#4434 Resident Allium

Summary

TBTL: Too Beautiful To Live – Episode #4434 "Resident Allium" Summary

Release Date: March 31, 2025

In episode #4434 of TBTL: Too Beautiful To Live, hosts Luke Burbank and Andrew Walsh delve into the quirky world of mustard enthusiasts, explore the shifting landscape of TikTok, and share humorous anecdotes from their adventures. This summary captures the essence of their engaging conversation, enriched with notable quotes and insightful discussions.

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1. Mustard Mania: A Journey to the National Mustard Museum

Andrew Walsh kicks off the episode by recounting his recent visit to the National Mustard Museum in Middleton, Wisconsin. Attending a mustard competition, Walsh shares his unexpected enthusiasm for the vibrant mustard culture he encountered.

Andrew Walsh [01:41]: "I was in Middleton, Wisconsin, yesterday at a mustard competition. Mustard. And I was surprisingly psyched about the whole thing. Honestly, it was very cool."

Walsh’s enthusiasm is palpable as he describes the variety and dedication surrounding mustard, contrasting it sharply with the more commonly enjoyed ketchup.

2. Stories from the Mustard Collectors: The Tale of Barry Levinson

A centerpiece of the discussion is the eccentric character Barry Levinson (not to be confused with the renowned film director). Levinson’s unique passion for collecting mustard jars stems from a personal epiphany during a tumultuous period in his life.

Andrew Walsh [02:29]: "He just had this epiphany. I'll just start trying to collect these mustard jars... 'If you collect them, they will come.'"

Levinson's journey from an assistant attorney general to a devoted mustard collector is both amusing and intriguing. Walsh narrates Levinson's belief in the power of mustard as a good luck charm, notably during a significant Supreme Court case.

Andrew Walsh [12:25]: "He was leaving his hotel room, and there's a room service tray with a jar of mustard... he argues in front of the Supreme Court with this jar of mustard in his pocket."

While both hosts express skepticism about the veracity of these tales, they acknowledge the charm and storytelling prowess that Levinson brings to the mustard community.

3. Mustard vs. Ketchup: A Culinary Rivalry

The conversation transitions to the fierce loyalty of mustard enthusiasts, emphasizing their active rejection of ketchup. This rivalry is humorously compared to the cultural tensions between Los Angeles and New York.

Andrew Walsh [03:40]: "People use ketchup, they put it on things... Mustard enthusiasts... it's an active rejection. It's not just enough to like mustard. You must also hate ketchup."

Walsh draws parallels between mustard lovers and New Yorkers, suggesting that mustard aficionados hold strong opinions against ketchup, much like New Yorkers often express disdain for LA.

Andrew Walsh [04:00]: "Ketchup is Los Angeles and mustard is New York... everybody in mustard really has a thought about ketchup."

4. The Evolution of TikTok: From Creative Hub to Ad-Saturated Platform

Shifting gears, the hosts examine TikTok’s transformation over the years. Andrew Walsh laments the platform’s shift from a creative space filled with diverse content to one dominated by advertisements and repetitive material.

Andrew Walsh [37:57]: "The algorithm is very smart... but now it's just turned into this really weird place where there's almost no new content."

Luke Burbank echoes these sentiments, noting a personal disinterest as the platform becomes increasingly commercialized.

Luke Burbank [42:39]: "It's actually less satisfying... Five years of my life... and then the full inshittification of TikTok for me to walk away from."

Their critique highlights a broader conversation about how social media platforms evolve and the impact on user experience.

5. Spice Overload: Andrew's Hilarious Hot Mustard Challenge

The episode reaches a comedic peak when Andrew Walsh describes his encounter with an exceptionally spicy mustard during the competition. Opting for an extra-large scoop, Walsh's reaction is both relatable and side-splitting.

Andrew Walsh [26:06]: "I take this overly large scoop... nothing happens. And then wham. Like, right on top of my head."

The vivid description of his experience, complete with involuntary physical reactions, adds a layer of humor and showcases the unpredictable nature of food competitions.

6. Listener Engagement and Culinary Tips

Throughout the episode, listener interactions enrich the conversation. Listener Jack from Honolulu provides detailed insights into cooking with garlic, emphasizing the importance of fresh ingredients over pre-chopped options.

Listener Jack [70:10]: "Whatever gets you to cook more and whatever makes your time cooking more fun is what you should be using."

This segment not only offers practical culinary advice but also reinforces the show’s community-oriented spirit.

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Concluding Thoughts

Episode #4434 of TBTL: Too Beautiful To Live masterfully blends humor with genuine discussions about food culture and the evolving dynamics of social media. Luke and Andrew's camaraderie shines through as they navigate through mustard competitions, TikTok frustrations, and personal anecdotes, making the episode both entertaining and insightful for listeners.

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Note: All quotes are attributed to the respective speaker with timestamps for authenticity and reference.

Transcript

[Luke Burbank]

Baby, everyone love me I'm living on imaginary radio I'm living on that TDTL TBTL this is the part where I'm.

[Andrew Walsh]

Supposed to do the whole intro thingy.

[Luke Burbank]

You know, I just came here to hit dingers and have a good time. That's about it. This is a show for dogs, about.

[Listener Jack]

Dogs, starring one dog and one dirty dog.

[Andrew Walsh]

Expect to feel several bone tremors and be perceived by all around you to be a disgrace. The comedy factor speaks for itself.

[Luke Burbank]

It's just painfully obvious. Yeah. It's an unfulfilled prophecy. It just has to be played out.

[Andrew Walsh]

Oh, this is fantastic. I've been waiting for this moment for months, and it's finally here. All right. Hello, good morning and welcome, everyone, to a Monday edition of tbtl, the show that just might be too beautiful to live.

[Luke Burbank]

This song goes out to all the.

[Andrew Walsh]

Coffee lovers of the world. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. Oh, yeah. Coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio, perched high above the mighty Columbia.

[Luke Burbank]

Bring it back home, baby.

[Andrew Walsh]

Bring it back home. Boy, does it feel nice to be home after a week plus on the road. Got all the comforts of home, including, of course, a Fresca. How about Fresca? Delicious can of Fresca. Ready to go. Ready to bring you episode 4434 in a collector series.

[Luke Burbank]

Let the fun begin.

[Andrew Walsh]

I was in Middleton, Wisconsin, yesterday at a mustard competition. Mustard. And I was surprisingly psyched about the whole thing. Honestly, it was very cool. And then I ate some very hot mustard on camera and then felt embarrassed, which we can get into coming up. But first, of course, we gotta say hello to this young man. The longest running cobra of the show may be best known for his depictions of the tall ships. And also, of course, the man who.

[Luke Burbank]

Brought the rock and roll edge to the Eagles.

[Andrew Walsh]

He's Andrew Walsh and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

[Luke Burbank]

Good morning, Luke. I was just thinking. I was sort of, sort of pondering your words, as I like to do.

[Andrew Walsh]

Thank you.

[Luke Burbank]

At the beginning of the show and it occurred to me, like, how much better it was that CBS sent you to cover a mustard gathering or convention or museum than a hot sauce. I feel like you would have had such a different attitude if you were going in looking at a bunch of little bottles of just like Mama's Flaming Behind Devil's sauce. Yeah, exactly like. That is not a good cultural fit for mustard, is it, really?

[Andrew Walsh]

Honestly, Andrew, I had a really great weekend in Middleton, Wisconsin, visiting the National Mustard Museum and It is sort of an interesting topic, honestly, because it seems to engender a real sort of fierce loyalty that, like, for instance, ketchup does not have. Like, you know, people use ketchup, they put it on things. Again, I've done a whole story on ketchup, but what I was not expecting was the mustard enthusiasts. Part of their enthusiasm for mustard is a rejection of ketchup. It's an active rejection. So it's not just enough to like mustard. You must also hate ketchup. It came up over and over again.

[Luke Burbank]

From people like, I don't like that.

[Andrew Walsh]

Well, it's. I didn't realize there was a rivalry. And it reminds me of the rivalry that I, in my experience, Los Angeles and New York have. And ketchup is Los Angeles and mustard is New York. And what I noticed living in New York and living in LA and traveling between them a lot was when I was in New York and I'd be talking about something in LA or going to la, people would be like, oh, God, that place, the traffic, the whatever, the smog. They were real kind of. There was a lot of anti LA sentiment. Like, I could never live anywhere but New York. And LA is just like a golden retriever. He'd be in LA and be like, I'm going out to New York. New York. Oh, cool. I love New York. Like, that's ketchup. Nobody in ketchup has a thought about mustard, but everybody in mustard really has a thought about ketchup. In fact, there was a listener, See if I can quickly grab their name. Who reached out to put it on my radar that there is a. Like, there's mustard influencers on TikTok, people who just really deal in a lot of mustard related content. And one of them, I think it was listener Kevin, by the way, who reached out. Thank you, Kevin. Turned me on to a woman who kind of goes by the name the Mustard Queen. I don't think we're going to interview her for this story, but it was kind of interesting to see how deep in the world of mustard she was. But her handle on. On TikTok is ketchup is garbage.

[Luke Burbank]

Geez Louise, ketchup is garbage. Just relax.

[Andrew Walsh]

So, I mean, yeah, I don't know if I'm not saying I agree or disagree with it, but it was kind of surprising to me that. Did you know, Andrew, that Saskatchewan, that's where most of the world's mustard seeds are grown. It's an ideal environment for mustard seed growth. Isn't that surprising? Saskatchewan?

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah. I would have thought that, like, I.

[Andrew Walsh]

Would have thought somewhere in, like, the subcontinent.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, I was gonna say, yeah, I did. I didn't have it in the States, certainly. I mean, listen, I'll come back to this ketchup and mustard thing. And I have. I have a, you know, chip on my shoulder about that because, like, people, like, for a while there talk about hot dogs and people writing you're doing. I just always hate the you're doing it wr wrong attitude. And I sort of feel like that's calmed down a little bit on the Internet in the same way people like just saying you're welcome when you didn't thank them. Like, they're just certain, like, sort of like edgy ways of communicating that kind of popped up during the Internet era that, like, kind of really grind my gears or making my. Make me grate my teeth a little bit. Grind my teeth a little bit. But all of that is to say, like, I do understand why mustard, with all due respect, ketchup, I eat them both. Mustard is just a more interesting story, though, because they're the. At least the way it's evolved. Like, the types of mustard are so varying. I mean, a stone ground mustard is nothing like that Coleman's English mustard I told you that I love so much or the Beaver brand sweet and spicy mustard that I love from Oregon. It's like each one of those is so different. And ketchup, I mean, how much, you know, I know that they've played around with some like, you know, spicy ketchup or a ketchup mayo kind of thing, but for the most part, you lock onto your brand. But it's not like, do you want the stone ground ketchup?

[Andrew Walsh]

You know what's also interesting about ketchup to me, as far as how different from mustard it is, is there's basically a couple of, you know, there's Heinz and then there's Hunts and there's maybe a few others. There's, you know, like, whatever the store brand might be. But what I think is interesting is there's nothing worse than a particular restaurant's artisanal attempt at ketchup. Like, it for some reason is something that is worse when it's dealt with with more love and care. Like, if small batch ketchup, there's nothing worse than being at a restaurant and asking for some ketchup with your fries and they bring out something that they've made that has some weird cardamom going on or whatever. It's like, it's. Whereas with mustard, you really could make your own. And there really are all these varieties and they're interesting for that reason.

[Luke Burbank]

I'm guessing you eat at more places with their homemade ketchup than I do. But I've had that before. I don't have a bad reaction to that. But you know what my version of that is? And it's, it's a different, it's usually going to be a different style of dining, of course. But when you go to a place and they, they're, they're serving like potato chips along with a sandwich or something like that and it's their homemade potato chips. I'm just like, no, I do not want your home. I hate homemade potato chips. Really? So much. Yeah, I hate the, it's, they're usually thicker and somehow less crispy. Yeah, it's hard to get.

[Andrew Walsh]

That's one of those things where whatever the, you know, whatever the lay's corporation, whoever they sold their soul to to just get that crisp thing dialed in. Whatever abomination is happening to those sliced.

[Luke Burbank]

Potatoes anymore, I'm not even sure whatever.

[Andrew Walsh]

That, I'm not, I'm not either. But like it's working. It's good. Or like a Pringle.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah.

[Andrew Walsh]

Like those are, that's, you know, those are tasty and crispy and it is hard to achieve those on the artisanal level. But so yeah, I on Saturday interviewed the guy who is the founder of. I'll tell you this, Andrew, on the record, but also off the record. This guy, his name's Barry Levinson. He's a really charming dude. He has like a million great stories. I don't know, I wonder if they might be ever so slightly apocryphal. Ever so slightly building the mythology. But they're great stories.

[Luke Burbank]

So Barry Levinson. Yeah. Also the name of a film director, right? Yeah. Not saying.

[Andrew Walsh]

Well, Barry Sonnenfeld. And then I think there was a producer or is he a director?

