Muse

tbtl hey guys it's me andrew uh this is a strange thing to say but this is not an episode of tbtl you are listening to right now um i realize that can be somewhat uh confusing or maybe misleading given the fact that i am talking to you on a podcast that popped up in your tbtl podcast feed So, hmm, I guess when is a TBTL really a TBTL? But here's the deal. The real TBTL, where it's me and Luke spoofing around, that's going to come later on today. Actually, more like tonight. The reason being is Luke is working on some projects this week that will have our recording schedule pushed back like significantly. We usually wake up here and start recording the show about 9 a.m. West Coast time. And this week, like today, we might not even start recording until as late as like 530, potentially. And that's, again, West Coast time, which means if you're on the East Coast, like you might not be seeing your regular TV TL for the next couple of days until pretty late at night. So my apologies for that. But I think they're going to be good shows, by the way, where they're going to be full real TV TLs with all the spoofing and goofing and drops and everything. In fact, Luke will be he's in town here, so he's going to be swinging by my place later tonight to record today's episode or tonight's episode of TBTL. And it's always fun when he's he's in studio with me here. I think the energy is always a little bit better. So I'm excited about that. But while I'm here, you know, sending you this little message, I figure we could have a little bit of fun today. I have some emails and voicemails that I've been wanting to share with you, but kind of keep on not getting to them during the show. So including a funny story here, I'm holding it in my hand, by the way, this is a printed out Luke would be so proud. I'll make sure to mention this to him later when I see him. But, you know, we talk a lot about mascots on this show. And of course, we were talking about Mr. Met quite a bit last week, I think, or a couple of weeks ago. And I didn't realize that the Cincinnati Reds have a mascot called Mr. Red, which is apparently very similar to Mr. Met. And listener Brian sent in an article with some background about Mr. Red. Here, I'll just say Mr. Red and Mr. Met are mascot first cousins, but only one was threatened by the Secret Service. And this was something written in pen live back in 2014. And I'm going to share that story with you. It's pretty great. um also uh i'm sure that a lot of you i got a lot of nice messages from a lot of folks over this weekend i'm sure a bunch of you have heard through social media and and what have you that we did indeed have to say goodbye to my dear old cat theo this weekend and uh that was you know tough and it remains tough um but i asked luke uh when we do the show later on today

I asked him if we could just not talk about it like at all like not even I don't even want I don't even want to acknowledge it with like a sympathetic hey buddy how you doing at the top of the show because it's really hard to talk about without me just becoming like a big slobbering mess and I just I just don't want to do that like I know that we are very open about our feelings on the show and I'm not you know I'm not too as you know I'm not too manly to cry but i also just don't want to be like you know kind of choking and it's just tough man it's it's it's we're just really sad right now i'm really sad right now and um you know i i know that what i should be doing right now and i'm a little disappointed in myself is i should be you know doing like a a nice tribute to theo and talking about how much he meant to me and what a great caddy was but again i kind of i can't i don't think i'm in an emotional place to do that right now um and also i like to think that throughout the show um maybe the show itself has been a tribute to him especially uh more recently as he became a bigger and bigger part of the show because he wouldn't shut up during the show and of course i was talking about him a lot as he kind of got older and sicker and what have you and um you know part of me was worried that if i didn't talk about theo at all today um or just talk about him in in this in this manner that i'm talking about him now you guys would all think I'm like a sociopath or something and uh rest assured I don't think I'm a sociopath in fact I might even be can you be too much not a sociopath like can you because that might be what I am like I'm just one big nerve ending that's ready to start crying at the drop of a hat so um I didn't want to kind of do a messy uh a tear filled show I'm sure as uh you know as the days and weeks progress we will talk more about Theodenal come up um and he will continue to be a part of conversations in my life but um i wish i could do something more special right now um One thing that I noticed, too, is, you know, a lot of times now we talk about how Luke and I overshare or maybe just share our personal lives on this show. But, I mean, we all do that now, right, with social media and everything. And often when a pet dies, there will be a tribute on social media. In fact, I even saw today that listener Alex, I actually don't know if Alex still listens to TBTL, but they also lost their cat over the weekend. and wrote just a really, really beautiful tribute to their cat on Instagram. And, you know, I thought, boy, I should really do something like that. But I just, I can't explain why I don't want to. I promise you, I don't think I'm a sociopath. I just, I don't know, in a certain way, it's still very just personal, and maybe I'm clinging to it because it's just mine right now,

