll go back down for a really, really long time while they get more fish.

but like the actually i think the coolest thing that we saw involving whales and breaching was not even in that boat but i think later on that same trip we were like driving around it was me and becca and um her brother scott and his wife tiff and it was just it was like sunset and we're like literally like in maybe we were in maybe their rental car or something and we just roll up to this beach and just happened to be sunset and we didn't have like a blanket and a pillow like we weren't there to do like a picnic we're just like hey at sunset let's try to catch a view of that it's hawaii it's the sunset we park i think illegally because i think the place is already packed we jump out we run over and literally as the sun is setting there are these two enormous like i'm gonna say humpback whales although i don't really know what they were but we're talking gigantic ones that just decided to put on an incredible performance where they were just jump like almost completely leaving the water and then slapping down and then another one would go up and like as the sun is like setting behind them andrew if you think i wasn't crying a little bit it was like it was intense it was like one of the coolest things that i've ever seen so um but but critically and i think this is what the listeners are also curious about andrew do i have

it on my calendar that you're going to hawaii yeah i think we talked about this a lot you should We'll talk about it more. It's at the end of March. It's kind of a Genevieve birthday trip situation.

By the way, I am sending you a photo of— I do not have it on my calendar, and I'm sure that's not your fault. I better put it on there.

Yeah, yeah. I'll resend you the dates later. Why don't you send me those deets? I think I sent them a long time ago. Let me check my palm pilot. But anyway, I did just send you a photo of Genevieve and dolphins. I just want to be very clear. When you open this up and you look, you're like, those are—Andrew thinks dolphins are whales. I just want you to know that the photo I could find on the fly was of dolphins.

See, I don't even know.

So, maybe I have seen those, but I don't even know if I've seen something that cool in the dolphin space. I think I've mostly seen porpoises, and this is obviously Hawaii, I'm guessing.

This one here, let me see. I can't figure out if it was Mexico or Hawaii. Okay, somewhere warm, though. Yeah, exactly, yeah.

We was hoping for some razzle-dazzle. Razzle-dazzle. That's right, man, razzle-dazzle.

On your mark. On your mark. Get set. Get set. Now ready. Ready. Go. Everybody rattle, dattle

All right, let's thank some dazzling donors. These folks are donating a dazzling amount of dough. And that's how this whole thing can work. That's how we can do this five days a week, all year long. It's 100% listener-supported. Supported by folks like our friend Barbara West of San Jose, California. San Jose Barbie. Pronouncer or Barbie, I suppose. I don't know, that I suppose, Andrew, sounds like maybe Barbara, maybe we're entering a Barbara phase.

Barbara explained this maybe last year or the year before, that she goes by Barbara, but I think when she joined the Tens community, maybe there was already a Barbara or something. There was some reason that she created that name specifically as kind of her Tendom. TBTL handle.

Yeah, nom de plume. But I just want to make sure that Barbara, like, is still cool with that. Sure, yeah, I'm with you on that. We just made a big production the other day about how we will pronounce your name, ideally, correctly, or even however you want it, even if it's incorrectly. If your name is Des Moines, that's fine. We'll call you Des Moines. Barbara is in San Jose, California. It says, wow, it's hard to believe another year has gone by, and I'm so happy that TBTL is still such an important part of my life. Aw, Barbara. I'm glad that it's part of your life too I remember when Barbara entered the discourse Like years and years ago And I remember it blowing my mind That we had someone listening in San Jose, California Yeah, all the way I feel like it was definitely still radio times maybe And just like Anytime we had somebody checking in from a place That wasn't, you know, Green Lake It was just like, I can't believe this is traveling As far as San Jose And so for this to be so many years later So many episodes later And Barbara's still listening and donating It's just like incredible I've still never missed an episode And whenever the guys say I'm sure everybody stopped listening an hour ago I promise you We haven't TVTL continues to be a weirdly important relationship In my life Despite the fact that we're all imaginary radio friendos You three business boys are such special people And so are all the other people Who pop into the show Like Luke's mom, David, Veves, Bingo, P. Fletch and all the others who make surprise guest appearances. I'm looking forward to many more years of being able to support this podcast and the awesome community surrounding it. Ah, Barbara, well, thank you so much for, yeah, just being a friend of the show for all these years and for giving me some early indication that maybe this was working, that maybe people outside of the immediate Cairo radio listening audience would have some interest in this.

Eventually you'd reach as far away as New Hampshire and Japan.

Yeah, yeah. Did you ever interact with, I mean, I know you sent in some drops, right?

I sent you that Bob, not Bob Garfield, the Bob Edwards drop of that's the saddest thing I've ever heard.

Oh, and that's still in heavy rotation, so good instincts on that.

Yeah.

Also, I wouldn't put it past you to send me a Bob Garfield.

Bob Garfield has made its way into, let's see here, here's the email that I sent to you on March 5th, 2009. so March 5th we're getting close to the anniversary of this thing although I can't do the math I wrote to you hey Luke Andrew Walsh here the guy from New Hampshire so apparently you apparently I had reached out to you in some sort of correspondence before this I would have guessed this was our first correspondence but I guess not Andrew Walsh here the guy from New Hampshire I'm attaching a two second piece of audio here Genevieve and I play it for each other a lot it's from a Bob Edwards morning edition interview I can't remember the exact topic oh you know what i realize i might have this is march of 2009 i'm already in seattle i must have come and visited you and then i must just i must have captured this in new hampshire and then sent it to you years later which is weird i can't remember the exact topic but his guest quoted a study that says people will eat a lot more food if they can order it from a machine instead of a person so if that if fast food restaurants want to make more money they should use robots and machines to take orders instead of people something like that bob's response is attached hope you're doing well that's the saddest thing i've ever heard that is all true i remember that i'm i'm confused why i sent that to you once i was already in seattle i swore i had a memory of sending that to you when i was still in new hampshire but i guess not

well again

you know not to uh turn this into the luke appreciation club but it i find it oddly gratifying andrew that you in new hampshire when we had literally never met um liked the show enough to kind of give it a listen and when again a lot of that's probably jen's energy and sean and just like the overall whateverness of the show but you know you and i have a lot of similarities but then also a lot of differences in our personalities and i would be i would have been unshocked if you would have turned it on and maybe it was just like a bad night for me or I'm just saying something silly or whatever and you were just kind of like I don't like this guy like I wouldn't I wouldn't have been shocked either if that was the response but the fact that you were like oh yeah okay let me give this a listen let me let me listen to this while I'm mowing the lawn let me let me kind of engage with this content like it's so weird for that to be really gratifying to me now that I know now that I've known you for so long and so well but like I'm glad you liked the show back in the day or at least tolerated the show because you know it would be weird it'd be