[Luke Burbank]

Barry, Barry Levinson is a director. I was just like Barry Levinson.

[Andrew Walsh]

I know it's not, but, but you're.

[Luke Burbank]

You'Re, I just needed to clear that out of my head. Yes. Okay.

[Andrew Walsh]

I, I, it was how I, it helped me remember this guy's name because there's a different Barry Levinson. So he was, this guy is like a real character. He's you know, he's wearing a mustard yellow collared shirt. He's wearing a tie with a hot dog on it that has mustard on it. He's like right out of central casting. He used to be the assistant attorney general. I Think of like the state of Wisconsin. That was his real job. And this is his story, Andrew, that in 1986 he's at this, he's from Worcester, Mass. Okay. And when. So he's a dyed in the wool Red Sox fan. And in 1986, when the Red Sox famously, they lost to the Mets, they appeared to have the World Series locked up. And then Bill Buckner had a ball go through his legs and it gave the Mets a chance and the Mets end up winning the series. His story is that he was so depressed from this when the Red Sox lost the 1986 World Series that he didn't know what to do with himself. And he just found himself wandering an all night grocery store, a shopping cart. And he just found himself standing in front of the mustard section. And he just had this epiphany. I'll just start trying to collect these mustard, these mustard jars. And he, he said, I, he said it to me, he said it to other interviewers. I heard him saying it to random attendees. He was like, and that something just said to me, if you collect them, they will come. And I did. And you have Mustach. And that's such a great story. And I wonder if it's true. But he tells it so well. I think I'm just going to have to. In the story. What I'm going to have to do is I was talking to our producer, I was like, we're going to need to footnote these with according to Levinson, like just put that out there that this might be real. Because this is his other big story. He is. And this really happened. He argued a case in front of the U.S. supreme Court, the William Renquist U.S. supreme Court. And this was a year or two after his mustard epiphany. So now he's on the prowl for mustard. And his story is he's leaving his hotel room. He's literally walking over to the U.S. supreme Court. And he's in the hallway of the hotel and there's like a room service tray. You know, someone's already had their room service. And then they put the tray back outside and it had one of those jars of mustard.

[Luke Burbank]

Well, the little mini guys, the little.

[Andrew Walsh]

Mini guys, which are really kind of cute little objects, you know. And he's walking by and he, at this point he's trying to accumulate any mustard that he doesn't have. He's building his collection. And so he looks around and figures this is fair game because people are done with their meal. So he gets the mustard. He puts it in his pocket. And according to him, he argues in front of the Supreme Court with this jar of mustard in his pocket. And it was a good luck talisman. He ends up winning the case. And that jar of mustard is framed in a little thing at the Mustard Museum. Again, also a great story. Difficult, difficult. To our producer. You want to know about dedication to the craft. Our producer, Young Kim, read the entire Supreme Court case to see if any of the justices commented upon the mustard can. It's the mustard jar.

[Luke Burbank]

Is that mustard in your pocket? Are you just excited to argue in front of the Supreme Court?

[Andrew Walsh]

Literally, what Barry said to me on camera was, and the last question From Sandra Day O'Connor was, is that a jar of mustard in your pocket, or are you just happy to see us? And then he pauses and he goes, that is, of course, a joke.

[Luke Burbank]

Okay. I was going to say there's no way that's true. Like, who would guess?

[Andrew Walsh]

There's no way that happened.

[Luke Burbank]

Although, if he does have it framed. Let me just give you my. As you recount those stories for me, let me give you my gut check on it, because I know that's what you really need is the. Honestly, the second one. I think both of them have kernels of truth to them, you know, and.

[Andrew Walsh]

Certainly based on true events.

[Luke Burbank]

Based on true events. And also, like, I'll be honest, like, the way I remember things, even before I started retelling a lot of the stories from my past on the show for my job, just in reaching, retelling or recounting them for myself, there are certain things that I remember from, like, high school, like, when I met a huge chunk of my friends. I remember it all happening on one very special evening. And the more I think about it, I'm like, that couldn't have quite happened the way I remember it, you know, like. And so. But I know that there's a lot of truth to that, to my memories of that night as well. So it's kind of like. Well, over time, you tell stories almost kind of like we're discussing. Mulaney had somebody call into his show. I don't think you heard it. And he kind of just finally hung up on the guy. He's like, you've been telling this story for too many years. You've turned it into a yarn. You've added too many little details to it. And so that's what the first story feels like to me. Like, I could. I totally could imagine being as. I mean, how a Red Sox fan must have felt. Did you say that was 84 or 86, I can't remember. And, like, how a Red Sox fan must have felt after that. Must have been like the lowest of low you can feel as a sports fan because of the whole idea of breaking the curse and just feeling like we were being thrown back into the darkness. Like, it just like, I can't imagine a more devastating blow. And that's somebody who was rooting for the Seahawks in 2015, you know, so. So I can imagine being stunned. I can literally imagine being like, I don't know what to do with myself right now. And I can imagine myself wandering around a grocery store. You know what I mean?

[Andrew Walsh]

Actually, just all sounds like something you would do.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah. Actually, wait a second. My name is Barry.

[Andrew Walsh]

I could imagine myself fighting a security guard at sars.

[Luke Burbank]

I can imag of myself getting tased.

[Andrew Walsh]

In the meat aisle at sars.

[Luke Burbank]

But anyway, so I can sort of imagine maybe just even, you know, like, going there and like, maybe buying a bunch of mustard. I don't believe that in the grocery store, he thought to himself, I will start a museum. And I certainly don't believe. And I'm sure this is just a bit of a joke that he put to the end. And I said, if they build it, they will come.

[Andrew Walsh]

That is referenced.

[Luke Burbank]

Like, that is so corny. I don't believe that. I don't believe that a man is going around framing a special little bottle of mustard just so that he can go and. And say that.

[Andrew Walsh]

No, no, no, I don't think there's any.

[Luke Burbank]

I believe that that is probably. There's probably even more truth to that one. Sure.

[Andrew Walsh]

And apparently he loaned it out to someone else who was arguing, a kind of a younger attorney who was arguing in front of the Wisconsin State Supreme Court. He, like, loaned it to him as a good luck sort of talisman. So, no, no, I. I don't think that the. I don't think that there's any intentional mistruths. I just think these are really good stories that have been told lots of times, and I'm fully including them in the. In the piece, but I want to footnote them that. That this is, you know, kind of. This is this person's version of events. I, by the way, ran into a couple of tens first. I think it was Laura came by on Saturday and got to chat with her. I think she was over from Madison at the mustard museum or the mustard store. That's like, it's a gift shop upstairs. That's what I was really into. Andrew. I bought, like, I don't know, 80 bucks worth of mustard that I'm having shipped home. And I am psyched about it. Like dill pickle mustard. I got some Stormin Gorman Thomas, which is, I couldn't get over that. Like, so there's a baseball player named Gorman Thomas who was a Milwaukee Brewer. So folks in the, in Wisconsin remember him, but he was also a Seattle Mariner. And he was a Seattle Mariner right when I was coming into consciousness about the Mariners. And we had these two guys, I don't even know if they were on the team at the same time, but Gorman Thomas, I included a picture of him in the text chain yesterday when Gorman Thomas was a Mariner. He looked like he was roughly 75 years old. And we had this other guy, our, our, we had a pitcher named Gaylord Perry who was roughly 80 years old when he pitched for the Mariners. Gaylord Perry's whole thing was he used to somehow figure out ways to get spit on the ball. He was a 300 game winner. Gaylord Perry. But he was at the way end of his career and he was like always like everybody knew that he was doctoring the ball somehow, but it just, I guess they just let him do it because it was like, ah, what do you. It's Gaylord Perry. So we had like Gorman Thomas and Gaylord Perry. These two just elderly looking dudes to me, you know, playing for the Mariners. This like young startup recently, you know, minted team or whatever. So when I thought there was a Gorman Thomas mustard, which. So I found out that he was this year in the competition, one of his mustards was in. And this is what I really want to get down to. Oh, by the way, I also met up with a 10 named Andrew who was judging the contest on Sunday. He was one of the many judges and he works for public television in Wisconsin. And he said that there was a period of time where he had somehow just in his life in public broadcasting. He. Because I guess Rewind was on in Wisconsin, you know, that like, satire show that was hosted by Bill Radke that I worked on. And I guess Rewind had sent out as a promotional offer, like rainbonnets, like Rewind branded rain bonnets to stations, like as a little tchotchke probably because like we're from Seattle, it rains or whatever. And he said that he, he used to have one. He was going to send it to me. He can't find it anymore. I was like, oh my God, dude, I got to get eyes on that.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, definitely.

[Andrew Walsh]

I love some old weird public radio Ephemera.

[Luke Burbank]

That is a. That is a weird. That is a weird giveaway, especially because I feel like other parts of the country. It's also interesting that Seattle back then was still trying to, like, kind of tell the world who it was, sort of.

[Andrew Walsh]

Sure.

[Luke Burbank]

Like, I don't know if you do that today.

[Andrew Walsh]

And also we were going with, you know, I mean, that must have been such a Hail Mary. That was probably like, we're getting distributed by. In fact, maybe NPR made that. I think we were distributed by npr, which didn't mean much except that they were allegedly supposed to get us on a bunch of stations. But that might have even been promotion from them from D.C. or something, or whoever did their thing. But all that is to say I was very impressed at how seriously the judges and everybody was taking the mustard championship on Sunday. So what happens is people who make mustard, including baseball player Gorman Thomas, one time baseball, one time Seattle Mariner Gorman Thomas, all these people and companies, too, you know, like professionalized companies, they will make these different mustards, and then they will submit them to the contest. And then there's like, it's double blind. Like, nobody knows what brand of mustard they're tasting. They're not supposed to know anyway. Nothing is labeled. I mean, it's a very serious process. The. The guy, Barry Levinson, not the director, he, like, discourages people from sitting near anyone they know. And you're not allowed to influence anyone else's thoughts on a what mustard. They like. There's no kind of, like, you know, jury tampering or whatever.

[Luke Burbank]

Like, is it broken? Serious category, though. So if it's a blind test, like, you can't be comparing, like I say, I mean, there's. It's so disparate to the different kinds of mustard. It must be broken down by category. Right.

[Andrew Walsh]

There are, I think, like 12 or 13 categories. There's like the most of the ones that you would think of. There's Dijon is a category. Of course, Deli is a category.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, that would be a fun one.

[Andrew Walsh]

Then there's exotic. There's fruit, a lot of fruit. Mustard. Yeah. And then there's like, hot, and then there's like super hot. And then there was this other one, it was explained to me where the particular kind, where the heat comes from the mustard seed somehow. And it's a very. Maybe horseradish, too. I don't know. But it's a very intense initial kind of punch, and then it goes away quickly. Whereas there's a kind of other category of heat where it sort of stays with you longer, if that makes any sense.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah.

[Andrew Walsh]

So, but the folks that were doing the judging, some of them are chefs, some of them are food writers, some of them are kind of regular citizens. But like, again, people were taking this very seriously. And it was funny because as I was collecting up all the different mustards that I was purchasing and having the very nice owner of the shop, I believe her name is Patty, she was like, she told me that her phone had just been ringing and it was Gorman Thomas trying to find out if his mustard had, if his mustard had made it through to the next round. And she was like, I don't know. But I love the fact that this mythical guy from my youth is somewhere in Wisconsin calling up the mustard museum to find out if he's moved on to the next round of the mustard championship.

[Luke Burbank]

Do you remember a few years ago I stopped randomly by a garage sale and there was some fellow who was selling like old baseball cards for like really, really cheap. And he was just selling like packs that he made of old mariners. And I was going to go through these and see if I could find a Gorman card. And what I had forgotten about was last year at some point and in a very Andrew moment, I decided to alphabetize all of these. So I can tell you in. I have a Lee Gutterman. Do you know Lee Guterman? Guterman. I have Lee Guterman. I got him. I have, oh, I do have a Ken Griffey Sr.

[Andrew Walsh]

Okay.

[Luke Burbank]

But it looks like I'm going to be missing out on a Gorman. Unfortunately. I go from Fleming to a Griffey to Guterman.

[Andrew Walsh]

Fleming. Dave Fleming.

[Luke Burbank]

Let me see here. That would be a Dave Fleming, a left handed pitcher.

[Andrew Walsh]

You don't have a Scott Bankhead.

[Luke Burbank]

A Bankhead, that's going to be in a different package for a Scott Bankhead sinker ball pitcher. I thought maybe, because I have probably about a hundred of these things, I was hoping that maybe I'd have a Gorman, but unfortunately I don't. That could have been your Gorman, man. I would have given it to you.

[Andrew Walsh]

Oh, man, that would have been pretty dope. But yeah, so I, I, I found myself really intrigued by the whole process and I, I've been, I've been converted. I, I've, like I said, I, I, I will never, I can't imagine running out of mustard ever again in my life. Andrew.

[Luke Burbank]

Well, what did you. Okay, first, first of all, stop. Ketchup. Hate. We just want to put that out there. Maybe that's a, maybe that's some bumper.

