Episode 191: The Great Seattle Fire

Yeah, no, it's like that time. Liam, you remember that time we went to, I forget what the entire circumstances were, but we were walking to a liquor store. We were at the liquor store, and you were levitating. I was like, Liam, what's the opposite of coffee? How do I get that? Alcohol. That's big. I was like, and I just flatly said heroin. Yeah, that's a better answer. If you think about it this way, what does coffee make you do? I thought I was very funny. It excites you and makes you shit yourself, right? Yeah, it blocks you up. Yeah, exactly. It depresses you, makes you unable to shit yourself. Cooking up an industrial-grade slow fast. Oh, God. Instantly, immediately. I hope that they don't put age verification on watching this video as well, but just because we talked about coffee making ourselves. What's a slow fast? Slow fast, it's an old Tumblr post, really, but it's like somebody was like, I mixed like NyQuil and DayQuil. To create Quill. To create Quill. And I don't remember exactly how they get to the punchline, but the punchline of the whole thing is it's slow fast. It feels incredibly bad. And it's just like the feeling of vibrating while you're also so tired that you can't think. Yeah. So we already invented that. It was called a speedball. I think that killed George V. That's also alcohol withdrawal Ah Yeah kids don't do that Just keep drinking God damn it Ross Yeah the DTs are not for me As someone who has Drank so bad he's gotten the shakes before You don't want that smoke You don't want that mess My 20s were a bad time Ross was there I am the fabled occasional drinker the social drinker and i'm i'm just back from having two gin and tonics yeah yeah gin and tonics the other thing right i because like because i'm on manjaro right one of the things that does is it really compresses and destroys your ability to like um consume food and alcohol so i had a lovely time um having my two gin and tonics at the pub with new people making friends felt like I was getting a good grade in social interaction felt very garrulous, all of this came home, was like, I'm starving I'm going to order myself a burger and be a real treat, alright? and I had, like, sort of two bites of the burger and I'm now currently in the vestibule of hell the anteroom of hell the place where you go where you know that at some point in the course of your work recording, the two gins and tonics which are a lot when you don't lay anything and the sort of two bites of burger are going to really all catch up with you at once. So if I start groaning like I've just been punched in the solar plexus, that's... I adore her. Yeah, I adore her. We're going to, what we're going to do is I am on that Zemi, and they're switching me to Manjaro or the other one whose name I can't recall right now, Zepbound. Yeah. I think they're putting me on that Jaro. And I have made, like, as I drank on antidepressants, so I shall drink on GLP once. watch out for that 7.5 milligrams it's got hands they're like don't do that i'm just like i can't hear you i like jameson too much no no listen listen let me let me explain to you something about drinking on manjaro right the first time because i am an occasional drinker right and so i was a drinker yeah i had been on it for a few months the first time i had a drink because i was reading secure boot yes if they don't want you to drink on that drug, they shouldn't make it sound like a delicious tropical cocktail. That's true. Speaking of delicious tropical cocktails... Let me finish the fucking story! I was in London. We had done a live show, and in the course of an evening, we went to a Mexican restaurant. London has a couple of good Mexican restaurants, and I was like, okay, I've done all my work, fuck it, let's get lit. Let's have margaritas, and let's keep having margaritas. and let's do some good old-fashioned British binge drinking, right? Let's just have a night to not remember. And I got to three margaritas, which is not a high number by sort of binge drinking standards. And then I got every single stage of drunkenness and hungover at the same time. It was like getting hit by a truck. I genuinely, I was having the fucking interstellar time compression where I was like I'm still buzzed, I'm too drunk, I'm way too drunk, I'm sobering up, I am hung over, I'm really hung over, in the same instant. And once you experience that, you will not want to drink a lot of Manjara. Alright, well thank you. I'm gonna go ahead and put that in the castle of ignorance. God fucking damn it. Go have a wonderful Manjara with a slice of lime and stuff. Yo, Ross, in the waters of the Caribbean like Rihanna. The next time you're over, I have a rum cocktail book, so I will be putting your ass to work. Oh, you're making me make the cocktails from the type of liquor I refuse to drink, yes. That's because you got too shitty on Captain Morgan when you were a freshman. That's not my fault. It was worse than that. Was it Admiral Nelson? No, it's like the one that's like 150 proof. Oh. Ray and Nephew overproof or whatever it's called. Ray and Nephew, Bacardi 151, there's Gosling 151. I think it was Gosling 151 because I had the C-Log. Why would Ryan Gosling do this to you? Yeah, no, I was, uh, I got really fucked up. Pro Bowl Blackout. Yeah, exactly. That was not good. My moment where I drank too much all at once and I decided I couldn't drink that way again when I was um, 17. Uh, it was I would say almost all of a bottle of absolute raspberry vodka. Oh, I love absolute raspberry. You start feeling the flavor in a flavored vodka pretty quickly. It sticks around. Minus that Magellan gin on food poisoning. I've drank on food poisoning. Do not do that. Drinking the entire bottle of raspberry flavored absolute feels like the most woman-coded thing you've ever done. I was simultaneously a young woman and a young gay boy at that moment in my life. And both of those are demographics highly vulnerable to drinking too much flavored vodka and throwing up a color no one's seen before. Oh, yeah, vodka, the color of fear, when you dissolve the Skittles in the butt. I got you. Yeah. This reminds me of the menthol vodka at the Street Fight Show. Oh, don't remind me of the menthol vodka. And then I don't remember what happened after. I think we just went home. Did we just go home or did we go to the bar? No, no, we hung out and talked to Allison in June afterwards. That was when I met June. That's right. Okay, November's drinking story. I've got one more before we start the podcast that we get paid to do and we're here to record. Are we familiar with a drink called Advocat? Two A's in the end. Yes, you are. Okay, good. Yes, we are. We're familiar with that. You're familiar with the devil's eggnog. Yes, yes, yes, yes, of course. What if the kind of satanic Hollanders made an alcoholic custard? And what if you, at Christmas, decided to drink kind of too much of it and felt the kind of heaviness of that gastrically, very intensely? It is a slime. It's an alcoholic slime. It climbs up the sides of the bottle. Cramping in ways that have never been seen before. It tastes really good for the first little bit. I haven't learned so much about various fucked kinds of British liquor since joining onto this show. It's crazy. I know what I'm doing next time I come to Scotland. I have that, and then I'm going to go. Yeah, Buckfest. That would definitely be an interesting D&D villain or enemy or whatever you call it. It's alcoholic slime. you know you guys it's a dream we're all gonna go out there he's getting he's getting shoomed in the gelatinous alcoholic slime yeah that's how Ross are going out at the very least it's been good though you know what we should do we should do a sink point we should count down one more story we should do I'm talking to a death dog we're gonna run it out are they all going in the show no we'll cut all of these out they're 100% going in they're going in I'm trying not to creak my chest tell us all the most embarrassing things you've done when you were drunk. Bombay Sapphire, you son of a bitch. Bombay Sapphire. I made Death Nog. Which one? No. I remember the Death Nog. Remember Death Nog? Yeah. You didn't do a job right. If you survived, I failed. Yeah, no, the Death Nog did not kill me. No. No, it killed Joey. I think it killed Joe. I think it may have killed a friend of the show, Aaron, last name Redacted. What the hell did you put in the nog? What kind of nog is this? It was a death. I put in Wild Turkey 101 and like a splash of Everclear. Yeah, that was some nog right there. Yeah, you liked it, I think, for the first cup. And then I think, if I recall correctly, you refused to drink any more of it on ethical grounds. Yeah, I switch to beer, which is what I do, so I don't, you know, have liquor problems. Liquor doesn't treat me very well. No. That's why I drink beer. Beer can never harm you. Yeah, beer is the cause of and solution to all my problems. Yeah. All right, let's do a sink point. Sure. Okay. I'm going to do three, two, one, Mark. Three, two, one, Mark. Okay. Hello, and welcome to Well, Where's Your Problem? It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. I'm November Kelly. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are she and her. Yay, Liam. Yay, Liam. As recently promoted assistant to the world's sleepiest boy, Justin Rosniak. Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson. My pronouns are he, him. and we have, uh, Jesus wept, man. Get a tissue. And we have a recurring guest host slash employee, world champion. Modern apprentice. Yeah. World champion of podcast appearances. Yeah, suck that shit, Gareth. Hi, my name is Victoria Scott. My pronouns are she and her. Perfect. Beautiful. All right. What else? I wrote this one, so I guess we can all go home, right? Victoria. Yeah. Yeah, I'm just going to tell more booze stories, and I'm just going to yell over you whenever you try and stop me. I enjoyed this guy on the sort of bridge here, phasing through existence. Have we merged it? Yeah, I think we have. I think we formed a kind of hive mind here. Yeah. Oh, this is just mirage block magic with the phasing. Yeah. That's what the new popular television show is about, right? Oh, yeah, absolutely. We have an eye pluribus now. Yeah. Oh, I haven't seen it. God fucking doubt. Do none of you keep up with your, like, responsibilities as content creators to stay abreast of American popular culture? I had to watch 18 billion seasons of Breaking Bad and pretend it was good just so people would think I was full long enough to pay me $2 a month. I'll die on that hill. Look, I got a lot of things to work through. I'm not even finished with Columbo yet. My wife and I are watching that, actually. And he's on season. What season have you been? Are you on season two of The Sopranos yet, Rods? Oh, no, I actually got through all of The Sopranos, but the last few seasons were a blur. The fun thing about watching Columbo with your wife is that you get to see my wife knows a lot about Columbo bit every time. It's delightful for that. It's also delightful because Columbo is like the consummate car guy, and there's a whole, there's like just started season two and like the best episode that I've seen so far, a crucial part of like how he solves the mystery is he pays really close attention to this guy's jaguar e-type and i'm just like oh my god he's just like me for real like i would absolutely be like oh it's a beautiful machine you got there and also he drives he drives like a peugeot 503 convertible that apparently peter falk found on the universal lot and was like oh that's cool i'll make them pay to fix this up for the show this will be his car i didn't i literally i was shocked because I couldn't identify it. I was like, what the hell is he driving? Anyway, it's great. One more thing, actually. One more thing. One more thing. Yeah. So about this photograph. Yeah, you could buy some latrine boots and shoes, which sounds disgusting. And I'm back. Welcome back. Thank you. Like I said, if I crash several more times, I just need to get through my news item, and then that's all I care about, frankly. Okay, sure. That's totally fair. This is a Liam verse. Yeah, this is part of my plan, actually. I've targeted your apartment with bad internet so I can usurp you and move up in the pronoun introduction order. I prefer to go last. I want to say yay Liam. Hand of God, if it were up to me, I would just go last every time. We can just do that. We don't have to do sort of complicated coups. Okay, we don't have to do coups. Coups all the way down, Nova. Like a bunch of pigeons. that was really cute yeah that was really cute I liked that one anyway this is a picture of the city of Seattle that can't be true I don't see any like transferase stickers in this this was when they were still importing the transferase this was 1889 they had Just invented trans people, furries would come out in 1905. Remember when they signed you a fursona on Ellis Island? Bunch of cat girls off the boat from Japan. Anyway, the city shouldn't look like that. Or maybe it should. There are some people who disagree, yeah. It was actually an episode about the Great Seattle Fire of 1889. this is immediately afterward and it's pretty bad I gotta say feeling pretty good about my decision to buy a latrine boots and shoes or I mean the name is still disgusting but the guy's still got like a hoarding up which is you know shows get up and go an entrepreneur yeah this is where my shop used to be I'm still gonna sell shit here yeah exactly what are they gonna do kick me out yeah exactly yeah and actually you can kind of see like this is for people who live in Seattle, all the street names kind of stayed the same. So you can actually kind of recognize, that's West Seattle on the other side of the water there. And you can kind of recognize sort of where this is. I'm excited to be talking about this. That's the guy between Yesler and Columbia. I'm excited to be talking about this because on my other podcast, No Gods No Mads, we did Hiram Gill, mayor of Seattle. And I mentioned in passing that I was very struck by a line on his Wikipedia page which just says, Off the Great Fire of