Your Brain on Facts
Host Moxie LaBouche brings you a weekly half-hour of things you didn't know, things you thought you knew, and things you never knew you never knew. Topics range from the history of nursing to the Balinese funeral rite David Bowie requested, from the origin of the Vulcan salute to the theft of Canada's strategic maple syrup reserve. This is your brain on facts. yourbrainonfacts.com
info_outline
We Can't Have Nice Things - Radio Contests (ep. 193)
04/26/2022
We Can't Have Nice Things - Radio Contests (ep. 193)
It's the return of our ocassional series, We Can't Have Nice Things. This week, we look at radio contest and promotions that went badly wrong, often at the draft stage. Free nude wedding anyone? and shirt raising money for at yourbrainonfacts.com/merch 02:45 Radio Luxembourg's Ice Block Challenge 06:02 Bait & switch 10:12 Rules are rules 17:36 Review and news 20:40 No accounting for taste 22:15 Library of Chaos 27:27 Good, better, breast 30:08 Playing matchmaker Links to all the research resources are on the . with your fellow Brainiacs. Reach out and touch Moxie on , , or Become a patron of the podcast arts! or . Or and . Music: , . Canadian radio station AMP Radio in Calgary, caused a lot of buzz with a promotion called “Bank it or Burn it” which asked listeners to vote whether they should #BANK C$5,000 and give it away to a listener, or #BURN the money, literally. With 54% of the votes, the option to #BURN emerged victorious, and AMP Radio burned C$5,000 and put it on YouTube. A YouTube video was posted of the station’s morning show hosts throwing the bills into an incinerator. AMP Radio defended their actions noting that businesses can easily spend C$5,000 on marketing in a week, and that their promotion has garnered a lot of talk, but at what price? While this promotion received a lot of attention, the vast majority of it came from outraged Calgarians claiming that they would no longer be listening to station. However, that hasn’t stopped AMP Radio from continuing the promotion. The second phase is currently underway, and this time C$10,000 is at stake. Radio stunts, and their shifty cousins, radio hoaxes, have been with us since the early days of broadcasting as a favorite marketing tool to gain listeners and advertising sponsors. Orson Welles' 1938 "War of the Worlds," caused widespread panic among listeners, who actually believed Martians were invading. The fallout can range from disappointment to embarassment to property damage, crimes against the person, and even deaths. You probably recall the incident in California in 2007 where a contest called Hold Your Wee for a Wii, where contestants had to drink a large volume of water and the last person to go to the bathroom would win a video game console, resulted in a woman’s death from acute water intoxication. New Yorkers are unlikely to forget the day "shock jocks" Opie and Anthony finally went too far with a contest that encouraged people to have sex in public, with one couple opting to have their dalience in St. Patrick's Cathedral. Today’s topic was voted on by our patrons, including our newest member Paul D and Pigeon and our All that and Brain Too supporters, David N and EmicationLikely, who just got a bonus mini dealing specifically with radio pranks while I struggle, and struggle it is, to confine this episode to promotions and contests. The pranks go way, way worse. Patrons get early, ad-free episodes, but you can also get a glimpse of next week’s show and what it’s like hanging out in the booth with me by following my tiktok; I’ve start live-streaming *some of the recording process. There’s nothing new under the sun and that applies to radio contests as much as anything else in life. Take Radio Luxembourg’s and the ice block expedition of 1958. The challenge: to transport three metric tonnes of ice from the arctic circle to the equator, without the benefit of any form of refrigeration. The prize was set at 100,000 francs per kilo of ice that made it to its destination as a solid, or about a million bucks per tonne in today’s money. Radio Luxembourg felt they could put their money where their mouth is since who could transport ice that far without refrigeration? The contest drew fewer hopefuls than your average ‘say the phrase that pays’ call-in, but the Norwegian company Glassvatt took them up on it. A company that produced fiberglass insulation, incidentally, and is still in business today. Ice was cut out of the Svartisen glacier in 200kg blocks, flown to the nearest town, and melted together into a single 3,050kg block of ice. It was then wrapped in the company's signature glass wool and placed in an iron container on a truck donated by the Scania company and fueled with with gas donated by Shell. This was an opportunity for publicity for everyone involved, not just the radio station. Together with a film crew and a van full of equipment, they expedition set off from the Norwegian city of Mo i Rana on February 22, 1959, stopping in Oslo to pick up over 600 lbs/300kg of medicine to schlep along to a hospital in Lambarene, Gabon, because when else was so much cold storage going to be going that way? They made stops in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, France, which was the comparatively easy bit, then on to Algeria, Niger, and finally Gabon. That’s when the going got tough. Not a lot of paved roads across the desert, plus Algeria was in the midst of a civil war for independence from France. Getting stuck in the sand was a frequent occurrence that cost them hours of digging-out time in the 120degF/50C heat, and their supply of water ironically rather limited. It took a month a day, but they did it! And the giant block of ice had only lost about 11% of its weight to melting, so even if Radio Luxemborg didn’t pro-rate for partial tons, Glassvatt was still looking to collect about $2mil. Except. Radio Luxembourg had withdrawn the offer. When an insulation company stepped up to their ‘move ice without refrigeration’ challenge, Radio Luxembourg got cold feet, npi. The cancellation wasn’t the jerk move it sounds like; they actually called it off before the Glassvatt truck even set out. Glassvatt decided to continue anyway, because even without the prize, it still seemed like good publicity. That’s really the name of the game, the whole reason radio stations do these things. It’s the aural equivalent of butts in seats. You’ve got to entice the public to listen to your station over all their other options. They can be cheaply run, these contests. Folks my age probably won a bumper sticker, which costs the station very little, or some concert tickets, which often cost the station nothing since they come from the promoter. But a constant need for contests means you’ve got to keep them interesting while not blowing through the promotions budget. This leads some DJs to get creative and not in a good way. Oh and a word about DJ. My mom really wants me to refer to radio DJs as “on-air radio personalities” such as when I reference her background in FM radio in NY and FL in the 70’s, because these days “DJ” means Skrillex types, but I can’t be asked, so for today, they’re all DJs. In 2005, a Bakersfield, CA station announced they were giving away a Hummer to the person who could correctly guess the number of miles that two Hummers the station had had supposedly driven around the town during the course of a week. The answer was 103.9, the same as the radio station’s frequency, which one Shannon Castillo cleverly guessed. She must have been on cloud 9 to have won herself a $60k vehicle, which if I were her I would sell because it would cost $60k in gas, so you can imagine her disappointment when she went to collect her prize and was handed a remote control car. Castillo hired an attorney, and I don’t blame her, who pointed out that the station had indicated that the vehicle had 22” rims, so either they were claiming it was a real vehicle or that was one jacked-up RC car. Castillo sued the station for $60k, but as if often the case, lot of news outlets carry the initial story about the lawsuit, but nobody cared to report how it came out. That’s my research bug-bear. Well, one of them. A similar but 166% worse frustration was felt by that same year by Norreasha Gill, a KY woman who was the to the lucky tenth caller in a contest to win “100 grand.” This was going to be life-changing! She told her kids how they could finally buy a home of their own and have financial stability, so she probably saw red when she turned up at the station to collect her prize, only to be handed a 100 Grand candy bar. I like caramel, rice crispies, and chocolate as much as the next person, probably more than a lot of next persons, but I totally agree with Gill suing the radio station for 100,000 actual dollars. Pulling the wool over peoples’ eyes is not only mean-spirited; it can also land businesses into all manner of trouble. You can’t say “it was just a joke” and go about your business. A FL Hooters, not a radio station, I grant you, learned that lesson in 2001 when they held a contest among their waitstaff for most drinks sold, with the prize being a Toyota. The winner was blindfolded and led out into the parking lot to discover her Toyota was a toy Yoda, a foot-tall figure of the puppet from Star Wars. She quit and sued the owners of the franchise, settling out of court a year later. Radio stations operate under the auspices of the Federal Communication Commission, and they have some pretty firm opinions about what shenanigans you can get up to if you want to do it on the broadcast airwaves. The rules require a radio station fully and accurately disclose the material terms, aka the relevant details of the contest, which cannot be deceptive, misleading, or patently false, and then to follow through with those terms. If you’re talking about a contest on the air, you have to give the material terms on the air. It’s not good enough to say “we’re giving away a hundred grand, see the website for more info” and on the website, admit that it’s a candy bar, no siree. No claiming it was just a joke if you made it out to be a legit contest. The FCC fined a Kansaa station $4,000 for failing to announce all material terms of a contest, even though it was on the website, and for failure to comply with the terms for their Santa’s Sack contest. Listeners were to call in and guess what was in Santa’s Sack and you’d win what was in the sack plus a teddy bear; seems simple enough. A listener who guessed the sack held $1,000 was told she was wrong, but the next day, she heard someone else guess $1k and that person was proclaimed the winner. The first caller complained to the station and when that went nowhere, filed a complaint with the FCC. With the feds breathing down their necks –don’t forget, the FCC isn’t just about issuing fines, they can yank your broadcast license– the radio station claimed it was an innocent mix-up among the staff, some of whom included the value of the $10 teddy bear and some didn’t, and that the rules were on their website. The radio station then sent a check for $1,000 to the complainant, meaning they were out $5k over a $10 teddy bear and for want of a memo. The FCC issued KDKA in Pennsylvania with a Notice of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture, a scary-sounding document that says “Look what you did! I should take away your license for that.” On Thanksgiving day 2007, a DJ, I assumed bored or annoyed at having to work a holiday, said that he’d give away $1,000,000 to the thirteenth caller and he’d do it once an hour. A listener called and was told he was the thirteenth caller and was then placed on hold for 43 minutes before being put through to the DJ and immediately hung up on. The station claimed that the on-air contest rules did not apply here because listeners should have realized it was a joke. The FCC disagreed, since the DJ never said anything to indicate he wasn’t serious, at one point saying it was “the real deal,” and he announced the “contest” *several times during his 3-hour show. After finding that the on-air contest rules applied, the FCC smited them–smote?-- for the tag team of failure to announce the material terms *and failure to comply with said terms, i.e. pony up the dough, and fined the station $6,000. An LA station got their own Notice of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture and $6k fine after they held a contest online with a drawing for tickets to the musical Les Miserables. Their web site said the contest would run from 3:50 pm on May 29 to 8:50 pm on June 2. A listener complained to the FCC after the station awarded the prize to three people at only 3:00. Yer man must really have wanted to see Les Mis. The radio station responded that the on-air contest rules didn’t apply to its contest because the contest was exclusively online. The FCC disagreed. The rules apply to "all contests conducted by the licensee and broadcast to the public" and since the radio station had announced the contest several times on-air and told listeners who entered the contest to stay tuned, it was an on-air contest. You don’t necessarily need the FCC in your stable to hold a radio station’s feet to the fire. Just ask the folks at Singapore’s Gold 905 after their big-money game “The Celebrity Name Drop.” They made a montage of 14 celebrity voices, edited so that each celebrity said one word of “Gold 9-0-5, the station that sounds good, and makes you feel good.” I couldn’t find a clip of it, but if you do, hit up the soc meds or post it in soc. To win $10,000, the caller had to correctly identify each voice in order. It took a skilled ear, as well as listening out for other people’s right and wrong guesses. Muhammad Shalehan thought he had it after a month of puzzling and repeatedly trying to get through the phone lines, but when he read his list of names, the DJ said he got one wrong. A few weeks later, Gold905 declared they had their winner, one Jerome Tan, and that was a wrap. Except. Listeners jumped on the station’s FB page, pointing out that Shalehan had given the right answer more than two weeks earlier. Mediacorp, the station;s parent company, said that Shalehan's attempt was invalidated because he failed to pronounce the string of celebrity names accurately, specifically that of Tony Hadley of Spandau Ballet. So Muhammad went to the mountain or in this case, the internet, whereby Shelahan was able to locate Hadley’s management and ask if they could help. He then got a video from Hadley himself, confirming that, while Muhammad Shalehan has a “slight accent,” he had, in fact, “pronounced my name absolutely correctly.” Armed now with some pretty bitchin’ evidence, Shalehan went back to the station again. After viewing Hadley's video, Mediacorp …. still refused to pay out. [sfx] But they offered to make a “goodwill gesture” of $5,000. By then, the online community, a barely-controlled and badly-tempered beast on the best of days, was having none of it, making for some long work-days for the PR department. Finally, Mediacorp relented and paid Muhammad Shalehan the full $10k. MIDROLL don’t forget ad sting If these stories haven’t made you face-palm and ask “what were they thinking,” I’d bet my mortgage one of these will. Strap in, kids. The tragic Hold Your Wee for a Wii contest wasn’t the first or only radio station promotion to involve urine. In 1999, KOMP 92.3-FM of Las Vegas DJ Greg McFarlane was trying to think up a novel approach to give away some Mötley Crüe tickets. His first idea was to have contestants re-enact the Pamela Anderson-Tommy Lee sex tape live on-air, fully clothes of course; wouldn’t want to be in bad taste. Idea number 2: make contestants drink their own urine. Y’all 1999. What was the value in seeing Motley Crue in 1999? That cheese had been moldy for years. Three die-hard fans actually came into the studio, then lost their nerve when confronted with the fact that McFarlane was in no way kidding. Then, in McFarlane’s own words, “The fourth guy walks in, pushes everyone out of the way and throws it down like it was Pepsi.” So concert tickets for guy #4 and an empty cardboard box to McFarlane, to gather his personal effects because he’s just been sacked. Hey, remind me to check my stats and see how many people jumped ship in the last 60 seconds. For those still with me, we go now to a library in Ft Worth, TX, where the staff suddenly found themselves terrorized by crowds of people ransacking the stacks. Unbeknownst to them, a KYNG DJ thought it would be a keen idea to announce that he had hidden $100 in $5 and $10 bills between pages of books in the library's fiction section. Even adjusted for inflation, that’s just under $200 to try to outcompete hundreds of other people for. "People started climbing the bookshelves; they started climbing on each other, and books became airborne," library spokeswoman Marsha Anderson said, adding that 3k books had been thrown on the floor and some ended up ripped and with broken spines. Count the books on your nearest bookcase or shelf. How many of those would need to get to 3k? That’s a lot of damage! Do I need to say that the library has an amount of heads-up from the radio station and that amount was none, or did you just assume because what librarian would agree to that? More than 500 people stampeded through the Fort Worth Central Library looking for the money. There was money in the library – the station claimed it was $100 and that was the only amount it was ever said to be, whereas a number of people in the money-mob thought it was as high as $10k. A KYNG spokesman said the DJ was only trying to boost public interest in the library by giving away about $100, and they had no idea where people got the $10k idea. That was after the fact of course. In the moment, it was the librarians who had to handle the situation...because they couldn’t get ahold of anyone at the radio station. They told the crowd the only thing that could possibly make them stop looking – that someone already found the money and had just left. Sometimes it’s not judgment that’s wobbly; it’s taste, subjective as that may be. BRMB in Birmingham, England ran a contest where they would pay for the winner’s wedding, which as anyone less clever than my hillbilly butt getting married in my own yard both times can tell you can really run into money. There was, of course, a catch. The station reserved one creative right for the wedding that the station paid for. This wedding had to be conducted au naturale. In the buff. Nude. At a minimum, the happy couple had to be in all their glory; don’t know if there was a maximum. The lucky couple, who won by listener vote, had been together for eleven years, attributing their long engagement to the cost of the wedding. Again, back yard, it’s free. The station paid all the expenses and the bride and groom held up their end…as it were, though the bride had her veil and the groom used a top hat as a fig leaf. Your other why-is-this-so-expensive life event would come just after the end of your life, your funeral. It costs as much as a decent used car and you don’t even get to...