[Andrew Walsh]

Stickers there's ketchup visibility, day end.

[Luke Burbank]

That's right. And then aside from that. Well, what did you get as far as mustard? Did you get a wide range?

[Andrew Walsh]

I did. Well, first of all, they made us some. Like, this actually happens fairly frequently. And it's very sweet. It's very kind. They sort of gave us a. A number of jars of mustard that they had, like, printed out a CBS Sunday Morning label for and kind of gave it to us as a sort of a surprise gift. And I believe it said it's like CBS Sunday Morning, the news show that cuts the mustard or something. And then the actual mustard, I think was made, is made by the Beaver Company. Oh, right down in Portland. Turns out Portland is really pop. Or Oregon is really popping off with the mustard culture. I didn't know this, of course. The Beaver brand.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, that's a big one.

[Andrew Walsh]

Pretty famous in the Northwest and has won a variety of gold medals in this competition.

[Luke Burbank]

Glad to hear. It's one of my favorite.

[Andrew Walsh]

And I think there's one called Kelly's that's out of Pendleton, Oregon, which is also really yummy. So I got. They have a whole. They have mustard in this gift shop. They have mustard sommeliers, and they really know their shit. Actually, there's just like, a hundred different kinds of mustard that you can taste. And I did, and I really liked this dill pickle one. I was also starving yesterday, so I, I knew that I wasn't going to be tasting anything as part of the competition. Like, I did not. I literally did not want to have my unrefined palate be the make or break for somebody who worked really hard on their particular product. Like, because, I mean, that's how seriously everybody was taking it was like, I, I'm. I'm not good with describing how something tastes to me other than to say, that's really good. That's my classic line. So I, I, But I did think, well, I'm going to be eating a lot of mustard. And I. Somebody said, one of the folks said, you know, don't eat a big breakfast because we're going to serve you lunch. And also, mustard is filling. So, like, I went for a kind of a long run yesterday. I didn't eat anything. So I show up at this mustard museum slash mustard shop, and I'm just famished. I'm literally just, like, careening around looking for small pretzels and any mustard I can dip in.

[Luke Burbank]

This sounds like, by the way, my instinct. And, you know, we'll see where your story Goes. But my instinct is like, the opposite of that. Like, I like, if you're going to taste a whole bunch of mustard, I feel like you want some. You don't want to be too hungry because mustard is just like on an empty stomach. Mustard, mustard, mustard, mustard. Like, you're gonna. I feel like you needed a base level of something going in.

[Andrew Walsh]

Well, like, we can fast forward to the end of this fascinating story, which is we. Our producer, Young, really wanted me to taste. Well. He said, is there an interesting one to taste? I said, well, the obvious bit is something that's really hot. And so I did. I mean, I tasted a bunch of different things, but. But the kind of crescendo was to taste something in the really hot category, which there was a whole. Somebody there was describing the whole scientific principle behind what exactly was going to happen to me. And so the nice folks who had been judging the hot category, I said, which one of these should I try? And they go, well, like, number seven is the really, really hot one. And so I, of course, take like an extra large scoop of it instead of a teeny amount to get the sense I'm like, well, it's probably not that hot or it's probably not that intense or whatever.

[Luke Burbank]

And so when there's a vehicle here, are you putting it on something?

[Andrew Walsh]

Well, I guess that. So here's. There's a whole. There's a few different schools of thought. One is you dip a pretzel in there, but then you end up eating a lot of pretzels by the end of the day, and you just, like. It's a lot to get through. So I think theoretically the way to go is just a little black, a little white plastic spoon. Oh, so that there's not. But then people are eating apple slices in between the courses as a palate cleanser. People are drinking water. But it seems like the most sort of the least. The most, I guess, honest way or whatever to get the mustard taste is to just have it be on a plastic spoon that has no flavor unto itself. So I take this little, very small plastic spoon, like the kind that they'd give you a sample of ice cream with at a Baskin Robbins. Do they still have those?

[Luke Burbank]

I don't know. I don't. I haven't been to an ice cream shop in generations.

[Andrew Walsh]

Oh, I had mustard ice cream, by the way, which was surprisingly good. Well, because the thing is, the mustard, it was like a raspberry mustard kind of sweet thing or something.

[Luke Burbank]

Oh, yeah, you mentioned this fruit mustard thing, which is Something I'm unfamiliar with. So maybe I should keep my ugh to myself.

[Andrew Walsh]

Keep them to yourself, Andrew.

[Luke Burbank]

But stop mustard hate, as I always say.

[Andrew Walsh]

Exactly. This is how ketchup hate gets started. You know, when you got mustard hate and ketchup hate. An eye for an eye leaves the world insane. Anyway, and so I take a overly. Probably slightly overly large scoop of this very spicy stuff, and I take a bite and first of all, or just take it down and nothing happens. For one second, nothing happens. And then everything happens. It feels like my. The top of my head. Have you ever eaten something where the spice. It's not even in your mouth? It's not like. Because that's. This was this different category where it's like. It's not like, I ate a jalapeno that was like, oh, now my mouth is hot. I ate something that was like a depth charge. It was like, okay, gulp. Well, that's gone. Nothing happened. And then wham. Like, right on top of my head.

[Luke Burbank]

Oh, no. I've never had. Is this the first time you've had that top of your head thing?

[Andrew Walsh]

It was. And my eyes immediately start watering. And, like, I actually did it. Like, I don't know. Well, God, I don't know what this is gonna look like, what the footage is, because this was a truly unguarded moment for me on camera. I lost the ability to. And, like, let's be honest, it's not like it's working great as is. It's not like I'm coming off as super cool on camera ever. But I am aware that I am being documented and I am trying to probably present as best I can. This was a moment where I was not able to monitor or to control how I was presenting. It was that intense. Just like, I had, like, an involuntary twitch. Like, it's probably a very, very, very uncool moment for me. But hopefully, I guess that will also make it kind of funny.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, I mean, that would be the whole point, right? I mean, if you're going for the bit and then you eat the really hot thing and you're just like. Doesn't affect me. That's not exactly right.

[Andrew Walsh]

But this was like, I. I was wondering if I was going to have to kind of like, sort of. What's the word? I was wondering if I was gonna have to kind of like, play it up a little bit. Well, okay, so. Yes, thank you, Andrew. This is a good point. So I end up eating that one on camera, and then I eat a few more off camera, and then I'M just kind of grazing. And everybody so nice at this, at this thing. I really love folks from Wisconsin. What a, what a great bunch of people. But everybody was, you know, calling us over and saying, oh, try this one, try this one. And you know, and they're, they're, they're not giving me like, hey, here's the totally down the middle Dijon when they're like, oh, you should try this crazy fruit thing or something. So this is all just going into my empty stomach, right? Because the lunch was, it was very nice, but the lunch was brats. And you know, that's not a thing I really mess with. So my lunch was some veggies from the crudite plate, which was not a lot of food. And now I've got like probably 20 kinds of mustard fighting it out in my stomach as the Lyft is coming to pick me up to take me to the airport to take two flights back to Portland, from Madison to Phoenix and from Phoenix to Portland, by the way. I got home at like 2am But I realized like, oh, this, this could be a not ideal situation. I've got, I've got 20 kinds of mustard duking it out, so to speak, in my empty stomach before I'm going to be on all of these kind of small regional aircraft. And this could be a bad situation. Luckily, I did eat some fried cheese curds at the airport, which seemed to really settle the whole situation down as I watched. Thank you, Andrew, for the MLB login. Oh, yeah, that thing was saving my life this weekend. I was able to watch Julio Rodriguez hit a no doubter and the Mariners win the game. I ate some cheese curds and was right as rain.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, no, I mean, that's classic Wisconsin doctor's advice right there. Just like, well, you have an upset stomach. Well, have you tried cheese curds? That's what's going to settle everything down.

[Andrew Walsh]

Well, you're famished. You have. What is your cheese curd intake.

[Luke Burbank]

You only had one hot dog bowl.

[Andrew Walsh]

Exactly. Yeah, they're really leaning into. I did see a T shirt. I put a little, couple few pictures up on Instagram and I did like right when you, you know, I don't know if this stat is true anymore, but for a long time, Wisconsin regularly led the nation in drinking per capita. You know, I guess average amount of, of alcohol consumed per person in the state. I don't know if that's still the case. If it, I don't know why it would have changed. But like, I had a sense that that's kind of a big part of the culture. When the first thing you see is a sweatshirt that says Drink Wisconsin, and then has the outline of the state. It's actually a pretty funny spoof.

[Luke Burbank]

You also shared what I thought was a really good spoof. Now, I don't know why it's important for you to know how I received this spoof because it was on the text chain. But I was already driving in my car running some errands yesterday by this point. And so the Mariners game is on. I've listened to, like, the first part of it on the radio in my kitchen. Now I am in the car, and I'm listening. Listening to the Mariners game. But the ongoing text conversation that I've been a part of with you goofballs is ongoing. So my phone is plugged into my car, and so I'm listening to the game. But then every now and then, it's like, you have a new message from David Burbank. You have a new message from Luke Burbank. And then I hit play, and the robot reads your text. Right. And so I was kind of enjoying the back and forth. Your brother David had a good spoof about instead of a designated hitter, calling Gorman, is it Gorman? I'm sorry, I'm Gorman.

[Andrew Walsh]

Thomas Gorman.

[Luke Burbank]

Saying calling him designated or, I'm sorry, a dijonated hitter, I believe would say.

[Andrew Walsh]

That was pretty clever.

[Luke Burbank]

But then what I heard, the robot quote to me was your text, which was. Apparently they have a video area here at the museum called Mustard Peace Theater. I gotta say, that is some. That's really. That got me. That was good wordplay.

[Andrew Walsh]

Honestly, I think this Barry guy got into this whole thing for the wordplay.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah.

[Andrew Walsh]

So he. I. It's also being mailed to me, but he. If you go to the Mustard Museum and I don't know what you have to do to qualify, but he will. He'll print you out a diploma from his pretend universities, come up with called Poop on you. Like, as in Gray Poupon, but poop on You.

[Luke Burbank]

Sure. Yeah.

[Andrew Walsh]

He. He, like, he is. He's an attorney as well. He doesn't really practice, but he teaches food law. And apparently he wrote a book about food law called Habeas Codfish. He's.

[Luke Burbank]

So this is why he did it.

[Andrew Walsh]

He really, really loves a good, like, food related or mustard related kind of spoof. Like, they're everywhere in that place, which is pretty fun. I was a little let down because I was flexing when he told me he wrote a book. This is we were in the sit down. He wrote a book called Habeas Codfish. And I said, produce the codfish. Because that's, I believe, what habeas corpus means. It means produce the body.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, right.

[Andrew Walsh]

It's sort of, you know, but I, but I think, I think that he kind of was. Didn't quite catch what I was. I wanted a little attaboy. I wanted to like, hey, good job that you understanding. Understand what habeas corpus means. The other thing that didn't maybe get the strongest of reactions was when I did play this off of my phone, like I asked him, I asked, I believe, 76 year old Barry Levinson, not the director, are you familiar with the work of Kendrick Lamar? And. And he sort of said, yes, I've been hearing something about it. And I said, well, do you know that he has a song where he just yells this? And then I just like had it on my phone ready to go and I hit play. And then it's just him just kind of looking at my phone as. It's just that. And he shifted pretty quickly. He goes, well, you've also got the, the 1910 song Baby Cut the Mustard or whatever. He starts going into like broadside ballads.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Andrew Walsh]

And I was like, this has got to be really good for the movement. You know, the fact that the young people of America are walking around yelling mustard at the top of their lungs.

[Luke Burbank]

And he's just kind of. He's doing that great. People who are good with the media do this. Like, if you don't have anything to say about Kendrick Lamar screaming mustard, then just shift to something that you do know, which is my baby's got a mustard bonnet or whatever. And just. I kind of keep the conversation going. But he obviously found the super bowl.

[Andrew Walsh]

Show to be a little too black.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, right. Yes. Or as some idiot on a podcast I heard said, it wasn't for people of my skin color, which. Or something just so. So just like it's been somebody just saying. I don't know. That was such a immature way of describing race.

[Andrew Walsh]

I really can't. I don't know if I can think of a pop culture event that's been more of a slow build for me than that halftime show. I mean, you, you and a lot of other folks were right. Were very excited about it. Right when it was happening, I was, I was in a weird place because I was on an airplane going to England and so I couldn't really watch it. It was like freeze framing. I had my cell phone propped up in like, the front row of coach on this flight. So I didn't really get. And then I watched it later, but I was. You know, it was just a weird way to experience it, and I was a little down on it, but now it's like, it's really grown on me. And now when it pops up again in various forms or just people are playing it for whatever reason, it's like every time I watch it again, I'm like, I think I saw something on Tick Tock the other day, by the way. Tick Tock is so bad now. Like, I actually think I'm probably. I'm not gonna, like, quit it, per se, but I'm like, I'm finding my interest level in looking at Tick Tock has really waned.

