2025.09.01: Pop Up Blocker

He's dead, Captain.

Hey!

He's not.

We're recording the ball.

Good

morning to you, wherever you are, because

it is morning somewhere for September 1st, 2025.

My name is Bertie Burns.

Snuck it in there.

Sitting right over there.

She can't believe it's September already.

It's September.

It's actually burns had actually.

Wait, does this mean we're all going out for pumpkin spice?

Let me tell you exactly.

Oh, I got a pumpkin spice notification

on my Starbucks app.

Did you like look down and suddenly your shoes had magically transformed into Uggs?

Listen, all I'm going to say is as soon as that badge hit my phone, I was living my best life.

Hold on a second.

Let me see here.

So this is from the Starbucks UK app, if I am picking the right color of green.

The notification that I got said, Be the first to pick up pumpkin spice.

Let's talk early access.

Come and get our pumpkin spice range a week before the autumn menu drops so dude special invitation okay but here's the thing if they're just like sending notifications to your app that you can come and get it oh yeah are they is it let's read your app let's see what's in your garage or can i go up to the counter and be like hey

i want to order off the secret menu i'm i like that i'm over here bragging about being in the pumpkin spice algorithm i'm part of the marketing engine for pumpkin spice but you know what you know how you have to get it though you can't just like walk up and get it.

You have to be dressed as Han Solo.

Right.

You have to have your boots and your leather leggings or whatever the fuck that is.

You have to have your little, like, your nice little puffer vest that fits just so.

I'm going to, I'm going to all hairy with a bandolier, and that's it.

That's how I'm going into Starbucks to get my pumpkin spice.

Somebody in the subreddit, I think, posted, we were talking about brand kerfuffles like iHob and Cracker Barrel.

And they brought up that, was it last year, they redesigned the holiday cups and everyone lost their mind?

oh yeah they they basically like made them just generic red cups and everyone was like how dare you this is i've i this is i what it was a violation of all that we hold dear in our starbucks red cup season wasn't there actually like a

like there was a satanic bend to that kerfuffle wasn't there well i assume that a lot of this is the argument over whether do you say happy holidays or do you say merry christmas or is this the war on christmas like you're not allowed to say Merry Christmas anymore.

It's like your pumpkin spice voice is in full effect right now.

Oh, baby, I haven't even started with my pumpkin spice.

Okay, but I'm so excited for my pumpkin spice.

You don't even know.

Let me just say, we can now say it without jinxing anything at all.

I had a huge jinx this weekend, by the way.

I'll tell you about it in a second.

Uh-oh.

We did it.

We made it through the summer.

As far as I'm concerned, once you get to September 1st, you're in autumn.

Right.

I don't give a shit about the whatever the first day is.

This is now autumn.

It's pumpkin spice, for God's sake.

September starts autumn.

September, October, November, you are officially autumn.

Copyright.

According to this podcast began this weekend, Texas played Ohio State.

How'd that go?

We're in.

Shut up.

Sorry.

I didn't even sit here.

I apologize.

I'd like to apologize for saying shut up.

Talk about that in a second.

But we, yeah.

So to me, it's like, but the thing is, we had.

A great summer.

And we can now say that because summer is over as far as we're concerned.

The skies won't open and start dumping rain on us.

We did have a winter, and even if they do, we would welcome it.

Yeah, we would.

It's good for the garden, Ashley.

The garden really needs this.

Yeah, we had to use that on our uh immigration re-up uh test.

We had to say, like, when it rains, as a British citizen, you're supposed to say, This is good for the garden.

I've, I know, this is, by the way, I now know how to make friends with the other like moms at school drop off, which is we just go, Wow, this is the most amazing summer we've had in years.

And they're like, Yeah, and I go, Our courgettes are growing like crazy.

It was a stellar summer.

The people who tell you that Scotland has terrible weather, they are lying to you.

Or they were here last summer.

Oh, yeah, that's true.

Last summer was terrible weather.

But this summer,

as you put it to me,

this summer we got both this summer and last summer all together.

Yeah, that is true.

Like whatever the days we missed of summer last year, we got this year as well.