Seattle reconfigured the city. So I'm excited to learn about the reconfiguration. Yeah. This was a major event. Seattle, this was like right at the precipice of Seattle becoming an actual city. We'll get into it. I don't want to interrupt too long because we have to do something else first. We have to do the goddamn news. Yeah, so this has been a pretty crazy news item recently. Yeah, we have another reason to feel bad about the Grenfell episode thumbnail besides the big Vote Labour sticker on there, which has aged just terribly. Just very poorly, yeah. I've got to leave it there as a historical monument to our hubris. Well, that was the original plan with Grenfell as well. So, yeah, Hong Kong appears, maybe it's some kind of, like, former British colony kind of social contagion, I don't know, but Hong Kong has decided to outdo London by having a kind of mega Grenfell in Tai Po and the New Territories, where you had a bunch of apartment blocks, which, like, there's like nine of them built together, and like four or five of them caught fire. and they have like the death toll is still climbing because as with Grenfell you have a bunch of people who are just in the buildings dead but they haven't recovered yet and maybe just won't but like it's minimum it was still burning for a couple days yeah yeah this is really bad they also had like a firefighter killed as well which is like unusual even for these kind of like really terrible fires What seems to have happened as of this point is these buildings were under some kind of renovation. I'm not sure exactly what, but there were some kind of facade repairs being done. So they were covered in bamboo scaffolding, which in and of itself is okay, right? But they had some kind of low-quality nylon fishnets around. What? Yeah. Yeah, this sort of netting around the bamboo scaffolding was just fishnet. Yeah, it should be fire resistant or sort of fire retardant. Whether or not it is, I mean, you can kind of see. It turns out not. But as well, they were also, when they were doing repairs around certain windows, you know, you want to board it up so you don't break the window. So, well, rather than using boards, they used some kind of expanded polystyrene foam, you know, just styrofoam, right? That's pretty flammable. Very, very flammable. Yeah. As we kind of talked about on the Grenfell episode, that kind of like foam insulation can be extremely flammable. There's also a political angle to this, right? So bamboo scaffolding is like, it's fine. It is not a well-regulated industry. It's quite a corrupt one in Hong Kong, but it's also one that only really persists in Hong Kong. My understanding is one of the contributing factors here is that Hong Kong doesn't have a fire code. It has three fire codes because it's a special economic zone. So you can use the Chinese fire code. You can use the European fire code or you can use NFPA, the American fire code. So obviously like one country, three. Your inspectors are definitely overloaded. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But also there's, so like the supply of this bamboo scaffolding and the sort of like assembly and maintenance of it is the province of like a handful of specialists, which leads to a kind of quite, it's like monopsity, I think you would call it, right? Like it's quite a sort of cozy relationship. But that's political too in the sense that mainland China uses like all steel scaffolding, right? And there is a kind of push on behalf of the sort of like Beijing allied politicians to modernize and to use like steel scaffolding. Conversely, if you are a sort of like Hong Kong independence or Hong Kong nationalist sort of supporter, then this is a sort of like a Hong Kong tradition that should be preserved. And so there's a lot of incentive on the one hand to put the blame on the scaffolding. And equally, there's a lot of incentive to be like putting the blame on the scaffolding is Chinese propaganda. Right. So I think what we really needed was not just Grenfell and more buildings, but Grenfell and more buildings with a kind of really tense political sort of discord over it. Yeah, I mean, you know, that's definitely like, and just from, I don't know, from where I'm standing, I'm kind of like, it's probably that, you know, polystyrene foam they were using to board up the windows. That was probably the, you know, the big thing here that caused like apartments to catch fire and stuff. But I don't know yet. We'll see what happens, how this all, you know, works out. I don't know. Maybe China finds an excuse to like eat Hong Kong over this. I don't know. No, I mean, that's already happened, basically, is the thing. Like, there are elections coming up, but they're going to be, like, entirely controlled in that sense. Like, anybody who is a big kind of democracy supporter is now in Britain, right? Like, or, you know, in Chinese prison. So that's not really the kind of thing that's going to be downstream of this. what's going to be downstream of this is like it might fuck up the career of the current like chief executive what is interesting is that unlike Grenfell we had arrests very quickly and that is one kind of I will frankly say superiority of the Chinese political system is okay we're still not going to do anything and like all the kind of corruption might stick around and the stuff will still happen but you will get some scapegoats whereas in Britain everybody is too important to scapegoats apparently all these things you know they just happen there's nothing we can do about it it's like there'll be a fucking inquiry and like in 10 years time somebody who like died 5 years ago might get a kind of like official frowny face no games though yeah as opposed to 14 people who've been arrested you know can you do me a huge favor can you kill your videos because I am dying. I'm crashing every minute, minute 15. But I don't know if it's a video. You look wonderful. I don't know if it's a video. I'm really sorry for interrupting you. Please go on. It's completely fine. I was coming to the end of my point anyway, which is, shit's bad but I do feel like when something like this happens and your name is on it, you probably should get arrested and I don't say that in the like, you should get killed sort of way, but like, that's arguably, you know, something attendant to the seriousness of an investigation, you know? I'll buy that. I do think if a positive thing comes out of this, it's maybe Hong Kong can slim down to one fire code as opposed to three. That would be progress, yes. Yeah. What a colonial legacy we in the United Kingdom have left there. Yeah, yeah. It's like we can just cause confusion and delay here. Could you explain the three fire code things already? Because I'm not familiar with that. Yeah. I was dropping out and dropping in. Different countries have different fire codes, and that's okay, as Matt Euclid just said. And Hong Kong is different countries in a very real sense. Yeah, because of just the legacy of colonialism, Hong Kong is, you know, you can use the European fire code. You can use the Chinese fire code, right? You can use the American fire code even. I'm not quite certain how that got in there, but it did somehow. So if you are, you know, someone like a fire chief over there, of course you're going to be completely overwhelmed because you've got to know three whole codes. Yeah. I think it might not even be the European fire code. I think it's the British one, which is stricter and requires ludicrous amounts of fire extinguishers everywhere. I mean, also the fact that this happened in the new territories, right? Like, you're not looking at the waterfront burning down, right? You're looking at a sort of subsidized government housing thing. There was especially very elderly residents as well, which is one of the reasons why I think the death toll is going to be so high. Yeah. So as ever, it is like there are structural reasons why the people who like die in this sort of thing tend to be poorer and older. Yes. So, yeah, five towers got set on fire from one little fire. There's a video of the original fire catching actually. Just a little thing. Goes up instantly. My God. It's crazy. Once you see anything like that, you do get why. Because sometimes fire brigades are kind of victims of their own success in fire prevention, where people aren't scared of fires perhaps as much as they should be. And then you see how quickly an entire building can take light, and it's like, oh, yeah, this is why this has been sort of like a key emergency service since Roman times. Yes. We'll talk about fire brigades in history later. Very good. All right, John, shift in tone? Yeah. In other news. Happy anniversary, Liam. Happy anniversary to Liam and Corinne. Thank you. Thank you. All right, moving swiftly on. Is that all you want? Do you just feel bad about the proximity there? 150 people plus died. Happy anniversary, by the way. Yeah, happy anniversary. I kind of wanted to go first, but then I felt like I wanted it even more. Then it's kind of worse, right? Because then happy anniversary, many happy returns, you know, infinite happy years together, unlike about 150 people. Well, she'll never listen to this, but I adore you, sweetheart. So, yeah, all right, great. As my wife will vouch for, never listening to your partner's podcast is by far the healthier decision. She does technically listen to it when forced to, i.e. when she has to work the live shows. It's unethical to do that. I was debating getting her earplugs as a yuck. Oh, Roz, I forgot to tell you I got you a present for the live shows. Oh. Do you want to know what it is or do you want me to? Is it a 12-foot paint roller? No, it's an 8.2-foot pointer, extendable. Oh. That'll be useful. The point of the work. But the pointers worked on the other live shows. I just had to tape them together. It's like a fishing rod. Yeah. All right. We should talk about the live shows. Yeah, that was the goddamn news. Speaking of the live shows. The live shows. We're not allowed to threaten you as much because we don't want to get the video. Yeah, no. YouTube doesn't like when we actively do death threats against the audience. Okay. I would recommend we don't do that. I am imploring you, please come to the live shows. Beseeching you. Yeah, you will be the sexiest listener. I think that probably might be now you're going to get us age-restricted for another reason. You're just listening. Oh, heaven, please come to the live shows. We are going to maintain on both ends an appropriate listener-creator relationship with you if you come to the live shows and also if you don't, but please come to the live shows. When are the live shows? I'm hearing you ask. December 14th and 15th. Where are the live shows? I hear you ask. The live shows are at the Spaghetti Warehouse. It's not called Union Transfer. What are the live shows about? that's for us to know and for you to find out that's right please come to the thing will I be able to buy merch at the live shows oh like you wouldn't believe we have so much merch which is another reason why it's important for you to come to the live shows we will separate you from your money so well I will say honestly this but we have hi-vis, we have signs we have beanies, we have a limited run of holiday themed food acts. I'm so excited to get a care package of all of this stuff, which he remembered to send me four to six months later. Well, I'll be ready and tired for next Christmas. Isn't Gwen coming to the United States? Gwen is currently in the United States, so I'm sorry to say that you'll be missing my wife, otherwise I would send you my wife to help. Yeah, I was about to say we could send some shit back with her, but I guess not. It wouldn't even be the first time that she's stood in for me at a live show. She played me at the opening of a Kill James Bond show once. This may be more plausible. It was a good bit. Sadly, the live show it will be Gwen-less, but don't not come just on the basis of that. You should come to the live show. We're very excited. We will do one in Europe. We will fucking do one in Europe, okay? Stop yelling at us. Yeah, or Maine, or someone told us to come to Mexico, which, brother, you tell me what town, and we'll be there. I would love to go to Mexico. Oh, yeah. Cozcoacos. We are going to get assassinated by the Mexican Navy for your listening pleasure. No, we did squash the beef. Personally shot in the back of the head by Claudia Scheinbaum, yeah. It's no more than we deserve. Yeah, that actually does track. Right. Links in the description. The link's in the description. I'm also reiterating my plea. You know, if you ever want November to come to America to do a show, she needs an 01 visa, which is difficult to get. But one of the big parts of that is we need press. If you are a journalist, please write some articles about us. Nice ones, please. Exactly. We'll take bad ones. Do you work for? I don't know. A media agency. Yeah. Yeah. Do you work for? I can't even think about. Roger Ver. Do you work for the National? Do you work for Russia Today? Commersant. Do you work for Press TV? France 24. Is the Epoch Deutsche Welt? yeah if you if you write for any of these write about us profile us please it helps we we want to be featured in the arlington catholic herald anyway you could probably just ask your mom and you would be featured at the arlington catholic herald she a protestant that right yeah we going to be in the arlington protestant Protestant Herald Oh no We don want that No Take that one back No it would have to be the newsletter for ah crap What's the one? Lexington Presbyterian. Right. Oh, that's not so bad. Lexington Presbyterian Herald? I don't know if they have their own. They got a newsletter. They must have a newsletter. Yeah, for some reason, the newsletter is called Sexy Lexi Prod. Put us in your newspaper, put us in your newsletter, put us in your blog post, put us in your sub stack about how your girlfriend cheated on you with RFK Jr. Oh, you beat me to it. Damn. Put us in. We want to be featured in the Rockbridge County News Gazette. Oh, hell yeah. Just us. We could do like a Ken Burns montage of pictures of us over Jump Mountain Blues. I