[Luke Burbank]

Like, tell me about this. Because, you know, I had an instinct the other day. I was looking, I was missing Instagram. And for a very, very quick, fleeting moment, I think this was literally yesterday. Luke. I had a thought that I don't think I've ever had before, which is, maybe I should just open up TikTok, because I still have it on my phone, right? And I was like, maybe I should get it. Cause I can't remember. I think I was, like, looking for something. Not just something to fill the void, as usual, but, like, something. And I'm sorry to cut off your story, but I remember just feeling like I've just been feeling disconnected. Oh, you know what it was? And I'm trying to think. I don't remember the specifics, but I know it was somebody that I used to follow on Instagram. It might have even been some of our listeners or something. And I was like, oh, well, you know What? Everybody's on TikTok now. I could probably just look up this person on TikTok, and I could be kind of plugged in because I kind of miss some of my parasocial relationships, you know? And that's what it was. And then it was a fleeting moment, and something flashy caught my eye and I moved on. But I just had this weird moment of being like, well, I don't know if I want to get into TikTok at this point. It's not like they've been some beacon of purity and democracy in these dark ages.

[Andrew Walsh]

Well, my journey into TikTok as the listeners are, well, familiar, is like, pre pandemic, or maybe right about when it was starting up, I just kept noticing that a lot of the things that I were seeing online that were, like, funny or weird or, like, maybe audio drops, they had that TikTok watermark on them. Like I was seeing them on other platforms, but they were from TikTok. And I just thought, well let me go to the source on this. And then I just fell, fell down the hugest rabbit hole with TikTok, particularly during the pandemic. Just. And my memory when I started with it and when I was really heavy duty into was just this really interesting place where you just had. The algorithm is very smart in the way that it delivers content to you and you see a wide range of things and it feels very confessional. It's just tons of people just in their houses talking into their phones. All different kinds of people. Like a lot of the funny humor, I mean a lot of the stuff that I'll send you as intro tape is stuff that, you know, came through TikTok. I see stand up comics on there, I see people doing weird sketches. I see old Tim and Eric. It's just like, it's a, it's a crazy stew of content that, that I really, really was enjoying. But I don't know, I think something has shifted to where they're in full advertisement mode now. Like I, my, my sense is it used to be that you'd see an ad or some sponsored content on TikTok, like every, let's just say five things you were watching. Maybe one out of five, maybe it was one out of ten. It now feels like it's three out of every five. Like there is more advertising. And of course it doesn't look like an ad. It's not like a Juicy Fruit commercial or something. It's some person going, I am so sorry to all of you who bought the viral Pendleton blanket because now it's been marked down to like this is the weirdest construction. And it's a very tick tock thing which is some voice of a person. Or a robot.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, or a robot.

[Andrew Walsh]

Some weird ass thing where the person or robot is apologizing to a hypothetical group of people who purchased a thing before this deal on the thing was available. Because now the thing is way cheaper. Sorry to any of you who bought the viral beer koozies because now they're half off. It's like, it's the, it's the strangest sales pitch but it's just like it's thing after thing after thing of that. Or, or, or you know, just like it's just all commerce now. And I don't know if it's just because there's a bunch of people that are trying to make money on TikTok in other words, there's. There's like basically I could go on TikTok right now and I could be hyping some. Some product and I don't know exactly how it works. If I have to actually like somehow have the inventory or if I'm just partnering with the people that make it so that when someone goes and buys it, if they go through my TikTok feed, then like I get a credit or something. I don't know how it all works, but basically you got a bunch of normal people that are trying to supplement their income or make their living on just like talking me into buying like a rubber thing that sits on top of my stove that I can put all my spices in. It's just like a weird random shit that's made in China and they're trying to get me to buy it, but somehow me buying it, if I see it on their page, they get a percentage of it or something. It's just turned into this really weird place where there's almost no. It feels like there's actually not very much new content. I'm also seeing stuff I've seen before, which is very unsettling. Like, you know, the whole idea of TikTok is it's the endless scroll. You can't get to the bottom of it. There's no bottom, Andrew. I think I got to the bottom.

[Luke Burbank]

It's like silt. It's like silt down there.

[Andrew Walsh]

It's like fucking the Titanic is down there. There's like one bigger fish like that live in total darkness, but they have like a dangling part of their body as a light.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, yeah.

[Andrew Walsh]

Like it's weird down there, dude. Because I seriously now will see something and I'll be like, oh, I know how this DUI stop went. Like I've seen it before. Oh, I know this entitled Karen messes with the wrong no nonsense target employee. Like I. I'm now seeing content that I've seen before, which means I've gotten to the bottom of Tick tock.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah.

[Andrew Walsh]

Which is really messed up.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah. It seems like it's a pretty bad time start like deciding.

[Andrew Walsh]

I don't think, I don't think, I don't think that. I think it's. It's. I wonder if other people are having the same experience to where it's just like it's so posted now. The inside ification, I guess of TikTok is so. It's so noticeable that it's actually now changing my behavior. Like I don't have the desire to like sit There and scroll on TikTok as much because it's. It's actually less. It's notably less satisfying.

[Luke Burbank]

That's good. That's good.

[Andrew Walsh]

Honestly, I mean, I guess that's all it took was five years of my life and then the full inshittification of TikTok for me to walk away from. It wasn't me making better decisions. It wasn't me prioritizing family and health and brain expansion. No. It was just that it ended up getting so crappy that I just didn't want to go there anymore.

[Luke Burbank]

Well, you know, it's a good time for that. Honestly, we. This is not an introduction to baseball talk. You and I, as you like to say, foamed all that off. We talked.

[Andrew Walsh]

Boy, we did a one hour. We could have just. No pointed. Yeah, I know.

[Luke Burbank]

We did a one hour conversation about various developments in baseball.

[Andrew Walsh]

Your love for Julio Polanco's bug eyes.

[Luke Burbank]

Jorge, first of all, excuse me, I do like Jorge's face. But also. Anyway, we talked a lot about baseball before the show. I'm not trying to get into that. But I will say that one thing that I noticed this weekend as I went full baseball mode, like, probably more than ever in my life, I always look forward to opening day and I always follow the Mariners. But this is the first season where I had MLB TV on just kind of in the background. But for a big chunk of the weekend going, a fantasy team going. I was out doing some yard work this Saturday, I guess, and so I was just listening to whatever games were on. There's like, you know, the radio broadcasts of games around the league. I was just like, kind of as I came home from my volunteer gig yesterday and just turned on Sunday night baseball. Two teams. I don't really. It was like San Diego. I can't remember who the Padres were playing. It was maybe the Braves. It was two, you know, NL teams I don't have tons of interest in, but I just. Of course I'm not listening anything else. I don't have to choose between Comedy Bang Bang or the Lebiton show or whatever. I told Veeves. I'm like, the nice thing about baseball season is you never have to think about what to listen to. It's just there's always baseball on somewhere. And it's kind of like. It was like, refreshing because this happens to me around this time every year. I'm kind of like, I'll just get obsessed with the Le Batard show, try to listen to every single minute of it. And then it was around this time of year, I get compulsive about it, and then I burn out on it right as baseball swings in to take my attention away. And I'm like, oh, this is good. Like, I can now just lean into baseball for a while now. And then eventually with my fantasy team starts, you know, going downhill or whatever, maybe I'll. I'll get in it. Maybe I'll get too saturated on that as well. But, like, right now, take your. This is all for me to say. Take your, you know, sort of tick tock hole and just. You have my MLB app now. Watch some games, dig into stats. Like, do you want. How do you want to help me with my. Well, I don't know. I don't know if that's a good idea.

[Andrew Walsh]

Poorly, once.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, let's not get you involved in my fantasy team. But it's all or nothing either. Take the whole thing. Take the thorn from.

[Andrew Walsh]

Take this cup, Lord, if it be.

[Luke Burbank]

Thy will, from my head, or get your own team. But I just sort of feel like there's plenty of other things if you just have a bottomless hole that you need to distract yourself.

[Andrew Walsh]

Well, I'll be very honest with you. I mean, part of the way that we got you and I got on our, like, unsanctioned, unrecorded Mariners podcast this morning that we just did for each other is I asked you, oh, is there a game tonight? And you said, yeah, I think that they're playing the, like, Detroit Tigers and. Or as I like to call them, the Detroit Lions sometimes. And made me so happy to know that there is a baseball game tonight that I can watch is like, oh, that's gonna be great. And then my next thought was like, and I'm also gonna be miserable for easily 80% of it. Like, I was so mad this weekend going back into last week. It was like I was just so mad watching them. And I was like, I feel like I really gotta start. I need to kind of make sure that I don't just become such a force of negativity in our. In our sports text chain. Because, first of all, I get on other people about that. I police that a lot during football season, which is probably not cool. And it's just not fun for it just to be a string of negativity. But it's so hard because so many bad things keep happening repeatedly. Like, guys just, like, not hitting the baseball or catching the baseball or doing the baseball things, and it's just like, it's just one defeat after. It's like, it's Like. Like a baseball game is just when it's the Mariners, it's. Well, okay, I should just know this. How is it 27 at bats, is that like a. Well, it's three times. No, it would be three times nine. That's pretty easy up to, I guess, if you're the home team. You might not do the bottom of the ninth if you're leading, but what. It's just like, whatever that is. Yeah, 27. It's 27. It's 27 chances for me to die inside a little bit. And with the Mariners, it's like, generally, 26 of those 27 events go poorly. So it's like, I'm both completely buoyed by the fact that there's a Mariners game tonight. And I also know that with it comes a lot of emotional pain and frustration for me tonight that I'll probably be taking out on our friend group.

[Luke Burbank]

And unfortunately, with the Mariners, it is sometimes only 27 at that. Like, that's the bare minimum. Right? Like, you're hoping that it's not going to be 27. Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're. What you're saying there. You're hoping that there's more. Three. More than three at bats.

[Andrew Walsh]

Right. It's not a perfect game by the.

[Luke Burbank]

Other team, but when it comes to the Mariners. So, listen, we said we weren't going to get into this, but I want to clean this up a little bit for listeners who are just kind of like, listen, you're four games into the season. You are being ridiculous about this, the frustration. And first of all, I don't think that you need to worry about being, like, a cheerleader or something. Everybody who's on that chain that has a buy into this is basically on board with the same thing. All of the Mariners fans, you, me, your brothers, Ders, like, we're all in the same place. And it's like, it's not like, oh, the season's over, because, well, maybe Ders is. I haven't checked in on him, but I understand that it's only four games in. But even the broadcasters on Sunday gently were saying, listen, the frustration that we and the fan base might be feeling here. And this is, by the way, these are the broadcasters of the game who are. And the Mariners organization is notoriously very sensitive about what their broadcasters or even people in the media are saying about them, and they will, like, reach out to even, like, podcasts. I've heard podcasts apologize for things that the Mariners have forced them to apologize for because they Thought they. Yeah. The Mariners organization is notoriously sensitive, and even their own employees were saying on the Sunday radio broadcast leading up to it, it was Gary and Goldie, and they were saying like, well, what's going on here, though, is we're seeing across the first three games exactly what we were seeing in the previous season. And the whole narrative was the Mariners didn't do anything to change their lineup or their. Or their fate, other than saying, well, these players have potential. They're going to be better this year. And so when you see the same exact pattern that we've seen for two seasons now of the Mariners having amazing pitching and totally squandering it by not building up a team that can support the pitching and just has like, what we've had, like you said before the show, we've had four games and about two productive innings out of those four games. And so we're, you know, we're a.500 team right now. No, the sky isn't falling. No, we're not, like, absolutely absurd about this. It's the frustration of just seeing, like the same thing being implemented time in and time out. I don't know if that's an expression. And of course the results don't change, and that's where the frustration comes in. So that's why we're already freaking.

[Andrew Walsh]

It's like, and I don't think you've been through this, but I sure have. It's like you're in a kind of a relationship that's. That's very volatile. That's. That feels really. You know, when it's good, it's really good, and when it's bad, it's really bad. And then you break up or you take some time off or whatever, and then enough time goes by that you sort of forget about some of the bad stuff, and then you decide to give it another shot and you sort of come together and there's like maybe a day or two where it just feels great. You're back connected with the good part of it, and then they just do something that was the kind of thing that was really triggering for you in the past, and then you're just right back in. Yeah, this is a continuation. I mean, I think you said this again in the pre show show that we didn't record that. For us, this is not four games. This is the 166th game of this story.

[Luke Burbank]

Right.

[Andrew Walsh]

You know, it's like this starts long ago in a galaxy far, far away for us. So of course we're freaking out, but it's because there's a long, long kind of. There's a prelude to all of this that's making us insane. But that's all I'm gonna say about that.