really weird if you hated it and you weren't here the thing to remember is there were fewer podcasts back then so no i did i'm obviously teasing you um i do remember it being a period that did help where i was trying to grab you know i was listening to a lot of podcasts podcasting was new and you guys were doing a radio show but putting out the podcast and i did love it i wish i could remember better like maybe the first episode i listened to or something but i'm sure i've said this to you before. When I think about those early days of me listening, I have a very specific memory of listening while packing up the house to move out to Seattle. And I don't know if you're like this, but there are certain things that I just remember exactly where I was when I heard it. I remember specifically the closet in this living room area. We had a closet, kind of a storage area. And I remember, I think Genevieve might've already been in Seattle. I was still back in New Hampshire, and I'm emptying out that closet and packing it up, and I'm listening to you and Jen and Tom Tangney. Oh, wow. See, Tommy T. Yeah. Boy, I just got in my head about that, because everybody says his name wrong, and now I haven't worked with him in so long. I'm always... Tom Tangney. Yeah, I said it right. Yeah, you said it right. Yeah, I was just questioning myself, because he had a co-host who couldn't say his last name. Tagney. Yeah, and it made me so angry, and I was just double-checking myself there. Anyway, it was the one where You all were reviewing Christmas movies, I think. And I think Jen got literally emotional and started crying while talking about Home Alone or something along the lines of that. That sounds about right. And I just, I remember listening to that and emptying out my closet and being like, oh, yeah, these are my people.

And you remember thinking, someday, someday that'll be where I work. And, in fact, I will have done, what, 4,000 more episodes than anybody on this thing except Luke.

Someday this show will make me unemployable for any other job.

Someday this show will break me.

Like all the pretty horses. Yep. Maestro. On your mark. On your mark. Get set. Get set. Somebody's reading Cormac McCarthy. Yeah. I finished that a while back. I'm kind of in between books. I'm reading the world's worst mystery novel right now. I was telling you off air by Truman. I'm sorry, Harry Truman's daughter, Margaret Truman. Murder on Capitol Hill. I got to find a better book to read.

Murder at Bullfeathers.

What is Bullfeathers?

It's like a bar on Capitol Hill, like a restaurant that people would go to.

I'll bet you it's in the series.

Hey, look who we're thanking. It's our friend Aaron Schultz, who's in Shoreline, Washington. Aaron says Aaron is pronounced A-A-Ron. Of course. Key and Peele style. And the last name is the name of the guy who stole the Sonics, but no relation. Okay. Because, you know, Aaron, if you've listened to the show for a long time, and you probably have, I've got that story, which I'll spare everyone from, where I had a chance to finally give Howard Schultz a piece of my mind. And I opted not to because it was more important in that moment that I seem, I guess, what? Wealthy? Cool? I don't know what I was doing. I was more interested in just being seen as his equal than letting him know. And that means I've still got some Schultz-related anger I need to unload. But it's not going to be on you, Aaron. It will never be on you.

I don't want to say got in my head. You were sort of ahead of something. Luke, you were ahead of my anxiety on something, which is when people were talking about the fact that the Seahawks will go up for sale after the Super Bowl, the one that just happened, and it looked like, oh, this is definitely in the works. you were the first person to say oh yeah and you know it could easily be somebody like bezos and then how am i gonna feel rooting for the seahawks and then of course you know now the the news is official it's up for sale and the what does seattle times have but a big picture of bezos is probably top contender and it's like oh my oh my god i know you know becca texted me

like she got a news alert this is her level of engagement with the seahawks she got a text alert that said seahawks for sale she goes is is this an issue for you and my first thought was like well no because they're not going to move i don't think there's any danger of them of them leaving seattle so that's always been my fear around my teams being sold because it almost happened well actually it almost happened to the seahawks you know they had moved their workout equipment to los angeles ken baring had actually had moved the Seahawks' actual brick-and-mortar stuff, like their weights and stuff.

Was this after the Cleveland thing? Was this after 95-ish?

I think it was before that. Really? You know me. I'm terrible with dates. But it was the Seahawks' ownership, this guy named Ken Baring, decided he wanted to move them. And I guess this maybe would have been a time when L.A. didn't have a team or had one team. and uh there was i remember there was news clips of like moving trucks like packing up the like seahawks like workout equipment and leaving heading for california um and then the mariners same thing happened where they were they were rumored to be going to tampa bay if they were sold and and of course it really happened with the sonics all that is to say my fear around the sale of my team is always are they going to move that's not my fear with seattle but then i also realized man good ownership really really really sets a tone for a team and bad ownership also really really sets a tone for a team yeah you know it's not a non-factor in how the overall kind of like health of the team it really does sort of seem to emanate from the owner because they of course have a huge say in who the coach is who the general manager is so it's all an extension and a reflection of them in a way and i like i guess we got to give jody allen a lot of credit really i mean she was sort of pressed into duty when paul allen died but um so anyway i guess i went from being not stressed about it to now being more stressed about it you know it's funny i was

um thinking against my own values this morning because i don't i don't i'm not worried about the team moving either and you're right management does translate and ownership does translate into the product on the field but aside from that it's just been like okay Jody Allen like pretty innocuous owner kind of like temporarily inherited the team to run it has done a great job made hiring decisions that led to a Super Bowl and also is just somebody who I don't have hate in my heart for you know and so i'm like why can't jody just keep the team i mean technically she's running it for the estate but that's the craziest part of this whole story to me they're selling it because there's a mandate for the estate to liquefy the assets and do good things with it supposedly get it into like the hands of people who will make the world a better place yes and i'm kind of like but i don't want to root for bezos yeah totally i've been going on the same journey in my mind

it's like this is ultimately this is a very good thing from paul allen yeah to realize that when he was long gone that there was no need for these is like extremely valuable assets to what just sort of i don't know exist in perpetuity in his memory with a kiddo who knows even who would be running it. It was like, no, the money from all these things should be going to things that are important, you know, and that's actually a really good way to think about, you know, this kind of wealth that he amassed. So it's all a good thing, really. But yeah, it kind of bums me out because it's like, couldn't we go back and just like maybe not do that? Can we just ignore this one thing from his will? Because it all seems to be going pretty well right now. Yeah, exactly. We got Jody Allen, who we like. The team is rocking. We got a young coach. In fact, that's actually what Becca said was, because I keep telling her, I'm like, I think we're in a window here. I think we're in a window. I think we're in about a three-year window where the Seahawks are going to be phenomenal. And her message was something like, does this mess with your three-year window?

