The Press Box - Don't Pence Me In | The Press Box

Episode Date: July 5, 2019

Images from the border (02:00), the “Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week” (18:30), the case of the disappearing Mike Pence (21:00), and more. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. To get you through the holiday week, check out the ringer.com for our July streaming recommendations, analysis on the U.S. women's national team during the World Cup, and takeaways from an exciting start to NBA-free agency. Also, we'll be sticking to our regular podcast schedule, so make sure to tune in to your favorite shows throughout the week as usual. David, do you know what the journalistic term, Evergreen means?

Okay. Yes, I do. It's a story that can run at any point in time. It doesn't have to come out right when it's done. And I guess the connection you're drawing here is that we're recording this podcast a couple of days early so that it can come out on its regularly scheduled Friday time slot. Right. This is being recorded on Wednesday, but it could essentially come out any time.

You can listen to it anytime. This is what journalists do before holidays. Write something that'll survive. Write something that'll last. Right? And somebody that anybody can read. This is what we're doing here. This is fantastic. Well, it's nice to know that even though

Kawhi Leonard will almost certainly announce his free agency destination as I crack open my third or fourth beer on the 4th of July, that we can at least get some work then ahead of time. There's some evergreen content that we can be proud of. I was trying to think, you know, what would be the media story where I'm going to have to find the microphone and record a new opening like Bill did the other day when DeAngelo Russell got traded? York Times gets sold. Jeff Bezos goes to prison.

I mean, what is the what would require us to get back and front of the bikes and record a new top to this podcast. Yeah, sadly, I don't think we're going to need a top or where we say, you know, the Trump administration has totally renounced its immigration policy. And so ignore the rest of the show. But, you know, we can always hope. We are the hearty perennial of media podcasts. This is the press box, a part of the Ringer podcast network.

Fantastic. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to the press box, Brian Curtis, and David Shoeaker of the Ringer. here, lots to get to today, including farewell to the tabloidiest tabloid reporter of all time, the disappearing Mike Pence and Clay Thompson's unlikely tribute to print newspapers. But first, David, we should spend a few minutes, I think talking about the images we've seen lately from the border. On Monday, Joaquin Castro, U.S. representative and brother of Julian Castro, who's running for president,

was touring the Border Patrol facilities in Texas, according to the Washington Post, the phones of the politicians who were there were confiscated, but Castro managed to secretly make recordings and take some pictures, which he put on Twitter. He tweeted, Our Border Patrol system is broken, and part of the reason it stays broken is because it's kept secret. The American people must see what is being carried out in their name.

And let's run a little audio here. This is not going to be particularly meaningful, but it will give you a sense of some of the video that Castro was able to get out of the Border Patrol facility. There's a woman here. There's a woman here. The doctor told her she needs a biopsy for the lump on her back. So,

we've got out of a next stop. We obviously don't have the facility in a surgical lives here, but we'll make sure that her continue to her care. It's on her record. And when she gets to her next stop, wherever that is, whether it's in our custody or out. What what Castro is doing in that video is actually also holding up a handwritten list of names of some of the women at that detention facility that he had scribbled down. He tweeted they asked us to take down their names and let everyone know they need help.

He also took footage of the shower facilities, which he called dank and dirty. Said that many people there had not bathed for 15 days. Said that some of the women had not received their medication, including one for epilepsy, members of Congress. comforted them when the women broke down. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was also on that visit, and afterwards she said this. There's abuse in these facilities. There's abuse.

This was done on their best behavior, and they put them in a room with no running water, and these women were being told by CVP officers to drink out of the toilet. So why all this is particularly interesting, David, is because the American media and therefore the American people have seen almost nothing of these facilities to this point.