mean, here's the thing, right? If you wanted us to be profiled in the press, if you wanted me to be profiled in the press specifically, all I have to do is do something really transsexual, like try to use the women's changing room at the hospital where I work, and the British press will write thousands of words about me. What if you gave a bad essay a zero? Ooh. Yeah, I might do that. I might do that, yeah. Infinite war, just war on the University of Oklahoma. If I go into that, I'll definitely go to be restricted again. I've got to get real clever now. Just a war on the University of Oklahoma. Just a peaceful transfer of power. At the University of Oklahoma. Yeah, exactly. We hope they have a nice time. Yeah, we do. No threats to violence here. Can you say those words in that order? I don't know. I think we're fine. And if we're not fine, then we live and learn. But I continue my winning streak Well we don't learn Because YouTube doesn't tell you Why you are restricted They should really do that YouTube is a vast and infinite monster That I do not understand Maybe we need to get online Hey do you guys want to read the comments I'm like no Spotify I don't They're like hey do you want to read the comments Maybe we should get on like fucking Vimeo Dailymotion We should get on flub it's all on flub it's literally on flub it's literally every episode in like a series of 275 consecutive minute and a half long tiktok okay so here's the thing victoria you don't have access to well there's your problem inbox but i sure do no i don't want that the madness fire hose have you seen the emails that are like we could uh make your content into youtube shorts and or tiktoks I don't check those. I specifically don't remember the Patreon login, so I don't read the comments to make myself feel bad. When I want to make myself feel bad, three in the morning, I'm on the YouTube comments sourcing newest first, looking for the motherfucker who's like, who's this guy? And I'm like, then I switch accounts and I go, f*** that motherfucker right now. You have to believe that. Don't do that. Don't do that. you know just cut all of that out mostly uh just bleep and bleep well i'll be the fucker while we're here but uh i do i also sort new it and i'm just like oh my enemies list grows longer by the day i see i did short form video for an automotive publication for about three months went directly to a psych ward resumed doing it for six months and then quit my career yeah yeah that's right All right, well, there's your problem make work program. Yeah, I remember texting you in the psych ward, quite concerned. And what I should have done, really, has been like, do you want to come on my fuck-ass podcast? Your listeners are much nicer to me than the subscribers to a large automotive outlet's Instagram videos. In fairness, being on Instagram is a sign of a decayed soul. Being a car enthusiast on Instagram is like two strikes already. I wish I could own that one oh boy look at this AI concept Maybach that should result in us declaring World War 3 against Germany yeah you know one of these times we got a strike first yeah it's crazy that Mercedes just made the Hitler car and just announced it with like the red banners and just do like latest Mercedes concept you'll find it you know what I mean anyway live shows Come to the live shows. Okay, well, those were the announcements. Announcements, announcements, announcements. I don't participate in this. I boycott this like the Soviets at the Olympics. All right, two hours in, we're ready to talk about what the fuck is a Seattle. Yeah, that's right. About an hour and 30 minutes of death threats cut out already. We're really chewing through these, man. Yeah, so to explain what the Seattle fire is, we have to explain what Seattle is. This is a topographical map of what is now known as the city of Seattle. This is a heat map of molecules. Actually, it does map fairly closely. Good, man. Transgender density. It's a good thing y'all have the high ground, you know, for the invaders. Yeah, the civil conflict to come. Yes, it's a glacially carved fjord. It's, like, one of the only parts of America where we have, like, honest-to-God fjords. And so it was under about 3,000 feet of ice 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. You know, there's been humans here for, like, 4,000 years. In the 1850s, when, like, white people started showing up, there were at least 17 Duwamish settlements alone just, like, around the people's island. So it's been, like, inhabited for ages. the original parties to come settle it show up in 1851 and they settle in what is now called Elke Point in West Seattle which is you know you can see it on the map right on the bottom left yeah it's the big sort of protuberance yeah so they sit up there and they stay there for a winter and then they realize that you know the winter weather just sucks out there and the tides are really intense point in a fjord terrible idea. Yeah, and they're like, this is not going to work. This is a terrible idea. So they Arthur Denny, who was the original settler, there's like a Denny way in Seattle and a bunch of buildings named for him. He was like one of the six. Oh, the guy who invented the Grand Slam. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the concept of getting breakfast drunk off your ass at 3 a.m., that comes from him. Wow, what a city. this is the problem you needed norwegians for this type of terrain and they had i have no idea what kind of white ethnics these were we do actually have an enormous uh like scandinavian population here uh including within my own polycule pining for the fjords i do pine for the i realize not not to make me sound like i'm better than you but i realize i've never really thought about the the like individually ethnic comp like composition of my polycule i haven't I'm not making everybody do the sort of calipers before I start dating them. Well done. No slobs in my park. Come on, man. It only comes up because my girlfriend really wants a sob, you know? Yeah. According to my heritage, I have the sob hatler group. It's made. Made in so bad. Just for the kind of car you want. Like that's actually how auto reviews work Because they're like well actually Sponsored by Mercedes I gotta watch out for the German polycules You gotta watch out for the Germans You can stop that sentence right there Yeah that's true World War 3 book it folks I don't know German polycules Very orderly On the other hand do not ask the German polycule What they think about Palestine don't ask them about what they think about the polish polycule either don't talk to me about the polish polycule you want to elaborate on that further no no one does actually remember those two weeks when I was learning polish not me either they're still working on changing that light bulb don't belittle your own people belittle other people that's the important bit of humanity we're all on a level playing field of sucking our polycules I don't know I'm monogamous I got nothing for this bit I just got nothing I'm just like yeah my wife's cute you're in a monocule I wish I had a monocule I would look tight in a monocule that's a rule that's going to be your next gift for the next episode So you've got to go to the German polycule for that. I'm not going to any Germans. I don't like Germans. I don't trust Germans. I have made this very clear, abundantly clear. I know we have German listeners and fans. To that I say, the nuke is coming. Doing the live show in Germany, but it's just we have a big banner behind us that says Morgenthal Plan Now. Where's your problem? March on Berlin. I mean genuinely I would love to do this and I would love to get a German guest for this so shout out in the fucking email or whatever I would love to do a bonus episode where the problem is Germany yeah I also look forward to the off the weighted bonus episode our dads where it's just our dads roasting us I think my dad would just be incoherent he'd be like ah my son is great now let me talk to you about Mao get my son And then he would tell my mom that Mal had to break a few eggs. She'd call him a mass murderer, and they'd just get in an argument again. I genuinely don't know what my dad thinks about Mal. Ask him. Okay, sure. Love it. You were saying before I derailed and ruined everything. Oh, yeah. I think I was talking about my... Seattle. Denny's. Nordstrom. I don't know. What else is there? The Kraken? Seahawks? Hey, we've got a women's hockey team now. They just said they're all tied. They're so good. They just set an all-time attendance record for women's hockey in America at their first game. Wow. Because this city is like 35% lesbians. It's incredible. I need to go to that. Bring back the Sonics. I need to go to Philadelphia, and I need to go to Seattle. These are my priorities. I have my future sister-in-law. It's from Whitby Island, Washington. So, Claire, if you're listening, go crack and hello. So I really, I do really need to go to Philly. That is actually true. Yeah, we'd love to have you. We have a guest room. Sweet. Yeah, we'll do that. I'll record the next one live from your guest room. Anyway, yeah, Seattle is like full of fjords and lesbians. You know, so why is this important to know? So, okay, yeah, all right. I remember right now. Arthur Denny, after inventing the Grand Slam and Drunken Breakfast at 3 a.m., they set up their new encampment in what is now the middle of Seattle in what is called Pioneer Square, like right there where all the ferries come out of, sort of at the foot of those hills. Now, you'll notice that all of the land due south of that is very low on this topo map. It's like almost directly at sea level. Uh-oh. That is because that is the mouth of the Duwamish River, which was just like low-lying, you know, like tidal mudflat, basically. So that would all flood or, you know, get filled with the incoming tide or whatever. And it was pretty uncontrolled. Like, it was very, like, basically where the green ends in the current topographical map was, like, the actual, you know, sort of edge of where it was no longer just tidal mud flat. That was actually land. But because, you know, the city of Seattle is, was glacially carved, all of the dirt in the area is what's known as unsorted glacial till, which is basically just frozen mud that was left behind when the glaciers retreated. So it makes it really easy to kind of shift all of the land masses around and play like Cities Skylines on like free roam mode with the topography. So that was like the first 70 years of the city was just messing around with that. What that means is... You're doing like Cities Skylines topography stuff by hand, a bunch of guys with shovels. Yeah, well, they got a little bit more advanced with it later, but yeah, pretty much they were just like, yeah, we can just kind of like, this mud looks good. We can just add a little more mud if we need to. It's no big deal. You know where this goes on the silt, sand, and clay chart? No, I don't know. I am not a loam expert. You don't know about it? Yeah, no, I never understood that chart either. As we've been clear on this podcast, we've spoken about it before, we don't understand soil science, right? No, that was tense. I took that class two times, and I got through it the second time with a D. You just put a paper at the end that just says dirt. Dirt. And dirt is in this L. D-U-R-T. Listen, the Bible says God created clay and loam. There's no such thing as sand. God created the firmament. Right? D-U-R-T. Getting zero, 25 for this. A Q, a second Q, a third Q, a fourth Q, and the Batman symbol. And somehow Roz got an A- in that class. No, that was thermodynamics. I'm going to get myself the gigantic sack of Hershey's Lauren brought me back from America. Thermodynamics is the class I got an inexplicably high grade in. I mean, you are a smart guy. I'm not shocked by that. No, it's like, you know, thermodynamics, you just need to know three things. You can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the game. the only way to win is to not play i don't yeah all right yeah moving on yeah that's how you win at thermodynamics never get never be born that's how you win a life it's like an escape room for your for your soul uh anyway yeah that area you circled down there where it's got like harbor island and all of soto and both of our stadiums and stuff that didn't exist that was just like the mouth of the river. Ah. All right. Hershey's acquired. I'm going to rustle this into the microphone and really enjoy it. Ooh. So, so yeah, so this is, you know, so basically, you know, the white people get here and they're like, all right, next slide, please. That was fucked up for them to say, but, uh, sure. Holy shit, there are so many trees. There are so many trees. Yeah. So we start cutting these down immediately. We can make so much money. It's free real estate. It's free planks. It's free, uh, like, timber uh we're inadvertently gonna name skid row that for skidding logs down it yep this is this is the original mill uh that was shipped so they shouldn't send us theme mill here via boat from new york uh to to build on the waterfront here and this is the original mill of henry yesler uh this is the end of skid road this later becomes yesler avenue which if you've ever played Gran Turismo 4 and raced the Seattle circuit, you know that road because it's the one where you start cutting uphill right before you get to the cool jumps. That's Yesler. We've also got a really cool skyscraper there and whatever. That's Seattle geography, so you can place this if you've ever been here. So anyway, because the city is an entirely old-growth forest that was well taken care of by the native people for thousands of years. just dusting our hands and saying goodbye to all of that as it turns into planks it turns into planks immediately looks like some spruce pine fur to me with this one weird trick an entire old growth forest can become a bunch of matchsticks you know they used to cut down redwood trees for matchsticks specifically I do yeah yeah Yeah, they used to, you know, I saw it on Looney Tunes. They put the whole thing on a lathe and carved it down to one master. I'm going through these