Good.

Anyway, back to A.A. Ron Schultz's dazzling donor message. Hello, co-bros. I'm excited to be able to dazzle you with my donation this year. I was able to increase my contribution due to the construction materials company I independently represent. It's called HydroBlock Showers, which, according to my accountant, I must mention twice for taxes. Well, I'll say it again. HydroBlock Showers. I appreciate all of the hours of entertainment and parasocial camaraderie you provide. The more opinionated and uncensored, the better. See that, Andrew? A. Ron would like some hot talk from us.

Ooh, I'm going to think of something really, really spicy for later.

Occasionally, opinions on products or services in the home remodeling sector will make me want to throw my phone, but in the end, this has helped me professionally approach my job.

as industry education rather than pushy sales to remarkable success because everyone has topics in which they are specialized. Anyway, if you want to correctly waterproof your next tiled shower or tub surround, whether in the construction trades, a homeowner hiring a pro or a DIY enthusiast, check out HydroBlock, ice out, and remove the orange tyrant. Job done. Nice. A.A. Ron. Aaron, would you believe that you can't see this because this is audio, but behind me there's a respectability bookshelf, which features two of my daytime Emmys and other TBTL stuff. Also a picture of the Junior Sluggers, who are going to be getting back on the field pretty soon here, Andrew. Behind that, though, is a wall. And on the other side of that wall is a bathroom.

And in that bathroom are two bobbleheads of you and me that watch people when they pee. Yep.

Is that still true? Not anymore. Not after the police stopped by. But there is a shower that is yet to be installed in there. And, I mean, you know, it's framed and it's plumbed, but there's no tile. There's no drain. We were thinking, get at me, Aaron. We were thinking about doing one of those schluder, doing a schluder kind of shower pan situation. But I'm going to check out HydroBlock. You should. Because when you say if you'd like to correctly waterproof your next tiled shower, it's going to be a tiled shower. So I'm going to give that a look-see. I'm on the website now. Listeners can find it at HydroBlock.com. You guys aren't doing anything to do with your bathroom, your downstairs bathroom.

No, I mean, that would dare to dream at some point, but that would be super far down the line. My bathroom's pretty jacked up, unfortunately. It's like a really terribly installed, very cheap shower tub thing that was installed so poorly that water doesn't drain right out of it. It's kind of a nightmare. That's what you need, HydroBlock. I know I need HydroBlock.

Looking at this right now, this looks a lot like, excuse me, this looks, I mean, this is a shower pan. This looks a lot like what they do with that Schluter situation. So, yeah, Aaron, hit me up. Let me know what I should be doing here because that's a big project for, like, this summer is Walt and I are going to get in there and actually we're going to finish off the Madrona Hill studio, which means make that bathroom totally functional with a shower and then also finish the kitchen so that there's a actual, right now what happens, Every day when I finish the show with you, Andrew I usually will take My cup of coffee, which almost always has A little coffee left in the bottom of it And I will dump it into the bathroom sink Which feels very There's something wrong about that

Luke, I, you know, because our kitchenette Because you're doing that right now Well, our kitchenette is all ripped out I try not to do it Every now and then I'll dump a little bit of something But I will, now I have a better situation than you because I have a kitchen right above me You have to go outside You know what I mean? So in that way, I mean better. But so right now, when we don't have our sink in the basement, I can't tell you how many times I'm going there after the show with like a water bottle and a cup of coffee that I'm going to maybe just like rinse and drain. I'm like, oh, it's not there. And then I think for a second, will I go into the bathroom to rinse this mug? And I decide, nay, I shall go. I shall march myself upstairs because I know there's something weird about that to me.

Brown coffee into the bathroom sink just feels like I'm not living my best life for some reason. It's very upsetting, anyway. Hey, thank you so much to our donors. Thanks for making TBTL possible. Hello, and welcome to Top Story. So, Andrew, you were talking about this French film, Bonheur, which translates to happiness, that you just kind of randomly watched yesterday or two days ago or whatever, recently on HBO. And last night, after I finished up a bunch of my LiveWire research, by the way, tonight, LiveWire, Alberta Rose Theater, 7.30, come on down. I was like, let me treat myself to a little bit of the other two. And then I was going to watch that, but then I was like, oh yeah, but Andrew mentioned that movie. Let me just like, I was like, I just kind of want to see what he was talking about. I want to see what the pacing of the movie is and what the color is and stuff like that. And so I went ahead and put it on and it, by the way, you had sort of mentioned when you were talking about it that the, I think you said like something like it wasn't a long film or something, but I mean, it's a standard length film. It was like, what was like 80 minutes or something.

But by today's standard, that's so, I mean, that's under an hour and a half. I just feel like movies have gotten so long and I've gotten to this point where it's like, oh, you really got to sit down and commit to it. It felt like, and I did watch it, and this is not the best way to watch cinema, but I did watch it in a couple of different sittings because I kind of started it in the middle of the day, just wanted to see what it was about and then had to go on to do other things and then came back to it. But yeah, to me, 80 minutes just feels like it just feels so doable by movie standards these days.

I was watching it probably in like the ideal circumstances, which was like the whole, you know, had the house. fairly dim i have pretty big tv you know and just like had the sound bar going although actually i would say the audio is a big part of it or at least the the music is a big part of it you know yeah it's funny like in the music credits it's like whatever mozart's i don't think i've ever thought about i guess it's wolfgang amadeus mozart it's like music w a mozart oh i didn't

i didn't notice that i was like i've seen that name before it's funny i didn't pay attention to the credits but that but i looked up later what the music was because it was so it was classical music but it was very edgy at times near like especially near the end and um i was like

what what is this it's i mean and what you had said about the film was you watched it you kind of couldn't stop thinking about it you were still sort of trying to make up your mind a little bit about the film and i would say that that's probably exactly where i am one thing that i will say is i did not as i so often do experience this as a two screen situation which is to say at no time did i pull out my phone and start like looking at tiktok oh interesting yeah yeah which is funny because you know you'd think okay this is this movie it's i think 1965 it's french they're speaking french it's kind of like nothing's going on really for most of the movie it's just people are just kind of living their life and so in a way you could say and again i also don't know if acting is good or not because it's in french do you know do you know about the actors do you know

this dazzling detail uh-uh i don't think so the main are they all were those his real kids yeah we and his real wife who are not actors so the main act the main character is an actor i noticed they all had the same last name oh okay yeah because you were looking at the credits i was looking him up to see if he was still hot yes he looks like barry bill hater but bill hater Barry from TV, and he looks a lot like Bill Hader, and I think Bill Hader's kind of hot anyway, but yeah, this is super hot Bill Hader. This is like a real steamy Bill Hader. And there's something about the way he acts, too, just like small gesticulations. You could believe that there would be some sort of a relation there. I'm sorry to keep going here, but anyway, he...