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/22890014
info_outline
Courthouse Rock (ep 192)
04/19/2022
Courthouse Rock (ep 192)
Not all heroes wear capes. Some wear leather jackets with chains, long hair, and lots of eyeliner! Today we look at three times heavy metal musicians said "We're not gonna take it" and defended the freedom of speech, but were they "Breaking the Law" and just "Howl(ing) at the Moon"? 0:42 Twisted Sister vs Congress 17:07 Reviews and news 19:58 Ozzy Osbourne's Suicide Solution 26:20 Judas Priest, Better Than You 28:28 Subliminal back-masking and shirt raising money for at yourbrainonfacts.com/merch Links to all the research resources are on the . with your fellow Brainiacs. Reach out and touch Moxie on , , or Become a patron of the podcast arts! or . Or and . Music: , It’s not unusual for the business side of the music business to include trips to the courthouse. Usually, these are for copyright infringement, someone else ripping off your schtick. In the halcyon days of 2005, the band Slipknot was moved to sue, of all people, Burger King for their commercial with a fake band, all in scary masks and costumes, called Cock Rock. The best way to describe the 1980’s would be to say, you had to see it to believe it. Weird times, man. If we weren’t panicking about Russia, we were moral-panicking over Satanic things like heavy-metal music and Dungeons and Dragons, the things that make life worth living and were supposedly at the core of wildly rampant crises of child sex abuse and teen suicide. In the red corner, the busy-body buzzkill today is Tipper Gore, then-wife of then-congressman Al, who had it in her head that rock music was a huge threat to the bedrock of society. Feel free to picture Helen Lovejoy [sfx clip]. And in the blue corner, an unlikely hero in the form of Dee Snider, front man of oh so typical larger than life hair metal band Twisted Sister. The trouble started when Tipper bought her 11-year-old daughter a copy of the album "Purple Rain," the smash-hit album from the *R-rated film, both courtesy of *Prince. And Tipper was shocked, *shocked to hear inappropriate lyrics. She clearly did not know his body of work. "Darling Nikki" was a bridge too far, and if you know, you know. With bra cups brimming with righteous indignation, Tipper gathered like-minded, and I’m assuming bored, wives of senators, cabinet members, and prominent businessmen to for the Parents Music Resource Council or PMRC. But this wasn’t censorship, the PMRC wanted everyone to know. It was just about helping parents make informed decisions. They wanted to see music rated like movies, with warnings for the R-rated stuff. Critics pointed out that that was easier said than done. The Motion Picture Association of America rated about 350 movies a year. By contrast the Recording Industry Association of America saw 25,000 songs a year being released in those days. To focus their efforts, the PMRC threw down the gauntlet on the "Filthy Fifteen," a list of songs from the likes of Madonna and Sheena Easton to AC/DC and Judas Priest, that were part of what Gore called "the twisted tyranny of explicitness in the public domain." I did a Thundercats burlesque number to one of the songs. Care to guess which one? While the PMRC wasn’t an official government anything, the record industry needed to stay on their good side. They were lobbying for a tax on blank cassettes, absolutely besides themselves over the idea of losing money to tape dubbing. Four members of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation were all married to PMRC members. This was enough for the RIAA to cross the street to get away from the principles of free expression in hopes of getting the blank-tape tax. When the Senate committee called for hearings on this issue. Arguing for totally’not’censorship, you guys, were PMRC members, child-health experts, and religious figures. Standing up for their rights as musicians was an interesting trio – Twister Sister’s Dee Snider, folk singer John Denver, and I would not insult him by trying to affix a label, gonzo rock god Frank Zappa. We don’t know how many musicians were invited, but they were the only ones who showed up. Anyone else who was invited missed the chance for a lot of press – the hearing room was packed with reporters and tv cameras til the fourth estate were packed in like sardines. PMRC husband Sen. Hollings played their hand right away, referring to the music in question as "porn rock," saying "If I could find some way to constitutionally do away with it, I would." I bet he’s fun at parties. Sen. Paula Hawkins waved off concerns about artists' rights of free expression under the First Amendment as she waved away the idea of parental responsibility, and bemoaned rock music becoming much more explicit in the 30 years since Elvis. A 2012 study by Elizabeth Langdon at Cleveland State University found that music has indeed grown more explicit in its sexual content, but "the sexual attitudes and behaviors (and related outcomes) of adolescents do not appear to be following suit at the national level." When it came time to make their case before the government, Tipper Gore and Susan Baker, wife of then-Treasury Secretary James Baker, testified on behalf of the PMRC. Album art, a much bigger part of the whole music buying and enjoying process. Remember liner notes with all the lyics? It was like Christmas! Those albums that had Playboy, Boris Vallejo, or Saw vibes on their jacket were used as evidence. A local pastor read salacious lyrics about bondage, incest, and "anal vapors"...to unrestrained tittering and laughter. A child psychiatrist testified that David Berkowitz, the serial killer called "Son of Sam," was known to listen to Black Sabbath. sigh You shouldn’t be allowed to get a degree without understanding the difference between correlation and causation. Then the defense took the stand. Rally, lads! Zappa was up first, looking as not Frank Zappa as I ever saw, with short hair and a suit. "I've heard some conflicting reports on whether or not people on this committee want legislation. I understand that Senator Hollings does." Sen. James Exon butted in, saying he might support legislation that makes the music industry "voluntarily" clean up its act, which Zappa astutely pointed out is “hardly voluntary." [sfx clip] "The PMRC proposal is an ill-conceived piece of nonsense which fails to deliver any real benefits to children, infringes the civil liberties of people who are not children, and promises to keep the courts busy for years, dealing with the interpretation and enforcement problems inherent in the proposal's design. It is my understanding that, in law, First Amendment issues are decided with a preference for the least restrictive alternative. In this context, the PMRC's demands are the equivalent of treating dandruff by decapitation." He took dead aim at the inherent conflict of interest and said the whole issue was a facade for "trade-restraining legislation, whipped up like an instant pudding by the Wives of Big Brother." Chef kiss. The senators were less impressed. Thankfully the next at-bat was Ivory soap clean, openly devout Christian John Denver, or as Dee Snider later described him, "mom-American-pie- John-Denver-Christmas-special- fresh-scrubbed guy." Despite his broad appeal, Denver was no stranger to censorship, which he warned the PMRC was approaching. "Rocky Mountain High," one of his biggest hits, was banned from some radio stations for drug references that weren’t actually there. "What assurance have I that any national panel to review my music would make any better judgment?" Denver asked the senators. A "self-appointed moral watchdog," he argued, was antithetical to the ideals of a democratic society, the sort of thing you saw in Nazi Germany. Denver then excused himself from the hearing because he had a meeting with NASA in hopes of becoming the first civilian in space. Not a word of a lie. Luckily, he didn’t make the cut; the flight in question was the catastrophic last flight of the Challenger. With the opening acts out of the way, it was time for the headliner, Dee Snider, who quite plausibly believes [1] “the PMRC — or the senators whose wives were in the PMRC — invited me to make a mockery out of me in front of the world." When Snider walked in, they probably thought they’d gotten their wish. He was wearing his “dirtbag couture” – jeans, a tank top, sunglasses, and voluminous bottle-blond hair. But Dee Snider wasn’t the airhead they were expecting. He introduced himself as a married father, a Christian, and neither drinks nor does drugs. He’d brought his Army and NYPD veteran father with him. (Zappa brought his kids, Moon Unit and Dweezil because they were Twisted Sister fans.) He addressed Tipper personally for her misinterpretation and misrepresentation of his song "Under the Blade," which they claimed was about S&M and rape, citing the lyrics “Your hands are tied, your legs are strapped, a light shines in your eyes/You faintly see a razor's edge, you open your mouth to cry.” Snider countered was about their bassist Eddie Ojeda having surgery, literally going under the knife. "Ms. Gore was looking for sadomasochism and bondage and she found it," indicating the bondage was a metaphor for fear. Snider later wrote for the Huffington Post that he enjoyed the "raw hatred I saw in Al Gore's eyes when I said Tipper Gore had a dirty mind." Snider highlighted another accusation from Tipper Gore, "You look at even the t-shirts that kids wear and you see Twisted Sister and a woman in handcuffs sort of spread-eagled." This was a complete untruth. Twisted Sister "never sold a shirt of this type; we have always taken great pains to steer clear of sexism in our merchandise, records, stage show, and personal lives. Furthermore, we have always promoted the belief that rock and roll should not be sexist, but should cater to males and females equally." He challenged Tipper to produce any such shirt and when asked about it again by Senator Al Gore, Gore clarified for the record that "the word 't-shirts' was in plural, and one of them referred to Twisted Sister and the other referred to a woman in handcuffs." Snider stuck to his guns insisting Tipper was referring to Twisted Sister before Senator Gore changed the subject. During Snider's testimony, Senator Ernest Hollings from South Carolina asked him about different perceptions of obscenity and vulgarity. He read part of a Supreme Court verdict in the Pacifica Case involving the Federal Communications Commission (famous for the role George Carlin's "Seven Dirty Words" played in it). In the case, the Supreme Court ruled that "Patently offensive, indecent material presented over the airwaves confronts the citizen not only in public, but also in the privacy of the home. The individual's right to be left alone, plainly outweighs the first amendment rights of an intruder." They still hadn’t figured out who they were dealing with. Snider pointed out there was a difference between the airwaves” as opposed to a person going with their money to purchase an album to play in their room, in their home, on their own time. The airwaves are something different." Sen. Al Gore opened his questioning of Snider by asking what the initials of their fan club “S.M.F.” stood for. [x] "It stands for the Sick Motherf------ Friends of Twisted Sister," Snider testified. "Is this also a Christian group?" Gore asked, to a smattering of laughter. "I don't believe profanity has anything to do with Christianity," Snider said. I could watch replays of that hearing all day. [y] "The beauty of literature, poetry, and music is that they leave room for the audience to put its own imagination, experience, and dreams into the words," Snider testified. "There is no authority who has the right or the necessary insight to make these judgments. Not myself, not the federal government, not some recording industry committee, not the PTA, not the RIAA, and certainly not the PMRC," Snider said. [sfx clip?] When it was said and done, it's unlikely that many minds were changed by the hearing. Although, despite the protestations to the contrary, quite a few senators and witnesses had explicitly argued in favor of government action. No laws were passed, but they still got results. The RIAA agreed to work with the PMRC on labeling objectionable content with a bold black and white sticker reading "Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics." So the rockers kinda lost, but they were awesome and I’m counting it as a moral victory. That black and white sticker was worse than a Scarlet Letter. Huge retailers like Walmart would not sell "labeled" records, period, cutting out a huge slice of the marketplace for "labeled" artists. Some smaller stores were threatened with eviction if they stocked "labeled" records. The city of San Antonio barred "labeled" artists from performing. Maryland and Pennsylvania debated requiring retailers to keep it in an "adults-only" area of the store. Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra was prosecuted in California over "Distribution of Harmful Material to Minors." But musicians would have the last laugh. The explicit lyrics sticker very quickly went from mark to shame to selling point. Retailers realized the money they were missing out on and began stocking the albums. Teens and young adults would often buy albums *because they had the warning. In fact, if you were hard-cord or counter-culture or punk in any way but didn’t have a warning label, scoff! There was also a shed load of reaction music, including Danzig’s only mainstream hit. [sfx clip] Nowadays, not only have our buying habits changed, but our standards have too. MIDROLL CW: The following section is about news events subsequent to suicides, without going into too much detail about the suicides themselves. If that’s not where your head is today, no worries, we’ll catch up next week. In 1986, Sharon Osbourne called her management client and husband Ozzy Osbourne that he had to get on a plane as fast as possible and get to LA. Like a phone call from a movie, she refused to tell him why, but demanded he go now. Ozzy landed in LA into the loving embrace of a batallion of reporter’s microphones and those stupidly bright news camera lights, asking him how he responded to the suicide. What Sharon could have taken 10 seconds to explain to him was that the previous year, 19 year old John McCollum was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in his California bedroom. The album Blizzard of Oz which he’d allegedly been listening to for at least six hours straight, was still spinning on the stereo turntable. McCollum’s parents believed Osbourne was responsible, that his song “Suicide Solution” was a proximate cause of their son’s death. Okay, that was about 20 seconds, but I stand on my statement. In their lawsuit, McCollum’s parents claimed that there were hidden lyrics in the song that incited John to kill himself, with messages like “get the gun and try it, shoot, shoot, shoot.” Osbourne countered that the song wasn’t about a solution as in an answer, but a solution as in a liquid, specifically the one he was at the time slowly killing *himself with, and which has killed AC/DC’s Bon Scott, alcohol. [ozzy 1] "Suicide Solution wasn't written about, 'Oh that's the solution, suicide.' I was a heavy drinker and I was drinking myself to an early grave. It was suicide solution," Ozzy said later. "Wine is fine but whiskey's quicker. Suicide is slow with liquor. That's what I was doing for a long while.” The plaintiff’s case was that the song Suicide Solution should be exempt from the first Amendment’s freedom of speech. In the US, you’re free to express any viewpoint or feelings, up to a point – it is not legal to directly incite specific, imminent actions which cause harm to others. That’s hard to prove and virtually every attempt to hold an entertainer responsible for allegedly inciting action has failed. One notable exception, and a replacement for the tired old ‘you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater’ example is that of radio disc jockey The Real Don Steele, who told listeners to hurry as quickly as they could to a certain Los Angeles address to win a prize. This is 1970, only two years after seat belts became mandatory, and people were getting in crack-ups, and one motorist who had no idea what was happening was killed. In a case still taught in law schools everywhere, his family sued and the California Supreme Court ruled in their favor. I really could do a whole episode just on radio promotions going terribly, terribly wrong. At issue in the McCollum case was not whether there actually were hidden lyrics, but whether such lyrics are protected speech or incitement to violence. If successful, the McCollum lawsuit would have had sweeping consequences for artists in every medium, potentially holding them liable for the actions of those who watched, read or listened to what they’d created. At the very least, it would have made Ozzy too big a liability for any record label or concert promoter to associate themselves with, and it’s not hard to imagine that that pariah status would spread to other metal bands. [ozzy 2]“I feel very sad for the boy, and I felt terribly sad for the parents. As a parent myself, I'd be pretty devastated if something like that happened. And I have thought about this, if the boot was on the other foot, I couldn't blame the artist." The suit wasn’t just about Suicide Solution; they also blamed the song Paranoid. Data point of one, but I can disprove that one by sheer force of math; it’s probably my most-listened-to Ozzy or Sabbath song, with the very Un-Sabbath Laguna Sunrise as a close second. Plaintiff’s counsel Tom Anderson claimed McCollum had been a normal, happy well-adjusted young man, who listened to ″Suicide Solution″ for hours before killing himself, and that a low-frequency hum on the record, only audible if you were using headphones as McCollum had been, had caused him to be more susceptible to the song’s hidden message. Attorneys for CBS, Ozzy’s record label and party in the suit, argued that Osbourne was no more responsible for a listeners’ actions than Shakespeare would be for Hamlet’s soliloquy, Tolstoy for Anna Karenina throwing herself under the wheels of a train, or the producers of “M.A.S.H.” for choosing “Suicide Is Painless” for its theme tune. When Judge John Cole dismissed the case, spoiler alert, he left room for the plaintiffs to appeal over the mysterious hum, which they did; the appellate judge upheld the dismissal. This wasn’t the last time a fan’s suicide resulted in legal action. The family of another young man brought a similar lawsuit against Osbourne in 1986. Their case was also unsuccessful. 5 years later, CBS was back in court, though this time it was Judas Priest who found themselves in the dock, but with a pseudoscience twist. In December 1985,...
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/22833545
info_outline
Apple of Our Eye (ep. 191)
04/12/2022
Apple of Our Eye (ep. 191)
and shirt raising money for . It's another one of those episodes all about a topic that sounds totally mundane and boring! Where did apples come from? Was Johnny Appleseed real? Why does planting apple seeds lead to disappointment? And why are some apples considered intellectual property? Links to all the research resources are on the . with your fellow Brainiacs. Reach out and touch Moxie on , , or Become a patron of the podcast arts! or . Or and . Music: , , and . Want to start a podcast or need a better podcast host? Get up to TWO months hosting for free from with coupon code "moxie." Sponsor: What’s more wholesome and iconic than an apple? In the Bible, Eve ate an apple and now half of us have to have periods and crap. In fairness to apples, the Bible just says “fruit” and it was Milton’s “Paradise Lost” that declared the fruit was an apple because the Latin word for apple, m-a-l-u-s, is also the word for evil. There’s the Greek myth of Atalanta, who would only marry the man who beat her in a footrace, so Aphrodite helped a Melanion cheat by dropping golden apples that she stopped to pick up. An apple fell on the head of Isaac Newton, leading to the discovery of gravity – prior to that, everyone weighed a lot less. The record label that gave the world the Beatles and one of the largest consumer electronics companies in the world use an apple as their logo. [tiktok] Bonus fact: The Apple computer logo has a bite taken out of it so it isn’t mistaken for a cherry, which I don’t think would really have been so great a danger, and is *not a nod to Alan Turing, the famous mathematician who helped Britain win WWII but was hounded by that same government for being gay and took his own life with a poisoned apple. Steve Jobs and co repeatedly said they wished it was that clever. We say something is “as American as apple pie” and even though Ralph Waldo Emerson dubbed apples “the American fruit,” the tasty, sweet malus domestica as you’re used to it is about as native to North America as white people. That’s not to say there was nothing of the genus malus in the new world; there was the crabapple, a small, hard, exceedingly tart apple, which is better used for adding the natural thickener pectin to preserves than anything. The story of apples actually begins in Kazakhstan, in central Asia east of the Caspian Sea. Malus sieversii is a wild apple, native to Kazakhstan’s Tian Shan Mountains, where they have been growing over millions of years and where they can still be found fruiting today. There’s evidence of Paleolithic people harvesting and using native crabapples 750,000 years ago, give or take a week. The original wild apples grew in ‘apple forests’ at the foot of the snow-tipped mountains, full of different shapes,sizes and flavors, most of them bad. Kazakhstan is hugely proud of its fruity history. The former capital city of Almaty claimed the honor of ‘birth place of the apple’ about 100 years ago. Seems a suitable sobriquet since the name ‘Almaty’ was previously recorded as ‘Alma-Ata’ which translates from Kazakh as ‘Father of the Apples,’ though in Latin Alma means mother or nurturer, which feels more fitting but that’s beside the point. This origin story was not without controversy, but what am I here for if not to teach the controversy? In 1929, Russian scientist Nikolai Vavilov first traced the apple genome. He identified the primary ancestor of most cultivars of the domesticated apple to be the ancient apple tree: Malus sieversii. There used to be some controversy over this, but it has since been confirmed, through detailed DNA testing, and a full sequencing of the genome, as recently as 2010. It was probably birds and traveling mammal species that initially transported apple seeds out of Kazakhstan long before humans started to cultivate them – by eating the apples and then pooping out the seeds. By 1500 BC apple seeds had been carried throughout Europe by the Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans. Bloody Romans. What have they ever done for us? I mean apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans really ever done for us? Oh yeah, apples. The Romans discovered apples growing in Syria and were central in dispersing them around the world from there, using the Silk Road as a means of transport from East to West. Romans were a fair hand at grafting, taking a cutting from one apple variety and attaching it to a rootstock (young roots and trunk) from another tree – more on that later. As such, the Romans started to grow apples in Europe and Britain that were bigger, sweeter, and tastier than any before. Let’s not forget variety. There are a whopping 2,170 English cultivars of malus domestica alone. Apples arrived in the new world first with the Spanish in the warm bits and then with English settlers in the cooler bits, which when I say it sounds like it was done on purpose. Ask an American child how apples spread across the nascent US and they’ll tell you it was Johnny Appleseed. We tend to learn about him around the time we learn about “tall tales,” i.e. American folklore –stories like the giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, or John Henry, who could hammer railroad spikes in ahead of a moving train – so it can be a little tricky to be sure if Johnny Appleseed is real or not. Don’t feel bad, a friend of mine just learned that narwhals were real the other year when she wanted to be one in a cryptid-themed burlesque show. Johnny Appleseed, real name John Chapman, was a real person, though naturally some aspects of his life were mythologized over time. Details are sparse on his early life, but we know that Chapman was born in Massachusetts in 1774 and planted his first apple tree trees in the Allegheny Valley in Pennsylvania in his mid-twenties. He then began traveling west through Ohio, planting as he went. These were frontier times. We’re talking about a good 70 years before the transcontinental railroad, so much of the area he went through did not