chocolates here. I just have one quick question to Americans in general, really. What the fuck is a Mr. Good Bar? Why does it have a title? You ever heard of Dr. Pepper? I mean, I guess, but why do you need your foodstuffs to think that they're better than me? Is there a Mrs. Good Bar? Mr. Peanut. When Woke 2 shows up. Mr. Good Bar is going out with the sexy green M&M. Dr. Pipp. When Woke 2 shows up, they're going to have to rename this to Mix Good Bar. It's a non-binary Good Bar. Oh, yes, the Envy Bar. A nuttier bar for nuttier times. I'm assuming kind of a Liam role of derailing the podcast, because that's what happens when you get a couple of drinks from me. I'm saluting. You can't see it because I had to turn my camera off for a family purpose, but I am still living. The Mr. Goodbar will have to either change his... I don't know. Should we force Mr. Goodbar to change his pronouns? I don't think so. I mean, half the reason I like Mr. Goodbar, yeah! Half the reason I like Hershey's is that they've already got pronouns. this is a this is an ethical question i think that um yeah i think it's ethical to force that mr goodbar that's the last thing americans you fucking love discrimination so much that you gerrymandered my bag of hershey's miniatures here oh yeah oh yeah no we're the we're the we're the country with the problem with titles yeah this is this is supposed to be This is supposed to be regular Hershey's, whatever the fuck a crackle is, Hershey's special dark chocolate and Mr. Goodbar's. And I would say this thing is like solidly 95% Mr. Goodbar. No, but that is not a murderer's row of Hershey chocolate. I will send a care package. I am from central Pennsylvania. I will get you the good shit. Okay. Yeah, please go directly to Hershey Park to get like the good chocolate. Yeah, you go to Hershey World, dude. Yeah. Have you ever been to Hershey World? Let me into your country. Do you love the idea of going to the supermarket and getting, like, the C-Listers bag of Hershey's? That's what it feels like. Well, there's no, like, two crackles, whatever the fuck that is, in here. And then it's, like, 95% Mr. Goodbar. Here's what's left at the bottom of the bowl after Halloween when all the kids pick through to get the good shit out. No, but if and when you come to the United States, I'll take you to Chocolate World. Oh, yeah, we should all go to Hershey Park. Oh, my gosh, that'd be so fun. Yeah, we can put that on the corporate card. Yeah. Right, yes. Cutting down all the trees in Seattle. Yeah. For one toothpick. Yeah. Basically, immediately Seattle's entire purpose as a city is it's a frontier town that cuts down trees to ship lumber to California. although it does, there are ships that send lumber as far afield as Alaska and Hawaii and even Australia doing the Monty Python lumberjack song joke for this because Seattle as it became what? never mind oh god is it, oh no I've blocked that from memory, I'm sorry it took me a minute to realize what you're talking about that's a British thing we don't, I don't fuck with that what if our beloved comedy was transphobic every single time somebody's like oh I remember this beloved British media property you should check it out and I watch it it takes me 45 seconds to hit the most offensive transphobic joke I've ever seen in my life the only American who ever got close is Matt Groening and it still took him like three seasons to get to a point where he was comfortable working them in in the writer's room where it's like every single British thing it's like hey what are you doing today I'm out of ideas what if women were actually guys yeah yeah I'm from hell I'm from Waterloo where the vampires hang out When I came to visit you this summer we land in my wife and I land in Glasgow and we have to, sitting on the plane for a while I gotta go to the bathroom, the first thing that struck me about the country, even before I noticed how bad the airport was was that every single restroom is signed with females and I was like, so much just made sense Hold on, we gotta compare notes here the Glasgow Airport versus the Edinburgh Airport, which is where I came in. Edinburgh, it looked like the Top Gear Technology Center. It was just like a shed. They kind of both are. But Glasgow Airport just kind of felt like it was a – like it reminded me a lot of like the shitty unremodeled parts of O'Hare, where it's like, wow, this was a nice airport in 1963. Except they didn't build more or make any part of it nicer. The whole thing just looked like 1963. Well, we're bringing the social attitudes back too. Yeah, Edinburgh was like, no, this is just a shed. I was like, the thing that really struck me is the customs area was like, gee, I could just probably walk around this, you know? Oh, yeah. Well, like, we kind of stopped bothering to enforce custom stuff once we were in the EU, and now we've left. We can't afford to start. So we're just in limbo. I will be right back. Keep going. All right. The thing that strikes me here, sending lumber to Alaska, you know, that feels a bit like sending, you know, coals to Newcastle, you know? Yeah, but you don't have the mill, and then they'd have to send the mill. Yeah. Yeah, everyone's trying to mine gold up there when there's all these trees around, you know? Well, they weren't doing that yet. That comes later. That's another big part of Seattle's history, which we do. You're ruining the episode. Damn. Ah, shit. Okay. Anyway, so they make a lot of logs. That's like the history of Seattle is white people get here, and they're like, damn, look at all these trees. Let's cut them all down. And they start doing that, and Seattle becomes a timber city. So next slide, please. I like these woodcuts. These are very pleasing. even though these came out of like an old growth tree. Yes. Yeah, this is actually from Harper's Magazine in 1870. And this is what Seattle looked like in September of that year. Now you'll notice that these houses are kind of like, they go up the hill a lot. And then there's even more trees behind it that's even steeper. If you've ever walked around the city of Seattle, it's very, very hilly. And you can kind of, you know, if you look at that topography map, but I had a few slides, you can tell, like, it's, it's, because it was, you know, glacially carved, just sort of like a big mess of hills. Is this why you kept saying Glasgow reminded you of, uh, of Seattle? A little bit. Is that it's really cold, wet, and full of molecules? Yes. Yeah, no, that, that is actually entirely it. Um, also, yeah, I don't know, everybody was like, it was kind of nice. I really loved Glasgow, except for the airport. It's, it's a good city with a weird airport, yes. Yeah, but I mean, like, me saying, me ever comparing anything to Seattle is very high praise. I do love it here. But yeah, Glasgow did kind of remind me a little bit of it, and a lot of it is because, yeah, it's incredibly steep everywhere all the time. I like the weird mall. Oh, this is the Enoch Center. Yeah. The St. Enoch Center. What if we built a gigantic, we didn't, no. What if we just built a gigantic glass pyramid? That you have to drive through to get into. It's a good mall, and they're demolishing it any second now. Oh, God. Can't have anything. Well, in Seattle, because, you know, because they're just sending out timber, you know, you want to be as close to the water as possible. So you can just float the logs. So they just started building the city directly into kind of, like, tidal flats. Right. And so, you know, you can kind of see, like, here, there's got, like, stuff on piles right basically built down the water. I am a fire of mud. Just kind of doing, like, mud Venice. Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, the tides were really big. So because, you know, the Puget Sound is part of the ocean. So, like, it would flood all the streets, you know, that were kind of like at this original part of the city, like at water level, built into the mudflats. And, you know, in this era of extremely early plumbing, they basically just ran outhouses downhill via wood pipes into Elliott Bay. and then, you know, they would just dump the shit and piss into the water and then the tide would come in and flood the muddy streets with shit and piss. Yeah, white people have showed up to bring you civilization in the form of cutting down your entire forest and filling the sound with piss. And shit. Of course. Log rolling. Yeah. I mean, it's not really relevant to the episode, but I was curious since I was doing the research for this episode, it took, like, one year of being chartered as a city for white people to be like, okay, we're going to kick out all of the Native people who live in the city limits. Yeah, that tracks. Yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah, they ended up having to recharter the city again for some weird reason, and they tried again. It's pretty bad. It's pretty bad because it was, like, the first thing they did. The streets are still full of shit and piss, which seems like it should have been a more urgent concern. I think it was still, like, during the Civil War. And they were like, no, we've got to let's get so fucking, racist with it. Yeah, your sort of first concern, the thing that's more sort of repulsive to you than the shit and piss is... And this is the other thing that's so ironic about Seattle is its name is taken from one of the chiefs of the area that was, like, friendly with, like, white settlers. And they were taken... I believe this was... It was, like, basically concurrent. The city took the name of the chief and then also was like, we're also going to kick out everybody who lives here already. It's a very American process. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it was bleak. And then, of course, you know. Anyway, next slide, please. This is what is basically now First Avenue in 1878. So this is eight years after the Harper's Woodcut. And as you can tell, like, they've begun to, you know, regrade the city a bit. The buildings are all kind of lifted on stilts. The road surfaces and the sidewalks are all elevated to get them out of the mud flats. There's, you know, like, and they do this for a lot of, like, low-lying stuff. done by where the mill is. So they keep kind of the same topography in terms of, like, the ground is still below and muddy, but people are no longer walking through shit and piss to get to their, you know, shoe store or whatever. Yeah, and just stand on this kind of precarious pile that's, like, balanced in the mud. Yeah, and the other thing, too, that's worth noting is because trees are everywhere and the city is founded around a mill, timber is free. So the road surface, the sidewalks, the road supports, all of the buildings, all the framing, everything in this picture is made out of wood. There's like three entire... What's the title of this episode again? The Great Seattle Nothing Happened of 1889. Yeah, yes. The Great Seattle Polycule of 1889. Oh, God. There's like three brick buildings in the whole city. um there's not it's you know we basically it's it's it's you got to get the bricks up there for one thing and why would you do that when a wood building is fine and also insanely cheaper yeah yeah yeah and doesn't need to be transporting there's no masons in the city everybody's like a woodworker carpenter because it's like you know that's why you'd come there because again you know next slide please um so this is seattle june 5th 1889 uh a picture of a block that is going to become important in one day um i like yeah i like this picture the city is getting more yeah so many damn telegraph wires this was the posting of its day you know we should have your internet should come to you through like a wire arrangement this obvious and striking you know yes we still have so we we still have trolley buses here and so there are some intersections where we get to see all the wires up above and it does building with that kind of like childlike wonder. Yeah, I like the best of it. It contains the sense of busyness, you know? A telegraph pole with like 45 horizontal doohickeys and a million wires on it. Yeah, so you know, the city is developing into something a little bit more like a city, you know. I think at this point, 1889, it's got like 30-ish thousand people living there, they're estimating. But, you know, it's still like dwarfed by like SF. You know, it's not quite a frontier town anymore, but it's also not really a real city. And, you know, because it had kind of developed so slowly and so sort of built on top of each other, they're lacking a lot of stuff you would hope a city in the late 1880s would have at this point. Notably, like a centralized water system. Go down to the mudflats of the bucket and grab yourself some good old American mud. Well, that's kind of what they... I mean, that's salt water, but there was, like, other, like, tributaries they were kind of pulling from, and there's, like, some springs nearby. And so they've got, like, six different sources for water, um, and some, like, water towers, uh, like, up, way uphill. Um, and they're... All of these water sources are run through hand-hewn, hollowed logs for pipes. Yes! I found sources that said that there were thousands of feet of these. Wooden plumbing. Wooden plumbing. No, this is the bragging thing. Hold on. I've got to figure out when the last wooden pipe was taken out of service here. While you do that, I've just completed. Spoiler alert, but I think it was probably shortly after June 5th, 1889. While you're working that one out, I've completed my Hershey's miniatures audit, and let me tell you, the results are atrocious. Regular Hershey's We got 8 Dark Hershey's we got 18 Mr. Goodbar We got 24 And then a single crackle You got absolutely hosed I have been generationally Shafted My ancestors are feeling this one Okay so we don't know The crackle's like the only one that seems good I'm not sure I like the regular Hershey's But like still it appears that we don't know if any wooden service pipes are still in service but one was dug up in 2017 Seattle moment yeah wood supremacy well it was just kind of like you know it's there and you know I guess we should plumb stuff