I will say this about last year, though.

Last year, we had a lousy summer, but we had a really lovely spring, and we had this weird, incredible autumn.

It was a gorgeous autumn.

So, let's prepare for like a shitty autumn, and we're going to need all the pumpkin spice we can get to keep our mood up.

Okay.

So, I'm launching the Texas Longhorns play Ohio State University.

All right.

I made a couple mistakes.

I don't really, I drink like more casually now here in Scotland.

I would say that like I'll have a pint with my meal when we go out to a pub or something.

I don't usually order a beer in the U.S.

Like, do you remember me like sitting in ordering a beer?

Not really.

You're like, you would maybe, if you went out with friends specifically to watch a game at a sports bar or something, sure.

But you don't usually sit down at a restaurant in the US and be like, yeah, I'm going to have a beer.

My one exception is usually the first football game of the year that I watch, I will have my classic drink that I had when I was college.

We would sneak.

Sorry, we would sneak flasks of then back then was Jim Beam.

Now, Now, due to my successful media career, I can afford Maker's Mark.

Do you go for the red wax or do you go for the special colored wax?

Listen, my white whale of one of me, I have said that I collect whiskey.

I don't think I've ever said that on the public podcast, but I have hinted that I collect something.

Whiskey is what I collect because that's where we are.

We're in whiskey country.

And so I started finally collecting whiskey because I like the art, the mixture of the whiskey is a lot of lore.

It's a lot of storytelling.

It's a lot of storytelling.

It really is.

It takes like four days to make whiskey, and then they put it in a barrel for 21 fucking years.

And then, so all that time, they've got to like come up with lore and marketing and stories.

And I love it.

Have you heard of our Lord and Savior pumpkin spice whiskey?

You have a hot buttered popcorn rum, and I don't think we've ever tried it, but we all smell it all the time.

I have.

And can I tell you that I put, so I did, it was a buttered popcorn rum, and I put it in Coke, which I guess is a like caramel flavored soda.

And it tastes like caramel popcorn.

It's incredible.

Do you know the brand name?

Can you say it?

No, I don't know the brand name, but I'll find it and I'll post it in the link dump because it is so good and I love it.

And it's one of those things where, you know, you drink something and you go, oh no, I now know this exists and I will forever be chasing this high.

It's one of those.

So I had this bottle of bourbon.

It turned out I was unprepared for college football season to begin.

This game was one of the first of the season, if not the first,

and had no Jim Beam, nor did I have any Maker's Mark here.

How did that happen?

Well, I did, but I had a bottle of Maker's Mark Seller Aged, which I had bought and I've had for like two or three years.

I'm just not going to open it for something like that.

So there was another bottle I got when I was in Texas and brought back here.

I can't even tell you the name of it.

It has a cool white label and everything like that.

So I had that bourbon coast with that.

Ooh, learned a valuable lesson after decades of drinking.

If you're going to drink a new bourbon, read the label.

Okay.

Read the label.

Okay.

It was like 63% alcohol by volume.

It was like 130%.

You didn't taste that it was that strong.

You know, not after the first couple sips.

I didn't.

You take a sip and you go, oh, a little bit of spicy on that one.

So that was that.

And then that's it.

Yeah, that was a rookie mistake.

Now I can't feel my face.

Anyway, I ran out in the field all the way from Scotland.

I ran across the dish and ran out in Oklahoma.

I will say it in Oklahoma, Ohio.

One of, if not the worst, walk back to a car I have ever had was when we,

my university buddies and I, we went to Columbus and watched the Longhorns beat Ohio State, what was it, 2006 or something like that?

And that walk back to the car, even as we were going out in our Texas gear, as we're leaving the stadium, the security guys were like making eye contact with us and going, straight back to the car, guys.

Straight back to the car.

Did they offer you a police escort?

No, no, no.

They were just like, make a direct line, shortest possible path between this stadium and you getting the fuck out of here.

And zip it, okay.

And they were right.

They were right.

Like, we just made a B line, and it was like, it was, you could feel the tension.

Did you have to like set up a rear guard?