yet have white settlers in it, but Chapman seems to have a knack for predicting where they would settle and planting nurseries in those spots. Chapman was also a devout follower of the mystical teachings of Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, and he tried to spread Swedenborgian doctrine as well. People were open to some parts of it, like kindness to all animals, even the unpleasant ones. The apples that Chapman brought to the frontier were completely distinct from the apples available at any modern grocery store or farmers' market, and they weren't primarily used for eating, but for making hard apple cider. Cider was a mainstay item for the same reason people drank beer at breakfast, because it was safer than the water supply. This didn’t actually apply as much in the not-yet-destroyed frontier as it had back in London, but old habits die hard. I’ve often wondered why cider is such a staple beverage in the UK, but only resurfaced in the last 20 or so years here in the States, where we have to specify hard cider” because the word “cider” normally means a glorious, thick, flavorful unfiltered apple juice you only get in the fall. It’s thanks to the colossal failure that was that “noble experiment,” Prohibition, when some people didn’t like drinking and told the rest of us we couldn’t either. "Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider," writes Michael Pollan in The Botany of Desire. "In rural areas cider took the place of not only wine and beer but of coffee and tea, juice, and even water." The cider apples are small and unpleasant to eat, so they were really only good for cider-making. As such, during Prohibition, cider apple trees were often chopped down by FBI agents, effectively erasing cider, along with Chapman's true history, from American life. But Johnny “Appleseed” Chapman wouldn’t know anything about all that. Within his own lifetime, tales of his activities began to circulate. Most of these focused on his wilderness skills and his remarkable physical endurance. Chapman cut an eccentric figure. He wore a sack with holes for his head and arms rather than a proper shirt and after he’d worn through multiple pairs of shoes, he gave up and went barefoot. Perhaps his most distinct feature, the one always included in drawings, apart from a bag of apple seeds, is his soup pot, just about his only possession, which he wore on his head like a hat. Starting in 1792, the Ohio Company of Associates made an offer of 100 acres of land to anyone willing to make a homestead on the wilderness beyond Ohio's first permanent settlement. These homesteads had to be permanent; no pitching a tent and saying ‘where’s my land?’ To prove their homesteads were the real deal, settlers were required to plant 50 apple trees and 20 peach trees in three years. Since an average apple tree took roughly ten years to bear fruit, you wouldn’t bother unless you were in it for the long haul. He might have looked like a crazy hermit, but Chapman realized that if he could do the difficult work of planting these orchards, he could sell them for a handsome profit to incoming frontiersmen. “On this week’s episode of Frontier Flipper, Johnny plants an orchard…again.” Wandering from Pennsylvania to Illinois, Chapman would advance just ahead of settlers, cultivating orchards that he would sell them when they arrived, and then head to more undeveloped land. That was very clever. What wasn’t clever was Chapman growing apples from seed at all. This is the bit about grafting, in case you were jumping around looking for it. Statistically, at least one person was really waiting for this part. Apple trees don’t grow “true-to-type,” as WSU tree fruit breeder Kate Evans explains. That means that if you were to plant, for instance, Red Delicious seeds in your backyard, you wouldn’t get Red Delicious apples, not that you’d want to, but more on that later. Boy, what a tease. Instead, planting and breeding means matching a scion to a rootstock. The scion is the fruiting part of the tree – most of what you actually see. The rootstock is everything that goes in the ground, as well as the first few inches of the trunk. Buds from one variety are attached to the rootstock of another and they grow into a tree that will produce apples. But matching up the scion and rootstock isn’t enough to grow good apples. You also need a tree to act as a pollinator. “If you don’t have good pollination, you can end up with misshapen or small unattractive fruit,” says Jim McFerson, director of the Wenatchee extension. Up to ten percent of an orchard can be pollinators, and most today are crabapple trees. Apple trees cannot normally pollinate themselves. Unlike, say, peaches, which can and do self-pollinate, predictably producing peaches virtually identical to the parents, the viable seeds (or pips) will produce apples which don’t resemble the parents. This requirement for pollination is how there have come to be so many varieties in the world, at least 20k and that’s a conservative estimate. For context, there are only two varieties of commercial banana and just one kiwifruit. Grafting was an established way of propagating apples and was commonly done in New England, so why didn’t Chapman do that? Apart from the fact that it’s easier to travel with just seeds and planting is faster than graftering, as a member of the Swedenborgian Church, Chapman was forbidden from cutting two trees to cobble together a new tree and it was thought to make the plants suffer. John “Johnny Appleseed” Chapman died in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1845, having planted apple trees as far west as Illinois or Iowa. A century later, in 1948, Disney solidified his legend with an animated version of his life. The cartoon emphasized his Christian faith, but conveniently left out all the Swedenborgian stuff. MIDROLL Speaking of varieties, as well we might, what would you guess the most popular apple variety has been for the past, say, 70 years? The apple whose name is half-lying but unfortunately it’s lying about the important half, the Red Delicious. They are the most iconic apple across most of the world. Don’t believe me, just check emoji packs in other countries. Their appearance is the whole reason these apples exist, with their deep, even red color and dimpled bottom that look so enticing in the produce department; it’s also the reason they suck and are terrible. They taste of wet cardboard and have the mouthfeel of resentment. Their flavor and texture were sacrificed for botanical vanity and shippability. Even apple growers hate them. Mike Beck, who tends 80 acres of apples at Uncle John’s Cider Mill, admits he grows some Red Delicious to add color to some of his ciders, but he won’t eat them. The Red Delicious was first called the Hawkeye, and one Jesse Hiatt found it growing as a random sapling on his Iowa farm around 1870. The fruit that eventual tree produced was sweet and fruity, but it wasn’t red, rather red and yellow-striped, like an heirloom tomato. Of course, back then, those were just called tomatoes. It was introduced to the market in 1874 and the rights to the Hawkeye apple were sold to the Stark Brothers Nursery, whose owner thought it was the best apple he’d ever tasted. By 1914, Stark’s renamed the variety Red Delicious, and over time, produced a fruit with less yellow and more red year over year. It also gained its buxom top-heavy shape and five little feet nubs on the bottom. As with any product, it took a hefty shovelful of marketing for Red Delicious to gain a following, but gain it did. Current estimates have Red Delicious being 90% of the apple crop at one point. That point happened in the 1950s, thanks to that force of nature, changes in buying habits. PreWWII, people would buy food right from the farm or at farmers markets, then the modern grocery store, with its cold storage, and the refrigerated truck courtesy of Frederick Jones. Bigger stores need to move more product and a big pyramid of shiny, sports car red apples by the front window will really bring the punters in. Growers could sell them to packers, who in turn sold them to those grocery store chains, which also fueled a change in their taste. Orchardists bred and crossbreed the Red Delicious to get that perfect shape and color, uniformity and resilience to handling and shipping; they just left off tiny considerations, very minor concessions really, like taste and texture. But there’s change a-foot again. People began to realize you can have an apple in your pack lunch or the big bowl at the fancy hotel reception desk that you’d actually want to eat. Now we’re all about those Sweet Tangos, Braseburns, and Honeycrips. Unwilling or unable to admit defeat, however, the Red Delicious is still out there. But like a lot of has-beens, its seeing more success abroad than at home, and they’re exported to the western Pacific Rim, Mexico and parts of Europe. Apart from random saplings popping up randomly, new varieties of apples take a lot of people a lot of time and effort, to say nothing of a robust research & development budget. Take Washington State University Tree Fruit Research and Extension Center, for example. In 1981, now-retired horticulturist Bruce Barritt set out to create an apple bred for flavor and long storage instead of appearance, to compete with the Fuji from Japan and the Gala from New Zealand. Like breeding animals, you start with two parents with known traits, then selectively breed for the ones you want over the course of several generations. You have to have the patience of a Buddhist monk, since apple trees take four to five years to bear fruit and you know whether or not it worked. Barritt needed that patience to eventually create the apple that actually made mainstream, even international, news in 2019 – the Cosmic Crisp. These are no small potatoes, either. There’s probably a French language joke in there. The marketing budget alone is $10 million. A $10mil marketing budget….for an apple. Cosmic Crisps are mostly a dark-ish red with yellowy speckles reminiscent of stars. The website, did I mention it has its own website, says [commercial read] “The large, juicy apple has a remarkably firm and crisp texture. Some say it snaps when you bite into it! The Cosmic Crisp® flavor profile is the perfect balance of sweet and tart, making it ideal for snacking, baking, cooking, juicing or any other way you like to enjoy apples.” Hire me for voiceovers at moxielabouche.com for lightning-fast voiceovers because I was one time hit by lightning. The first Cosmic Crisp seed began in 1997 with pollen from a Honeycrisp flower, applied by hand to the stigma of an Enterprise. Racy stuff. Honeycrisp as we know are lovely and Enterprise apples were known for disease-resistance and long storage life. Storage life is important because an apple has to be as good in late spring as it was when it was picked in the fall, as most to all of the apples you buy are. Yep, all apples are picked at once and sold for months to come. Holding up in winter storage is one of malus domestica’s best features. If that bothers you on principle, though, don’t look up harvesting oranges for juice – it’s positively depressing. After two years of greenhouse germination, the very first Cosmic Crisp trees were planted, and a few years later after that, fruit happened. That was when, according to Barritt, the real work began. He’d go through the orchard, randomly picking apples and taking a bite. “Most were terrible, but when I found one with good texture and flavor, I’d pick 10 or 20 of them. Then I put them in cold storage to see how they would hold up after a few months,” he told PopSci in 2018. Barritt’s team would compare the apples for crispness, acidity, firmness, how well it stored, and on and on anon, to determine which trees to cross with which and start the cycle all over again. They weren’t testing only Honeycrisp and Enterprise, but lots of crisp varieties – Honeycrisp is just the one that worked. It took until 2017, a full 20 years after the first seeds went in the ground, for Cosmic Crisp trees to become available to growers, to say nothing of the fruit reaching the public. The project actually outlived Barritt’s participation, when he retired back in 2008 and turned everything over to WSU horticulture professor Kate Evans. There’s still the question of why, why spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars to create a new apple? This wasn’t about developing a product to sell and make money, it was about saving an entire...