and none of this like Seattle was not ever intended to become a city they were just like oh it a frontier town you know but I think it like I going to get the dates wrong because I didn write all of this down first But you know for most of the 1870s and going into the 1880s the Seattle population was like 10 or 12 men to every one woman Like, it was just dudes cutting down trees. Some people are going to have to transition. This is why they invented it then. One of Seattle's biggest early businesses next to logging was, like, running brothels because there was such a shortage of women. Yeah, yeah, that's, yeah, it was, you know, it was a good crossover. It was very, everybody was like, damn, there's no ladies here. And they hadn't figured out how to distill the estrogen out of horse piss yet. Thank you to whatever horse piss scientist or fetishist or both enabled the creation of the modern T-girl. That was like ancient Greeks. I'm taking credit for that one. That's us. Thank you, ancient Greek T-girls, for inventing modern T-girls. Anyway, so, you know, hand-hewed... Greatness consists in planting a tree whose shade you will never live to sit under or something. they would be so proud of like the messy ass gay lesbian drama we've got going on oh yeah that is what they whenever like politicians are like oh we're like the ancient Romans or the ancient Greeks it's like no bullshit we're like the ancient Romans or ancient Greeks yeah at some point I was I don't know I was thinking about I turned 30 recently which means my mortality feels so real oh trust me we're waiting So you're staring down the barrel of 35. Yeah. And I'm hearing a lot of hollow laughter from our own comment sections. Yeah. I know that I'm not, like, you know, that old. But also, like, I finally get to look back at my 20s and say, like, those were a thing that happened. Nothing else was written when you look at my 20s. As a trans woman, like, hitting your 30s or your mid-30s is like, oh, shit, I get to be one of the red dots on the plane that wins arguments. Yeah. Yeah, so I'm looking back and I'm like, Jesus, I feel like I've, you know, I used to read stories about queer life in the 60s or 70s or whatever, and I was like, this is wild. These people had crazy lovers, and they were bouncing around the country all the time, and they had got laid constantly and did all of this crazy shit, right, and had completely unconventional careers and existed basically outside of all of what felt like proper society. And then I looked back at my 20s and I was like, ah, shit, cool. That worked out better than I thought it was going to. I like being in my 30s better than being in my 20s. I'm just going to say that. I hope you treat this in the kind of spirit of admiration in which it's sort of conveyed. You have old man spirit. Ross, you were born 65 years old. Yeah, that is accurate. Yeah. Came out of the womb with like a model train in one hand. Yeah, a cup of decaf coffee in the other. Half-caf, half-caf. No, no, yeah, exactly. Give me half-caf, not decaf. I'm not. That was his first one. Bubba, Bubba, what is this, half-caf? Bubba. This is vibrating off the ceiling. You know, some people say that you shouldn't feed a newborn baby espresso. Those people are not Italians. You are 0% Italian. I'm 0% Italian, but I enjoy going there. I hate that the federal government keeps making us put what percent Italian we are in the podcast. It's like a Carlin Monroti label in here. Yeah. I don't know how much Moretti I have to drink to get my numbers up Quite a bit I got 5% Other Western European So plausibly there's Italian In there 95% British And Irish I am of the people who heard That in it like you know Who survived like famines And revolutions and And like restorations and wars and were told that an entire new world had opened up and went nah, I'm gonna stay. I'm gonna vomit. That's so fucking funny. I have the complete opposite of a spirit of adventure in my heredity. Just like, no, I like it here, or I don't, but I'm not gonna get in a boat. I think that's a big one. No, I don't think I've ever seen like what I would describe as like joy at waking up in like the UK from British people. God can you imagine? It seems like every single person in the entirety of the British Isles like wakes up and they're like ah fuck. Every day. Yeah and I'm the descendant of hundreds of years of people continuing to do that long enough to have children. damn the sun's not going to come up for another five hours it's going to be there for 25 minutes still better than going to america yeah well the thing about americans is like they keep they're like the northern pacific railroad that they just have to keep moving west until they finally hit salt water and then be like well i'm still me i guess i gotta deal with my shit now Is it more inspirational if I become an American at this point? And I go to America and I'm the first in hundreds of years of people who is like, you actually fucked this country? It took this long for one of us to cotton on that it's going to stay shit forever? You don't want to come here now. Yeah, I know. I don't want to come here now. But once the peaceful transfer of power happens. Surely, which it surely will. You could come to America. You could build a new life. You could build a business. You could become the first trans woman in America. To start a podcast. Yeah. But the thing is, I managed to start a new life and a business with Americans without ever leaving home, which is a generational run. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So about this wooden plumbing. Oh, yeah. So the wooden plumbing. I didn't even get to the good part yet, which is that every single water source is privately owned, and so there's like six different companies all competing. Oh, good. It's like municipal railways. Awesome. Yes. Yeah. It's like six different companies all competing with one another to be the source of water for your building. I mean, I'm oversimplifying for humor, but yeah, you get the idea. We would never have entirely parallel networks of water pipes and all that sort of shit. Yeah, also, it's not a super profitable thing to install fire hydrants. They don't really start doing that until the late 1880s, and then they put up fire for them. There's nowhere near the density you would want for a city made entirely out of timber. You get a fire hydrant opposite the house that is too rich to afford burning down, you know? Yeah, yeah. But then you also have the issue that, you know, that's a high-pressure system, and that's hard to do with wooden pipes. Yeah, yeah. Well, so in 1889, there was actually a ballot issue to municipalize all of the water system, bring it under central governmental control and unify it. But before they could get to the election, next slide, please. Oh, boy. At 2.15 p.m. on June 6, 1889. Oh, we got in real fucking quick, huh? In the basement of a shop. Yeah, why do you think I've been doing so many bits about how many fucking Mystic Good Bars I have? Yeah. In the basement of a shop on the corner, what is now Madison and First, John Back is working with a hot glue pot. This exact hot glue pot, actually. Oh, that's the glue pot. That's cool. It's the property of the Museum of History and Industry, Lake Union. You don't visit the glue pot. This glue pot is going to be historic. Right. John Beck is working with this exact hot glue pot in a room whose floor is covered in turpentine-soaked wood chips. Oh, good. Yes. That's just how I like to work. And the glue pot gets hot, so somebody covers it up. The wooden plank, because it's around, there's wood everywhere. Yeah. And then the wood just spontaneously ignites because the pot got too hot. And so somebody else gets the idea, like, okay, let's throw cold water on this. And the glue fire scatters all over the room and ignites all of the turpentine-soaked wood chips on the floor. Wow, it's gone poorly. A deal, that's what I would say. It suddenly becomes a lot more important of a day. Would you believe that the corner of First and Madison is now a coffee shop? A likely thing to exist in Seattle, Washington. Wow. Wow. Yeah, come cracking. Shout out to, I guess, Storyville Coffee, corner of First and Madison. You and your third wave bullshit. Pick a sentence and stick with it. I have no idea about anything about that coffee shop. I'm looking through the windows right now. I'm in your wallet. Again, the future is weird. I have started a podcast, started a business with Americans on the internet, and also I'm A bad idea. I couldn't have done that. A coffee shop on the internet. There's a guy drinking and driving in the street view of this. He's going bottle up to his face, and they've pixelated his face and the bottle. It might just be a water bottle. Damn, I want to know what he was drinking. I still want to believe. Raspberry absolute. Oh, no. I taste it every time you mention it. Ooh, yeah, I'll get there. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, the floor full of turpentine and glue. Oh, so a city-wide game of the floor is lava, yes. You know, if you're curious, I've got an interview with John Back directly from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. If you'd like his direct thoughts on that. Absolutely. It's a 1980s newspaper interview, so you don't get your hopes up too high. Quote, I cut some balls of glue and put them in the glue pot on the stove. I put in some shaving where there was little fire, and then went to work about 25 feet away near the front door. After a while, somebody said, look at the glue. Another fellow, a Finlander from New York. This is pointed out in the newspaper story. I told you. I told you everybody here is like, we got a ton of Nordic people. It's super cool. Then took a piece of board and laid it on to smother the glue, but the board caught fire. Then I ran and took a pot of water to smother the fire and poured it all over the pot of glue, which was blazing up high. When I threw the water on, the glue flew all over the shop, into the shavings, and everything take fire. It was all the Finns' fault. I can't believe a Finlander would do this. You have to know, it was this one fucking Helsinkian. He did. I was curious. He did actually, he just disappeared from records. I thought he left the city. They are dastardly people. I guess he kind of felt bad. For recently, we'll be coming out shortly. interviewed by name as starting the subject of, oh, there's your problem episode. It's not looking good for you. Yeah. Hi, Bert. It was his birthday this weekend. His birthday. Everybody sang him a song, and we got him some churrus, and he got a catnip banana. Don't rub your face in the microphone, dude. Anyway, next slide, please. The Finn returned to his natural habitat, the cold forest. Maybe a Soviet? Yeah. Yeah. The thing is, he had a sort of miswiring of the Scandinavian brain thing where there's a switch in your head that makes you try and kill as many Russians as possible. In this case, it's like it makes you try and kill as many Seattleites as possible. Well, he could have. He just had a really bad. He was like, I got to destroy every timber building I see. Geographically closest city I'm in to Russia needs to be destroyed right now. So the fire starts. It takes – Seattle only has a volunteer fire department, right? It's kind of like a holdover from the pioneer days where they're like, well, we don't really need like an actual – we don't have to pay for firefighters. It's also like as you're growing into a city, it's also a fun patrician thing you can do, right? Like being in the Night Watch, like in that Rembrandt painting. It's like you're in the volunteer fire department. It depends on the fire department. 19th century firefighting is interesting. I don't know about Seattle. I do know about Philadelphia, where it's essentially just ethnic gangs. Oh, shit. They all hated each other. And God is a different final line. I call the Finnish fire department. No, you would have, like, multiple fire companies show up, and the first thing they would do was vandalize each other's equipment. Bring that back. We can bring this back. We can restore American greatness, which is taking a halogen tool to the Serbian fire department. No Bosnian. No Bosniak is going to extinguish this fire. That's a beast you've never even conceived to be possible before. Justin, have you ever thought about what it would be like if you were from Herzegovina? Would you like to? Say that again. Because you would be Justin Bosniak. Oh, God. God damn it. I gotta have about two drinks before recording more often. Like, about two. I mean, okay, I should have two drinks before recording more often. I can't believe these croatic trainers. We put the ginazonics on the work card? Yeah. I mean, shit. I didn't fucking anything on the word card. So the place where I had the gin and tonics, right, I was on my second gin and tonic when I turned to look at the wall behind me because someone I was with pointed it out. It was covered in tin types of, like, old police officers, so I think I may have gotten tipsy in a cop bar. Oh. Yeah, well, it happens. Now it's got lots of bars. That's true. I'm not proud of it. But they're not as bad as those dirty serbs. Oh, oh, oh, these YouTube comments are not going to be kind. We're going to lose Liv Agar. I don't remember Liv Agar's ethnicity. Frankly, it would be weird if I could. Her ethnicity is Canadian. That's true. That is true. well so i don't i don't think i if seattle did have like rival ethnic gangs of like firefighters i don't know about it they came together like the warriors in this moment to fail miserably uh crucially yeah we got we got both kinds we got norwegians and swedes it takes half an hour having a kind of Glasgow school playground argument to discover whether or not a Serbian counts as Swedish or Norwegian don't worry about that it takes half an hour for them to find where the fire is it's in the glue weren't you listening well because the fire is started in the basement of this building which is like below grade so they're kind of outside seeing all the smoke looking for fire and they can't find it and by the time they finally do by ripping up part of the sidewalk boards to like go looking for where the fire is at the fire is already burned through the wooden basement wall that it was in and started to burn into the next one and it's also caught the underside of the street on fire that's some inception shit the like Yeah, yeah. The bottom of the street you're on is on fire. Yes, yes. After they've pulled up the sidewalk, they're like, oh, shit, this is on fire. Technically, you're now being, like, grilled at that point. Gently, I suppose, yeah. Broiled? It's like how they make a whopper. It's, like, flame grilled. Yeah, you'd be flame grilled, yeah. If you were under the sidewalk, you'd be getting broiled. Yeah. So the firefighters find where the fire is finally after half an hour of letting it burn through the basement wall and into the next building. More like the fire finders. This photograph is taken like a couple hours in when it's like, oh, this is a problem, actually. You can see the massive crowd that has gathered to be like, damn, that's a crazy fire. Going out in the street to be like, damn, that's crazy, has been one of the great American activities of all time. I didn't have Netflix yet. I mean, even now you do have Netflix. Americans, you'll still go out in the street and be like, damn, that's crazy. And it's like a frontier town. There's not like a ton to do besides like drink and gamble and I guess go to the brothel. Yeah, I would definitely be gambling on how big the fire would go. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. The building market was fucking crazy. Yeah, I know it is. It's the actual. Oh, fuck you. So the firefighters tap into the hydrants, of which they can find like three because there's hardly any in the city. and they start spraying the fire down and then they lose all pressure immediately and they're extremely confused about this according to Paige Olson who is runs the last resort fire department which is a historical society that's got a bunch of vintage fire trucks and stuff in Seattle God that's cool you can just do anything I've tried to visit for this episode but because of the holiday I couldn't actually get in to see them because they're open for like one day a week because it's a very small group, but they do have an Art Deco fire station full of vintage fire drivers. That sounds fun. Yeah, I gotta go. We can do that. Come to Seattle and we'll go visit the vintage fire department. I'm trying. Americans, please. Peaceful transfer of power. Yes. Or at least a border permeable enough to smuggle me over. So, Paige's theory on this is that basically the fire has eaten away at the underside of the street enough that it's actually caved in a bunch of the wooden supports for the wooden pipes and started burning through all of it. And so it's lost. The system loses all pressure. The sole pump house in the city is now just spitting water back out into Elliott Bay instead of actually pressurizing the hydrant system. And at this point, the firefighters are like, oh shit. There's a direct quote from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. A cheer rose from the crowd as the beat of engine number one was heard and two streams of water were turned on to the fire. But the cheer of hope died away in a wail of despair when after a few minutes pumping these things, they became so weak that they did not reach the top of the building, showing that there was no water with which to fight the fiend of fire. Again, great street faces to be like, whoa! Whoa! Well, no, it gets better. At this point, the massive crowd begins heckling the firefighters. Yeah! In a massive tradition! So, yeah, so they're like, they're getting spit at. Meanwhile, they're trying to run hoses out to, you know, the Elliott Bay. They go, just suck up seawater. But it's low tide, so it takes them, like, another half an hour to run a hose down there. Guy in, like, fire boots having to, like, inch his way over a mud flat to get to the water. Yeah. Yeah. While being hackled. Like, you know. Yeah, people are throwing garbage at you. Yeah, getting batteries thrown at you and shit. That's a hard thing. Sorry, I don't know what they throw at you. Getting, like, Easter dial, like, vials. Just 18-mail with caravan. No, this is a modern day because somebody writes a call-out post for you. Actually, the Seattle Fire Department is contributing to an era of, like, unsafety. The Seattle Fire Department can't get it up. Damn. You've been a way better firefighter hackler than me. so yeah so at this point you know by the time they finally actually have water the fire is going spreading through basements and under the streets um and advancing like in all directions at once uh there's not like any single direction because it's just sort of burning in a big circle so uh next slide please i've had rim world games go like this yeah so the fire reaches the next block where it reaches the diez and meyer liquor store hmm um and of course they know watson yeah what oh i was thinking dixon watson the the the meat guys yeah oh no these guys there are meat guys yeah yeah yeah well gonna fill an asshole you don't got a meat guy come on not a real i don't gotta i don't got a meat guy i'm sorry uh you gotta get a meat guy i'm i'm fucking trying what do you think i'm on the apps for Someone to provide you with delicious deli meats. I should be on an app for that, actually. Yeah, no, there should be an app for that, actually. A man just comes and provides you with wonderful deli meats. Slicer, but spelled without the E. So, yeah, at this point, the heat of the fire explodes a bunch of barrels full of whiskey in the basement of the liquor store, which obviously is just like a shit ton of fuel to the fire, and it's very intense at this point. Why does this fire smell so much like artificial raspberry flavoring? What's happened to me? Oh, whiskey, no. And chronology is, please forgive me, because the chronology of this is a little mixed, because reporting on even who started the fire or where it started wasn't correct for weeks afterward. It was kind of chaos. but at some point around now the very massive ornate opera house burns down and everybody's kind of like oh shit because that was actually a well constructed building unlike the rest of these storefronts are just kind of all burning through a lot of this is kind of like yeah we threw up this shack as fast as we could that one was actually a building they were like oh it's got like nice thick windows and walls and we care about it that catches fire and burns down okay this is going to be an actual problem Yeah, no, this is not, no one's stopping this thing. Yeah, well, making matters worse, the fire chief, Hosea Collins, is at a, reportedly, I don't know, like, some people insist this isn't true. I saw it in enough sources that I'm going to say it's true. He was at a firefighting convention in San Francisco when the fire broke out. Now, I mean, considering how the fire in San Francisco went a few years later, I don't think he learned anything. The thing about the San Francisco fire, right, is if it hadn't followed an 8.5 magnitude earthquake, it would be like, yeah, it was mismanaged. Here they had every chance possible to stop this first. It's just going to your 1880s firefighting convention and a guy takes the podium, fires up 1880s PowerPoint, and the slide just says, nothing we can do. Throws his hands up and gets around to a force. Yeah, and the next slide says that Croats are dog people and serves a better bread. The problem is, it's like a weekend convention. but the actual two weekend days of that are taken up with, like, inter-ethnic fighting. Slurs you've never heard of. You get, like, some slides, some presentations on, like, the Friday evening, and then Saturday morning through to Monday morning is just, like, fisticuffs. Yeah, slurs. No, that was actually a serious problem, at least, again, at least in Philadelphia, was fire companies going and trying to burn down each other's fire stations. of course we attack them with their most hated enemy fire they would steal each other's fire engines being a firefighter arsonist is some real like Oppenheimer trying to harness the energy of the gods type shit you know it's like I fight the fire but I also you know I use the fire yeah exactly Now I am become Croatian destroyer of fire station. Yeah, so the fire chief is gone out of this firefighting convention. Some people say it was a wedding. I like to believe it was a firefighting convention. Why not combine the two, you know? They were trying to unite two desperate volunteer firefighting corps. Yeah, serves a crime. Doing Romeo and Juliet, but the Montagues and Capulets are different fire companies in 19th century Philly. I would watch the fuck out of that. Yeah, me too. Yeah, they're like Poles and Ukrainians. In many ways, it's fucked up that the Ukrainians are in a sort of like fight for their life against the Russians when the kind of natural instinctive enemy of the Ukrainian is the Pole. Yeah. It's true. Yeah. and like now you're in a situation where the Poles are like you know funding Ukrainian defense and like no wonder the Poles right wing get mad about it it's one of those things where it's like only I will defeat my nemesis I don't need the Russian help to do this only I get to make mass graves of Ukrainians and then lie about it only me and maybe the boy and by the boy I mean Lithuania yeah anyway so the fire chief is gone The brick opera house has burned down. Oh, no. I'm like, fuck, mine's a good boss. Making things worse, the acting fire chief, James Murphy, was reportedly, they completely annihilated this guy in the press. The fairest description is that he was distraught. I was sort of read, like, dead drunk. Yeah, just absolutely, like, freaking the fuck out. Dead to rights, right. So the mayor, Robert Moran, takes over, and he's like, alright, it's time to break out dynamite. We have to blow up this block of wooden buildings. Yeah. Just fire the water cocaine. Guess what we're going to fucking do, boys! American layers left their own devices, even absent a firefighting situation, will be like, we have to blow up these poor people's houses with explosives. No, that's the next time they use the dynamite. The first time was just it wasn't poor people's housing. That's the next one. You've got to stick with me here, because the fire immediately The fire blows directly over the new block of buildings they've just exploded. If the streets are wooden, I don't know what they were expecting to fucking accomplish here. I would like to order cheesesteaks. Sorry, I was texting. I like to read out my texts as I make them. My phone is upstairs, so I was using the watch feature. What? I'm very confused. What kind of Pennsylvania secret agent bullshit is this that you get to say, I think we should order cheesesteaks into your wristwatch? I have no gadget cheesesteaks. Shut up. My phone can upstairs because it's charging. Because it's a fast charger's upstairs, right? Okay, great. Are you still with me? So my phone and watch are connected so I can talk to text and I can't be bothered to go upstairs to talk to my wife to order cheese. I love our work. So you talk into your watch, which sends it to your phone, and then an AI orders you a single pair. I believe in that. First podcast to be destroyed by competing ethnic divisions. Surely not the first. One of us could steal all the Patreon money and start up microbrewery. You know? Well, I mean, why do you think Chopper got rid of Virgil, Texas? No, I was referencing a different leftist podcast. You're going to have to bleep the word, and I'm going to have to really insist that you called him a Croatian or something. I am not surprised. Virgil Zagreb? I just like... Virgil, regions of Croatia. What is the most Texas like? What is the Texas of Croatia? What is the Texas of Croatia? Isria. Virgil Isria. I just saw that movie a couple days ago. Virgil Dalmatia? Virgil Slavonia? So anyway, everything's on fire and they're blowing up buildings. Yeah. You know, the thing is the fire is moving slow enough they can, like, get stuff out of some of the buildings because all of these hastily constructed shacks are made from old-growth timber that would cost tens of thousands of dollars today. Oh, good. I feel even better about this now. The entire new scandal was covered in these, like, huge, old, gorgeous forests, and they tore them all down to make these hastily constructed, shitty-ass buildings. So the fire burns relatively slowly through them because the wood is so dense. And they try and save, like, a handful of buildings. there's like they take the courthouse and they run a bucket brigade all the way up to guys on the roof who just pour water down the sides of the building to keep it cool enough to from sparking because the hoses don't have enough pressure to reach above the first floor at this point and the other courthouse is full of records and they were apparently they apparently were conducting a murder trial until like the fire was like two blocks away and then they were like all right court's adjourned we got to stop the building from burning down also also a good setup for a movie But also just like the most frontier town shit you've ever heard. You know, this is just Seattle was like ruggedly clinging to the ways of the old west by being stupid and obstinate to the last possible second. Then they decide, OK, let's blow up all the poor people's houses to try and save the mill. and it doesn't do anything except like prepare the city for what Robert Moses will do in another century to the same neighborhood which is just go through and blow up a bunch of people's houses. Hi Burt. Burt is back. Hi Burt. We're a strongly pro-Burt podcast. Yes. Pro-Burt anti-Robert Moses. To be clear if you're writing in the comments Burt is spelled with a U Yes. His name is his name for Burt Reynolds. His whole name is Bartholomew Reynolds Ooh! He has seven. Alright, anyway. Sorry, I'm distracting myself. No, it's my fault. What I done is I introduced a bonus episode energy into the mainline episode So if you on the fence about subscribing to the Patreon it all like this yeah if you like this subscribe to the patreon if you don