A lawyer told the Washington Post, Paul Farhey, if journalists had access to the detention centers at the border where children are being held in filthy conditions, those centers would not exist. So is this a case of

the media is barred and essentially politicians are temporarily taking the role of the media? Yeah. I mean, I think that's a good way to look at it. I mean, I'm, it's, it's honestly a subject that's kind of hard to, to wrap one's mind around as far as,

you know, um, you know, there have been journalists that have been there, I mean, that have broken parts of the story before. Um, but, you know, it's a, it is a, in a lot of ways as, you know, the sound clip you just played, you know, evinced was that, you know, it's a, it's a visual media, right? I mean, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's, it's necessary to have video to fully wrap one's head around what's going on. The photos have done, you know, have gone a long way to help. But, you know, I mean, it's, I'm sure there's a lot of enterprising journalists who are stymied both by their, you know, both by what the government's letting them do and by the, by the, you know, strictures of print journalism or whatever else

they're working with. So it's, it's an incredibly difficult situation. That's say nothing of the morality of it. One thing Farhi notes in his piece is that essentially all the people who are trying to report on these centers are doing it secondhand at this point, journalists that is. They basically call lawyers and victims advocates and immigration advocates and say, what's going on? What have you seen in these centers? And then as you say, use print to basically describe it.

And of course, that was supposed to be what happened here with Castro. He was just able to smuggle pictures and video. out of the center without, you know, kind of around the government and give it that vibe. I mean, this is, I think, all two, we should probably think of this as kind of part of a flood of images that all of a sudden we have begun to see from the border. Most strikingly, and that is me struggling for a neutral adjective here, is the photo of the Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his two-year-old daughter Valeria, who were lying face down, drowned in the Rio Grande, taken by a journalist at La Hornada,

the newspaper and then of course played all over American media sources. Today and yesterday we've also seen photos from government investigators of overcrowded shelters. We have seen Ocasio-Cortez posting pictures on her social media of tiny little squeeze packets of shampoo that the detainees were given. Ocasio-Cortez is also, I think, rhetorically used the term concentration camps to describe the facility. she tells Jonathan Katz and Mother Jones, we need to repeat the term and allow ourselves to be comfortable with that. The reason no one was talking about it was because we had accustomed ourselves to depravity. And sometimes you have to make people uncomfortable in order for us to do anything about an issue. So it's sort of saying, you know, I really feel that this is this is all happened in June essentially, right?

this is the point where we've finally gotten images to match a policy and a policy that is, you know, striking, offensive on its face, but again, almost hard to process without seeing pictures of it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it wasn't that long ago. We were talking about our buddy Chuck Todd, you know, coming out against, speaking out against Alexander Ocasio-Cortez's use of the term concentration camps. You know, I don't know how much MTP daily has gone in to actually, you know, investigate what's going on there or even to address the kind of moral catastrophe and, you know, the term humanitarian crisis gets thrown around a lot, but I think that that's justified, a justified term in this situation. But it's, you know, it seems like these photos without, I mean,

the photos and videos that we've seen make that sort of distinction it seems just sort of silly to be arguing over terminology and I think Ocasio-Cortez makes a strong point about making people uncomfortable deliberately. And even the term humanitarian crisis doesn't really I feel that's one of those newspaper terms that we're just numb to at this point? It is. It is and it cuts both ways in the sense that like you know there was you know, the Trump administration can talk about the crisis on the border, referring to it as a

humanitarian crisis from, you know, nominally the other side of the argument, it doesn't really seem like you're arguing too much, you know? I mean, like you said, you're numb to it. And in some ways, this is a, it's not a manufacturer crisis that the causes of the mass migration are in a lot of ways out of the hands of the United States government, but the politicization of it is certainly manufactured to a large degree. These concentration camps, if you want to call them, that are, you know, a decision that was deliberately made by the Trump administration. And, you know, the situation, I mean, the fact that we're arguing over this in terms of politics

is just sort of mind-blowing. Yeah, it's funny about immigration, too, that when I used to write about this a little bit, it was always interesting to me that this issue is probably number one or at least in the top three of issues that have these striking, conflicting, often misleading images that lead the public debate. You'll remember right before the 2016 midterms, excuse me, 2018 midterms, the big image you could not turn to Fox News or Trump's Twitter account and not see images of the migrant caravan. fan. And when Trump and his allies would use the word crisis, the crisis they were talking about was crisis of people coming into the United States, the U.S. border being overwhelmed. If you went back to the Obama administration, the images were often, that was when the Mexican drug war was in a different stage and the images were often, you know, dead bodies in Mexico and narcos and the