[Luke Burbank]

There is a. I just want to say some guest on Comedy Bang Bang, of course, hosted by Scott Aukerman, and I want to say it's his buddy Adam Scott. I think that's right. It might be another one of his regular guests, who's a name that everybody would know who comes on Comedy Bang Bang at least once a year or something like that. And he. Oh, you know what it is? It's probably Man Zukas. I think it's Manzukas who comes on much more than that, usually a year. But they'll always allude to the fact that the fans don't. They're like, we could do a podcast about comic books, but we just know the fans don't want that because both of those guys are huge comic book nerds. And a huge chunk of their audience would be comic book nerds. But as far as I know, none of them have comic book podcasts. And they just torture their audience by saying, like, yeah, no. I mean, if they get close to talking about comic books, they'll be like, oh, but we can't talk about that. Our audience doesn't want to hear us talk about comic books, Otherwise we do a whole show about it. That's what you and I are doing, because I know that we have some sickos out there always, like, just do, like, do more. Do another no point. We want to hear a no point. Well, and us just saying we did a no point and we didn't record it, and it was before the show into these exact microphones is really, again, not a torture for the majority of our audience, but certainly a section of it.

[Andrew Walsh]

A very, very, very small niche of our listeners are. I mean, I'll just say it, Andrew. It's like the Beatles just decided to, like, play a whole album and not record it.

[Luke Burbank]

That's exactly what it was.

[Andrew Walsh]

I think that's exactly what it's like.

[Luke Burbank]

Me talking about baseball is like the Beatles talking about baseball.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah, we was hoping for some razzle dazzle. Razzle dazzle. That's right, man. Razzle dazzle. On your mark. On your mark. Get. Get set.

[Luke Burbank]

Get set now. Ready?

[Andrew Walsh]

Ready, Go. Everybody rattle D. All right, let's thank some dazzling donors. These folks are donating a dazzling amount of dough to keeping TBTL in business. I don't know where they come down on the topic of us recording entire sports Podcasts and then deleting the file, not making it available. This, that could be something that they're very relieved to hear about or something that infuriates them. We know that they like what we're doing right now because they're supporting it financially with a not insignificant donation each month. And we want to thank Ashley Wilson in Dallas, Texas.

[Luke Burbank]

Hello, Ashley. Thank you.

[Andrew Walsh]

The stars at night are big and bright deep in the heart of Dallas, Texas. Ashley says hello, boys. Love to you all. No notes. See, Ashley has basically no thoughts on us recording episodes of the show or a version of the show and then deleting it. So that's good. I just wanted us all to relive one of my favorite moments in TBTL history. It's the origin of Not Today Babyface, and it's a term my 11 and I continue to use all the time. It was a true LOL moment in episode 2,289. Holy smokes.

[Luke Burbank]

So, yeah, can I ask. Can I stop for a second here and say, does this, does this ring a bell to you? Because I was thinking this would be maybe before my time, if not today. Babyface was a thing. Maybe it was from the radio days, but episode 2289, that had been well into my tenure, I believe. Well into my tenure, I believe.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah, but also a long time ago, right?

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah.

[Andrew Walsh]

Talking. Maybe not 10 years ago, but would this be like 17?

[Luke Burbank]

I'll let you continue reading this. Oh, so it's 2017 because Ashley, LinkedIn here.

[Andrew Walsh]

So it was a true LOL moment in episode 2,289 at about the 1 hour, 20 minute, 57 seconds.

[Luke Burbank]

Wow.

[Andrew Walsh]

Back when that was a. Remember when we used to sometimes do three hour shows just to see if we could.

[Luke Burbank]

Oh yeah.

[Andrew Walsh]

Gosh. While Luke was playing Baby Faces Whip appeal. I do love that song. Okay, I'm curious, as you're reading this, do you remember that moment? Keep doing what you're doing, dummies. I don't remember this moment, Andrew, but I'm. Thank you so much, Ashley, both for the financial support and for sending us a link to the episode and the exact timestamp. Because are we going to try to like listen back to what this was?

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, I guess so. So we said, or Ashley said one hour, 20 minutes and like something like 50 some seconds. Right. So let me just start this at. I'm going to start this at 1 2025. And I have not pre listened to this, by the way. So this is if we hear the.

[Andrew Walsh]

Babyface song Whip Appeal.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah.

[Andrew Walsh]

We'll know that we're in the right neighborhood.

[Luke Burbank]

This it? This must be it, right? We're gonna be pulled off here. I'm gonna try to talk over this a little bit.

[Andrew Walsh]

I mean, the irony. The irony that we probably got pulled down back when we did this, and now we're getting pulled.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, no, go ahead. So I'm gonna pause this for a second, and then looks like the music's gonna go out. Then you're gonna talk over. But what were you saying? The irony?

[Andrew Walsh]

I was just saying the irony is that, like, is that us playing this segment again here today will probably also get us playing.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, exactly. We're lucky that this is still online here. No, well, we just got to hear.

[Andrew Walsh]

The whip appeal part.

[Luke Burbank]

Okay. Still doesn't ring a bell to me.

[Andrew Walsh]

But I'll do this song so good. 3165. Thumbs up. 115. Thumbs down. 115 people went onto YouTube and just were like, nope, not today, baby face.

[Luke Burbank]

Pretty good. It's so funny. A quick throwaway moment like that just stays in Ashley's head for all these years.

[Andrew Walsh]

And they're 11 or saying that. I love that. Here's what I want to say about whip appeal. I don't think I said this seven years ago or whenever that was, but I don't. Somebody might correct me on this. I don't think whip appeal was a thing people were saying. Like, he's. Babyface is basically making. This is. He's, you know, he's wooing a woman because of her qualities, because of her. What he calls whip appeal.

[Luke Burbank]

Oh.

[Andrew Walsh]

But, like. And he's Like, He's. As you heard, he's singing keep on whipping on me. And he. I think in the song, he goes on to kind of describe what whip appeal is, but it's. I feel like this is a. Unless this was something that I didn't know about that was happening in another part of the country or different part of culture than I was really privy to. I don't know if people were walking around saying whip appeal before this Babyface song. Like, I think he may have invented the concept and then convinced us it was a thing.

[Luke Burbank]

Well, here's how stupid I am. I don't know if people could tell when it was me talking on the tape and me talking in real life. But the irony is, is way back in 2017, you played that song for me, and you were clearly saying, do you recognize it now? Do you remember it now? And I was saying, no. And now in 2025, I'm listening to it again, and if you had asked me, I would have said no. I've never heard that song before. It still has not. Has stuck. Has not stuck with me. But I assume that whip appeal was like, comparing. Because you know how, like, a lot of cars will compare situations or in some cases, women to cars. I feel like that was a big thing in the 60s or sort of like this idea of, like, a fast lifestyle and car culture was a big part of it. And so I thought, like, whip appeal was like, oh, maybe you're driving in your car and your whip is so sweet that you one has whip appeal. But is the term whip used as an automobile at all here? And by. By the way, yes, this is how the song was intended to be discussed with me, describing whips as automobiles.

[Andrew Walsh]

Well, Urban Dictionary, I was just trying to look up whip appeal definition. Like, mostly what happens when you. When you ask about whip appeal, you just get the babyface song. But according to Urban Dictionary, when a girl is so pretty, so hot, or so fine. Oh, I'm sorry. This is actually Webster's I'm reading from.

[Luke Burbank]

Yes, right.

[Andrew Walsh]

I mixed it up that other people are whipped for her, meaning they'll do anything for her or let her do whatever she wants. Hot girl, colon. I'm just reading from the Internet. Don't come for me. Can you please take me to the mall, Matt? Yeah, anything for you, Matt's friend. Damn, she got that whip appeal. But again, like, you're whipped.

[Luke Burbank]

Almost like you're whipped.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah, but that still feels to me like this is somebody on Urban Dictionary writing this based on what they perceive baby faces.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah.

[Andrew Walsh]

Definition to mean like. Like, you know, I just. Because I'll tell you, you know, walking around Seattle, Washington, circa, whenever that song came out, I was, you know, I was fully convinced that whip appeal was a. Was a. Was a thing that that was. We were all agreeing was something that, you know, we were saying and thinking about and doing and being a part of.

[Luke Burbank]

Listen to this. So I did the same thing you did. As I was chatting, I. I typed in whip appeal slang, and it took me to Urban Dictionary, and I saw that same definition now. Now my next step on this stuff usually is to go to genius.com. genius used to be called rap genius. It's a lyrics repository, if that's the right word, where you can look at lyrics of almost any song in the world. And then often, though, it is, like, sort of annotated. You can click on a specific verse or line or lyric, and somebody on The Internet. The Hive Mind has kind of given you some context text for it. And what I think is really funny about Whip Appeal is none of the verses or bridges or choruses or pre choruses are annotated except for one line in the whole song, which is, you've got that whip appeal. So that's what we're looking for. So I'm going to go ahead and click on it. And according to an unreviewed annotation. So we need to make sure that this has not been reviewed by the Hive Mind. One contributor says the term whip appeal was coined by RB pop singer Pebbles. Babyface overheard a conversation Pebbles was having with her cousin, R B singer Shirelle. I don't know if I'm saying that name correctly. She was referring to her at the time husband, Antonio Le Reed. I'm sorry, so you know Antonio LA.

[Andrew Walsh]

Reid, L A Reid, and Babyface ended up being huge producers.

[Luke Burbank]

Interesting. Okay, so apparently Pebbles was referring to whip appeal. And Pebbles is a woman, it looks like. Right. And so. And talking to Cherelle. So if this is to be believed, this was two women talking about her husband having that whip appeal. Yeah. So that's interesting.

[Andrew Walsh]

Antonio Marquis reed, born June 7, 1956, in Cincinnati, Ohio. That's known more widely as L A Reid Reed. So maybe LA Reid had that whip appeal.

[Luke Burbank]

LA Reid is from Cincinnati. Shouldn't he be Cincinnati Red maybe instead of LA Reid?

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah, we should actually look into that. Yeah, he. Oh, yeah, Laface, that was. That was their label. So that was. That was Babyface and LA Reid. They had the Face records. And I remember they were just like. They were just a hit factory back in the day. Yeah, yeah, they had Tony Braxton on there. Outkast, tlc, TI Was on there, among. Among many others. So, anyway, well, hey, thanks, Ashley, for. Thanks for quoting TBTL with your 11. And thanks for allowing us to take that little journey down. Getting pulled from YouTube. Couldn't do it without you. Maestro, on your mark. On your mark.

[Luke Burbank]

Get set, get set now. Ready? Ready.

[Andrew Walsh]

Look who it is. It's Rachel and Matt G in Bellevue, Washington. I've been really struggling with hard and soft GS this round of donors. Oh, yeah, but this one, the. The spelling is G. E, E. Wait, did I add an Eden? Add an X.

[Luke Burbank]

No, you did it right.

[Andrew Walsh]

G. Two E's. And it says the last name is.

[Luke Burbank]

G, like the letter G. That's easy to remember.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah, that one. Thank you, you, Rachel and Matt, for helping me, because again, this is a real Achilles heel of mine.

[Luke Burbank]

You know, you did that so well, Luke. I would call you a whiz. I'd call you a G wiz.

[Andrew Walsh]

Oh, yes. Love it.

[Luke Burbank]

Oh, that was just good for everybody involved. Yes.

[Andrew Walsh]

Produce the pronouncer. They're in Bellevue, Washington, and here's what they say. As we write this, the world feels strange and dark again with our message, we'd like to reinforce the importance of being where your feet are. Are. We're eternally grateful for tbtl. Both what you three, Luke, Andrew and John give us and the way the TBTL listeners surround, nurture and support each other. Want to get involved politically. We'd like to recommend getting involved as a PCO precinct committee officer, the backbone of the party and essential to turning out the vote and strengthening the party platform. I'm just going to wedge in my own. Just very quick thought on this, which is. Is just. Even in reading this, it feels to me more hopeful than just sitting around having, you know, being filled with existential dread all the time, which is kind of my default setting right now. In other words, turning fear into action, I think is a pretty powerful thing. And just the idea of saying, okay, I'm going to really. I'm going to make sure that I'm helping turn out the vote and presumably, you know, create a better outcome. At the midterm, I was like, I'm like, I'm starting to. I'm arriving at the place. Andrew. Where. Or at the part of the story where it's like. I mean, I'm obviously super upset about everything that's happening in our country. Super upset. But I'm heartened by, like, the Tesla protests. I'm heartened by, like, what's going on for Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders is going around just having, I don't know, 30, 40,000 people show up to say, this is not normal. You know, like, why didn't we elect him the first time anyway?

[Luke Burbank]

You know, I gotta say that's. Well, this isn't the time for it. I've. I did not vote for him. Him. You know, I was.

[Andrew Walsh]

I didn't either.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah. And I was.

[Andrew Walsh]

I was afraid that he was unelectable.

[Luke Burbank]

Now, that was also, though. Shoot, this is going to really. Oh, man, my memory is going to betray me.

[Andrew Walsh]

When did Shubert Dip come out?

[Luke Burbank]

But I did vote for Warren. Right. That. That would have been the same. That would have been the same primary.