I didn't know that was his real wife. That makes so much more sense.

I didn't know until afterwards, either. So she cast him, who he had a little bit of a... He already had a little cachet because he was in some TV show somewhere, but she cast him and then cast his real life wife and two children and those children are adorable

this makes so much sense because so let me just if I can like in two minutes lay out the basic plot if you will of this movie and I don't I'm not worried about spoiling it for people are you worried about

yeah here's why and I was thinking about this yesterday in case we talked about it I will say if we want to really talk about like what is really at the heart of this movie we have to spoil it and I know that you could make the joke like oh it's 1965 it's been a long time but there is a very real chance that people hear us talking about this movie that maybe they haven't heard of or meant to and they're like oh i would like to watch this now that the boys that's us the boys are talking about it so i will just say everything that i've just rambled for the past 15 seconds has given you plenty of time to skip ahead if you want because i think we will now enter into spoiler territory and i may i'll even try to put some time stamps in the show description maybe look in your show description and you can tell when to pick this back up and Now we're free and clear.

Although I was going to say, I don't, I think we can talk about it without spoiling it. What I was going to say was the movie basically involves a family. It's this guy and his wife and their two kids, and they're kind of living a, I guess it'd be technically called a suburban life, although, boy, the suburbs of France don't look like the suburbs of the U.S. Yeah. It still seems very beautiful and kind of urban in a way, you know, and just kind of a very charming lovely little kind of scene but you mean urban or rural because it struck me as being very rural the suburbs i guess although they live with neighbors you know right next door to them they have that little courtyard like when i think of suburban i think of american suburbs and i guess what i mean is their immediate flat they live in walking you know to get bread in the little town square like it just it felt very charming to me in a way that i guess what i'm what you're picking up here is i don't think of the suburbs is all that charming yeah okay i'm sorry yeah and i think

you're right about that i i was surprised to hear it described as suburban because it seemed like very very uh working class and rustic to me like maybe not rural but very rustic i mean literally sure first of all it's a different era their bed their bed i mean they are they are living this family's living a very very modest living their kitchen sink is like a tub that has a hose coming

into it yes and it's also where he shaves i think yeah like that yeah yeah so um but but all that is to say the what i was struck by immediately was the the naturalism of the kids and the way that the the husband and wife and the kids were all interacting i mean so much of the movie is literally them just like they're kind of at the park

on a sunday and then they're getting in the citron which is the the little car that i think he borrows from his uncle or whatever and then they're like in their house and i found the scenes of the with the children and the way that the children were talking to the parents to be so shockingly naturalistic and now that makes sense yeah because they're literally the parents that's

extremely smart casting it really is right and they all do a really good job like they do they You do a great job. The wife who, like, okay, kids, these kids are like, one of them is kind of pre-verbal. He doesn't really talk much at all. They reference that. The little girl who I guess is slightly older does talk a little bit and is very charming, but it doesn't seem like acting.

It just seems like a, but you need to cancel her over that like Native American headdress or Native what, I don't know what you even called it. I guess it's Native American because I don't think that was happening in France.

No, it was, it was interesting to watch. I was like, are you kidding me? I'm watching a movie in France from 1965, and I can't get away from this racist depiction of kids playing, quote-unquote, cowboys and Indians. But, yeah, I guess it was so popular at the cinema from Hollywood movies that it had made its way over to Paris, and so this little girl is kind of obsessed in part of the movie with, again, quote-unquote, cowboys and Indians, as they call it. But, anyway, I think I interrupted you here.

Well, no, just that makes so—I was really—well, the way this started was me saying, I can't really tell if the acting is good or not because it's in another language. And by that, I mean the way that, like, the—let's just say—so he's a carpenter. He works in this kind of carpentry studio wood shop, and there's this one point where he comes in, and he's got a couple of bottles of rosé, because I think it's maybe one of the guys that works there's birthday or something. And he gives the guy, like, a bottle of rosé, and the guy says to him something like, you've all like like like thank you so much you're the best you've been like a father to me or something and it's like is that the most naturalistic delivery of that line i don't know is that good writing we have there's no development of that character like it's weird to watch this movie and interpret it through a little bit through the lens of like what now in my mind passes for a good movie in like 2026 versus what they're doing in this movie but all that is to say I was totally entranced by the whole thing. Whether or not I thought that maybe every line was beautifully written or every line was delivered with believability or what have you, or if I think even the plot development makes sense to me, I don't know if any of that even

matters. I just couldn't look away from this film. Yeah, one thing, and maybe I'm, I don't know enough about this, so maybe I'm giving it too many excuses, but I have a strong feeling that some of that dialogue also is lost in translation quite literally like that line that you say specifically i'll bet you has a different meaning and different nuance in the french language and i there were a couple of times i was watching the subtitles and i'm like i know that i'm i know that i'm missing something here you know but you know not that this is this makes it a good movie but for me personally it was like every shot was like a beauty if i took if i took one photo as beautiful as a single random shot in that movie i could die happy you know what i mean like the color in the film color and the way that she uses the camera agnes varda is the director the way she uses the camera and that it'll it'll snap away to something else and the edits and like then i had told you yesterday that i was a little distracted because people had described it like literally in some official like genres people included in like the horror genre and i'm a little bit unclear about that i think that has to do with some some takes about what actually happens in the end of the movie and then when you combine combine her style but it's like i was telling you before the show it's not a horror film and you got that kind of was a distraction for me a little bit watching this movie knowing that like well what's gonna happen here although it might have been one of the

reasons i was so glued to it well certainly i was the whole time going like when's the horror part