the wages of that battle, shown to American audiences often with the idea of, uh-oh, the drug wars coming into the United States. Here are, you know, these, here are the things you have to, here are the reasons to be scared of the border. Here are the reason to be scared of other people, even if that was almost never the case. So I just don't know that any issue that I can possibly think of gets dominated by images like this. I can't even, I can't even know. I don't I don't know what's second place, to be honest. Another big story from yesterday was Akazio-Cortez and Representative Norma Torres. They said they didn't feel safe in the Border Patrol facility.

And speaking of which, there was a big report in ProPublica by A.C. Thompson. Yeah. And let me just read the first couple of paragraphs of that. Members of a secret Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol agents joked about the death of migrants, discussed throwing burritos at Latino members of Congress, visiting a detention facility in Texas, and posted a vulgar illustration depicting Akazio-Cortez

engaged in oral sex with a detained migrant according to screenshots of their postings. In one exchange, group members responded with indifference and wisecracks to the news story of a 16-year-old Guatemalan migrant who died in custody. One member posted a giff of Elmo with the quote,

oh well, another responded with an image and the words, if he dies, he dies. So, in terms of in terms of illustrating that part of the issue, that was another big story. Again, I think you and I are sort of at a loss for words here because I don't know what to say. It's sort of like all this has come out, all this has come out at once.

And I know what I think about it, but it's almost hard to put it into words. Yeah, I mean, this isn't exactly, I mean, there's no excuse for those Facebook posts and for, any actions that result from that or any dehumanization that goes that goes on and part of our you know and part of the Americans who are running these camps and it's not exactly the fog of war but but you know this is a we've seen this before you know in wartime situations and stuff that you know dehumanizing people in mass will lead to this sort of inhuman response And it's just a terrible state of affairs that, well, that here we are. I don't even know what to say either.

One of the politicians that went along yesterday, Texas House member, I believe, had a statement on Twitter afterwards where he said something like, I don't want to describe these facilities as not working because I think they're absolutely working in the way that Trump wants them to work. This is essentially a successful. execution of Trump's chosen policy rather than an unsuccessful execution of it. And that's an interesting way to look too, that we're finally getting images that show exactly what this was supposed to be in the eyes of the people who designed it. And, you know, it's just that, again, as you pointed out a second ago, rhetorically,

or in terms of pictures, we just haven't had something that's caught up with what the policy was. And finally we have, you know, and again, just we're talking a few images, a few snippet. it's a video here and there, something that kind of matches it. Yeah, I mean, it's just sort of disheartening just to imagine the direction this is going to take. And I hope that I'm wrong. But, you know, these are largely people that came here seeking sanctuary. You know, I mean, this isn't some like, like Craven crew that's determined to take American low-paying jobs. And even if they were, I mean, just sort of, I shrug my shoulders.

but it's not that it doesn't it's not that hard to imagine this being a part of Trump's campaign and not I mean the pictures may change everything and let's hope that they do but it's not that hard to imagine him starting you know we need more camp's chance on the campaign trail I do wonder about that because it you know I think you know lock up the migrants is something that he's indulged in a lot lot. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know how that, I mean, putting aside the morality and we probably shouldn't, but just for the moment, I don't know that that that can survive these kind of pictures. I really don't. And I don't know how much, you know, we've already seen, including in those

at ProPublica thing, a lot of those current and former members of the Border Patrol talking about fake news and, oh, are these migrant photos doctored and those kinds of things. But I, I don't know. You know, I think it's really hard, and I think it'll be a sort of interesting gut check, whether it's, it's a lot easier to sell a certain segment of the American public on quote unquote tough immigration policy. It's harder to do when you have those pictures to go with it. By the way, fascinating column by Jack Schaefer and Politico. He quotes from a book by Jessica Fishman. The book was a 2018 book called Death Makes the News about how the American media is.

much more eager to show photos of dead foreigners than they are of dead Americans. And it's really interesting. Fishman did these studies where she looked at the coverage of Hurricane Katrina versus the Indian Ocean tsunami, which was right around the same time, and found that American newspapers were constantly, were not bothered by posting pictures of foreign bodies. But when it came to Americans, they were much more interested in posting pictures of survivors. And it was almost like they got squeamish about it.