And it's just really personal. And I just kind of don't feel like sharing, sharing much. And you guys know how much I love Theo. So hopefully I don't have to, you know, kind of get into all the details of why or how that love manifested for you to know that that I care deeply about this. And, you know, I appreciate all the kind words and your patience with me as, you know, we kind of go through all of this. um by the way my nose speaking of like just crying too much you guys should see or maybe let me rephrase that you guys should definitely not see my nose right now I've been blowing my nose for the past like I don't know how when did this start time has no meaning anymore but I don't know four days ago and when things started to go really downhill and um I even bought something I don't usually buy which is those those tissues um with lotion in them I hate those things they always leave my fingers feeling I don't know lotiony um but no we went for the big guns we got a couple of boxes of those and we're out already so as soon as i'm done recording this i'm going to go across the street and do another tissue run um but uh thanks again to everybody for your your kind notes you sent me this weekend and text messages and emails and social media messages it really does mean a lot oh i know hey listen before i get off this topic because i want to get into some happier conversation here in a second but before i get off of this topic i did want to just say one thing that vives and i really spent a lot of time reminding ourselves of this weekend because obviously we were sad right that's that's what happens when you lose a pet you know maybe even especially a pet that you've had for so long I mean Theo has been part of our relationship since the very beginning of our relationship we got him together probably way too early in our relationship honestly if we were more responsible people but luckily it all worked out but you know obviously we're just incredibly sad and we cried our heads off this weekend but it was really good to remind ourselves that this was not a tragedy you know I mean how many people people how many people listening to this have gone through like real tragedies in their life here in in the tbtl community alone just think about the people who we've talked about on the show like true friends of the show who have left us far far too early and just people who've suffered far far too much um those are tragedies you know and vives and i while we were really sad this week and it was a good reminder of just how goddamn lucky we've been like we have not been touched by tragedy much if at all in our lives together and that's just something to really appreciate i think so so there you go for anybody out there thinking i'm i'm being too unfeeling i don't think that that's really a thing by the way but you know first of all i'm not a sociopath but also for the folks out there who think i'm maybe crying too much about losing a pet um i understand that this is um we were just lucky we were lucky to have them for so long so uh having said all of that do you guys want to do some emails let's get my nose up on this

negativity train what say 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 where should we start how about this you want to talk about Oreos. We talked a lot about Oreos last week on the show, and you guys were sending in a lot of life hacks on how to fully dunk an Oreo using a fork. Why did this come up? Does anybody even remember why we're talking about Oreos so much on the show? I, for one, do not remember, but I got a voicemail from listener Jake in Chicago, aka The Perfect Daddy. I'm glad Luke's not here to hear that, saying that he actually has a better alternative to Oreos. Now, a lot of you are probably thinking right now, oh, yeah, you're talking about JoJo's, those Trader Joe's Oreo-style cookies. But that is actually not what Jake is talking about here.

Hey, boys, it's The Perfect Daddy. Just calling in to say the best version of Oreo, Andrew is right. It's the double stuff, but not the Nabisco brand or whatever Oreos. main brand is it's the walgreens recreation of the double stuff oreo if you can find it get it asap it's so good i don't know what they do to it but it's better than the real brand walgreens double stuff unfortunately haven't been able to find it in probably five years uh all right that's it just just a cookie right all right i really should have thought about this

before the show because now I'm racking my brain. I cannot. And I'm sure that all of you know why we were talking about Oreos so much. I cannot remember the origin of this. What's the Oreo origins? But somehow Genevieve became part of this conversation, too, because she stopped by Trader Joe's last week at some point and bought a bag of JoJo's. Again, the Trader Joe style Oreo cookies or what have you. And she had never had them before. And she said, yeah, you planted the idea in my head and this is all they had, and I said, oh, well, JoJo's, I think a lot of people actually think they're better than the original Oreos. Isn't that right? Like, do we have JoJo heads out there? Because I feel like it's one of those almost, I don't know, culty kind of things, the cult of JoJo's, right? People, like, swear by them, but Genevieve ended up trying them. Maybe I built them up too much, because I said, oh, you're going to try the JoJo's, very exciting, and then she tried them, and she said, these are definitely not as good as Oreos. I'll be honest with you, I ended up not trying them. So good, good journalism on my part there. So I can't weigh in on this, but I was kind of astounded. I was like, Genevieve, people love JoJo's. There's a whole thing about JoJo's. And she's like, well, those people are wrong. So you can take, you can take that up with her. I'm not getting involved, but a listener. Jake was apparently talking about Walgreens brand Oreo style cookies. If you see them, grab them, maybe send them some, Just send it to Perfect Daddy, Chicago, Illinois. I was telling you earlier about this link that was sent to me by Brian in Seattle. It's an article from PennLive back in 2014 written by columnist David Jones about Mr. Red. That name, doesn't that sound like something from like some sort of like anti-communist propaganda? Watch out for Mr. Red. But apparently Mr. Red is actually the mascot for the Cincinnati Red. And David Jones, who is a Reds fan, apparently grew up really hating Mr. Red. I'm going to read a little bit from this article. Everything about Mr. Red was totally indicative of the club's tight-fisted, knit-witted management. Mindless, arbitrary, and done on the dirt cheap. Right down to the fact that Mr. Red had a number on his uniform, number 27. Not like 81 for the year, or something zany like number 000, or even something really wrong like number 666. No, Mr. Redd was number 27. Why number 27? Nobody knew. It was recently reported by a Redds blogger that club majority owner Francis Dale, who would later become a member of Richard Nixon's infamous committee to reelect the president, he assigned number 27 to Mr. Redd because his kid's favorite baseball player was Dale Maxville. Yes, Dale Maxville, a journeyman shortstop best known for playing in the 1967 World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals, but never even played for the Reds.

