When you are sitting in the middle of Midtown Manhattan, you are sitting amongst the 20th century invention.

A city that grew up at an explosion, as an explosion, it is an explosion, an experiment, a system of test tubes,

gargling, boiling out of control, radioactive atoms, swirling.

Civilization has never looked like this before.

This is ludicrousness, and this cannot last.

The New Antaylor store on the ride.

Hey folks, and welcome to a Thursday afternoon edition of TBTL.

This is the show that's probably too beautiful to live.

My name is Luke Burbank, I am your host, thank you for tuning in.

If I sound even a little more recorded than normal, if this sounds even more like Memorex than a typical edition of this here show that might be too beautiful to live,

by the way it would be great if we actually recorded this show on Memorex.

I'm sure there's a podcast somewhere that's obsessed with early 80s technology, and part of their whole deal is they record everything on cassette tape.

We don't, we use computers because we're rich people.

This computer, though, is recording my voice the night before Thursday afternoon.

That's because early Thursday morning, I'm getting on a plane, I'm flying to Chicago, taking part in the Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, which is news quiz on NPR.

So what we've got for you today on the program is a conversation.

It's part one of a two-parter conversation that I had recently on stage in Seattle with Damian Eccles.

Damian Eccles is the guy who was probably the most well-known member of a group known as the West Memphis III.

They were the subject of the documentary Paradise Lost, which aired on HBO and drew all kinds of attention to these guys' case.

In case you missed that documentary, you haven't heard about these guys.

They were three kind of self-described white trash guys living in West Memphis, Arkansas.

They were like teenagers.

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