Fascinating thing. And Schaefer says in his column, it'll really change the way you read about the newspaper. I've got a Rush Limbaugh clip up here, but I don't know if I really even want to hear it. It's just him making fun of Ocasio-Cortez. So how about- I mean, we don't need to play the clip.

But I do think it's salient to recognize that there are major conservative voices that are joking about the situation, right? So, I mean, so when we talk about the Trump campaign trail, I mean, like, listen, I can sit here and say that I'm confident that, you know, the American public, like writ large should not and will not stand for this sort of thing. But that doesn't mean that like Trump can get far enough outside of his, you know, his campaign rally bubble to, I mean,

I still, I do think that like, you know, lock them up is going to be, you know, is a chant that would get people chanting behind it regardless of the actual, the actual political and humanitarian implications of it. And the rush thing shows the playbook, which is, you don't talk about the policies, but you attack AOC, who is already an obsessive figure of Fox News. You'd go after her and you sort of hope that the policy, you know, people just sort of forget about it or, you know, it becomes this kind of vague thing that nobody can get their mind around. All right, time for the overworked Twitter joke of the week, David, where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. From the U.S. soccer team's

victory over Pierce Morgan, I mean, England, Tuesday, when a goal was taken away from England by the dreaded video assistant referee or VAR or instant replay as we call it. It was an overworked Twitter joke to say VAR, I take back every bad thing I've said about you. That one snared Mina Kimes, PFT commenter, Big Cat, Roger Sherman, and the ringer's main Twitter account. And thanks to Paul McGrannett for that one. Speaking of snaring everyone, are we past the point where you just tweet ball don't lie during a game? just in a moment like where everybody just hits that at the same time. Ryan Rogers tweeted that it was a joke so obvious that all of Ringer Media made it exactly the same time since it got Tate, Mina, and Michael Bauman.

Thanks to Ryan Rogers, Ryan Patrick, and Kyle Madsen for pointing that one out. And finally, after England lost two to one, it was an overworked Twitter joke to write the Brits already blew a 13 colony lead. So this is unsurprising. Thanks to Argyll umbrella for that. this one from NBA free agency and I only say that so we just can never use it again but free agency and the NBA was supposed to start Sunday night Eastern time and then of course a whole bunch of signings were announced right at the second it began. Yes.

Meaning that of course everyone tweeted there is no tampering at all in the NBA and this obviously proves it. So it's kind of like the one where we start this team starts 1 and 0 and you said they're going to they're on pace to go 82 and oh. let's just end that right now. Thanks to Big Little Rise and Pierce Treyhan for sending that. About the Colin Kaepernick Nike Betsy Ross thing, which you might have read about on every single conservative website in America.

Nike was going to put the old Betsy Ross flag on a pair of Air Max 1 quick strikes and Kaepernick, who has a Nike deal pointed out, and it's often used as a symbol by racists. So Nike took it off. Wall Street Journal broke the story. it was an overworked Twitter joke to write this Kaepernick Betsy Ross Nike thing truly is a fight for the soul of America

S-O-L-E-S-O-E-S-O-Gue. I know and I know I'm not endorsing it but it was everywhere. Thanks to bards against for that one. All right, David, time for the notebook dump. And since we know everything in this media world we live in, I thought we'd say something about the strange case of Mike Pence's disappearance this week.

I'm sure you follow this. according to CNN, he got on a helicopter at the Naval Observatory yesterday, went to Andrew's Air Force Base, and then got on a plane to prepare for a flight en route to an opioid treatment facility in New Hampshire. A person at the facility then walked out and told the press, I do have some bad news at this point. Air Force 2 was headed this way. There's been an emergency. Turns out Air Force 2 never took off. Of course, immediately the press starts wondering what the emergency is. a senior administration official told CNN,

this is not health related for the VP or president, nothing related to national security. Okay. So it's not Pence's health. It's not Trump's. We haven't invaded someone or attacked someone. It's not national security. Trump was also not seen yesterday,

though he did tweet logistics of his July 4th tank event, which was off topic, but seemed to indicate everything was okay. And then Mark Short, who is Pence's chief of staff, according to CNN, intensified speculation when he told reporters

who were asking what happened that they would find out the cause, quote, in a few weeks. So, something happened.