when's the horror part are you being serious even even though I said try to get that out of your head I then I just read the misinformation even more yeah and I and I actually understand that interpretation and we don't have to kind of get into it now but I think it's more of a movie about nature the guy is obsessed with nature and it plays a huge role do you do you love it I don't remember what the there what the I looked it up later but the opening scene is this family and they're they're playing out in the woods they live in this sort of you know very um like I said humble abode somewhere in what they call the suburbs but they clearly love to spend their Saturdays or weekends or whatever just like with the kids rolling around in the in a field under a tree waiting for the kids to take a nap so the kids under a mosquito net yes and so the parents can have mommy and daddy time and what I liked was on the actual opening shot you notice that the the the mom slash wife is wearing like a really cute like dress like kind of a summer dress but it's a little dirty and I notice she wears the same exact pair of shoes in every single

single in every single scene in the movie and so you know again sort of underscoring the fact that these are not rich people but when the movie opens i don't know anything about it i'm like is this a movie about people living in the woods like is this a family that a guy because the kids are sleeping the the parents are sort of lulling about or whatever and um and i really like that like you see how dirty her kind of dress is at the hems because she's been you know tromping around in the in the woods and then they end up we learn that no they're just having a day in the woods or in a field somewhere. And it's just something that they enjoy doing as a family. And I think that that is a major theme in the movie. And I like when they come back to sort of quote unquote civilization and they go to visit his uncle just very briefly. There's this weird scene where for some reason they just go and say a quick hello and then a quick goodbye. But the aunt and uncle have a TV in their living room and they're watching either a TV show or a movie. But it's an absolute echo of the scene that we just saw it's two people sitting under a tree and i really love that

and the woman is saying to the man i love hearing you talk just say something oh yeah that's right in the and then he's just he's going into this very kind of eloquent thing that he's saying or whatever yeah um yeah i mean uh there was one more thing that i wanted to say about oh the camera work is phenomenal to me there were so many and maybe this is a new wave cinema thing that i don't know about because again my knowledge of of this of this period of cinema is very very limited actually but i get the sense that you know cameras were big and bulky and kind of hard to do like there was no steadicam there was no guy wearing a harness that's like you know like with a some kind of gimbal on it like but there were so many shots where it's like i don't know how she was getting this effect with the camera where you're like in this apartment or in this flat or in this whatever and the camera is just moving with people in this way that i feel like i don't i've never seen a movie of this era where they could do that with the camera it was so much more just like you had to lock it down i don't even know if at this point that they really did the thing with like the tracks you know like a tracking shot very much like the camera was so intimate in these in these rooms there was also those edits that you were talking about where like it like just it totally non non-naturalistically like it just cut between something and something else and something and something else in a way that maybe under other circumstances would kind of annoy me because I'd be like, what is this doing for the story? But it was just creating a vibe that was really interesting and cool to me. Also, one deed, oh, I meant to go find the... Andrew, if you think I'm not going to start dressing exactly like Hot Bill Hader, actually, I should really dress like the uncle. That's more my demo now. If you think I'm not going to start dressing like the uncle... He's kind of wearing work pants a lot, right? Am I doing that right? totally yeah that's like this like you know his uncle is also a carpenter and they're just wearing this like what's kind of working man's clothes but which are so stylish you know what they actually remind me of a little bit i don't know if you remember this as much as i do but in the movie her the outfits they have joaquin phoenix and it's a lot of like chore coats and barrel kind of barrel pants and like high-waisted things did you i just learned this recently so there's a coat that the the main the main uh you know the dad i guess uh the main character in the movie is wearing at one point and it's it's like invented in france it's called the chore coat and it's basically like you know it's kind of um like a cotton and it's got two pockets on the front and it's blue and it was you know for working people you could put your tools in the pockets but it was made out of a durable material that wouldn't you know and i own like two or three of them they don't look as cool as on me as they do on that guy did you know that's where the term

blue collar comes from no but that makes total sense that's the origins of blue collar work is

from the french chore coat which this guy is totally wearing like not for effect but because that's what a guy of that era in france who had that job would be wearing it's just what you would

wear do you know what i always thought i never re-examined this as an adult like of course the phrase would go back further than this but you know i worked for my dad and you know i worked out in the shop and there were like the people who worked in the front of the building and that was the office where the engineers worked and the bookkeeper and whatnot and then out in the shop you had the guys like me who were like you know I was sorting scrap there were other people who were welding and stuff like that and the people my people in the shop we're all wearing those Sintas uniforms you know with the little name on it here and our shirts were always that like light blue color that shop blue color that you can picture on your classic work shirt and that's I just always thought well that's why it's blue collar because we wear the blue collars out here

they wear the white collars up there i think i mean i'm it also may have just like been something that we said over here like concurrently but i was somehow watching a mini documentary about the chore coat the other day unrelated to this movie and they were talking about that too but yes the fashion in this movie it just kills me it's just like i'm like i gotta take notes

And I have to basically burn all of my current wardrobe and just start dressing like one of the people in this in this movie, one of the guys in this movie, because it's like they're all. And again, it feels so not an affect. Like, of course, if I did it, it would be a total affectation, but it's not an affectation for them. I was also really obsessed with what the what was going on with people's teeth in the movie, because, you know, everyone except the two children is just chain smoking constantly. probably you know like both in the film and not in the film you know because that's just what france does what's happening in france in 1965 so i was trying to see like i don't know trying to i was trying to in a way get a sense of what actual 1965 france was through the actors and the people in this movie not even in the story that was being portrayed in the film but in the like the neighbor lady's teeth were very brown and i was trying to imagine her life as an actor in france was she in movies was she a stage person how did she get this role was she famous in france i was like i don't know it's going to these weird places in my mind but uh all that is

to say thank you for the recommendation what do you think about him stealing that bread from that woman walking across the street there's so many now that we're talking about it there's so many little details and i know you're wrapping up but do you remember he's just like and i'm trying to figure out is he is it just because he's got hot guy swag or in the 60s you could just do that but So there's literally, I mean, it couldn't be more Parisian, right? He's in the city, and a woman is passing him, and she's got a baguette in her bag that she's carrying. And he's crossing, passing her, and he's, like, kind of in love and skipping. And he just rips a big chunk of her baguette. And she gives him a look like, hey, what's up, Buster? But he's just, like, shrugs. But then she also smiles.