That's why the Reds mascot is number 27, based on some baseball player who didn't even play for the Reds. Now, of course, I'm excerpting this column from, you know, columnist David Jones. But then David Jones in his column, he excerpts from a book by author A.J. Mass. And A.J. Mass is one of the people who actually played Mr. Met. OK, so this isn't Mr. Red anymore. This is Mr. Met. And A.J. Mass is one of the people who was inside the Mr. Met suit back in the 90s. In fact, A.J. Maas was playing Mr. Met when President Bill Clinton visited Shea Stadium in 1997. And this is the excerpt from his book about what his interaction with the Secret Service was like. So bear with me here. This is another kind of long excerpt. Now, listen to me very carefully, the agent tells me. As he continues to speak, he does something that nobody else has ever done in all of my years as Mr. Met. He isn't looking up, as everyone automatically does when talking to me, because most people out of habit make eye contact with the person they are talking to, even if the person appears to be a giant living baseball. So I've gotten used to seeing people's necks when they address me because they're craning their heads up to meet what appears to be my gaze. But the man in the dark suit is staring directly into the recess of Mr. Met's mouth, knowing full well that even though he isn't able to see inside, it's exactly where I am looking out from. It's hard to explain how utterly creeped out I am by this The closest thing I can compare it to Is the opening scene of the movie Scream In which Drew Barrymore's character

answers what she thinks is a harmless crank call, and the strange voice on the other end of the line asks her what her name is. You never told me your name.

Why do you want to know my name?

Because I want to know who I'm looking at.

What did you say?

In an instant, Drew knows that she's in a whole lot of trouble, and that's exactly the vibe I'm starting to get from the man in the dark suit. Needless to say, he has my full attention. He says, we have snipers all around the stadium, just in case something were to happen. Like I said, do whatever it is you normally do. Nobody will bother you, but approach the president, and we go for the kill shot. Are we clear? That, my friends, is a power out if I ever heard one. All right, thanks for that link, Brian, in Seattle. Did I have anything else here that I wanted to share with you guys? Oh, yeah, let me play this. I've had this in the chamber for quite some time, but I never got around to playing it last week or the week before. This is from our friend Maggie, who I believe is also, Maggie is out in Swarthmore, right? That's Pennsylvania too. I think I got that right. Anyway, we were talking about hard words to say. I don't know how we got on this. Obviously, there's a lot of words that I struggle with, but aesthetic is the one. I can't say that word. And the problem is that is a word that I feel like I use a lot or need to use a lot, aesthetic. There, did I say it? Did I do it right that time here? I can sometimes do it when I hear it. I have it on the dictionary.com here.

Aesthetic.

Aesthetic. The computer makes it seem so easy. Aesthetic. Aesthetic. That's what I said. Anyway, that word always trips me up, and Maggie says she has one of those as well.

Hi, guys. This is Maggie from outside of Philadelphia, and I was listening to you guys talk about the words you can never say, whether it's Andrew's cryogenics or Luke's apothecary, and the word I can never ever say is statistics and that's how I have to say it, I have to like gear myself up because otherwise it comes out all sorts of other ways that I'm not even going to try to do on the voicemail I guess, because I'm ticketing out, but anyway, thanks guys, I love the show you take me on my commute every day

bye. That's right, it was and I'm going to try this again, having heard Maggie just say it, it's cry I know. See, that's the thing I can. The problem with me saying that word is I can't picture it. I literally I think I don't know how it's spelled and I don't know where the R's go. Cryogenics. That's it, right? Cryogenics. I think I'm always trying to jam more R's into there. Cryogenics. Look at me. What are the aesthetics of the chiro? Oh, damn it. I was so close to pulling that off. Let's see here. All right. That's probably good for today, right? Well, not for today. Again, remember, this wasn't this was not this was definitely not an episode of TBTL. Let's not sully the brand by calling this an episode of TBTL. The real TBTL will be coming out again, probably in, I don't know, five hours or so. I guess this is a podcast. Time doesn't really make sense anyway. So it'll be coming out later on today. Luke will be swinging by my apartment, and we plan on having some fun and kicking back and having a TBTL after dark. Of course, it's dark here at like 4 o'clock these days, so it's kind of easy to do a TBTL after dark. So, okay, let's leave it there. Thank you, as always, for your patience and your grace with us as we go through these types of things. So, all right, everybody, no power out here, but we will talk to you shortly.

If I could Maybe I'd give you my own Happy night When you're taken from me You can go your own way Go your own way You can call it another lonely day You can go your own way Go your own way Tell me why Everything's tearing around

Backing up, jacking up

So you won't do Therefore we wouldn't be here doing it Without you, the donors of the day Thank you so much

Thank you, baby, thank you, baby, thank you, baby, but everything's going to be bad.

That is such perfect timing, Theo. Oh, Theo. I love it.

Oh, man