Yeah, I had missed the in a few weeks part of this. Yeah, I was watching TV yesterday when this was going down

and it, it seemed, I mean, it seemed like a national emergency briefly, you know, I mean, it seemed like

there was something, Like there was some giant story or news or, you know, catastrophe about to drop. And then there was just sort of met with a, you know, an eye roll from the vice president's office. It's kind of hard to know what to make of it. Presumably news will come out at some point sooner than a couple of weeks, but maybe it'll take some, Maybe we'll have to wait for, you know, the next Trump White House expose book to get published. But this is just a really just maybe insignificant, but just, you know, deeply weird moment. Yeah, my interest in it was the fact that there was actually something in the world that we didn't know.

Yeah. And that we didn't find out for 24 hours. It's really weird, especially with the Trump White House, by the way, where we seem to know everything like instantly. But when there's just a hole in the. news and there's no answer at all and also the kind of panic like uh-oh something happened to mike pence which is still kind of america's backup plan did you see david the strange but touching tribute to print from clay thompson nick de paula who covers sneaker stuff reports that thompson is celebrating his lucrative new warriors contract by dropping a pair of shoes that

are decorated like a newspaper it's a tribute to thompson's pregame locker room ritual of reading the paper according to DePa. If you see these shoes, it's just newsprint and big headlines over it. Yeah. DePaula also adds all buyers of the

newspaper themed sneakers this weekend will get a free one-year subscription to the East Bay Times. So that's true. Is that that's true? Yeah. You get a newspaper buy the shoes that look like a newspaper and then you get a subscription to a newspaper.

Well, it'll be interesting to see how many of the shoe buyers become regular subscribers of the East Bay Times, but I can be hopeful, I guess. Is this a way, do you think, to save America's slumping newspaper industry to make shoes that look like newspapers? Like spary top-siders that look like the New York Times Arts and Leisure Section, maybe? I mean, buy a different thing and get a free subscription has been a functional part of America's print media financial plan for some time. time. Yeah, going back to ESPN Insider. But yeah, I mean, but cheer, if this helps, then I'm all for it. Also, maybe I was just totally missed the fact that Clay Thompson was a, I mean,

had a ritual of reading the newspaper in the locker room before every game. I'm not sure I knew that either. It seems like maybe when you're designing your shoes, you should lean on maybe a slightly more, a more well-known part of your personality, although I guess like dancing funny on foreign trips does not, you know, does not a best-selling tennis shoe make. But, but, but, but, but yeah, I mean, I do think that, I do think it's a good looking shoe. I could, I imagine that there will probably be some ringer staffers rocking this in the not too distant future. Yeah, I kind of want some for us, you know. You don't, we don't,

we don't get too many, uh, too many press tie-ins here with the sneaker department, but these, these actually look kind of cool. David from the obit's desk, I want to direct you to an incredible obituary in the Guardian ran a while back. We'll put this on the, press box Twitter account for the historian Norman Stone the idea I think at this point in history of the legendary mean British obit is kind of more of a dream that it is an actual day-to-day reality but this one hit it the author Richard Day j Evans starts about talking about how Norman Stone was a specialist in character assassination and then Evans proceeds to do it on his own talks about what an unpleasant guy Stone was how much he drank how he blew his early promise as a his

historian, and this was the end of the O bit. This will give you a flavor of it. Journalist often described Stone as one of Britain's leading historians, but in truth, he was nothing of the kind, as any serious member of the profession will tell you. The former Prime Minister Edward Heath was wrong about many things, but he was surely right when he said of Stone, many parents of Oxford students must be horrified and disgusted that the higher education of our children should rest in the hands of such a man. Then there's a paragraph break.