Yeah, she smiles. Yeah, exactly. What I took away from that is, because I saw that, there was that scene. There was another scene where he gets home and he's really hungry, and he's like, basically, how soon is it going to be dinner? I'm starving, and he also just rips a piece of bread off. He was just raw-dogging that bread. No butter, nothing else, just a piece of bread, just a tip of a baguette by itself, which I thought was an interesting move because it would never occur to me to eat that kind of bread without some butter on it.

Oh, I'll bet you it's good. I'm sure it is. I thought you were thinking about the carbs because I was just like, oh, no, that's not fair. You don't get to have that jaw and just eat a baguette like that.

No, I was, though, very fascinated with seeing what that guy is one of the most naturally handsome people I think I've ever seen, like effortlessly so. And I was very curious, like, what's the trajectory for a guy like that? Because and again, you know, we're trying to be careful about how we talk about bodies and faces and looks and people and stuff. But like, I just, as a person who would never had that particular thing going, like, I'm always curious about somebody, particularly a guy, I guess, because that's how I relate, because I am a guy of like, what would it be like to be that dude in the world? just like you look like that and you and like you just steal people's baguettes and they just go you like yeah and then and then does that does that prepare you well for life or does that actually ill prepare you for life as you get older as your looks change as like you sort of come back down to earth a little bit with the rest of us you know what does that you know what does that look like or do you just get to be ethan hawk who just appears more or less unchanged like he's been doing a lot of interviews lately, and he's just like, Ethan Hawke just is Ethan Hawke. He just gets to be Ethan Hawke his whole life. He doesn't ever have to be like a normal

person. Do you think the French guy was look-smaxing?

No, because he didn't, he was not trying. That's what makes him in Clavicular

so different, Andrew. We finally got to the heart of the movie. Thank you.

There's a right way to rock and a wrong way to roll You can't just listen to your soul Just remember that life is number one You can be having so much fun Just remember that life is much fun You can be number one

We have a healthy amount of Blurzays today, Luke. Yeah, and this is the way you can wish yourself or someone you care about a happy birthday. You can email me, andrew, at tbtl.net. That's andrew at tbtl.net. Put Blur's Day in the subject line and just write a short little note wishing somebody a happy birthday. Toby says, wishing the happiest of Blur's Days to my BFF and the other king of Park Hill, Corbin. So I'm wondering, is Toby, are they co-kings, Toby? And do they know about the No Kings protest And do they know about that And how do they feel Corb simply rules because he is the funniest Cleverest and most outstanding human Nice. Huh, that's interesting. I thought I was. I guess I'm second to Corb. He also brought Hannah and Oliver into my life, and I love them so damn much I can't even handle it. Happy Blur's Day, Corbin. Cute. Hey, speaking of Corbin, Robin in Denver wants to shout out as well. Happy of Blur's Days to my pal Corbin in Denver. You're the nicest. So now we have nicest to add to the funniest, cleverest, and most outstanding. Most liberal back-in Parker I know. Cheers, Robin. from what i've learned from reading the email we have a lot of liberal back-end parkers in our

audience joe in winter spring become the amount of like dms that i'm getting on instagram about back-end parking and people either for it or again it you'd be shocked yeah out of everything

that you've ever said definitely my brand now i really wish i could separate myself more from it Joe in Winter Springs, Florida, says, that's interesting. Winter Springs, Florida. It's sort of like you think of Florida, you think of sunshine, but now you got me thinking of Winter Springs.

Right, it'd be like the Sunshine Coast, Nova Scotia.

Exactly. Joe says, happy Blur's Day. To my 11, Kim, you're the best person I know, and I'm so fortunate to share a life with you. You're a source of love and inspiration from me and our five, Claire. We're so proud of you for always fighting the good fight. Never forget how much you are loved. Aw, that's cute. That's wonderful. Happy Blur's Day, Kim, and good advice to everybody. Never forget how much you love. Leslie says, I want to say a happy Blur's Day to myself. It's a big one for me, 60, and I can only think of a few things that would make it more special than a Blur's Day shout-out from my favorite co-bros. That's us. Happy Blur's Day, Leslie. What? Ooh, you had a failure to launch there or something. Wow.

Yeah, I think it's supposed to be, this is what it sounds like. It looks like a picture of a hairdryer, but that's not what it is. I think it's supposed to be like a fanfare, but that's all it does.

I kind of like it.

We got this one. The whistle is really warbling now.

Ooh, I like that. That's pretty good. All right, let's see here. Leslie does say that I've met you in Denver, Friendship, Minneapolis, and Seattle. Also, P. Fletch and Stu. And TBTL has been part of my life since the radio day. So basically, the longest relationship I've ever had. Leslie also says, well, I'm at it. Happy Blursey to my birthday twin, Emily, a fellow Minnesotan. Happy Blursey, Leslie, and happy Blursey to Emily. Chris says, oh, I believe, let's see here. Yeah, this is Chris, our friend over at a Tacoma Little Theater down there in Tacoma. Chris says, happy birthday to my 11. And, Mike, you let me drag you to all the live shows, and I know that you would never admit it. You're probably closer to a 10 than you think. If I stop listening at two and a half speed, or I'm sorry, if I stop listening at two times speed, will you listen more with me? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Interesting. I think it sounds like Mike might be, um... Oh, my God! He admitted! Might be more of a listener than he'd like to let on. That's right. Welcome, Mike, and happy Blur's Day. I'm with you, though, by the way, Mike. I don't like the two and a half speed either I'm not telling Chris how to live his life but I'm just saying like sometimes I'll bump my phone when I'm listening to whatever and it goes even just to 1.5 and I know that for some people it doesn't negatively impact their experience and it helps them get through the many hours of this so hey do your thing but for me personally it's got to be the regular speed

well I hate to be this guy but this is how I'm going to combat it I'm going to talk slower so that when you listen at high speed it sounds normal okay I can't keep that up I was really curious to see how long you could stay in that space I felt like I was killing both of us

no no I wasn't getting mad I was like we'll see what's the over under on this DraftKings a minute

I got this note it says this is Ezra and Iris We are our mom's fives, and tomorrow is her Golden Blur's Day. Here's our message. So I think this came in probably yesterday. That's why. So today is the Golden Blur's Day. Here's our message. Hi, Mama. I hope your birthday is going wonderfully swell. You've made it a great year for all of us so far. And with you, we know that the rest of the year will be TBTL, too beautiful to live. Love, Ezra and Iris. Cute. That's awesome. Thanks, guys. happy blurs day to your mama

this message

says hey step my tbtl progenitor I just want to wish you a happy golden blurs day as that odometer that is life turns over One more time. That's from listener Alan Two-Step. More Golden Blurs Days in the news. Marshall in Amsterdam says, I want to wish my girlfriend Louisa a very happy Golden Blurs Day. She's enjoying sunshine and carnival in her hometown of Rio de Janeiro while I'm here freezing in Amsterdam. You should be in Winter Springs, Florida. I'm so excited for you this year. finishing your PhD and becoming a doctor, exclamation point, and also finally getting a permanent residency in the EU. You just need to pass that pesky Dutch language exam, but I know you can do it.