You, you know, you have like your front guard, you have your rear guard, you have like everyone's facing outward.

You have linked elbows as you're just all carefully going and making sure that you have all angles so that no one can sneak up on you.

You ever see the movie 300?

Imagine if it was just six dudes and no six packs.

It's just the phalanx, and that's it.

But I will say this: that stadium is gorgeous, the Ohio State stadium.

Great place to win against Ohio.

Yeah, and Texas ended up losing 14 to 7, but the jinx that I had was we were most of the way through the first half, and I made the fucking dumb comment of, hey, there hasn't been a lot of penalties in this game while Ohio State had the ball, and then all of a sudden it's like penalty, penalty, penalty, Ohio State's going to be a little bit more sporting.

Yeah, so that's all your fault.

Yeah, it's 100% my fault.

So you're not typically a very superstitious person.

How superstitious are you about sports?

Because some people, some people get really superstitious about like the minutiae of their sports rituals.

Nothing.

Not at all.

Yeah, I mean, you've seen me.

I am a complete fair weather fan when it comes to sports, and I feel like I've earned that over the years.

I get really excited when the team wins, and I don't care at all when they lose.

I don't care.

I lean into the, you know, the funny part of it, like, oh, this fucking sucks or whatever, you know, everything, especially now, since there's college football playoffs, it doesn't even fucking matter.

It doesn't matter.

And I hate to say that because I'm a little bit of a purist.

I liked when it was the polls and it was you had to argue and debate.

It's university football, right?

That goes along with being university people and thinking you're so smart and educated and you can analyze stuff.

Well, this team beat this team on this team, you know, on a sunny day in October.

Well, the math checks out and I know because guess what?

I passed it.

Right.

I did all that.

I did all that flowchart and math.

Yeah, so now it really doesn't matter.

And I'm the same way, like I said the other day when you and I were traveling.

I just, I don't get upset about traveling anymore.

It's like, we'll get there eventually.

It's hard when there's kids, but it's just like, there's no point.

It doesn't affect anything.

You know what I mean?

Like me getting mad at the airplane doesn't make the airplane take off.

Do you remember there was a story about, I think it was like an Irishman and something turned up on his farm.

And I think it was like, you know, they found a skeleton or something like that.

And he was doing an interview about it.

And they're asking, he's like, well, you know, I'm not really superstitious, but like I did these things just in case.

He said, he's like, just, he's just semi-stitchious.

Yeah, it was one of my dad's favorite quotes.

The guy said, I'm not superstitious, but I figure, why take the chance?

I'm trying to find a drop here of Michael Scott saying, I'm not superstitious, but I am a little stitched.

Just slightly, right?

I don't have any of that at all.

No, I have no illusion that I'm affecting anything that's taking place.

place can i tell you though uh i had a thing that while we're talking about jinxes and superstition and all that stuff go ahead you're a jinx i am and i had this thing the other day uh you'll remember this uh i was in the office i was working on the pc and everything like that and you were coming down the hallway between uh our offices and you were mumbling something like you were in the hallway mumbling but i knew the kids weren't there because it was a school day and evie was off doing something you were like mumbling to yourself or whatever and that's kind of like that's my thing ash and i was like i called from the office, I go, are you talking to yourself now?

And you just got really quiet in the hallway.

And I go, Ash?

And you said,

no.

And I go, no, you're not Ash.

And I walked out in the hallway and you weren't there.

And I went and found you and you were on the treadmill.

out in the garage.

And you had been for quite some time.

And I was at the top of the house.

Like I was all the way at the top floor.

So whatever was in that hallway, when I said, Ash, it responded as clear as day.

No,

that was an interesting moment.

I have a kind of creepy feeling talking about it right now, but I didn't have that feeling at all in that moment.

It didn't sound like weirdly threatening or anything.

That is in the last week, I have had my first ever what I consider to be a paranormal experience.

Well, I mean, we've experienced this.

We've been told the house has a ghost,

but we've been told that it's not a malicious ghost.

It's like an OSHA ghost, right?

That it specifically lives in one area of the house and makes sure that all the fires are put out at night.