Stone is survived by his sons and of Obit. It's fantastic work. Yeah, we'll put that on Twitter anyway. That was fascinating. The other one that I want to direct your attention to is that of Steve Dunleavy who I think you and I remember

as a New York post columnist, but was one of the most Murdochian characters in Rupert Murdoch's journalistic universe. When Dunleavy died a little over a week ago, Murdoch himself said he was one of the greatest reporters of all time. And I'm going to read a little bit from his New York Post obituary. He got exclusive interviews.

This is Dunleavy, who was, by the way, Australian, and you won't need me to say that when you read the rest of this. But he was an Australian journal. Got exclusive interviews with Sir Han, Sir Hahn, Sir Hahn, and the Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo. DeSalvo, the New York Post writes, also posed in the nude for Dunleavy, who had smuggled a camera into prison for the story. Still quoting from the post here. Dunleavy enticed three of Elvis's bodyguards to reveal the singer's drug addiction. Elvis fans were so mad they dispatched a hearse to the New York Post to pick up Dunleavy. Still more to come. We're not done. Dunleavy punched Phil Spector in the face. Yes, that Phil Spector. Dunleavy slashed his own father's tires because he and his dad and other journalist were competing on a story. He dressed in hospital scrubs to sneak into a hospital. and interview the family of one of the victims of son of Sam he says I lost count of the number of times

I posed as a cop a public servant or a funeral director in order to get a story he wrote a column that so impressed the far right John Bert Society that it named Dunleavy it's American of the year despite the fact that he was not an American

he beat ABC News's nightline out of an exclusive interview with Jessica Hahn remember Jessica Hahn by going to her house and telling ABC's driver that Han had been taken to the hospital. So they left and then he got the story. And then this is the best part.

On a snowy night, he went to Elaine's. Remember Elaine's, the old journalistic watering hole in New York? Of course, yeah. Where Dunleavy met the fiancé of an Australian journalist. He meets the fiancé of another journalist. While his pals de camp to another bar across the street, Dunleave and the fiancé wound up outside, quote, humping in the snow, arses going up and down,

according to a daily mail journalist. As we were watching, a snowplow came up the street and ran over Dunleavy's foot. One of the journalists who was watching said Dunleavy was so loaded. It didn't matter, but was eventually taken by ambulance to a hospital where he was diagnosed with a broken foot. So farewell to Steve Dunleavy, the New York Post's very own. That is what an amazing and strange person. David, I also want to direct you to a different topic. Also, as it happens from Australia, which is invasions.

that never happen. My pal Russell Jackson, who's one of my favorite sports writers in Australia or anywhere in the world, has written a new book called Electrifying 80s. Footy's outrageous decade and the words of its best writers. Available wherever fine books are sold.

Footy, by the way, is Australian rules football for us, benighted Americans. There's a piece in the book. You'll appreciate this from 1985 from a Melbourne newspaper called The Age. It's written by Trevor Grant. It's about how Australian rules football

was going to take over America. This is 1985. And I just wanted to shout this out because don't you love sports stories about how a sport is about to conquer America? Oh, yeah. That almost feels like it needs its own collection. I mean, what have we had over the years? Poker sort of did it. Yeah.

Actually sort of did it. I guess at a really low level. What else was going to conquer the United States? Did we have like a rugby run somewhere in there? Sure. I think Cornhole is the newest contender to the throne there. Mm-hmm. That's a good one. I think bowling is kind of a, it's anything that gets like a cable TV run,

which Footy did back in the day. Anyway, this piece talks about the fact that there were some Nike ads, funny Nike ads showing footy at one point during the 80s. He talks about how Australia Ann Rules football had gotten a better time slot on ESPN. Yeah. And was getting healthy ratings. Also, how a man in New York had become so enamored with footy. that he essentially got himself hired

by as kind of Australian rules as football's American publicist and was flooding newspapers with ratings info and all that kinds of stuff. I also talked about how the letters he was getting were 27% of the letters he bragged were from women,

which is pretty funny. But it's great. And what I love about this too is 1986 is when Crocodile Dundee comes out. I was about to say they were wrong about Australian rules football, but they weren't, but they were right about the Australia wave that was taking over the country. Yeah, it was kind of the wrong invasion, right?