My plan was to move to the Netherlands, but I didn't know there was a Dutch language exam.

I feel like Dutch is a tough one.

It looks so hard when you see it written. And again, everybody, I mean, I've been to the Netherlands. Everybody speaks perfect English, which is incredible. But yeah, when you see Dutch written, it is not, it ain't like Spanish or Italian or something where you can kind of piece it together. It is very, very different looking than what we're writing.

Are there similarities between Dutch and French? Am I right about that? No, not really.

Maybe. I mean, look, I am so bad at this kind of stuff anyway. I don't want to say anything that causes someone to throw their phone. but like it all yeah it seems almost like it's got a little german going yeah i'm totally i'm totally off on that you're right it's not it's not i can't like literally you know i pride myself andrew in being able to say like a word or phrase from a lot of places and it's great by the way when um you're with me and i meet someone from a place because i can say one thing to them and they love it they're like wow i feel like a bridge has been built i don't got one thing that after that you're like you're just destroying the bridge well I mean that's honestly you should interview the people who I've built the bridge with I think they enjoy it very much no I'm just saying like

I thought you were saying that like at first you build a bridge by knowing a word but then they want to continue the conversation and you have no more words and the bridge collapses is what I thought you were saying

it's as I'm getting out of the Uber and they're like they're looking kind of confused like oh yeah yeah dasvidanya yes I am from Russia originally that is a thing they say

there save it for the end though because then you can get out of there i like that i like that by the way i was looking up is any similar similarities between french and dutch and the answer is clearly no but not far down the list of questions uh is a quora question do the french like the dutch which i think is very interesting i'll be what are they saying they say well the ai overview basically says that um there doesn't seem to uh they don't seem to have a clear-cut opinion about the Dutch. Hey, by the way,

Andrew, according to AI, Dutch is a West Germanic, okay, so I was saying kind of German, originated around the 5th century CE from Low Franconian, a dialect spoken by the Salian Franks. So when you see Franconian, it feels a little French. Maybe it's like... Some kind of original mother tongue type of thing? Maybe if

French and German had a baby, it would be Dutch. I don't know. I think that we're probably...

We're never going to pass the citizenship test this way.

This is it. This is the test. All right, here we go. You ready? Yeah, I'm ready. I'm just making sure you're ready. Rebecca in Philly says, Happy Golden Blurs Day to myself. So many Golden Blurs days today. I'm impressed. Rebecca says, Here's hoping 43 is all 360 spins and slam dunk pointers. At the very least, things are going to start happening to me now. To be 43. Yeah.

The world is just at your feet.

Do you remember the time? I don't think you do. This was something that me and Genevieve, it slipped into our vernacular. It was a fleeting, fleeting, fleeting moment at the Sasquatch Music Festival when we were there with you and a bunch of other people that we knew. And Sean Datori was there, Japan's number one mixer. and there was some kind of crusty dude I believe who was like kind of coming over to our little camp area and he had a dog on a rope I don't even remember what happened or if there was any aggro-ness between folks all I remember is I was not super interested in chatting with him but he seemed to be like the group absorbed him in some way or whatever but then he was like leaving and walking away or something and he just said I got the world on a string And without missing a beat, Sean DeTorey said, and a dog on a rope. And it made me laugh so much. That was one of the funniest things I've ever heard. Bagel, bagel, bagel, bagel, boogle.

I think about it to this day.

And a dog on a rope. You remember that joke. It was so good. I remember that specific moment. It was so, like, just like he didn't miss a beat. I'm so glad you remember that. Absolutely. Because that's one of those small fleeting things in life that Genevieve and I talk about. I know.

I know Genevieve is particularly a fan because I've heard her say it in the years, in the subsequent years.

It pops up. All right, last one here. This is from our pal Summer who says, I want to wish a very happy birthday to my mom who is 84 going on 11 as in a TBTL 11. Nice. Nice indeed. She just blew out her birthday candles and a Blur's Day shout-out would absolutely make her day. Mom, I love you to the edge of the observable universe and back, and I'm so glad. This is our friend Summer, who is the astrophysicist. Of course, yes. And I believe Summer and her mom had a big cross-country move or a big significant move recently. And Summer says, I'm so glad we get to spend every day, the good ones and the hard ones, together. Let's keep doing nothing and see what happens. summer. Do you know what magic just happened? This has never happened before. The music faded out exactly as I finished reading your sentence. I didn't fade it out. The music ended. That was beautiful. What are you playing over there?

I don't even know. My computer just started firing something and I can't even get to the screen of where it is and I just muted my computer. I thought that that was a nice end too to the segment. A random blip of sound from somewhere in the bowels of my computer.

We had, this is maybe last week or something, Genevieve and I were recording our podcast. That's right, it was the Monday after the Super Bowl, so we're recording a very long edition of our podcast.

Although I hear less long this year than some previous time.