And if you light a fire in one of the fireplaces in that part of the house,

then that's when you have the best chance of seeing that.

Right.

And we never have, there was no fire going.

So I don't know if we have a second ghost or if our ghost was picking up extra shifts.

And it was.

a female voice.

It was a female voice.

And as far as we know, the OSHA ghost is also a lady.

I should say it was, I want to say it's the first like paranormal experience that I've had.

It actually is the second because remember the time I recorded?

I do.

I do.

You recorded someone in the attic.

So maybe this is the same ghost.

Maybe.

Maybe we have like, you know, like a lower floor ghost and an upfloor ghost and they, or they timeshare.

Right.

It's their week in the Airbnb.

Speaking of treadmills, though, speaking of treadmills, they, so The Long Walk is coming out.

And as a PR stunt,

this one theater in I think LA decided to do a long walk walking screening where they

changed out the theater so that it was all treadmills.

And in order to watch this movie early, the screening was, I think, Saturday.

You had to walk on a treadmill at three miles per hour.

Right.

Which is that's the same speed as in the movie.

It's really interesting you say that because what I took away from this was, here's an interesting fact about this, which is

in the book, it's four miles an hour.

That's a really fast walk.

It is.

And Stephen King said he always got it wrong.

There's two books I love where the authors have both said they got basically one premise very wrong.

One was Stephen King saying, Yeah, I said it four miles an hour.

Do you know for my entire life because of that book, when I read it as a teenager, I thought a walking pace was four miles an hour?

Oh my God.

Literally because of that book.

Have you tried walking at four miles an hour?

I now know that it's not, right?

I have to, but I have to, my stupid Apple Watch, I have to walk at a higher rate than you in order to trigger what's considered a workout heart rate.

You do.

I get exercise minutes counted on my watch.

No problem.

That's never an issue for me.

If I like run up the stairs, great, I got a minute.

Run into the Oshi ghost to wave hello.

Bang, there's another minute.

You have to like run full tilt before it counts anything.

Yeah, yeah.

And I have to do it for a while because all right, we'll give you a little green minute here, pal.

We'll throw you a bone.

But yeah, so this screening, though, I have to say, Bernie, I don't feel like it went far enough.

Not in the speed category.

Go ahead.

Oh, not everyone might know the premise.

Okay, so the premise of the...

I'm saying there might be a spoiler to say this.

The premise?

It might be because

it's a moment in the book.

It's a moment in the book.

It's a reality show where they have to walk, and it's basically last man standing who can walk the farthest distance.

But I see what you're saying about it taking too far if you go ahead and say what you're going to say because it is the premise just know skip ahead a minute if you want to preserve everything

if you don't know anything about a long walk just skip ahead a minute from now

okay but so what i'm saying is i just don't feel like it went far enough in that walking for two hours at three miles an hour is not that challenging It might be for some, yeah, it might be for a lot of people, your average movie going person.

Like, think about our butt num-a-thon we went to.

I mean, I guess

the thing is, like, okay,

very very funny.

What do you think?

Ready for Little Humble Break?

Oh, yeah, what do you think they should have done?

I think they should have had like a Stephen King marathon, right?

And have Long Walk in there, maybe not the first movie, second, make it the second, but it has to be at least a trilogy and see how far you can make it through.

Okay, for those of you who missed last minute, she spoiled absolutely nothing.

She didn't do it all what I thought she was going to do.

A Stephen King Marathon would be long, panic.

Well, yeah, obviously not like everything in the library, but do like, choose a couple of movies and do them.

And like, you know, I just, they said that you would get eliminated if you have to like slow down, right?

Or if you can't keep up the three miles an hour.

And I just, I don't think two hours is enough to really drive home the challenge there.

So I think they should have done a little bit more.

Somebody figured out it was something like the runtime of the movie was something like 5.7 miles is what people are going to walk.

And it's like, yeah, that's, you know, when you think about it, like five miles in a row, that's, that's farther than most people walk, I think.

I guess so.

I guess so.

I'm, I'm sure that I, I'm biased because the exercise that I do is walking in front of a screen for like 90 minutes at a time.