[Andrew Walsh]

So. So I think.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, I think so. And then. And then Hillary in the general. So it's not like I totally hate my vote there. Yeah. But If I had voted for Hillary in the primary potentially. And then seeing that Bernie Sanders. I think there might and some ageism mixed in there for me. And also the fact that unfortunately some of Bernie's supporters weren't doing themselves a lot of favors during that time.

[Andrew Walsh]

Sure. The Bernie Bros. As it were. I guess my point is that this is I think really good advice from Rachel and Matt, which is if you're feeling powerless, transfer that into doing something, you'll feel less powerless. I think it's the backbone of the party and essential to turning out the vote and strengthening the party platform. Wondering if now is the time to make a change for yourself. Question mark AA, Al Anon and other 12 step programs can be a beacon of light. Community will be everything the next couple of years and there are so many ways to be involved. Quote. We must be careful not to drift into worry, remorse or morbid reflection for that would diminish our usefulness to others. End quote. I believe that was something I said on the show once. I'm guessing that's a quote from me because that's how I talk usually very in a very meaningful and grammatically correct way. Luke.

[Luke Burbank]

A whip. An automobile. That is me quoting myself from earlier.

[Andrew Walsh]

We must be careful to always work on our whip appeal so as not to diminish our usefulness to others. Be good to yourselves. Tens and cobros, we love you. Ah, Rachel and Matt, we love you too. And that's some really, some really nice advice and some good thoughts on this Monday about about how we're all feeling and things we can do to maybe feel 5% less terrible about everything. Thank you very much for supporting tbtl. Here I go once again with the email.

[Luke Burbank]

Every week I hope that it's from a female.

[Andrew Walsh]

Oh man, it's not from a female. All right, Andrew, a email or V mail before we ski daddle on this Monday?

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, but before I do that, I want to send you tomorrow's dazzling donors. My caps lock was on so you're going to be getting an email here in a second that's going to yelling very shout.

[Andrew Walsh]

Okay. Thank you for preparing me for that. I will not take it the wrong.

[Luke Burbank]

Way, but in the meantime, this is a voicemail that you and I received. I do not remember when or why we were talking specifically about garlic. But I guess this is something that comes up on the show from time to time. Right? Because your store bought garlic situation.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah, because I feel like I've kind of found the perfect. I am trying to cook more. In fact, that's another thing I'm really happy about being home. I haven't. I realized before I left on this epic journey I was cooking pretty much every night at my house or at least you know, creating some sort of food thing for myself. And I was feeling good about that. And I've just been on this like run of just like questionable like hotel, you know, like bar food. But like these hotels like actually I stayed at the like. Let me just shout out the Courtyard by Marriott in Middleton, Wisconsin. It's in a generally kind of slightly depressing area in that it's across from a Costco. There's like nothing. It doesn't feel very walkable. It's in a kind of an odd little place. The hotel itself was the nicest staff and most professional hotel staff maybe I've ever stayed at in my life including very fancy hotels. And they had the craziest pool. I was using the treadmill and which was adjacent to the pool. It had like, it was like a water park. It was like a great wolf lodge in there. If you were looking for a staycation in Wisconsin and you don't want to go to the Dells and deal with all of that, go to this friggin Courtyard by Marriott. But anyway. But I've been eating a lot of prepared food and microwavable things out of the little like store at the Marriott. I'm very excited to start cooking again. But one of the things that I've been trying to figure out is the garlic dilemma. Like garlic as it's called is frowned upon usually by people that really know their cooking, including my girlfriend. But I also find the process of like taking an actual like head of garlic. It's got all that papery stuff on it. I've never mastered the like quick and easy way to go from I'm holding a thing of garlic to like I have minced garlic in front of me. It's like pulling off what seems like this endless amount of the papery outside and then just like dealing with it. I just don't have a good system and one thing that I've really gotten into now is buying pre peeled garlic. This is why we were talking about it.

[Luke Burbank]

So not pre minced like you'd have in a jar but it's like pre peeled but then it also in a jar though, right? In stainless steel, not in a jar.

[Andrew Walsh]

In like a little vacuum sealed plastic. And it so it I think has a pretty decent. In fact when I got home last night and I opened the fridge and surveyed the many things that need to be tossed. The garlic did not need to be tossed, whereas like normally that would have sprouted. But it's so, yeah, so it's, it's pre peeled but it's not chopped up and it's in a little like vacuum packed thing. And I think this is a great solution. At least it saves me probably, probably 30 to 40% of the hassle of regular garlic, but without it being fully jarlicked.

[Luke Burbank]

I will say this, you were mentioning all the things that you have been eating on the road and you forgot one thing.

[Andrew Walsh]

Oh my God, can't wait for my shipment.

[Luke Burbank]

But Jack in Honolulu, listener Jack wanted to weigh in on the garlic situation.

[Listener Jack]

Hey Luke, Andrew. This is listener Jack in Honolulu calling about your recent discussion of cooking with garlic and using pre chopped charred garlic or pre peeled garlic, etc. The correct answer is whatever gets you to cook more and whatever makes your time cooking more fun is what you should be using and it's fantastic.

[Andrew Walsh]

That's a very love garlic. Cause this, that's a really nice answer. That's the kind of opposite of the like you're doing it wrong, you know, like it's like, it's like do whatever gets you having a good time and making food that you enjoy. And if that's garlic, great and if it's something else great too, I like, that's a nice approach.

[Luke Burbank]

Stop the jarla Kate.

[Listener Jack]

But I do love garlic and I'm fascinated by it. So I thought I'd talk a little bit more about garlic. Garlic has a defense mechanism, so instead inside it's kind of like a two part epoxy system. So when you break the cellular walls of the inside of garlic, it kind of creates a new compound. Those two parts mix and it creates a compound called allicin. And allicin is a sulfurous volatile compound that gives garlic its delicious flavor and its aroma and everything that we love about fresh garlic. So when you use pre chopped jarred garlic, they cut it a long time ago that all that allicin, because it's volatile, has already evaporated and gone off by the time it gets to you. So that's why it doesn't have any of the same flavors or effects that fresh garlic has. Pre peeled garlic is a little bit different. To make pre peeled garlic, the companies boil it for 10 or 15 seconds so they can make it easier to peel at a mass scale and that takes away some of the ability to make allicin. But obviously they haven't broken those chemical or they haven't broken those Cell walls. So it still has a lot of potential to make allicin. So it's still a lot better than pre chopped garlic, but it's never going to be as good as fresh garlic, which still has its full chemical to make Allison. So just way more information than you needed about garlic there. And power up.

[Luke Burbank]

That was a great.

[Andrew Walsh]

That was a great voicemail jacket, I gotta say.

[Luke Burbank]

I was looking around for a MIDI version of Elvis.

[Andrew Walsh]

Literally every time he said it, I.

[Luke Burbank]

Was Alison, I found one, but then it wanted to charge me a few euros for it or something. I was like, I don't think I can do this on the fly.

[Andrew Walsh]

So we're already getting pulled over, baby face. We could just get pulled over Elvis.

[Luke Burbank]

Oh, my God. I'm now getting some warning that is literally in Syria is like. And I'm like, no, I am not going to mess around with any of that.

[Andrew Walsh]

I wonder if that term, Allison, is also. Is related to alium, although those are slightly different words. But there are certain aren't, you know, onions and certain things in the alium family. Although alium and Allison are not the same word.

[Luke Burbank]

I think you have told me that before because we came up with a great show title like alium, Ant Farm or something along those lines. Resident Alien or something like that. I'm not exactly sure, but.

[Andrew Walsh]

Okay. Well, I was listening very closely in my. Of what Jack was saying. Well, this is what I find interesting. He said that garlic has a defense mechanism. So in other words, this is, I guess a lot of plants will evolve something that. The idea is that the garlic does not. Well, I guess the garlic does not want to be eaten by animals. And so the defense mechanism would be when you're, let's say, chewing it. If you were like a, you know, some sort of animal roaming around and you dig up some garlic and you start eating has, you know, the. The allicin, this reaction between the. When you start to break up the cellular wall of the garlic that. But here's the thing. I find the defense mechanism delicious. This is bad planning on garlic's part. It's not like you start eating garlic and it turns into like a rotten egg. It turns into garlic, which we. Which we love. So if that's the defense mechanism, I find that an interesting defense mechanism.

[Luke Burbank]

We named episode number 2,937 Alien Resurrection. This is back from 2019, so I like that. But that clears up a resident alien for today's show.

[Andrew Walsh]

So we'll go with that. But you know what I mean, because what I take From Jack's thing is that the very act of breaking up the garlic, chopping it up, you're releasing this thing that he's calling a defense mechanism, that it's something. But then this is the other part I don't understand. There are certain fruits, like apples. My understanding of it is that apples have evolved to basically be enticing for animals to eat, so that an animal would eat seeds, eat an apple, and then poop out the seeds somewhere else, therefore propagating the plant. So, like, the entire sort of thing that we eat from the apple is really just like a big kind of calorically dense enticement to an animal to ingest the seeds of the apple and then go poop them out somewhere. So in that case, apples are like, hey, hey, Looking for a good time sale trailer. They want you to come over and eat them and then poop them out somewhere else. But does garlic not want that?

[Luke Burbank]

Maybe because it's. What is the word?

[Andrew Walsh]

Grows in the ground.

[Luke Burbank]

Perennial. Yeah.

[Andrew Walsh]

Or maybe because of how it grows, like, you know, underground or something. I don't know. But yeah.

[Luke Burbank]

And it can just kind of continue to sprout, by the way. Have you ever done that? Have you ever just taken. You said you. Sometimes your garlic, if it sits there too long, will start to sprout. I know that I've taken little bulbs before and put them in little. Little, like, flower pots or whatever inside on my windowsill, and it actually grows. Grows quite a bit. Genevieve put some out in the garden last year. I don't know what ever became of it. I don't know that the. Maybe Seattle temperatures are great for garlic growing, but it is. I mean, you have a little bit of land. It's. So when you see life happening in your kitchen sometimes, like, well, what if I just put that in some dirt? Let's see what happens. You ever do that?

[Andrew Walsh]

I haven't, but this is going to be my spring of doing a lot of stuff like that. Like, I think I'm going to build a little, like, herb garden box for the inside of the house.

[Luke Burbank]

House.

[Andrew Walsh]

I'm. Most of my grocery budget, not really, but a lot of my grocery budget seems to be herbs. Like buying fresh dill and rosemary and things like that. Things that you can very much grow on your own.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah.

[Andrew Walsh]

And it's like, sometimes it's not cheap. Like, a little thing of dill, I'm gonna say, is, like three or four bucks. And, like, I'm gonna use that entire amount of dill if I'm making, like, A. Like a tartar sauce for, like, a salmon patty or something. There's no, like, using half of it. Like, Like, I'm really. You know, and so then, look, I'm buying two of them. It's six bucks. It's like, you know, considering how easy it is to grow that stuff. So I'm gonna. That's one of my projects for. For the spring. What I thought you were going to ask is if I ever just take, like, a clove of garlic that's peeled and just pop it in my mouth.

[Luke Burbank]

Oh, why would I eat that?

[Andrew Walsh]

Well, people. I see people doing that. I see people online doing that. Not, thankfully, not walking down the street. But I. I mean, speaking of TikTok, back when TikTok was good, there was this thing, I think it was called, like, the Georgian breakfast. And I don't. Or Balkan breakfast. Not Georgian. Balkan breakfast. And I don't know how this guy got started, but the sense of it was that in the Balkans, in some part of the Balkan region, this is a regular way that people might be, like, having their lunch or their breakfast or whatever. And. And it's just like a bunch of kind of sort of seemingly odd and disparate, like, crunchy vegetable things, and then, like, a loaf of bread, and they're, like, eating, like, a big bite of a cucumber and then like a. Tearing off a hunk of the bread and then, like, two cloves of garlic raw. But it's like, it has an ASMR quality. When the guy, by the way, he's. I don't think he's even speaking English. He's just, like, eating this assortment of kind of oddish things, although, I mean, they're all just pretty much vegetables. So it's not like it's gross. It's just like. And then he's just, like, kind of just chomping down on. And this became something with hundreds of thousands of views for some reason. But anyway, he'll eat a clove or two of garlic. My fear is my breath would never recover for the rest of my life if I ate an uncooked clove of garlic.

[Luke Burbank]

You don't even look at garlic in the middle of the day. You're like, that will stick to me. And I have to.

[Andrew Walsh]

I am pretty paranoid about that stuff. And I. You know, I am. I'm so grateful that I get to work on the Livewire radio show and. And all of the people that put in so much time and energy to making it happen. I don't want to be ungrateful But I can never eat any of the food before the show because it's always from like the Jarlic Hut. It's always like just piles of very delicious smelling food that's all extremely garlic forward. And I'm like one, I'm probably a little nervous anyway, but two, I'm just kind of like I'm not going to be the guy on stage who's interviewing people who's just like, just had a huge thing of hummus and it's like just fire breathing on the guests.