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/22745270
info_outline
Gregor MacGregor (ep. 190)
04/05/2022
Gregor MacGregor (ep. 190)
People used to say "If you believe that, I have some swampland in Florida to sell you," but they really should have said, "I have some lovely acres in the Republic of Poyais you can buy, but you have to act now!" Presenting one of my favorite con artists ever, the man who declared himself prince of a South American country that didn't exist, Gregor MacGregor (yes, that's really his name). Links to all the research resources are on the . with your fellow Brainiacs. Reach out and touch Moxie on , , or Become a patron of the podcast arts! or . Or and . Music: , Want to start a podcast or need a better podcast host? Get up to TWO months hosting for free from with coupon code "moxie." Remember back in episode 155, Hate to Burst your Bubble, we talked about, among other things, the Florida real estate boom and bust of the 1920s? It’s where we get the phrase, “if you believe that, I have some real estate in Florida to sell you.” 100 years before that, we could have been saying, “I have some acreage in Poyais to sell you.” Never been to Poyais? Trust me, it’s amazing. The weather is always perfect, sunny and warm. Located along the eastern coast of present-day Nicaragua and Honduras, the soil of Poyais is so fertile, you can get three harvests of corn a year. The trees are heavy with fruit and the forests teem with entrees in the form of game animals. If you look into the rivers, you’ll not only see water cleaner and more pure than you’ve ever seen in your life and more fish than you could hope to catch, but in the river bed, the sparkle of gold fills your eyes, not from flecks and dust, but nuggets as big as walnuts, just laying there, waiting for you to scoop them up. The only thing missing is settlers to develop and leverage its resources to the fullest. Wanna get your share? Better hurry; hundreds of people are investing all their savings in a piece of the perfect Poyais. All you have to do is [] to the Cazique or prince. Who is the prince of this equatorial new world paradise? A Scotsman named Gregor MacGregor. MacGregor was born in 1786. His father, who died when Gregor was 4, was a captain sailing with the East India Company, so adventuring on a quest for riches might well have been in his blood. A clever chap from the get-go, Gregor enrolled in the University of Edinburgh at age 15, though he never finished his degree. No shade thrown there, I’m a 3-time community college drop-out and look how I turned out! (pause, sigh) At age 17, he took after his grandfather and joined the British Army, where he quickly rose up the ranks to lieutenant, captain, and major, largely by buying the next rank up, but that’s pretty much how it was done back then. Two years after enlisting, MacGregor married a Royal Navy Admiral’s daughter, and a mere five years after that, probably because he’d married into money, he retired from the army. The young couple moved to London, where Gregor called himself Sir and claimed to be a baronet, which ranks underneath baron in British noble hierarchy and is apparently a modest enough lie that no one would think to put the effort and time into checking it out. But ‘easy street’ only lasted another year before his wife died. No more wife meant no more wealthy in-laws, so MacGregor sold his Scottish estate and relocated to Caracas, Venezuela, where he married another wealthy family’s daughter. Never let it be said he’s not consistent. Wife 2 was actually a cousin of Simon Bolivar, of Bolivia fame. He was able to sell his military prowess to Francisco de Miranda, the Venezuelan revolutionary general. There was rather a lot of revolution going on in Spanish colonies at the time while Spain was well distracted dealing with a certain actually-of-average-height French emperor. At least MacGregor wasn’t lying about his soldiery, securing a number of victories and becoming a notable figure for the revolutionary set all across LatAm. In 1820, MacGregor moved to a former British Colony, in Nicaragua, which, true to its name, a swampy and pest-infested area that Europeans had until that point left to the Mosquito Natives. In 1830, MacGregor traded jewelry and rum for eight million acres of land. Now that was either an F-ton of rum or the land was utterly worthless. I’ll give you three guesses. The land was completely useless for farming, kinda of a big deal, being the production of foodstuff and whatnot. Realizing there was no way he could draw settlers in with the land as it was, MacGregor decided to draw them in with the land as it wasn’t. So he headed back to England, where he was well-known in society circles for his military achievements, leading his men into battle against great odds. Society not knowing that he’d also abandoned his men. Twice. But he rubbed elbows with the muckety-mucks nonetheless, telling them all about his new world paradise, the Republic of Poyais. And he went so far beyond Baron Munchausenian story-telling. Gregor made up a whole country and everything that goes along with it. To hear him tell it, the Republic of Poyais was not an impenetrable, parasite-ridden jungle, but a glorious tableau with a thriving civilization with a parliament, banks, an opera house and cathedral. The weather was ideal, a perpetual summer that was very appealing to Londoners. The soil was so rich that farming required almost no labor. The rivers that wound down the mountains teemed with fish and the surrounding forests were thick with game animals. In this dubious district, the capital of St Joseph had a massive infrastructure and a population of about 20,000 people. The economy was robust, if you felt like doing anything other than scooping up all the gold that was just laying around. MacGregor had pamphlets promoting printed, and they sold in the thousands around the streets of London and Edinburgh. He started a nationwide campaign to attract investment, taking out big ads in newspapers and even opened sales offices. The world-building that went into this scam would have made GRRM blush. Maybe even JRR Tolkien. Feel free to at me on social media; I love a spirited nerd debate. He came up with a tricameral Parliament and a commercial banking system. Like an African dictator, he designed Poyaian military uniforms, several, different ones for different regiments. He published a 350 page guidebook, under the pen name Thomas Strangeways, with a sliver of real facts about the region, but the Pacman portion of the pie chart all came from his preposterous posterior. The book was full of detailed sketches and MacGregor had a seemingly endless supply of official-looking documents. He had offices set up in London, Glasgow and Edinburgh to sell land certificates, which people eagerly bought. The whole operation looked completely legit; you wouldn’t even think to doubt it. MacGregor didn’t just succeed in his con, he was *wildly successful. Not only did MacGregor raise £200,000 directly – the bond market value over his life ran to £1.3 million, or about £3.6 billion today – but he convinced seven ships’ worth of eager settlers to make their way across the Atlantic. It became a popular investment, and many sank their life savings in land deed in Republic of Poyais. A London Bank underwrote a £2000 pound loan, £23mil or $30mil today, secured with the land sales. MacGregor was signing up settlers left and right. Settlers meant development, which meant the value of bonds and land certificates would go up, which would attract more settlers and investors, driving the price up further. Gee, it’s like crime does kinda pay. Skilled tradesmen were promised free passage and ostensibly, supposedly government contract work. Don’t think it was only the under-educated among the population that bought into this – bankers, doctors, civil servants, you name it. Whole families signed up and backed their bags. In September 1822, the first fifty settlers sailed for Poyais and were very confused when the landed. There was…nothing there. No port, not even a dock. I mean, there were trees and snakes and mosquitos, but no city, no road, no nothing. The settlers believed they were lost, but they couldn’t get a ride to the “right” place because that ship had sailed. Literally, the ship left them immediately. So they set up camp. 150 more people, including children, shortly joined them. They searched for civilization as best they could, but the rainy season descended on them, bringing on clouds of mosquitos, whose tiny bags were packed with yellow fever and malaria. A few settlers who were saved by a passing ship informed the British Colony of Honduras about the situation. The colony organized a rescue mission, but only a third of the population was still alive and rescued. In the meantime, five more ships set for Poyais had to be stopped by the Honduras government. They were informed that Poyais did not exist. It was Mickey Mouse, mate, spurious, not genuine. Twisting the knife counter-clockwise, the King revoked the land grant and told them they were now illegal squatters and had swear allegiance or GTFO. Dozens were too weak to leave. In a particularly depressing bit of math, of 250 or so who had set sail for Poyais, with all their hopes and dreams pinned to this mythical land, 180 died. That’s not even the crazy bit. Of those 70 who barely survived their ordeal, many of them did *not blame MacGregor. Six of the survivors, including one man who lost two children to the ordeal, signed an affidavit insisting that blame lay not with MacGregor but with Hector Hall, a former army officer who was supposed to be in charge of the settlement. They declared "[W]e believe that Sir Gregor MacGregor has been worse used by Colonel Hall and his other agents than was ever a man before, and that had they have done their duty by Sir Gregor and by us, things would have turned out very differently at Poyais". MacGregor claimed he’s been a victim too, defrauded and embezzled from by his own agents and undermined by merchants in British Honduras because the richness of Poyais threatened their profits Now I love a Scottish accent, but this must have been one charming melon-farmer. MacGregor didn’t know it, but he had actually been using “the six principles of persuasion.” These comes from a 1984 book by Robert Cialdini, “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion,” which looked at the factors that affect the decisions that people make, especially as pertains to sales, naturally. At the core of his work is the idea that decision-making is effortful, so individuals use a lot of rules of thumb and decision making shortcuts (heuristics) when deciding what to do, and of course once you know what those things are, you can manipulate them to your advantage. They are authority (in the sense that they’re an authority on the subject), scarcity, reciprocity (i.e. you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours), consistency (I still believe in this idea as much as I always have), social validation (everyone you know is buying one of these), and friendship or liking (picture the smile on a used car salesman). MacGregor seemed to know these instinctively. Mcgregor skipped town when the scandal broke, claiming he needed to take his wife to warm, dry Italy for her health, and headed across the channel to France and began the whole thing all over again. In Paris, he persuaded the Compagnie de la Nouvelle Neustrie, a firm of traders looking to break into the South American market, to seek investors and settlers for Poyais in France. In a matter of months, he had a new group of settlers and investors ready to go. Concurrent to all this, he tried to get in good with King Ferdinand VII of Spain, proposing to make Poyais a Spanish protectorate and a base of operations from which Spain could reconquer Guatemala. Spain, at least, ignored MacGregor. MacGregor might not have realized that France was more stringent than England in its passport requirements: when the government saw a flood of applications to a country no one had heard of, a commission was set to investigate the matter. Or maybe he figured he was on a roll and utterly bulletproof. This time, Mcgregor et al were arrested and tried. But he was found not guilty on all accounts, mostly because one of his accomplices was hiding in the Netherlands with a ton of incriminating documents. Once he felt that London had probably forgotten his colossal scam, he headed back…and started another scam. Smaller this time; I guess he’s learning. But the bonds didn’t sell well this time, and what’s worse -for everyone- other fraudsters started pulling their own fake paradise scams following his model. He retired to Edinburgh, then to Venezuela after the death of his wife, where he was granted citizenship and a pension as a retired general. He never faced any consequences for his actions and when he died in 1845, Gregor MacGregor was buried with full military honors. So the moral of the story is … crime does pay? That’s a terrible lesson. Crocker Land In 1907, Robert Peary was the most famous, and most experienced Arctic explorer in the world, but he had a problem—he hadn’t yet managed to become the first to visit the most arctic of arctic places, the North Pole, and his cash reserves were becoming nonexistent. The previous year, he had almost made it—supposedly getting within 175 miles or 280 kilometers—but was turned around by a combination of storms and depleting supplies, but Robert Peary was sure he could get there if he just had another try. He possessed the kind of confidence that only a man with a Lorax level mustache can have. All he needed to make another journey was money. However, the arctic adventure capital market was a bit reluctant to give him more after the previous failures, so, Peary hatched a plan. The key to that plan was a wealthy San Francisco financier named George Crocker, who had previously donated $50,000 to Peary’s failed 1906 voyage. This was, of course, a time when 50k bought you more than two buckets of movie theatre popcorn and a calculus textbook. Peary wanted Crocker to help fund his new voyage but, considering the previous trip he financed achieved diddly squat, this could be tough. But what if, and hear me out, the previous voyage wasn’t a colossal failure. Peary thought of a way to not only convince Crocker that the previous voyage hadn’t been a failure, but also to butter him up a little bit by doing the one thing that rich people love more than anything else—naming things after them. And so, Peary revealed that on his 1906 voyage, though he hadn’t made it to the North Pole, he had seen, from a distance, an enormous, previously undiscovered land mass. He wrote that he spotted, “faint white summits,” 130 miles northwest of Cape Thomas Hubbard, and that once he got closer, he could make out, “the snow-clad summits of the distant land in the northwest, above the ice horizon.” In honor of George Crocker, the San Francisco financier, Peary named this beautiful, snow-peaked land mass, “Crocker Land.” But then Robert Peary had two problems. The first problem? George Crocker had already given most of his money to boring causes like rebuilding San Francisco after the earthquake of 1906, and so as flattered as he may have been, there wasn’t money left for funding Peary’s arctic antics. The second problem? The island was totally, 100%, made up. Now normally, this might not be such a big deal. Guy makes up an imaginary island, who cares? Captain James Cook did so three centuries ago and still nobody’s called him out, but this fake island ended up mattering a lot. You see, eventually, Robert Peary did manage to secure funding for another voyage, mostly from the National Geographic Society. On April 6, 1909, he finally made it to the North Pole, or at least, he said he did. He had a picture, but this could be any old pile of snow. He returned home proudly proclaiming that he was the first man ever to reach the North Pole, to which a guy named Frederick Cook, another Arctic explorer, replied, “um…I was there, like, a year ago,” but, Cook said that he’d sailed through where this giant land mass called Crocker’s Land was supposedly located. If I know anything about boats, it’s that they don’t work well on land and, since Cook hadn’t found a thing except for cold water and walrus farts, someone’s lying here. But, because of this, the existence of Crocker Land became crucially important as it would prove who had really gone to the North Pole first. If it did exist, then Frederick Cook must be lying about going to the North Pole. If it didn’t exist, Frederick Cook did go to the North Pole, and Robert Peary was the liar. Of course, at that time you couldn’t just fire up your handy household satellite to check and so, to settle it, a man named Donald McMillian decided to go on another expedition to find the land. Not only would this prove who was telling the truth, but it would possibly give McMillan the opportunity to be the first to step onto what was considered, “the last great unknown place in the world.” That voyage was, incredibly, a failure. In addition to their ship getting stuck in the ice for three years before they could return home, the only bright spot came when a crew member saw what looked to be the island—a beautiful, snowy-peaked landmass—but it turned out to be a mirage. In light of that fact, some have suggested that Peary didn’t lie about the island, but was actually just seeing a mirage, but unfortunately for Peary’s reputation, it looks like that’s letting him off too easy. Historians looked at Peary’s original notes and logs for the date that Crocker’s Land was supposedly discovered, and they found that he doesn’t mention anything about it. All he says happened that day was that he climbed up some rocks, and then climbed down the rocks. Plus, the early drafts of his book even didn’t include anything about it, but then three paragraphs about Crocker Land mysteriously showed up just before the book was published—just when Peary needed to get more money. In other words, Crocker Land was a load of crock. One of Peary’s major issues, aside from inventing an island, was that, when he supposedly went to this north pole, his crew did not include a single navigator who could make their own independent observations as to whether or not they were truly at the pole, or just some pile of ice, and so people didn’t believe him. In the archives of the American Geographical Society in Milwaukee lies a century-old map with a peculiar secret. Just north of Greenland, the map shows a small, hook-shaped island labeled “Crocker Land” with the words “Seen By Peary, 1906” printed just below. The Peary in question is Robert Peary, one of the most famous polar explorers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the man who claimed to have been the first to step foot on the North Pole. But what makes this map remarkable is that Crocker Land was all but a phantom. It...