How

what's your average MPH when you do that?

Well, I do a couple running bursts, so that throws it off, but I walk three miles an hour.

You walk three miles an hour.

So I walk usually two and a half because you watch a screen and I'm usually playing something.

Well, I play something too, but it's turn-based, which means like it's easy peasy.

Yeah, I'm playing Doom when I do it.

If I can do something like Fallout,

playing New Vegas or Fallout 4,

I walked, what was it, 170 miles?

I tracked them all together.

It was a lot of miles.

Yeah, I walked 170 miles.

Not in one go, obviously.

Over the course of like a month, it was my treadmill game.

And that was, that was great.

That was great.

That was the first time I lost a bunch of weight.

I just started a new one, a new game.

So

we're headed into some series walking time territory.

I just started Metaphor Refantagio, which is a game from the studio that I think worked on Persona.

You can see a lot of the gameplay similarities, but it's a much more like fantasy-oriented story than like, you know, Magical Schoolboy.

And so

I think we're going to get a lot of miles out of this one.

The thing, by the way, I don't know, can I wrap up some like losing?

Bring them together.

The drop today was there was a rumor all weekend that President Trump had died.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then he was seen and it was just like

people were like, he hasn't been seen in three days.

They're putting up walls around the White House and everything like like that.

And like they're checking the, what is it, the pizza index, like seeing if the pizzerias around the Pentagon are seeing a spike in orders because that means the Pentagon is working late.

Right.

I think a lot of it started as a meme from The Simpsons.

What does that mean?

That there was some episode of The Simpsons predicting the president would die in August of 2025.

It wasn't about, you know, Trump specifically, but are you kidding me?

No, I think it started as a Simpsons meme.

Oh, my God.

Okay.

Well, he's been seen with like some.

And that was like the end.

That was like last chance for it to be, you know, the meme.

Swelling and bruising.

So people were kind of running.

And this has happened before.

Like with, I think even like at one point, Barack Obama, people swore that he'd been replaced with a body double.

And Biden, there was talk like that, too.

So it's not that unusual that people talk about it.

They're off at a club somewhere with Avril Levine.

Oh, but always weird.

Always a little weird.

The other thing was I was talking about the other book that had a major premise that was just based on the author goes, yeah, you know, I would do that differently.

Was Martian.

Oh, really?

Yeah, he gets strained on the planet because of a big storm that, like, you know, hurts everybody, but because of the lower density of the atmosphere.

Yeah, I think it's that like the storm couldn't actually work like that, but he needed him to get stranded there.

So, for the sake of the narrative, the storm happened like that.

Right.

And so, when people talk about dust storms on Mars, I mean, if you're a big fan of the book, you might think for a long time it's like these huge gale force, like, hurricane-style things.

And it's like it could be the same speed, but not have the effect on someone because of the lower density of the atmosphere.

Right.

Like, it would have to be, what, 10 times more powerful to feel the same force or something.

I don't know.

I'm not sure how that math evens out.

I'm going to say it's 50 times more powerful because no one listening to this will ever be able to prove me wrong.

Gonna go to Mars and test that theory out.

Oh, you have to be very committed.

Hurricane Gizgazop or whatever they name them on Mars.

We had a windstorm here this summer.

What was that one named?

We've had a couple.

We always have, they're awesome.

They always sound like they're Lord of the Rings characters here, the storms.

I mean, aren't the Storms their, are they nationally named?

I think so.

But they follow that same thing where they do it like in other countries alphabetically, always after women for some reason?

No, I think they've changed that now because people were like, hey, that's rude.

But what was the most recent was, was a Floris?

Floris.

And then was it, was it Awen, the one a few years ago?

Yeah, there was a Arwen.

Arwen.

That's it.

Thank you.

Arwen.

Awen, how dare you?

Sorry.

She is snowman.

Sorry.

Sorry.

Yeah.

and then uh they i'm waiting for like like windstorm gimli to come through or something like that

but it was a it was a glorious summer ashley we're going to talk about this one for years to come let's hope we have a good autumn if we stream two of these together it'd be crazy be pretty crazy let's see what today was let's parade to the pumpkin spice guys today was a lush day did my favorite activity we got off the pitching machine we were hitting like baseballs in the front yard and Finn is going around in his little John Deere ride-on tractor.