Yeah, exactly. It was not four and a half hours this time. It was a mere three hours. We left a lot on the table, as you can imagine. But we knew our contractor, Adrian, was going to be coming over sometime while we were recording, which is fine. We just left the door unlocked for him, and we heard him come in during the recording, and we didn't say hello or anything. We just kept on going, and then eventually he left, and then we kept going, and then eventually we were done with the podcast. And we came out of the podcasting room, this very studio here, and Genevieve's desk is set up in the basement in an area that doesn't have, like, she doesn't have her own kind of walls or door like I do. She's just got a desk set up here in the basement. And her computer, which looks to be asleep, is blasting through the tinny laptop speaker some audio of somebody going on and on about Christianity and religion or something like that. And we have no idea why. Now, Genevieve was probably doing a lot of, she probably had a million tabs open and a lot of YouTube tabs open for show prep before she came in here. but we can't figure out how this thing would have been fired because her computer was asleep and it doesn't take too long for it to go to sleep and we'd been in here for a long time we're like how long has this thing been droning on and on and on about christianity just one male voice talking we couldn't hear what it was and she stops it and then we're like that's really weird we're like god i wonder if adrian heard that does he think we're crazy was he using your computer for something and bumped it that that seemed very unlikely again the computer is this his favorite show and he just is this his favorite show like what's going on and then that was that night and then we forgot about it and then maybe i don't know if the next day or the next monday or something uh age the next time we're talking to adrian he's like so are you guys very religious which is an interesting question to ask somebody uh but i think you could probably tell by this point that we don't come off as the super religious kind right remember an earlier question was do you i smoke a lot of pot in this basement they're like yes sir we do oh i didn't i don't think i

don't i don't know if you had mentioned that before i didn't remember sure yeah you mean

did you assume that we would like go outside or something if we're gonna no no i just didn't know that he had asked you that oh yeah oh that he asked it yeah so it was sort of like i don't know i'm sure like you know we've been working with him for a while now we joke around with him we know each other's vibes i think he was surprised to come in and just hear some random like podcasty thing going on and on and on about religion from what seemed to be a religious standpoint and we're like no we have no idea what that was he's like i don't know he's like i recognize the voice because i've heard that same voice on podcasts that my son listens to about machiavelli or something like that i lost the thread at that point i was like i don't know what happened i'm still curious how's this how this computer just started randomly playing some audio that

would never have dialed up this is a very weird hazard of the modern digital age but sometimes i'll be doing something and i've got my phone going and either i'm like i'm watching something that i want to be watching or maybe it's tick tock or who knows but then i'm like in the middle of something i'm somewhere else in the room i'm up on a little ladder or whatever and it's either the same clip is just repeating a million times or it starts yeah going down some sort of playlist rabbit hole of, and then it's like weird ad. for things that you don't care about and like and you can end up with something happening on the phone and but you're too physically far away from it to go change it or you're too engrossed in what you're doing what i've had the real version of this for me is mostly tick tock related i'm like looking at a tick tock but then i go do something else and it's just whatever that tick tock is let's say it's 43 seconds i'll end up listening to it 15 times because the phone is across the room for me i'm now i'm engrossed enough in something else that i'm not going back to the phone but i'm still hearing it yeah i know exactly crazy loop i know exactly and sometimes i'll like

i want to listen to it twice maybe you've sent me something like hey maybe it's a good show tape or something right and then i'll i'll listen to it and then i'll i want to listen to it again maybe without the visuals and see how it works and but then you set it down and then you're right you just walk away a little bit and um and then you're like oh i can't reach that thing and it's still still just going and then you're like going insane you're like i will never use this tape because it's making me angry. I'm scrolling, and I'm trying to waste some time here because I'm trying to bide my time. I came across something the other day that was the funniest video I've maybe ever seen. I was going to bed, and this came across my blue sky, and I'm scrolling so fast right now, hoping I can find this thing. And somebody said, well, this is, if anybody wants to know the importance of editing, this video will explain it to you. and I can't find it. Oh, I watched this.

Do you know the one where the- You sent it to me. Did I? Or did I just watch it? Did I just see it on Blue Sky? I might have retweeted it. I saw you referencing it on Blue Sky.

Okay, so at least you watched it because I don't think that I can- That's right, I retweeted it, so maybe you were just seeing it because we follow each other and or whatever we call it. I don't say skeet. Anyway, and it's just like- It's one of those videos where, you know, a woman who's, I don't know, maybe our age, maybe a little bit older, is putting like a mint into a two liter of coke and it's going to explode all over her it's like a mentos and she's she's not our age she's older than us yeah she's maybe yeah maybe 10 20 years older than us yes and um she uh and it would just usually be a funny video because a woman would say well last time i tried this i did something a little bit wrong but i got a different kind of coke this time or something

along the lines of that she seems she seems suspicious that it's going to actually create

a big explosion a big explosion like another like kind of a homemade volcano or whatever and so but the thing is whoever made this video that i watched was making a parody of some sort of video game i guess which will sort of flash forward and yeah it kind of doesn't matter but this person kept almost almost like the crazy edits in lombard it was just like they would take split second flash forwards of her after the thing explodes in her face as it was it kept on like foreshadowing what's about to happen and then when it actually happens I I honestly can't remember the last time I laughed that hard by myself the first time I saw that it came across my blue sky I was going to bed you smoke a lot of weed in that basement I was up and I was up in my bedroom and I believe this was I believe this was a sober brain although who knows yes but I'm I open this up i'm going to bed and i watch it i can't get enough of it i just keep hitting play the whole thing is maybe 30 seconds long tops yeah and i am genevieve's downstairs i think she might have fallen asleep on a couch somewhere or something i am clutching my stomach on the edge of my bed laughing so hard and laughing in that uncontrollable way i hadn't laughed that hard like since i was a kid and i'd stayed up all night with my friend and i we no longer had any ability to contain it ourselves we're just laughing and crying only i'm up in my bedroom and i just keep watching it over and over and over again so i don't know follow me on blue sky if you're looking

for i was a little i wouldn't say how do i put this i was unsure what i was going to see because again your post on blue sky was something like i think am i crazy or is this the funniest thing i've ever it was something where you were kind of like i don't know if this is just me yeah kind of deal yeah and so i was like i don't know if it is just andrew and so then i'm watching it that it's like there's something about the the visual comedy of how it's edited and and and the kind of brute force of the imagery yes kind of like and it just kind of like the weird like we know how the story goes she doesn't think it's going to explode in her face and then it does but there's something about jumping right to that part and then going to the kind of setup and then like it's just it's a very interesting visual style but it's like super duper funny and funnier than if it was just i don't know if this is going to work i'm putting the things in now it's blowing up on me it's like there's something about the way that the joke is repeated and and previewed in a way that just like really really adds to the humor and because she makes a gurgle sound at one

point when it blows up in her face so now that we've set that up like that i will play the audio of this

I'm curious how it works as audio I'll play it at the very end of the show after we suck out of here well I guess that's our cue then to wrap things on up on this Thursday hey hopefully I'll see some of y'all down at Livewire tonight for the rest of you we'll be right back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio so please do stop on by for that in the meantime everybody have a great Thursday take care of yourselves and please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all

You know, I found out the hard way the last time that I tried this, and I haven't seen this time with any other sodas before, and I just don't think it's going to be as crazy.

Power out.