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/22661309
info_outline
Fell on Black Days: Sunday (ep. 189)
03/29/2022
Fell on Black Days: Sunday (ep. 189)
(Get Surfshark VPN at - Enter promo code MOXIE for 83% off and 3 extra months free!) There are four Sundays a month, but more than a dozen days we call "Black Sunday." Here are three -- two forces of nature and one parade of schadenfreude. 02:42 Black Blizzard 12:45 Bondi Beach 24:42 Disneyland Quote reader: Promo: Links to all the research resources are on the . with your fellow Brainiacs. Reach out and touch Moxie on , , or Become a patron of the podcast arts! or . Or and . Music: , , Want to start a podcast or need a better podcast host? Get up to TWO months hosting for free from with coupon code "moxie." Every year, tens of millions people or so go through Denver International Airport, the fifth busiest in the country and in the top 20 busiest in the world. That’s a lot of bodies to get from hither to yon, so the airport relies heavily on Automated Guideway Transit System, a people-mover that connects all of the midfield concourses with the south terminal, providing the only passenger access to concourses B and C. And in 1995, a day that will live in infamy for staff and passengers alike, the system failed. They refer to that day as Black Sunday. My name’s… So I said to myself the other day, you know what would make a good topic, days with colorful sobriquets, surely there are enough of those to write about. In what they call a good problem to have, there are in fact, too many! Most of the “black.” So I’m starting with a few Black Sundays and if you thinks it’s a fruitful area of discussion, I’ll make it a series, maybe one a month. I’d space them out because you don’t hear about the planes that land and you don’t call a day Black whatever if everything was chill. As such, today’s episode is two heavy topics and one packed with schadenfreude, so gauge how you’re feeling today., I don’t mind waiting – it’s not how long you wait, it’s who you’re waiting for. We’re going to go heavy, heavy, light, as decided by folks in our Facebook group, the Brainiac Breakroom, where anyone can share clever or funny things they find; same goes to the ybof sud-reddit. Speaking of social media, folks are starting to post pictures of themselves wearing their Russian Warship go F yourself shirts to raise money for the Ukraine red cross (url). Thanks to them specifically and I want to send a sweeping cloud of thanks to people in other countries for taking in the refugees. Speaking of refugees, there was a time when hundreds of thousands of Americans were refugees in their own country. During WWI, wheat prices rose and farming in the open prairies of the great plains was an attractive proposition. Homesteaders and farmers set up shop, ripping up or tilling under the native grasses that had evolved as part of that ecosystem, with long roots that both held onto lots of soil, but reached down far enough to reach water waaay below the topsoil, allowing it to better survive drought conditions. But we don’t like to eat those grasses, so they replaced it with shallow-rooted wheat. The rain stopped falling in 1931, leaving instead a severe widespread drought that lasted the rest of the decade, eventually killed thousands of square miles of wheat fields. No other crops, either, and nothing to feed livestock. Without live plants to hold onto the topsoil, it blew away. The prairie wind became a sandstorm and people’s livelihoods blew away. It got so bad, the dust clouds eventually reached the east coast and beyond. At the same time, they had this Great Depression on, a real nuisance, you’ve seen the movies, Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, the other versions of Of Mice and Men, O Brother Where Art Thou (only time I enjoyed George Clooney), and dozens more. The price of wheat [sfx raspberry] and people lost their jobs left right and center. Many families were left with no choice but to pile whatever they still had left onto the family car and follow rumors of work, sometimes migrating all the way to California, where, even though they were regular ol’ ‘Mericans, they were treated like foreign invaders. Black Blizzard, American Dust Bowl, 1938 That’s a broad-stroke quickie overview – and boy do I want to rewatch Carnivale for the fourth time (love me some Clancy Brown, rawr, I still would) – but we’re here to talk about one day, a black Sunday, brought on by a black blizzard. It’s a blizzard but made up of dirt so thick, it blocks out the sun. 14 hit black blizzards hit in 1932, 38 in 1933, up to 70 by 1937 and so on. The worst of it hit Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. The storms became so frequent that people could discern the origin of the storm by the color of its dirt – brown dust storms were from Kansas or Nebraska, gray from Texas, and red dust storms were from Oklahoma. People tried to protect themselves from breathing the dust and cloth masks were the least of it. They’d hang wet sheets over doorways and seal up windows, sometimes with a paste ironically made of wheat flour because that’s what they could get. They’d rub petroleum jelly into their nostrils, anything to try to prevent the “brown plague,” dust pneumonia. Constant inhalation of dust particles killed hundreds of people, babies and young children particularly, and sickened thousands of others. 1934 was the single worst drought year of the last millennium in North America, temperatures soared, exceeding 100 degrees everyday for weeks on much of the Southern Plains, absolutely *baking the soil. When spring of 1935 rolled around, there was a whole lot more dry dirt ready to be thrown into the air. After months of brutal conditions, the winds finally died down on the morning of April 14, 1935, and people jumped on the chance to escape their homes. Hope springs eternal and people thought maybe it was finally over. It was, of course, not over. The worst was standing in the wings in full costume, waiting for its cue. A cold front down from Canada crashed into warm air over the Dakotas. In a few hours, the temperature fell more than 30 degrees and the wind returned in force, creating a dust cloud that grew to hundreds of miles wide and thousands of feet high as it headed south. Reaching its full fury in southeastern Colorado, southwestern Kansas and the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, it turned a sunny day totally dark. Birds, mice and jackrabbits fled for their lives. Have you ever heard the sound *one terrified rabbit makes? I would not want to be on the ground while this was happening. Domestic animals like cattle that couldn’t get to shelter were blinded and even suffocated by the dust. Drivers were forced to take refuge in their cars, while other residents hunkered down anywhere they could, from fire stations to tornado shelters to under beds if a bed was the closest you could find to safety. Folksinger Woody Guthrie, then 22, who sat out the storm at his Pampa, Texas, home, recalled that “you couldn’t see your hand before your face.” Inspired by proclamations from some of his companions that the end of the world was at hand, he composed a song titled “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh.” [sfx song] Guthrie would also write other tunes about Black Sunday, including “Dust Storm Disaster.” The storm dragged on for hours and peoples’ wits began to fray. One woman reportedly thought the merciless howling wind blocking out the sky was the start of the Biblical end of the world – can’t imagine how she arrived there-- contemplated killing her child to spare them being collateral damage in a war between heaven and hell. By all accounts it was the worst black blizzard of the Dust Bowl, displacing 300,000 tons of topsoil. That would be enough to cover a square area of .4mi/750 m on each side a foot deep. “Everybody remembered where they were on Black Sunday,” said Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, a history professor at Iowa State University and the author of “Rooted in Dust: Surviving Drought and Depression in Southwestern Kansas.” “For people on the Southern Plains, it was one of those defining experiences, like Pearl Harbor or Kennedy’s assassination.” The Black Sunday storm blew its dust all the way to the east coast, causing street lights to be needed during the day in Washington DC and even coating the decks of ships in the Atlantic ocean. The next day, as the remnants of the storm blew out into the Gulf of Mexico, an Associated Press reporter filed a story in which he referred to “life in the dust bowl of the continent,” coining the phrase that would encapsulate a phenomenon, a place, and a time. Inspired by the myriad tales of suffering that proliferated in Black Sunday’s wake, the federal government began paying farmers to take marginal lands out of production. It also incentivized improved agricultural practices, such as contour plowing and crop rotation, which reduced soil loss roughly 65 percent. By then, however, many families had given up hope and ¼-⅓ of the most affected people fled the Southern Plains, never to return. But in the win column, thanks to better agricultural management practices, the massive black blizzards never returned either. Bondi Beach, Australia, 1938 The phrase Black Sunday isn’t exclusive to the US, of course. My one sister’s adoptive country of Australia has had their fair share as well. Like Black Sunday from 1926, an especially bad day during an already disastrous bushfire season. 60 people were killed and 700 injured. Or the Black Sunday bushfires across South Australia in 1955. 60 fire brigades and 1,000 volunteers were needed to get the fires under control. Thankfully this time only 2 people died that time. On the far side of the element wheel is the story of Bondi Beach, minutes east of Sydney, on a February Sunday in 1938. Sydney had recently celebrated its 150th birthday, or sesqui-centenary, with a big old parade and events planned to last until April. The city was a-bustle with visitors, many of whom joined the locals spending the hot, sunny day at Bondi Beach. The sky was clear, but the sea was already acting a fool. A large swell was hitting the coast and lifeguards at Bondi were busy all day Saturday pulling people from the heavy surf, as many as 74 rescues in one hour. Despite the heavy seas, beach inspectors gave a mayor of Amity-approved thumbs-up to opening the beach on Sunday, February 6. Beachgoers started coming and coming and coming. The morning started out relatively quiet for the lifeguards, but business got brisk, even as they tried to wave swimmers toward safer parts of the beach. As the tide moved out, more and more people ventured out to a sandbar that ran parallel to the beach. The crowd had grown to 35,000, enjoying the surf and sand. Extra surf reels were brought out to the beach as they tried to keep pace with the ballooning battery of bathers. A lifesaving reel is an Australian invention that was brilliant in its simplicity. It was a giant reel of rope, with a belt or harness at the end, in a portable stand. The life saver would attach the harness to his or her self then swim out to the struggling swimmer or surfer. The lifeguard –and I am going to persist in saying the American lifeguard rather than the Australian lifesaver– then puts the rescuee in the harness and a lifeguard on the beach would reel them in. The lifeguard in the water either accompanies that person back or goes on to rescue someone else. Boat crews were out in the water dropping buoys to mark out a race course for weekly races held by and for the Bondi Surf Bathers’ Life Saving Club. This would turn out to be as fortuitous as when a woman had a heart attack on a trans-atlantic flight, but there were 15 cardiologists on board, going to a conference. At about 3.00 p.m. two duty patrols were changing shifts at the Bondi surf club and some 60 club members were mingling around waiting for the competition. Suddenly, five tremendous waves crashed high onto the beach, one right after the other, in such quick succession that the water could not recede. Even though most bathers were only standing in water up to their waists, they were thrown onto the beach, and pummeled by the following waves. Then the water receded. What goes up must come down and what comes in must go back out. The backwash, which is the term for water on the beach finding its level and returning to the ocean, swept people who’d been nowhere near the water, including non-swimmers who never planned to get in the water, into the water. The people on the sandbar were then swept further out. The club recorded 180 people, but news reports at the time put the figure as high as 250 – 250 people now in need of rescue, panicking and thrashing in the surf. All hands from the Bondi Surf Bathers’ Life Saving Club lept into action. Beltmen took every available line out, many went in without belts and held up struggling bathers. Lifesaver Carl Jeppesen is said to have simply dived into the surf to rescue six people without the aid of a surf reel. One of the main problems was not lack of assistance but too much unskilled help from the huge crowd on the beach. One beltman, George Pinkerton, was dragged under water by members of the public trying to haul him in. He ended up in need of medical attention. Once the lines had been cleared and a certain amount of order restored, the lifeguards could get on with the job. Thankfully there were people who *could help. “I was co-opted into the situation because I was a strong swimmer and they put me on a line,’’ said Ted Lever, just 16 at the time, a member of the Bondi Amateur Swimming Club who would soon be invited to join the renowned Bondi lifesaving club. Even when the well-meaning public had been cleared from the lines to leave them in trained hands, there were still problems. The beltmen often found themselves swamped by swimmers seeking assistance. Some of them had to punch their way through a wall of distressed bathers to get to others in more danger. One beltman spoke of being seized by five men who refused to let go. “I was trying to take the belt to a youngster who was right out the back but I didn't get the chance. As I went by, dozens yelled for help and tried to grab me. I told them to hang on to the rope as soon as I got it out. I didn't think I had a chance when they all came at me. One grabbed me around the neck, two others caught me by one arm, another around the waist and another one seized my leg. I hit the man who had me around the neck, managed to get him on his chin and he let go. I had to do it; but for that, I would have been drowned myself.” The boat was still out after laying the buoys but the crew were waiting for the race to start, but they were completely unaware of the chaos just off the beach. Nobody thought to signal them, but even if they had, the boat could have posed a danger to people in the water with overactive waves and rip currents. It was difficult to tell exactly how many people had been rescued during the course of that chaotic 20 minutes. Rescued swimmers were brought up the beach by the dozens. About 60 needed to be resuscitated to one degree or another. Five people died, including one man who died saving a girl. American doctor Marshall Dyer, there on vacation, helped resuscitate swimmers. “I have never seen, nor expect to see again, such a magnificent achievement as that of your lifesavers,’’ he said. ``It is the most incredible work of love in the world.’’ There were inarguably many heroes on Bondi Beach that day, but the Lifesavers’ club stance afterwards was that “everyone did his job.” “It must be realised that though perhaps less spectacular, the work on the beach and in the clubhouse was just as necessary if not more so,’’ he told a newspaper. Instead of recognising individuals for their efforts the Surf Life Saving Association of Australia recommended the entire club for a special meritorious award. Opening day of Disneyland, 1955 even a potential COVID outbreak or the measles outbreak they had a few years ago would pale in comparison to the disaster that was opening day at Disney. Disneyland is known as the happiest place on Earth. But when the park opened on July 17, 1955, the now-ubiquitous nickname was downright ironic. Disney employees who survived the day referred to it as Black Sunday. So opening day at Disney was a bit more like the Simpsons episode where they went to itchy and scratchy world. The opening day was meant to be a relatively intimate affair, by invite only, not for every Huey, Dewey and Lewey. If you were friends and family of the employees, members of the press, and celebrities of the day, you received a ticket in the mail. If you were everyone else, you bought a counterfeit ticket. The park was only expecting 15,000 guests; 28,000 showed up, nearly doubled what they prepared for. Well, what they meant to prepare for, we’ll ride the teacups back around to that in a sec. The counterfeit tickets might have been better than the legit ones, as those were only good for half the day, morning or afternoon, to spread the workload out more evenly. The morning tickets had an end time of 2:30 pm, when, assumably, they figured people would see that and just say, oh, bother, my time is up, guess I’ll leave then. Nobody did that. One is stunned. You buy a ticket for a theme park, you're there all day. So the morning people were still milling about when the afternoon people started showing up. And then there were the people who started just sneaking in. One enterprising self-starter set a ladder up against the outside fence and charged people $5 to climb it. That’s about $50 adjusted for inflation, many many times over for schlepping along a ladder that I like to think he nicked from his neighbor’s yard. A lot of things were not ready on opening day, within the park and without. The Santa Ana Freeway outside turned into a 7 mile long parking lot. The opening of the park essentially shut the freeway down. There were so many people waiting so long, according to some media reports, there was rampant [] relief on the side of the road and even in the Disney parking lot. Like the video for Everybody Hurts, if folks couldn’t hold their water. If you just flashed back to your life when that video came out, be sure to stretch before you mow the lawn and don’t forget your big sun hat. Today might think of a Disney park as being meticulously manicured and maintained. Opening day, not so much. Walt Disney tried to have everything ready on time, hustling his people to work faster, but there’s only so much you can do. So there were bare patches of ground, some areas of bare ground that had been painted green, weeds where the lawns and flowers were meant to be. Weeds and native flora that they couldn't get rid...
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/22562423
info_outline
Tax and Taxonomy (ep. 188)
03/22/2022
Tax and Taxonomy (ep. 188)
(Get Surfshark VPN at - Enter promo code MOXIE for 83% off and 3 extra months free!) Who you gonna believe -- me or your lying eyes? Today we look at court cases where people try to avoid taxes by arguing that things aren't the things that they clearly are. 00:50 Tomato 08:18 Jaffa Cakes 17:48 Hydrox vs Oreo 37:40 X-Men Links to all the research resources are on the . with your fellow Brainiacs. Reach out and touch Moxie on , , or Become a patron of the podcast arts! or . Or and . Music: , Want to start a podcast or need a better podcast host? Get up to TWO months hosting for free from with coupon code "moxie." We like labels, as humans we like labeling things. Taxonomy is the branch of science concerned with classification and there used to be several inconsistent and sometimes conflicting systems of classification in use. Then came Carl Linneaus and his influential “Systema Naturae” in 1735, laying down the system we use to this day. Linnaeus was the first taxonomist to list humans as a primate, though he did classify whales as fish. Years later, a New York court agreed with him. My name’s… D&D Stats Explained With Tomatoes Strength is being able to crush a tomato. Dexterity is being able to dodge a tomato. Constitution is being able to eat a bad tomato. Intelligence is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put a tomato in a fruit salad. Charisma is being able to sell a tomato based fruit salad. TOMATOES So that’s more clear, but it raises a rather mad –and for some, maddening– question: Is the tomato a fruit or a vegetable? Well, yes, it’s both, but actually no. Botanically, it’s a fruit. But legally, it’s not. A fruit is technically the seed-bearing structure of a plant whereas a vegetable can be virtually any part of the plant we eat. Things must have been slow in March of 1893, because this definition was set by the Supreme Court. The issue at hand was tariffs, specifically a 10% tariff on the import of vegetables into the United States. Just veggies. Imported fruits were not. This was of particular interest to John Nix of Manhattan. He ran a produce wholesale business along with his four sons and found himself the proud owner of an enormous tax bill on a shipment of Caribbean tomatoes. John Nix & Co. were one of the largest sellers of produce in New York City at the time, and one of the first companies to bring the Empire state produce from such far-flung places as Florida and Bermuda. Nix disputed the tax on the grounds that tomatoes were scientifically-supportably fruit. Full of seeds, ain’t they? That’s the part that seems to turn grown adults into fussy toddlers when their burger has a tomato despite their very clear instructions. Worse than the anti-pickle crowd. Anyway, Nix filed a suit against Edward L. Hedden, Collector of the Port of New York, to get back the tax money he’d been forced to pay under protest. The crux of Nix’s case was the opening of an uninspired speech - counsel read the definitions of the words "fruit," "vegetables," and tomato from Webster's Dictionary, Worcester's Dictionary, and the Imperial Dictionary. Judgment for the plaintiff, case closed! But wait, there’s more. Not to be outdone, defendant's counsel then read into evidence the Webster’s definitions of the words pea, eggplant, cucumber, squash, and pepper. Oh, it’s on now! Countering this, the plaintiff then read in the definitions of potato, turnip, parsnip, cauliflower, cabbage, carrot and bean. That’s when, I assume, all hell broke loose in the courtroom and perhaps a giant musical number broke out. Just trying to jazz it up a bit. Nix’s side called two witnesses, not botanists or linguists, but men with a lot of years in the fruit & veg business, to say whether these words had "any special meaning in trade or commerce, different from those read." The supreme court decided to look more practically and less pedantically at the situation and ruled that it’s how a tomato is used that makes it a vegetable, not the official scientific definition. If people cook and eat them like vegetables, then vegetables they must be, and so they were subject to the tariff. “Botanically speaking, tomatoes are the fruit of a vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans, and peas,” wrote Justice Horace Gray in his 1893 opinion. “But in the common language of the people, whether sellers or consumers of provisions, all these are vegetables.” What was really important about Nix’s case was the timing. We’re talking late Victorian, after the age of sail had been obviated by the steam power of the industrial revolution. You might have heard about it, it was in all the papers. Ships could now cross the Atlantic in 1-2 weeks, rather than the 6-12 weeks it took in a century prior. Foods from the tropics could now reach New England in a week or less, making their import a viable option. This was when bananas went from being expensive oddity to must-have trend to staple of every grocery store, though that was the Gros Michelle banana, the one our fake banana flavor is based on, not the Cavendish banana we eat today, but that’s a topic for another show. To service the evolving tastes of urban population, a new class of national wholesalers, such as the Nixes, were born. The tomato’s identity crisis was far from settled, though. In 1937, the League of Nations, precursor to the UN, sought to classify various goods for the purpose of tariffs and they too labeled tomatoes a veggie, putting them under the heading of “vegetables / edible plants / roots and tubers.” Not to be left out, the U.S. Department of Agriculture agreed, citing 1890s Nix v. Hedden case. But there are always exceptions, hold-outs, outliers, and just plain contrarians. Tennessee and Ohio made the tomato their state fruit. If you think that’s silly, you might want to swallow your coffee before I tell you the state vegetable of Oklahoma is the watermelon. I did not care to look into their reasoning. The European Union went a step further with a directive in December 2001 classifying tomatoes as fruit — along with rhubarb, carrots, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins and melons. It’s bad enough all prepackaged fruit bowls have some form of melon in them (which causes me instantaneous reverse peristalsis), but it you gave me a fruit salad and it had cucumbers in it, I have a parking lot and I’ll fight you in it. But I think I’ll give the last word to George Ball of the Burpee’s seed and plant company: “Are [tomatoes] fruits? Of course,” he said. “Are they vegetables? You bet.” Though Burpee’s does put “vegetable” on the seed packet, so maybe it’s not settled after all. JAFFA CAKES Maybe things that grow are too ephemeral for man’s taxonomy. Things are a lot of simpler when we’re talking about man-made goods, things that don’t grow on trees, and it is only a tragedy that you can’t plant an entire orchard of Jaffa cake trees. For those whose life has not yet contained this job, a Jaffa cake it a little round of dense yellow cake –sponge, as they say in the home counties– with a disc of orange jelly on top enrobed in chocolate. It. Is. So. Good. You can sometimes find them in big grocery stores like Kroger and Publix if they have a large enough “International” aisle stock Branston pickle along with pad thai sauce and Tajin. This issue here it again taxes, but this time VAT. For those that don’t speak British, VAT or Value-Added Tax is “A type of consumption tax that is placed on a product whenever value is added at a stage of production and at final sale.” Basically sales tax cranked to 11. VAT is a tax that is paid by everyone involved with the manufacture of a given object or foodstuff, as well as the consumer. As I go to air, the VAT rate in the UK is 20%. If you’re a UK-based widget-maker, you pay VAT on the price of the raw materials. When you sell the widgets wholesale to a store, the retailer pays VAT on that sale. Then, when someone comes into the shop to buy one of your cutting-edge widgets, they pay VAT too. As with most areas of life, there are exceptions – a number of things are subjected to a reduced 5% rate and some things are exempt altogether. The exceptions are for the really necessary things, like mobility aids, menstrual hygiene products, stamps, end of life care, and most food, including cake. That’s some grade A foreshadowing right there. But some foods are just so wonderful, they absolutely must be taxed and taxed fully. Such luxury items include alcohol, mineral water, confectioneries and, with the specificity that all governments seem to love, chocolate-covered biscuits. Regular biscuits are apparently basic essentials. No, American listeners, not like buttermilk biscuits, because even I’d have to think twice about covering one of those in chocolate. Whereupon I would do it. I could make that work. You’re talking to the chick that made a startling good roasted garlic and parmesan ice cream. No, British biscuits are cookies. And British listeners, don’t at me on soc meds with the definition of biscuit, because you know you’re not consistent with it. The only word that’s more confusing is pudding. Is that a dessert course, a sausage made of 80% blood, a flambeed Christmas dessert, or a suet dough stuffed with beef and veggies and steamed for eight hours? While I’m on British language, Cockney rhyming slang has got to be the worst thing… The McVities company had a notion otherwise. They appealed, prompting a Customs and Exchange VAT tribunal. Jaffa cakes, they said, shouldn’t be taxed at the “most food” 20% rate, but at the 5% rate of chocolate-covered biscuits. It takes a lot of brass to make that claim when you yourself named the product Jaffa *cakes. [tiktok] origin