Yeah. But I just feel this is one of those great stories, and this happens to be an Australian journalist in this case, but this is one of those great sort of sports writing templates. Blank sport is on the rise in the United States. Not blank sport is interesting or blank sport is funny, but this sport is going to take over American, right? Because any journalist wants to be around at the birth of anything or the death of anything. So this is kind of the birth piece. Well, you know, Australian rules football still they still have a chance. I don't think the, I don't think the books closed on the Australian rules football

just yet. Maybe a name that doesn't emphasize its otherness would help. But who knows, who knows. Yeah. It's also kind of a great example of the kind of, you know, and of course Americans are just as guilty of this too. I feel like you know, we probably got a few of these when baseball was in London this last weekend and you know, look, baseball is invading another country. It's sort of it sort of works as patriotism too. Hey, look, even our strange bizarre sport is catching on in foreign land.

And so, um, so that's great stuff too. Some listener mail, David. Somebody named football state of mind sent me a note. Remember we were talking about media members last week and how they now do two job announcements. Whenever you leave a media job, you do an announcement that you're leaving and then you do another announcement a week later that you joined a new company. You must do two different things. Football state of mind notes of media members announcing their new job, now announce their new jobs like their NBA free agents where they write all cap sources.

I'm no longer a free agent. I'll be joining so and so. So that's kind of a bit now. this from JW who sends us some material for our occasional

segment on how people came to love Guy Fieri aka Fear Rehab J.W. sent us a tweet in which

Fieri put his blonde head onto Spider Man's body the occasion being the new Spider Man movie that just came out

and use the tagline with great flavor comes great responsibility hashtag far from Flavortown that's great yeah

So the rehab of fury continues apace. All right, time for David Shoemaker, Gases the strain pun headline. Remember that story about smuggled finches earlier this week? How could I forget? Yeah, America's Got Talent. You got it. Listener Michael Allen asks, how in the world was it not why the cage bird sings, which is pretty good. This one, David comes from Paul Gibson, pediatric oncologist in Canada.

Thank you, Paul. The headline is from the Toronto Star. Here you go. Are you ready? Okay. It's a story about Canadians who make miniature models of various Canadian cities. Okay. You know, you know, I feel like you see these things at a state fair or something like that.

You go and it's. Yeah, yeah. There's a miniature CN Tower, a miniature Scotia Bank Center. And it's so detailed that you can either both have the basketball court or the hockey rink in Scotia Bank Center. I mean, these are just people spending lords of time. Okay. What is the Toronto Stars strain pun headline

for a profile of the people who make miniature Canadian models? What? I'm totally drawing a blank. Let me just push you in the right direction. Am I looking for a city name? What am I working off of here? Let's remember the Raptors,

current NBA champions. The Raptors, okay. And remember a phrase or a, you know, sort of slogan the Raptors may have thrown around. Oh, no. Oh, yeah. Wait, is it, is it We the North with an extra E on the W on the Wii? That is correct. That has nothing to do with this piece.

That is so great, though. That is fantastic. We the North. Oh, my gosh. the obsessive dreamers behind a $17 million miniature model of Canada. $17 million.

That ran in Saturday's Toronto Star. It says it's an 11-minute read. So if you've got 11 minutes, me the north. Holy smokes. Oh, boy. Let us thank, give a special July 4th or July 5th

thanks to the producer of this podcast, Jim Huntingham, Chris Almada for research. David is back next to Tuesday with a special guest host, and then the two of us are back again on Friday. See you then, David. See you later, man. Have a good holiday. You too. David, take back every bad thing I've said about you. Okay. The fact that there was actually something in the world that we didn't know. Yeah, sure. And that we didn't find out for 24 hours. Oh yeah. It's really weird. Uh-huh. Where we seem to know everything like instantly. Yeah, sure. But when there's just a hole in the news,

and David punched Phil Spector in the face. Yes, that Phil Spector. Holy smokes.