His little, what do they call that in America?

Mighty wheels or whatever they are.

Something.

It's this cute little tractor ride-on.

It's got a trailer on the back, so he drives around collecting balls.

He wore his cowboy boots, which was adorable.

And his baseball

batting helmet.

And I have some bad news.

Why?

He's getting a little too big for those cowboy boots.

Well, it happens.

But that means Evie will get him as hand-me-down.

She's starting to come into some of his old boots, and she's really excited about it.

And he's sad that he doesn't fit them anymore.

It's one of those rites of passage.

Well, I want to give everybody a heads up on a couple of things.

We talked about this on the sponsor chat this weekend, actually, the bonus episode.

There's a new feature rolling out on the roostheet.com website that is private RSS feeds.

So you'll have your own personalized RSS feed for the sponsorship level content.

So you can check that out in your profile.

I think it's a really incredibly elegant solution that Ben came up with.

So you can take that RSS private feed that you've got and put it in whatever player that you want.

Yes.

And every player that exists will have a way for you to do that with an RSS feed.

So, the first thing we're doing now with is

Morning Somewhere.

You'll be able to, at the top of the show, find an icon in the show art where you will have a link to your own private RSS feed.

You can put that into your podcast player of choice, and then it will automatically pull all the episodes for you.

So, all new episodes moving forward will be in there automatically.

And then we're backfilling all the old episodes, which does take some time when you have as many episodes as we do and i like that's the other thing i want to say tomorrow's episode will probably be a short one because we're doing a really cool thing we have some guests in town uh who might make an appearance on the podcast we'll see uh we're gonna be heading out to the isle of sky which is

just a beautiful part of scotland we're gonna go check that out very so tomorrow's episode might be shorter but then i guess probably on Wednesday, we'll have a lot of cool things to talk about with Isle of Sky.

Digest it a little bit.

For an audio podcast, we'll tell you how cool the rainbows and waterfalls were.

How about you put together a PowerPoint showing how fun everything was?

You can share your photos with each other and then talk about it.

And that's the episode.

Yeah, and I'll do the same thing I did with the Texas game.

I'll go, boy, this is Isla Sky, there hasn't been a lot of penalties out here

or rain.

The weather's been great.

This could be when we encounter, there was a post on Reddit this weekend about it: the most feared animal in the British Isles, the wee beastie, the Scottish,

the Midge.

So that's an area that's renowned for midge.

So I told our guests, like, make sure you have a hoodie, something that you can cover up a lot of skin really quickly if you gotta.

Do we have any of those midge hats?

We do have midge hats.

Okay, can take the midge hats.

Yeah, they're those, they're that, that, that technology that is really cool in theory and really kind of a pain in the ass in practice, where it's like, it's a thing that like pops open.

And then the way you put it back together, it's like a frame on fabric and you twist it and push it together at the same time.

I can just never, ever do that stuff right.

And people who know how to do it make it look so easy.

They're like, oh, yeah, just take these two things and you go, and then it's, it's all folded up and it's perfect and it's great.

And I try to do it and the thing fights me.

It says, you're not my boss.

We had like a little like pop-up kind of shelter patio.

It's a big one, like a tent for like festivals and Highland games and things like that.

We used it once and it was so hard to get back in its container.

We haven't gotten it out in like two years.

We haven't gotten that thing out since.

Also, in Scotland, if you erect anything that can be taken away by the wind, guess what's going to happen to it?

It's going to get taken away by the wind.

Bye, buddy.

We'll see you later.

That's when your trampoline goes on a commute.

All right, well, Ashley, who are our favorite wee beasties for today's episode?

All right, shout out to our boy Dan Fedinition and Nick Taylor for being our wee beasties today, sponsoring this episode of our show at patreon.com/slash morning somewhere.

All right, well, that does it for us.

The first day of September 2025, we will be back to talk to you tomorrow.

We hope you will be here as well.

Bye, everybody.