[Luke Burbank]

You know what? I had a realization the other day. You know how I've told you I've been and I don't even know where it is right now, but I've been struggling with my sense of smell recently because I think it's because of this medication. I don't know, it sort of comes and goes. And also it's been going on for so long now that I can't tell if I've just gotten used to it, you know.

[Andrew Walsh]

What was coffee smelling like for you?

[Luke Burbank]

Like coffee sometimes from like from far away. Like if I was on a different floor of the house and the coffee was brewing and it sort of wafted through the air, it would almost have a cabbagey smell to it. A lot of the stuff I noticed was more synthetic scents, like air fresheners and stuff would have like maybe other people go through their whole life like this. I've always liked a synthetic scent, like a very smelly, like laundry detergent, like a traditional one. Like I like that kind of stuff. It kind of calms me and makes me, you know, maybe it's from childhood or something. But a lot of the synthetic scents in my life started to smell very chemic and almost like a burny chemically thing or an acidic chemically thing. But so I always was associating it with those synthetic scents. But I had a realization a week or two ago as I was cutting up a cucumber and I was putting on my salad and I thought, oh yeah, they finally got their cucumber situation straight. And when I say they, I was talking about the world because there was a period about, I don't know, maybe two or three months ago where I was convinced that there was something going on with the world's.

[Andrew Walsh]

Because they were going slimy in like two seconds, right?

[Luke Burbank]

Oh, well, no, that isn't what I was gonna say because maybe there was something going on. But like I had gotten a cucumber from like, I think maybe like a Safeway store or something and it just smelled funny to me. And I was like, kind of strange, not terrible, but not like. And I love cucumbers. I eat a lot of cucumbers. And so it's a smell that I'm pretty familiar with. And a very, I would say mild smell too. A cucumber smell. And then, and then I got another one from like Sprouts, which is like more of a, you know, produce forward grocery store around here. And I remember thinking, oh, this one has got that smell too. And I think I had like three or four cucumbers. I was like, wow, something must be going on with the world's cucumber population.

[Andrew Walsh]

As opposed to your nose.

[Luke Burbank]

And then, and then I started to realize other things were smelling. And I think cucumbers were the first thing that hit my nose in a funny way. And I thought that cucumbers, it was.

[Andrew Walsh]

The cucinary in the coal mine.

[Luke Burbank]

You're. You're getting me to change the show title, aren't you? But it turns out that no, no, no, it was my nose, not the world's cucumbers that were smelling funny.

[Andrew Walsh]

Well, this is what I've been dealing with over here, Andrew, for a while. I would buy the. Really? I never know what size of cucumber I'm like in the mood for. It's always a game time decision. And for some reason, like if I'm in Trader Joe's and they have those little ones.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah.

[Andrew Walsh]

You know, the kind of like they're like a little bigger than like your thumb or whatever, but they're like kind of mini. Yeah, cucumbers. And I don't know why I find those appeals, but sometimes I do. I just like. Well, that seems refreshing. And like I'll just, I don't know, take one and put some salt on it, have a Balkan breakfast or whatever. But like, I feel like those ones go slimy so fast. Like I would get them home, I would put them in the crisper and I would like maybe have, maybe get one of them, you know, consumed before the rest of them just went totally, like inedibly gross and slimy. Now I'm kind of only buying the ones that are in the, like plastic wrap because I feel like that helps. You know, the longer, like ones that are.

[Luke Burbank]

I've never seen them in plastic wrap.

[Andrew Walsh]

Really.

[Luke Burbank]

In the produce section, like shrink wrapped. Every grocery store I just go to, you just have a bunch of bulk cucumber. And I don't even mean fancy. I just. You just go to the produce.

[Andrew Walsh]

Might be like English cucumbers Oh, you're getting.

[Luke Burbank]

Okay, yeah, yeah. For me, I'm just getting the standard, like, kind of cucumber. I will say this, though. I do not abide by the too large of a cucumber. Like, just standard cucumber size. Standard cucumber. Cucumber variety. But, like. Like you were mentioning earlier. Wait, this might have been in the. No point. But this idea of. I think maybe we're talking about the. The new shape of baseball bats in some quarters. But anyway, you had said, like, we're talking about pictures or something. It doesn't really matter. But, like, this idea that, like, some, like, chickens and turkeys that you get at the store now, they're, like, too big. Like, what are we doing to these things? And I feel like produce goes the same way. This is what I want to talk about with large fruit the other day on the show. Like, I'm not into, like, produce. Can we stop, like, filling these things up with whatever hormones are making the cucumbers too big because they're not better. The bigger the cucumber, the more like, this. This. The. The center, the harder they fall. Yes. And, like, the. No, but, like, the inside is too seedy and too liquidy and stuff. Like, it's like these huge cucumbers. What is the point?

[Andrew Walsh]

What is your typical, like, preparation? It's. You said you throw it on a salad. Do you ever just, like, put that on my eyes.

[Luke Burbank]

I put. I lay down.

[Andrew Walsh]

Well, that's why you look so young.

[Luke Burbank]

And I put them on my eyes.

[Andrew Walsh]

I do a whole avocado.

[Luke Burbank]

Yes.

[Andrew Walsh]

And the eye part is the cukes.

[Luke Burbank]

I think the majority of the time that I'm cutting up a cucumber, I'm putting it on a salad. And it depends if you really wanted to get into detail here. If I'm making the salad for me and Genevieve, I'm cutting them as thin as possible because Genevieve is not as much of a cuke fan as I win. So she'll. She likes them, really. I tried to. What's that special device that you have that slices things incredibly? We have one, too. It's like a. A mandolin. Yeah, mandolin. I don't use that, but, like, I try to, like, just cut them as thin as possible for her.

[Andrew Walsh]

But for me, you try to go basically Paul Sorvino in Goodfellas with the garlic and the razor blade.

[Luke Burbank]

But I am. I realized that I was doing that for my own salads. I'm like, wait, this isn't how I like them. I like a chunky little cucumber. So I'll cut them in my salad into halves or quarters. Kind of chunky. But then also you and I have bonded over this recently. Like, I like to cut like I don't know what an 8th inch thick or quarter inch inch thick cucumber coin. Hit that with a little bit of salt and pepper. Bob's your uncle.

[Andrew Walsh]

Absolutely. I've been doing. Making my. A little like a brew of. Of like sesame oil and soy sauce and I've, you know, and like make a little kind of an Asian cucumber salad thing. So easy to do. You just, you know, cut up some cucumber, throw it in a bowl and then just like that's the thing that I'm starting to learn is just like making, making sauces just to taste like just being like, okay, it needs more of this. It needs to like a little bit sweet. Let's get some acid to balance it, whatever. And then you just like do. Do a bowl of that. And it just only gets better over time because it's just marinating more and more.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, yeah, no, that sounds good. You know, I've been looking for a good. I'll go online and look for those ingredients because I don't. I. I'm always looking for a good sort of like summer vegetable side sort of. And I have this like corn and black bean salad that I swear by. I've been making it for years and. But that's kind of my go to and I have maybe one or two others. But like especially for pop up, if I want to take like some veggies in or something, it'd be nice not to just bring like sliced up cucumbers. It'd be nice to have more of a cucumber salad kind of thing. But a lot of some of those, like my mom made one growing up that was more like kind of mayo based or something or some sort of.

[Andrew Walsh]

I've got an upcoming story at the Mayo Museum.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, that's right.

[Andrew Walsh]

It'll be a long weekend wheelhouse, the international mayo contest where I have to taste 30 kinds of. That's, you know, I do like, I do like mayonnaise. You are on the record as being suspicious of the product other than very specific circumstances. I am. I'm pro mayo. But I will tell you this. I do not like the. When I do not like mayo when they get off of just whatever. Like the best foods taste like, like the very down the middle, like American mayonnaise that I'm used to too. Like, I don't like that kewpiece stuff. I don't like Dukes. I definitely do, like, do not like Sir Kensington's Vegan mayo. Like, mayo is one of those things that if you. You try to get creative with, it is definitely not for me. I'm just like, give me. Give me some good old fashioned best foods mayo. I'll spread that on the sandwich and I'm good to go.

[Luke Burbank]

That's interesting because for me, like, I grew up never touching anything that was mayo or mayo related, and I hated mayo. But then, as you know, Luke, in the past, like, I don't know, 20 years or whatever is more in my adulthood, I started like, I was like, no, I don't. I would order a sandwich. I'd say, hold the mayo. Hold the mayo. But then, like, a sandwich would be like, yeah, but we have like, an herb aioli. An herb aioli or whatever. I'm like, well, herb deoli. I like herbs. Like, okay, you can just leave that on, you know. And then I started. And that sort of was the nose under the tent a little bit. Is it the camel's nose under the tent or is it the test nose under the camel?

[Andrew Walsh]

I can't remember, but camel's nose.

[Luke Burbank]

Okay, the camel. So. And now, like, if I'm ordering a sandwich because I'm already telling them to hold the cheese, it's just probably easier for me not to say hold the mayo too, as long as it's not too glopped on there. But I guess the only reason I bring that up is because it's almost the opposite of what you're saying. Like, it was the. The. More like, not down the middle, not your Hellman's, but more of a. Like, so sort of. Well, like, kind of the fancy ketchup of mayonnaise that you were describing earlier. That sort of like, got me to start looking the other way.

[Andrew Walsh]

Speaking of garlic aioli. And then we should probably ski daddle. I was in the Madison, Wisconsin, airport yesterday, and I was hungry. This is where I ended up eating cheese curds and watching the Mariners on your MLB.com dime. But first I was like, there was a sandwich shop. And, like, it said, literally in huge letters, it says made to order. And then right below that is the guy who's working at the sandwich shop at the register. And I come in and they've got like four or five sandwiches listed. And I was going to try to. I wanted to have him make me a sandwich that was to order because, you know, I don't eat a lot of meat. So I was going to have him make me something with a bunch of veggies and some cheese and some mayo and all that. And one of the things was that they didn't even have a sandwich like that, but everything had garlic aioli on it. But I didn't want garlic aioli. I wanted regular mayo. So I went, I'm just, I mean, I can't overstate how big the made to order sign is. And I was like, so can I do one of these? Can I do a make a make or a made to order sandwich? And he looked at me like I was so insane. And I was like, because I go like that turkey sandwich. I go, could I get that without the turkey? And could I add some other veggies to it? And he goes, yeah, we can't do that. And I was like, was the man.

[Luke Burbank]

To order a joke?

[Andrew Walsh]

Did like a comedian write this, you.

[Luke Burbank]

Know, like for real? Like, what is the.

[Andrew Walsh]

I, I don't know. I mean it was very like. So I think the deal was that they had like four pre made sandwiches or something that were totally not made to order that they couldn't deviate from. I was like, do you have pickles? He was like, yeah, we don't have pickles. I was like, could you put lettuce? And then I just kind of got a little bit like, not frustrated, but I was like, okay, this is not the place for me. But. And then I said to him, I don't know if this was a jerk move. I tried to have a big smile on my face because it's not this guy's fault.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Andrew Walsh]

He just works there. And I didn't want to give him any grief, but I was like, but.

[Luke Burbank]

You gotta ask, you gotta. I did.

[Andrew Walsh]

I go, I go, I go. They really. I go, they're really throwing you under the bus with this big. And it's. By the way, it's not a banner. Like, it's not like a cheesy banner that they hung up. It's giant like letters that are attached to, to the area. It's very permanent above where this guy works. I said, they're really throwing you under the bus with this made to order sign. And he goes, yeah. And then, and then I went over to the adjacent place and got some cheese curds. But it was like this could not possibly be less made to order situation when I just. All I wanted you to do. I almost was like going to have to five easy pieces. It.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, right.

[Andrew Walsh]

Okay, you've got a turkey sandwich, you've got lettuce you've got tomatoes. Now hold the turkey, add regular mayo. That's my Dennis Hopper impression.

[Luke Burbank]

No, we knew you didn't have to say that. Certainly, yeah. I mean, it's like Big Al's chicken. Can I get some chicken, please? No, sell chicken here. Like, I don't understand, like, what's going. And you're right to not want to like, make him have to answer to that. I actually kind of like the way you constructed that a little bit. It takes the pressure off of him. But like, because, you know, that's probably a very thankless job. I always think about that whenever I'm at an airport. I always think like, oh, could I get a job at the airport? Because I conceivably, you know, there's an airport in driving distance to my home. I think this is a notion I had ever since I moved out to Seattle because I didn't have a permanent job when I moved out here. And I'd be applying for a lot of different jobs in media, but I'd also sometimes see things like at the airport and I'd be like, at what point do I start applying for airport jobs? You know, just service jobs, whatever it is. And so maybe it's always been in the back of my head like, you know, what would it be like to work at the airport? Whether you're working in the food industry or working in more in the airline industry or whatever it is, it seems like a fascinating place to work in a certain way. Like the airports are unlike any other place on the planet, right? Like, just like, yeah, people from all over the place coming and going, blah, blah. I think it would be somewhat fascinating, but also such a grind. And I just wonder, like, what's it like getting to work every day? You have to go through some sort of security clearance every day. Where are you parking? Where's the employee entrance? I'm obsessed with this.