like this subscribe to the patreon anyway please but you're not going to enjoy it no yeah just give us money anyway so yeah subscribe to the patreon because it's helping pay my rent while i'm you know for real yes guest hosting and that's it that's praxis actually to fund a trans women's apartment in seattle i think that's true this is true it is um anyway so yeah i i actually you know speaking of seattle and places i i don't live that far from here it's kind of cool i like went down there and had a coffee like as i was writing these slides when i went to the library that's like two blocks away to research this episode uh with their files in the city um this is fun but anyway so at this point you know they've blown up a couple blocks of houses and they're like this isn't working this whole city's gonna burn down so people like take their either you know try to grab their valuables and run up into the hills basically outside of the city or they they put it all on a wharf to take it out into the middle of elliott bay where the water would protect them but of course like the it's unclear how well this worked uh contemporary reporting wasn't like some people were like oh they saved most of the valuables and some people were like everybody lost everything and i wasn't quite sure which was true this would be a great time and place to start stealing yeah all those wharves burned to the ground. And yes, on that note, they, you know, at this point, the fire is audible for miles in any direction because of how loud it's just like all of these buildings burning are. They could see smoke in Tacoma, 30 miles south. They call in reinforcements from Portland and Victoria, British Columbia, not to help fight the fire, but to help prevent looting. They're on to my ceiling, I think. Oh my god. Damn. They're going to bring in, I don't know, like some Italians or some Portuguese or something. My God. They're pretty Canadian. Bert, I'm begging you. Please stop. I just put this slide in because I thought it was funny because the concept of an insurance company sponsoring this exhibition specifically just made me chuckle. It's like, here's a time when we really ate shit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, remember the time in the city that you, because this is for the Seattle Museum of History and Industry, who has the pot now, the glue pot. So this is just like, hey, you remember the time that the city you live in burned to the ground? You should buy home insurance. I like the sort of illustration of all of these beautiful hose teams, you know, working with their high-pressure hoses that we know that they didn't have. Yeah, no. No, this illustration is very much like, oh, wow, look at how valiant they were fighting the fire. And it's like, no, they just kind of had to give up. Like, at this point, these guys are kind of, like, doing the, like, Chad versus Soy meme. They're sort of walking with their backs hunched over as they're getting heckled and pelted with trash. Yeah, these guys aren't getting pelted with nearly enough trash. Yeah. Yeah, no. So, next slide, please. Come on, Dald. You're getting called Macedonians. So, the fire burns until 3 a.m. June 7th, the next day. The exact amount of fire is a little bit hard to come by, but modern estimates are about 120 acres or 58 blocks. Jesus. Plus, like, almost every wharf in the city. It burned down Yesler's Mill and a handful of other mills. It burns down a railroad station and, like, the railroad dock. No one dies, which is insane. That's really impressive. Yeah. And you aren't getting any help from the firefighters is because they're all sort of fending off garbage. Doing ethnic wars. And doing ethnic wars. Yeah. Sov Kipur, motherfucker. It is estimated that a million rats died. That is a real gross estimate. Yeah, that's a lot of rats. Who volunteered that particular statistic? The rat man arrives at the offices of the Post-Intelligencer to be like, I conducted a thorough census. I'm missing one million rats. I am missing 1,000 instances of the end of the movie wanted Ratatouille yeah that's true another movie which features rats yeah that said it does do 20 million dollars in damage is that accounting for rats or nah no I think that was actually a bonus they were like ooh it's a rounding error don't worry about that yeah yeah they were like ooh now we won't get the plague we finally got rid of our rat 20 million dollars of damage 1 million rats worth of improvement no all those rats were the ratatouille rats they fucked up the Seattle culinary scene for like decades it damaged the sort of haute cuisine of Seattle so badly that they had to set pig in Portland yeah it's a good movie anyway the inflation adjusted it's about 700 million dollars worth of damage and of course there's like next slide please there's like no city left I have to pee I'll be right back go pee go piss girl that's looking out on the water you can see that like everything everything is burned to the ground yeah that's match six should I wait? no it's fine No. Okay. Oh, I mean, if you want to talk about, like, give me some, like, Hershey's opinions or something of that nature, that's fine. We can do that. No, I have a Rudyard Kipling quote because he visited, he was doing a tour of the West Coast and went to Tacoma, and then he stopped to refuel in Seattle. Richard Kipling doing a tour of the West Coast being like, all right, so you guys think that you're casual racists. Let me introduce you to a professional racist. A right competitive racist. This is how I know too much of my humor has come from listening to you make jokes on this podcast, because I was about to make the same fucking joke. It's ultimately sort of a closed loop. It's basically incest, what we're doing. I listen to this show basically constantly. No, it's fine. You are my baby joke sister, and you've gotten all of your jokes from me, and that's fine. People will appreciate getting the jokes in stereo. No, Richard Kipling being like, I am so racist that I've written, like, poems, a form of racism that the American mind cannot comprehend yet. Just incredible. I mean, Americans did love to import a sort of British man of letters. Like, Dickens came out there and, you know, like, a bunch of others. And, yeah, I'm desperately curious what impression America left on Richard Kipling. Well, so he visited it immediately upon it burning to the ground. Okay, so certainly not a great one. So this is his quote. Have I told you anything about Seattle, the town that was burned out a few weeks ago when the insurance men at San Francisco took their losses with a grin? In the ghostly twilight, just as the forest fires were beginning to glare from the unthrifty islands, we struck it heavily, for the wharves had all been burned down, and we tied up where we could. crashing into the rotten foundations of a boathouse as a pig roots in high grass. The town was built upon a hill. That is true. In the heart of the business quarters, there was a horrible black smudge, as though a hand, a capitalized hand, had come down and rubbed the place smooth. I know now what being wiped out means. The smudge seemed to be about a mile long, and its blackness was relieved by tents in which men were doing the business with the wreck of the stock they had saved. Incredible. That's Rudyard Kipling, upon seeing Seattle, which looked like this when he showed up. So, yeah, it was pretty bad. I, you know, when he says hand with capital letters, you know what I'm thinking of? No. What? That's right. It's Master Hand from Super Smash Brothers. Next slide, please. Final destination, no items, only fucked. Come on, the slight coward. So June 7th, 1889, the day after, the embers aren't even cold yet, and all the businessmen in the city get together, and they're like, all right, let's do another one for real. That was a goofy one. Do over. Let's do a city for real this time. They mobilize the National Guard to looting. They do not declare martial law, although they do note the arrest of a man wearing four brand-new suits at once. Is it illegal? Yeah, definitely. It's like, I'm an eagle, your honor, to look fly as hell. Yeah, I didn't know it was a crime to have that shit on. Jesus. It's cold layering. Yeah. Your honor, they call me ranch because I'd be dressed. So they keep more or less the same kind of like street grid, but they widen all the streets. they regrade up to 22 feet higher than the city previously was which uh nowadays you actually go visit it's like they call it the seattle underground tour because you can like see the original street level they built a bunch of the city at um and they just built all the streets over that and that's just kind of like i really hope the underground doesn't burn down again well that's the thing right it's like they actually wrote a fire code um and like a building code wow so you did all the new buildings that they built had to be made out of brick um and they They considered having three fire codes, though. No, just the one. They're like, we vastly need to increase the amount of bricks in Seattle, to which I say, open the border. You know, I had a joke in here for that. There's a slide in there. I was like, I shouldn't say it. I thought you might be doing a kind of like secret word thing where you're going to set up a klaxon the first time I made like a self-deprecating trans joke. I mean, we should do that. I should have a soundboard that just, like, does, like, the red alarm. I mean, this kind of self-deprecation pays my rent. Do we need to start practicing, like, radical self-care and, like, being nice about ourselves? Or is that – would that make it worse? Like, would that be the thing that, like, dynamites the whole enterprise? We'll all become, like, tech startup guys then. Doing, like, wellness tips. Yeah, no, you got to – yeah, exactly. You got to give me – I want some – yeah, we got to do this out there, and then I want fresh blood. gotta have my next gotta have your blood boy yeah Mad Max style if you don't have any self-loathing if you don't have any self-loathing that's a problem I think the world hates us enough we don't need to like help us out I remember that time I got yelled at in the comments for telling November I loved her I remember that I don't remember that sounds about right though so I was like oh braz I will fuck you up buddy you express love in different ways it's fine yeah yeah exactly it's like yeah yeah yeah you're not supposed to say that it's supposed to be implied one of these nuts next no i'm i'm i'm the kind of a trans woman where like uh you know for my birthday uh you know nova brought me out to glasgow and i got to like travel overseas for the first time i had this incredible time visiting all museums and having all this fun stuff and i I was like, I don't know if she actually likes me. Are we really friends? Or is she being nice to me? Killer Nater. I saw a picture of everyone in front of the house and Gareth. Yeah. And the whole time I was thinking, I wonder if all these people like me. Or if they're just kind of tolerating my presence. I'm probably really annoying them. remember how early on we joked that the podcast now is a project to make my self-esteem better the thing that nobody tells you is that when you transition there's actually a limited pool of self-esteem that transmen are allowed to draw from it's like orange caps in the single brain cell so like the more self-esteem i get i actually drain it actively from November. Every day I wake up, I'm like, you know, I feel pretty good about myself. And Nova's going to bed like, God, I fucking hate myself. Yeah, that's right. It wasn't my turn to use the self-esteem. Anyway, yeah, so they've instituted building code. In the city of Seattle, they're like, shit, we could actually, what if we did like a real city this time. They vote on that water supply issue. It wins by 1875 to 51. So we get city water. I guess having the city burned down the week before kind of helps. Every single one of the 30,000 citizens watching, hackling the fire department as they watch the hoses fail probably did have some. Macedonian dog boys, you're not very good at that. A bunch of fucking Greeks down here. Just rolling into the Seattle City Council meeting and being like, so 51 Bulgarians think. We don't need. Oh, we are going to get yelled at. Listen, if you're in the comments, if you're sort of patriotic for your country, whichever one it is, just say and say it's the best one. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Actually, give us the engagement, you fuck dick. I'm still clicking around the corner of First and whatever. First and Madison. We got a guy walking a tiny, tiny dog here, and we got a guy passed out in the front of the coffee shop. Common common Seattle scenes, yes. Beautiful. No, I was going to say, if we get enough into the ethnic grievances, if we can really dig deep... Oh, I can do that. I think YouTube will start recommending this to people. That's true. But the thing is, we've got to start offering life lessons about trad masculinity or something. Yeah, exactly. The superior European race is Romanian. I don't know what the superior European race is, but it is not Romanian, my guy. I mean, I'm probably about as qualified as Jordan Peterson to give masculinity tips. Yeah. It's Andrew Tate. What would Jordan Peterson have made of the total rat genocide of Seattle in 1989? That puts me ahead of 90% of masculinity influencers. I know how to change a flat tire. Allow me to be your father. Yeah, sure. All right. I don't give a fuck. What do you want to say? I know where the 716th wrench is. No, I don't know that, actually. Obviously, I lost that one. True men have two 10-millimeter sockets so they can lose both of them. Anyway, yeah, they regrade the city. They had to build out a brick. Next slide, please. This is a map of the city shortly after the fire. All of those orange buildings are, like, basically new builds out of brick. So they revamp the whole city. The population expands massively because they bring in all of these, like, masons and bricklayers to, like, help rebuild. It goes from, you know, somewhere around 30,000 to 40,000 in the span of, like, a year. Wow. They rebuild everything. You know, they didn't lose as much property as, like, they did during, like, you know, save, like, the SF fire or, you know, the same year, actually, Spokane and Ellensburg, two other cities in Washington also burned down. And those, you know, they didn't have, like, the bay there to, like, throw a bunch of property into. It burned quicker. Oh, no, my chest. So, yeah, so they were actually able to bounce back from this pretty quickly. And, you know, then the city is freshly rebuilt. There's a bunch of economic problems in the 1890s. We talked about that on the Cascades Derralment episode. But in 1897, you know, the Yukon Gold Rush starts, And Seattle is like the last big city before you make it to the Yukon. And you have to like take supplies with you in order to be let into the Yukon. And so that's like becomes a resupply point. So by 1900, the city is the city has 80,000 people. The population doubles in the span of a decade. Wow. Mostly just to supply these people who are all headed north to strike it rich or much more likely die of exposure. Strike it poor. Strike it poor and die. strike it dead. Sell shovels, dickheads. Sell shovels is the motto of Seattle. Like, every time it's got a population boom, it's because they don't, it's not like they've found anything here where they're like, ooh, let's make money off this. They just are like, oh, let's just do whatever's hot right now. We got Boeing here. We have, you know, Amazon. They don't actually make anything. They just help the guys who make things. They sell the shovels. Yeah. Yeah. I have a question. Yes. What is this wacky bridge? That is a rail bridge that connects, that was across the mouth of the Duwamish, which was still mudflat. So it's really shallow. It's just a trestle with like a little tourney bridge in it. It's like a horrible trestle, and then you just go across, and then there's a pier on the other side. Yep. I like it. Right where that is now, that's actually the West Seattle Bridge. There's like a big, there's a huge, huge like interstate height bridge that, you know, big ships can get under, and then there's a couple of drawbridges over there for like local service streets. but all of that basically from everywhere that trestle comes out down to about the mouth of that river that's all infill now and we have like the stadium and you know like all of Soto all of that car dealerships like a lucid dealership there now you know that's all infilled and then we polluted the absolute hell out of the Duwamish and you know that's probably another episode it was a super fun site for a while. It's still not great. But in any case, you know, 1900, the city has expanded massively. They actually did build a real city. Next slide, please. This is actually it today. The new buildings are what we call in Seattle now Pioneer Square, which is the oldest remaining district of Seattle. Looks very nice. I want to move here and start dating between 8 and 16 puppy girls. Yeah. That's too many people. Well, you know, nobody lives in Pioneer Square. It's just like where tourists go. We have one pedestrianized street. We have one pedestrianized street on, like, 8 to 16 leashes like that one photo of Daniel Radcliffe, and I'll take them to Pioneer Square. We can hang out, and then we go back to Capitol Hill and, like, you know. For people who don't live in Seattle, I do actually see, like, trans men being walked on leashes, like, not regularly, but not unregularly. I thought there was, like, a greater Seattle polycule that you had to be a part of. There isn't. And you should be scared of anybody who's telling you that you have to be. Oh, I see. Okay, okay. I don't know. I thought there was some kind of, like, dominant, like, political force there. So there's a couple of different polyfuels. We all run a fire department. It's just stealing the engine. You should see it when the she-her company runs into the they-them companies. my god they're fighting each other oh wait they're not that's not i didn't know you could use a hose that way the any pronouns fire company yeah so now now you know we have disease them various neo pronouns you know now we have uh now we now we pedestrianize a few of these you can pretend that you live in a paradise where cars don't rule all of America and walk around and, you know, see if there's some like cool bookstores and stuff. It is actually kind of cool. Notably, like this is actually, they almost bulldozed all of it in the sixties during another one of Seattle's growth periods because it was dilapidated and shitty and it was full of queer people because that was the only place that could hang out and not get arrested. And then somebody, somebody big locally was like, no, we should save it. Make it a historic preservation district. So they did. and then they pushed all the queer people out and arrested a bunch of them. So the queer people fled up into the city and they learned to seek higher ground and now they all live on Capitol Hill. I used to live on Capitol Hill and then the tech bros kind of encroached and pushed me out, so I'm further down the hill now. Nonetheless, queerness remains alive in Seattle, which is the end of the year. We have like seven hills, so you can just live on one of them. You gotta look down at all of the Microsoft guys commuting to their job in their car. as they seethe in traffic. You've got to put the barricades up. We've got woke mayor. She says that she's going to help build more bus lanes, so I'm personally hoping that they dynamite all of Denny Way and replace it with a big bus lane. Oh, yeah. We'll replace it with one big bus. Yeah, well, we're about to get that. In theoretically a couple of weeks, I'm hoping to be the first. I'm hoping to ride the inaugural passenger journey. We'll see if I can actually swing it. But they're opening the one-line, two-line connection. So we have two trains. They go across the lake, and they're connecting with a floating bridge. It's actually the longest floating bridge in the world, or second longest. I can never remember. We have both of them. It did not become a – well, there's your problem, Matt. It was the first train running across a floating bridge in the world. I'm so excited. Yes, it's the only train floating bridge in the world, I think, ever. I don't think anyone's tried it before. Nope. It's crazy. And in traditional Seattle fashion, what we do is we do an incredibly cool engineering project. It takes three times as long as it should and, like, three times the budget. And then it opens, and you're kind of like, well, this has some structural problems, but it is cool. Yes. So I'm excited to say that I was there. It's kind of like we hybridized the first of what is supposed to be a fleet of hybridized ferries recently. I was on the maiden voyage, like hybrid voyage of that, and it was really cool. And then it's broken down like three or four times since then. And we won't have shore power to charge it with for like another five years. It's kind of just like a really expensive project to like put a big battery that you can't really use. We run the diesel engine in a slightly different way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but yeah, the Great Seattle Fire was actually kind of, it's sort of like the perfect infrastructure project and then a big disaster happens, no one dies, and then it creates so many jobs that everybody's actually kind of happy it happened. Like most businessmen were like, yeah, that's actually pretty cool that that shitty old building I was in burned down. Now I get to like work in an actual store and the sewage isn't flooding the streets and the basements aren't made of wood. Can't do that today because of woke. now you have to build some kind of like memorial or something you know yeah like one million rats memorial yeah you replace the whole burned area with a park yeah the historic burned area district it's a burned over district that's in new york and then then you start mormonism future bonus episodes whenever we don't we don't bother to get reach out to the um bringing young money guys. Part of the reason Seattle's so cool is that it's like the least religious city in America. Huh. Nobody believes in anything here. It's not capital in puppy girls. Open the border. You're going to have to go over there with a great, great white fleet to open up the United States of America. Yeah. We would welcome you as liberators. President Scheinbaum, my friend's country, the United States of America, yearns for freedom. My country, the United Kingdom, also yearns for freedom, and I, for one, will greet Mexican troops as liberators, provided they're not, you know, the Mexican Navy who are here to kill me. The Navy, yeah, exactly. Well, they're offshore, and they're on the boats. Well, that's all I got. It's crazy how all that happened. We learned that it's actually sometimes good to burn a city to the ground. It's part of the life cycle. I wish I hadn't been made of old-growth timber. It's like the pine barrens, exactly. Yeah. You know, sometimes if you don't burn a city to the ground. It never grows. I still have like 50 fucking Mr. Goodbars. You should heckle your volunteer firefighters. Find new and exciting ethnic slurs to call them. Develop a series of like inter-Balkan beefs to throw at your firefighters. Do you hate Belarusians? Not enough. Yeah, talk about that. about that. Something about collaborators. I don't know. Go back to Smolensk. Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Dear Justin, Liam, and November. No mention of Victoria. No mention of Devin. No mention of Sam, the research assistant. This is bullshit. Yeah. Not even milkshake. Not even Bert. Yeah, not even Bert. But it's his birthday. It's his birthday. It's his birthday, yeah. You didn't mention Corinne. It's her anniversary. Yeah. Don't read this one. Yes, I'm ready. Hit me with it. Many years ago, I worked as a student temp for my large state university. Yeah, I noticed that LS and U are all capitalized. Yeah, yeah. Go in dumb, come out dumb too. The union workers graciously taught us how to avoid danger. They swathed us with face shields and gloves and made sure we wore leather boots. I was chosen to mow lawns because I was a girl. My boss, a former marine instructor, concluded that whether for reasons of biology or socialization, young women do fewer stupid things than young men. That is not true. The stupid things just present differently. Yeah, that's a damn truth. I'm a moron, so. The last two student mowers were male, and each had flipped a tractor over. Who amongst us? Legend. Yeah. And a clown. One had mown a hill laterally and toppled sideways. The other had tried to pop wheelies and succeeded too well. Yeah. I know that he lands in a way that compresses every vertebra in your spine like Jeremy Renner. Thus, notwithstanding my entire lack of driving experience, I was selected. I learned to back up small trailers and to start tractors with a cabinet key because the original keys had fallen out of the ignition switch into the grass. Then to use a paper clip once someone lost the cabinet key. And I never flipped a tractor over. The union men allowed me to mow until noon because it's hot in the summer on large state universities' unshaded lawns, and they didn't want to give the temp sunstroke. I was trained by an honest-to-God horticulturalist how to correctly prune anything I could reach, and he didn't do a lick of work otherwise, but he did teach me the horticulture joke. You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make a sink. Sure. Yeah, we've all... It's a Dorothy Parker joke. Yes. And he taught me to take breaks and drink fluids and not get heat stroke. This jolly occupation was ruined when large state university was selected to host the national convention of university housing departments. And we had to prepare for an onslaught of guests. Parts of large state university lie among squiggly country lanes and a superimposed military grid of roads one, two and three. Even locals get lost out there. So we needed sign in for visitors. and my unit was lent to a different unit to create those signs. My new unit supervisor, John, was in a hurry, and our use of saber saws and spray paint did not meet safety standards, but no one made a fuss until John told the union men to cut lumber with a table saw. The shop steward said no. That was out of title work in a higher pay scale. You need the International Brotherhood of Table Saw Operators. Yes. Yeah, for a union. But they'd do it if John brought in a competent trainer to teach them to use the saw, because then they could boast that they had that skill in pursuit of other large state university jobs. Now, John said, you need training to use a table saw? I'll show you how to use a table saw. Pride cometh before the fingers come off. The folks at the hospital reattach both parts of John's fingers. And during his recuperation, the department brought in a real trainer. The man learned to use a table saw with a guard. What did I learn? To seek union employment. That's right. I found state workers to be highly risk averse. They neither flip vehicles nor saw their fingers off. I retired with all my appendages. That is union education. Why do you want a union job? because you will have all of your fingers. Perhaps young people listening to your presentations will take note. Thank you for your support of safety from shop steward Sondra. Fantastic. Thank you, Sondra. Thank you, unions, for being a sort of sterling example of their own necessity. That was beautifully told as well. This is the exact kind of length that we want. This is the really good thing. The comedic timing. Magnificent. I like how it was implied. Yeah, it's all done in implications. It's done in ellipses. It's fantastic. It was wonderful. Well, that was 63rd. Our next episode will be on Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go? Please come to the live shows. Please listen to all of the other podcasts. Yes, listen to every podcast. Happy anniversary to Liam and Corinne. Thank you. Happy birthday to Bert. Yes. And seven minutes to spare, baby. Yeah. All right. Good night, everybody. All right. Good night, everyone. Bye.