[Andrew Walsh]

It. I'm sure it's the, you know, from when you leave your car, if you are driving a car, to when you're actually standing at your workstation at whatever restaurant or, you know, Hudson News or wherever you're working inside the airport. That's the part that basically, because I go through a lot of airports as it is and it. I find it to be kind of a soul crushing process. I can't imagine doing it five days a week to get to where, just to get to my job. And like, I have to check myself because sometimes I will be in a line at the. This totally happened to me actually at. Was it Was it the Madison Airport might. No, it was LaGuardia. I think I've been in a lot of airports lately. But, like, I was in line. This. The quick story is I was in line in LaGuardia. I have that thing clear, which I know is kind of part of the problem. Like, clear, like, makes the line worse for everyone else. So therefore, you have to buy clear so you don't have to be in the bad line that you created.

[Luke Burbank]

Soon I need to get clear. Plus, of course, because I, I have.

[Andrew Walsh]

Clear and I have TSA pre check, and I just have started using clear more because I'm paying for it and I feel like I might as well or something. And. But it's, it's. Sometimes it's, it's an improvement. Sometimes it's not. Like, sometimes it's like, in this case, it was slower than the TSA pre check line, which I also have pre check on my thing. Like, you go up somebody with clear, they're always very nice. They bring you over to this, like, kiosk. The kiosk scans your eyeballs, and then you're supposed to kind of cut to the front of the line. But there was something weird with this line where, like, we were. The clear line was taking longer than the TSA precheck line because they were letting the pre check people go over to our, whatever, security guy. And I found myself getting really annoyed and then having to think, am I late for this flight? I wasn't. Is this that big of an inconvenience? No, there's, like, basically no line. I'm. Now I'm waiting four minutes instead of one minute. And by any standard, going through the TSA in four minutes is a great win. So just because it's taking longer than I thought. But the other thing is, sometimes when I'm in a long line and I am frustrated and maybe I am running late, and then the folks show up who work at the airport and they kind of cut to the front of the line because they're allowed to do that because, like, it would be insane if they had to wait also in that line. And, And I've caught myself being, like, annoyed. Like, are you kidding me? Like, I'm not getting through this line fast. And then I'm just, like, thinking about this person's life and, like, what a pain in the ass it must be to work at the airport. They're very often a person of color, maybe a woman. Like, they're a person who I think is working pretty hard in this world to kind of like, have a life. Because things. Systems are not well set up for them, typically. And if the one thing is they get to go through this pat down that they have to go through every day to get to work, and they get to go ahead of me, that's fine. I have to, like, remind myself of that because I'll just be like, I can catch myself, be like, oh, you.

[Luke Burbank]

Gotta be kidding me.

[Andrew Walsh]

This lady that works at the Arby's gets to cut now. She's just, like, such a terrible.

[Luke Burbank]

I wish they were in Arby's at the airport.

[Andrew Walsh]

That's what I mean. I picked the worst example of a restaurant because I'm telling you, anybody who knows their stuff knows there are no Arby's in the airport. I think it would be a hit.

[Luke Burbank]

I think so. I mean, it seems like the trend is just going in the opposite direction, though, right? If you have Arby's on one end of the spectrum, and some people would put Arby's on one end of the spectrum in a fancy restaurant on the other, I would say we're going more towards, like, the regional famous chef, celebrity chef. Like.

[Andrew Walsh]

Like a terrible place. Pale shadow of what Wolfgang Puck could do. If you at his real restaurant.

[Luke Burbank]

Right, exactly.

[Andrew Walsh]

Branded as Wolfgang Puck.

[Luke Burbank]

But.

[Andrew Walsh]

But it's like, oh, can I just say one more thing out of complete left field? But, like, I can't remember who it was. Somebody that I think I admired, maybe a comedian. It might have even been Mulaney. I think it might have been an old Mulaney bit. I feel like there is a trend that I find very upsetting, which is people referring to the place that you get cinnamon rolls in the mall or at the airport. It's Cinnabon. B, O, N. There are a lot of people that call it Cinnabon.

[Luke Burbank]

Oh, yeah.

[Andrew Walsh]

And that really grinds my gears, because if you look at the last three letters of it, it's B, O, N. It's not B, U, N. And, like, again, it might have. I don't want to. Mulaney's having a tough enough time as it is with everybody's life, which I will also try to call into again this week. But, like, I don't want to throw him under the bus, but it was somebody that I remember thinking like, oh, this person has. Uses precision. Language. Language. Like, they're precise with their language. And they're calling it Cinnabon. And they were, like, the second person I'd heard in, like, a month just casually calling it Cinnabon. And I was like, that is not what it's called, my friend. It's Cinnabon.

[Luke Burbank]

But it is. They're asking for that confusion though. Yes. What is the point of changing the M to a B? Unless you're supposed to be invoking some sort of bun or pastry.

[Andrew Walsh]

Totally.

[Luke Burbank]

And again, I don't even know if I've ever been to Cinnabon, so I don't even really know what it is they're slinging. I know that it's some sort of cinnamony pastry. Right. It's class. It's like classic mall food. But I. The name does not make sense. So I sort of don't blame the people who are making that mistake.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yes. No, you're right. It's like it's a weird name and it's setting some because you. It's a cinnamon bun. We call it a cinnamon bun. Like that would be. So why. I don't know if they're trying to play on French like bon being maybe.

[Luke Burbank]

That, you know, maybe that's good to see or something. Look this up real quick. We got to get out of here.

[Andrew Walsh]

But I just want to like let everybody know in case you haven't looked closely lately. It's. Oh, and then what was the other. Andrew. I'm sorry, I'm just full. Oh, I know what it is this weekend.

[Luke Burbank]

It is the French thing, according to the AI overview, by the way. So maybe that I just sounded like a real dumb American there.

[Andrew Walsh]

Okay, this is my last. This is my last rant and then I'll let everyone go. There was a. A pretty funny little Weekend Update bit that I caught on the Internet. You know, I, I don't watch, of course I don't watch Saturday Night Live Live, but it'll pop up in my various feeds, particularly TikTok. And it was the Weekend Update. The premise was it's Joanne from Joanne Fabric.

[Luke Burbank]

Uh huh.

[Andrew Walsh]

And she's showing up at the Weekend Update desk to basically like make a bunch of jokes about Joanne Fabric because business and also kind of like have a meltdown. Like she appears to be drunk. It was actually very well played. I'm not that familiar with the cast member, but this is what's crazy to me. And now let me double check this because if I go on this rant and I'm wrong, by the way, I.

[Luke Burbank]

Was at, I was at a Joanne's briefly this weekend. It is a. I didn't know that they were still actually open, but yeah, they are in their death throes and it is a depressing.

[Andrew Walsh]

And you just Very unintentionally did the thing that they had me horked up about, which is, it's not Joanne's.

[Luke Burbank]

Oh, it's Joanne fabric.

[Andrew Walsh]

Joanne fabric. And so they were like. And now Joanne from Joanne's fabric. And she's like, the whole bit, which, again, I thought the bit itself was really funny. She keeps talking about Joanne's and the like. I think it's Colin Jost is calling it Joanne's. Everyone's calling it the wrong thing. And it's like, you wrote this whole bit. You rehearsed the bit. Did anybody Google what the name of the thing is? There's no no S. There's no apostrophe s. It's not Joanne's.

[Luke Burbank]

I would argue this. I would argue this. Like, you and I talked. I don't think this was on the air before the show. Like, JCPenney is JCPenney, but colloquially, our family called it pennies. And so I think there are certain things, especially with this kind of store. I know this isn't a department store, but that type of thing, like, I feel like, okay, if you say Joanne's fabric, that hits my ear really wrong. It's Joanne fabric or Joanne Fabrics. No, Joanne fabric.

[Andrew Walsh]

The fabrics is possessive.

[Luke Burbank]

But if you. If you say Joanne, the fabrics owns Joanne. If you say Joanne's, I feel like that is like a. That is just sort of a cultural shortening of the word. I have no problem with. If you don't have a problem with calling JC Penny pennies as a sort of shortened colloquialism, I would say calling it Joanne's would be the same thing.

[Andrew Walsh]

I think to me, it's like. Because I grew up in the home base of Nordstrom, and I always really bristle at people calling it Nordstrom. Nordstrom's, yeah.

[Luke Burbank]

And Pike Place Market. Pike's Place. That's a big thing around here. Stuff like that has come up before.

[Andrew Walsh]

I think I'm especially sensitive because of the Nordstrom's thing I did.

[Luke Burbank]

Because you don't want to drive your Volkswagen over to.

[Andrew Walsh]

Believe me, I'm in. I'm in. I'm in a. Like, a rigorous speech therapy program revolving on how to pronounce the VW vehicles that I'll just call them V Dubs for now.

[Luke Burbank]

I have an amazing.

[Andrew Walsh]

No, I hear you on that. I just thought it was funny because, like, to me, the pennies thing, that's like, a cute nickname for a place. And I can't give you a different example of something else, but that, to me, is Almost like a whole other kind of category, which is like a cute nickname that we'll give to a store that we all know is not the name, but it's what we're calling it. Like, Penny's is a perfect example to me. Just like the Saturday Night Live writers. I think no one actually looking closely to see what the name of the thing they're parodying is, is seemed kind of like, you know, seemed odd to me because, you know, but. But I was probably the only person.

[Luke Burbank]

Well, yeah, I didn't see that context. And it might be because Joanne's is. Genevieve has gotten so much into sewing over the past two years that I think I hear her say Joanne's. And it's sort of like I feel like the people who go to Joann's a lot more than you and I actually do call it Joanne somewhat colloquially and probably lovingly. Before this. Of course, it's not loving now. I mean, what happened to that store? Like so much many other great American brands with this investment capital coming in, just buying the name and gutting it is just so, so, so depressing. However, I came across what I would consider to be a dazzling detail as we get out of here about Cinnabon, which. Did you know that started in Federal.

[Andrew Walsh]

Cinnabon's.

[Luke Burbank]

Do you know that it started in Federal Way in 1985 at the sea Tac Mall? Wow.

[Andrew Walsh]

Where you're gonna work someday.

[Luke Burbank]

Where I'm gonna work someday. And I do wonder. Now called the Commons at Federal Way. That's what I guess Seatac Mall used to be called. Called Cinnabon was an offshoot of the Seattle based Restaurants Unlimited chain. And it says people associated with wanted to create the perfect cinnamon roll, eventually hiring Geralyn Brousseau to finalize the recipe. Since Brousseau was famous for her baking in the Seattle area. I don't know if that name rings a bell for you, but I didn't realize that there was such local root here. For.

[Andrew Walsh]

I. Here's what I think. I think I assumed it was local because I was a kid. And when you were a kid and you're in the mall, you don't have a sense of like, national brands maybe, or. Yeah, so I think I always assumed that, but. But not because I knew that it started in. At the Seatac Mall. Yeah, but by the way, when did we decide to start naming everything the Commons? Yeah, it was supposed to be classy, but yeah, it's kind of the. It's the rose gold fixtures of calling things things. And by That, I mean, like, you know, there was a huge trend in making, like, all your sconces rose gold in your bathroom that had the real edgy tile that was like kind of, I don't know, a really cool pattern, but, like, it's already firmly planted in 2022, which is. I'm not saying I did the greatest job with my little remodel, but I was very much trying to be a little bit less tied into the particular moment of time. Like, I really like what you and Veeves did in your kitchen, by the way. We never debriefed on that.

[Luke Burbank]

Oh, yeah.

[Andrew Walsh]

Looks like it turned out really well by way of Instagram.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, that's a bit of a. Yeah, we can have a conversation about that. I think the dur. Durability is going to be an issue. So it's definitely a temporary. We put down. For folks who don't know what we're talking about, we put down that temporary flooring that's sort of like these sticky, what, like maybe two foot by two foot tiles or whatever. It looks good, but it definitely is a temporary thing. We can talk more about that. But I was going to say, regarding the. What were you just saying?

[Andrew Walsh]

Rose gold.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah. It sort of feels like the. Or the Commons. We called them malls. It's the Drake meme. I didn't need to say this. Sorry. I just had it in my head a second ago and I was trying to remember it. The Drake meme of just like, kind of like shaking his head away at the word mall, but then call it commons, like. Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. We'll.

[Andrew Walsh]

I'll meet you at the Commons, so. All right, that's. That's about enough of that.

[Luke Burbank]

That was a lot of that.

[Andrew Walsh]

And we did a whole show before this that no one will ever hear.

[Luke Burbank]

Sorry.

[Andrew Walsh]

Okay, thanks for listening, everybody. We are going to be back here tomorrow with more of this imaginary radio for you. Please, if you can join us. In the meantime, have a good Monday. Take care of yourselves. Go marry mariners, and please remember, no mountain too tall.

[Luke Burbank]

And good luck to all. Power out.