story] According to the website for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, the court first had to establish a legal definition of what made a cake a cake and what makes a biscuit a biscuit, before determining which column Jaffa Cakes belonged in. Jaffa Cakes were assessed using the following criteria: The product name, ingredients, texture, structure of the product, the size, how the product is sold, and how the product is marketed. Towards this end, the main arguments on behalf of the office of Customs and Excise were that Jaffa Cakes are the approximate size and shape of biscuits, are stocked on the shelves with the biscuits, and, owing in no small part to McVities’ own marketing, people eat them in the sort of contexts biscuit are eaten. McVities countered by stating that Jaffa Cakes are baked in the manner of cake and of the same base ingredients. Their master stroke was staleness – cakes go hard as they stale and biscuits go soft. When Jaffa cakes go stale, and it’s hard to imagine them sitting there long enough, they go hard. McVities actually let a bunch of them out to go stale and brouhght them into court as evidence. And in a legal tactic I’d like to see more often, McVities baked a big ol’ 12-inch version of a Jaffa Cake, to show that if you blew it up to the size of a normal cake, it would just be a cake. If I were on the other side of it, I might make a big deal over the name, but the judge presiding over the case, Mr D.C Potter, ruled that to be of “no serious relevance” because a product’s name often has little to do with its actual function. In the end, the court decided the Jaffa Cake was, in fact, a cake, and the Irish Revenue Commissioners agreed, though their ruling was based on the Jaffa Cakes’ moisture content being greater than 12%. So no VAT on Jaffa cakes, which means we can buy more of them, hooray! HYDROX VS OREO In 1882, the entrepreneur Jacob Loose bought a biscuit and candy company that would eventually be known as Sunshine Biscuits, the company that would eventually give us Cheez-its, which my ex-husband went through at least a box of a week, dipping in port wine cheese spread. About as close as he ever got to a balanced diet. In 1908, launched the cream-filled chocolate sandwich biscuit known as Hydrox. The name, he thought, would be reminiscent of sparkling sunlight and evoked an impression of cleanliness (probably because it sounds like a disinfectant). This was after all only a few years after the Pure Food and Drug Act, before which your canned veggies might be full of borax and your milk be a watered down concoction of chalk dust and cow brains, and you wouldn’t know. Some tellings have it that Hydrox is a portmanteau of hydrogen and oxygen, the elements that make up water, the gold standard of purity. Meanings aside, the fact that there actually was a Hydrox Chemical Company in business at the time, one that sold hydrogen peroxide and was caught up in a trademark lawsuit at the time over the use of the word “hydrox,” should have given them a hint to maybe go back to committee. Hydrox chemicals lawsuit, btw, pointed out that the word “hydrox” was already in use for such disparate things as coolers, soda, and ice cream, so maybe Jacob Loose figured the word is out there, might as well use it. For four years, Hydrox cookies with their lovely embossed flower design made cash registers ring for Sunshine Biscuits. Then, 90 years almost to the day of this episode dropping, the National Biscuit Company came along –you probably know them by their shortened name, Nabisco– with the launch of three different cookies, the Mother Goose biscuit, the Veronese biscuit, both now lost to history, and the Oreo. The cookies were very similar, with Oreos even being embossed by the same time of production machine, but Hydrox have a sweeter filling and less-sweet cookie. Like VHS vs beta, which you can learn more about in the book and audiobook, the newcomer soon came to dominate the landscape, and there’s no clear reason why. Any chocolate sandwich biscuit is offhandedly called an Oreo, no matter how cheap a replica it may be. It’s literally the best-selling cookie in the world now, with $3.28 billion in sales in the U.S. alone. They sell 92 million cookies per day throughout 100-plus countries under the parent brand Mondelez International. That ubiquity has led a lot of people to erroneously assume that Oreo is the original and Hydrox is the Mr. Pibb to their Dr. Pepper. Hydrox did manage to hold onto a cadre of die-hards, especially in areas with significant Jewish populations, because Hydrox were always kosher. Oreo cream used to be made with lard from pigs and Nabisco would later have to invest a lot of resources into replacing the lard with shortening in the 90’s. Sunshine Biscuits was purchased by Keebler in 1996, who replaced Hydrox with a reformulated product called "Droxies," which 100% sounds like drug slang for a veterinary tranquilizer. Keebler was acquired by Kellogg's in 2001, and Kellogg's yanked Droxies from the shelves before adding a similar chocolate sandwich cookie to the Famous Amos brand, then discontinued them. In August 2008, on the cookie's 100th anniversary, Kellogg's resumed distribution of Hydrox under the Sunshine label, a limited distribution, one and done. Hydrox-heads besieged Kellogg's with phone calls and an online petition, asking that Hydrox be brought back for good, but all for naught. Less than a year later Kellogg's had removed Hydrox from their website. “This is a dark time in cookie history,” one Hydrox partisan, Gary Nadeau, wrote, according to the Wall Street Journal. “And for those of you who say, ‘Get over it, it’s only a cookie,‘ you have not lived until you have tasted a Hydrox.” As of the time of writing, I’ve never had one myself, but I’ll see if I can’t lay my hands on some before going to air. Getting my hands on some may be a touch trickier than it should be. They exist; that’s not the issue. In 2015, entrepreneur Ellia Kassoff, a lover of Hydrox who knew the trick to getting a trademark someone else had allowed to lapse, was able to pick up Hydrox for his own company, Leaf Brands—itself a dormant brand that Kassoff had revived. Hip to the time, Leaf Brands made Hydrox available on Amazon, so anyone anywhere could get them whenever they wanted (plus two days for delivery). These new Hydrox weren’t going to bow gracefully to the dominant Oreo. Their website points out that they use real cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup, and no hydrogenated oils, artificial flavors, and GMOs, and warn consumers, "don't eat a knock-off!" Hydrox are also made in the USA while Mondelez International was laying off U.S. workers. Sales of Hydrox grew by 2,406 percent from 2016 to 2017, amassing more than $492,000 in sales — clearly, still light-years away from Oreo's overwhelming dominance in the market, but impressive progress nonetheless. If you ask Leaf Brands, they’d be doing a lot better if not for Mondelez – not out-competing them, deliberately sabotaging them. This is the hard-to-find bit I alluded to. In August 2018, Leaf Brands filed a lawsuit against Mondelez International, seeking $800 million in damages because of "lost sales and reputation.” The charges claimed that Mondelez was using its massive industry muscle "to place their own products in favorable locations in stores and move competitors in less desirable positions on store shelves." On their Facebook page, you can see pictures of grocery stores where Hydrox cookies are hidden behind other displays, scooted to the back of shelves, and even turned sideways so the short end is facing out. If you’ve never worked grocery retail, your instinct may be to blame the store staff, but a lot of brands are actually stocked by the manufacturer. Ever pass a guy in a Pepsi polo shirt with hand-truck loaded with soda? That, but with cookies. And it’s not just their own products. Mondelez is what’s called a “category captain,” meaning they get to determine much of the layout for the whole cookie aisle. Leaf alleges that Mondelez employees and agents are deliberately making Hydrox harder to find while making Oreos pert near impossible to miss. This is far from the first lawsuit over Oreos. A class action lawsuit was filed claiming the cookies misled buyers by stating that the product contains real cocoa. The judge dismissed the case. And they were sued for Fudge Covered Mint Oreos not containing any actual fudge. The plaintiffs claim that these cookies don't contain any milkfat from dairy, a key component of fudge, but rather cheaper palm and palm kernel oil. As so often happens, there are eleventy-hundred articles from the week the case was filed and nothing on the outcome. That’s what happened with the main point of this article. I was dead sure I remembered Hydrox and Oreo going to court over the basic infringement question, and Hydrox losing, but I...
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/22504352
info_outline
It Stinks! (your sense of smell, ep. 187)
03/15/2022
It Stinks! (your sense of smell, ep. 187)
(Get Surfshark VPN at - Enter promo code MOXIE for 83% off and 3 extra months free!) Our Patrons have a nose for good topics, so today we 07:04 Smells and space 14:40 Ham-sniffer 21:17 It's the pits 30:48 Aromatherapy Links to all the research resources are on the . with your fellow Brainiacs. Reach out and touch Moxie on , , or Become a patron of the podcast arts! or . Or and . Music: , and . Sponsors: Want to start a podcast or need a better podcast host? Get up to TWO months hosting for free from with coupon code "moxie." Interior: The Morgue. The medical examiner stands over a body on a table. Two grizzled detectives stand nearby, one with a notebook in his hand. The ME pulls back the sheet and her nose wrinkles. She takes a deep sniff; the detectives look at her with confusion. “You don’t smell that?” she asks. “Smell what?” “Bitter almonds. This person was poisoned with cyanide.” My name’s…. The nose knows, but we need to know our noses a little better. Their usefulness is as plain as the nose on your face. And if you think I’ve sniffed out things you never knew you never knew, you’re right on the nose. Noses keep up safe from things like gas leaks and spoiled food; tell us when our personal hygiene game is lacking; filter dust, bacteria, and other detrimental detritus from the air; they’re even the reason that we’re practically the only primate that swims on the regular – our nostrils face downward rather than forward. So how do invisible qualities in the air turn into sensations in our brains, like fresh bread, cut grass, and dirty diapers. Your ability to smell comes from specialized sensory cells, called olfactory sensory neurons, which are found in a small patch of tissue high inside the nose and connect directly to your brain. Each olfactory neuron has one odor receptor whose job it is to take in microscopic molecules released by substances all around us. Once the neurons detect the molecules, they send messages to your brain. There are more smells in the environment than there are receptors, and any given molecule may stimulate a combination of receptors, creating a unique representation in the brain, what we think of as a particular smell. They say we eat first with our eyes, but we taste with our nose. Sure, the tongue gets all the glory and the taste buds do their bit, but they can only detect if something is sweet, salty, bitter, sour or umami, a savoriness you find in parmesan, anchovies, and mushrooms. The actual flavor notes come from our sense of smell, with a little help from the other senses. Without smell, foods tend to taste bland and have little or no flavor. Smells reach the olfactory sensory neurons through two pathways. Through the nostrils, as I mentioned, for one and through a channel that connects the roof of the throat to the nose. Chewing food releases aromas that follow that second route. If the channel is blocked, such as when your nose is stuffed –hello allergy season– odors can’t reach the sensory cells. As a result, you lose much of the input you need to enjoy a food’s flavor. If you’ve eaten while on a plane –and hopefully someday I’ll be on a flight fancier than the plain Utz chips flights I’ve been on thus far– you probably didn’t enjoy the taste of your food. It’s not that the food itself was bland; it probably had more salt and seasoning than food intended for non-flying consumption. Although the plane’s cabin is pressurized, it’s still less than you would experience at sea level. That lower pressure encourages fluids in your body to move upwards and the nasal cavities swell, decreasing the surface area engaged in making that sallow chicken breast and overcooked broccoli taste better than it looks. Some people, and they have my sincerest sympathies, are born without an olfactory bulb, the organ that was previously believed to be essential for the perception of smell. About 5% of the population is anosmic, which means that they cannot smell. While doing a bit of brain imaging, as you do, a group of researchers realized that one of their test subjects in the control group *had no apparent olfactory bulb, but somehow they’d scored in the normal range for standardized smell tests. They discovered that 0.6% of all women can smell perfectly well without an olfactory bulb. This rises to 4.3% in left-handed women. I literally don’t know what to make of that information, but it’s a good time to remind everyone that correlation doesn’t equal causation. But only female test subjects had a chance of smelling without an olfactory bulb; the gents were out of luck. The loss of smell and therefore taste has come up a lot more in the past two years than probably our whole lives put together, as it can be a symptom of covid. It also graphs exactly to the number of calls coming into Yankee Candles’ complaint line, apparently. It’s not uncommon for a virus to get between you and some Vanilla Fields or Clean Cotton, but for some, it can take several *years for their sense of smell to come back, if it comes back at all. Many people develop parosmia, an inability of the brain to properly identify a smell, during the early stages of recovery as the sense of smell works its way back. Smells are badly distorted and twisted into something repulsive, often described as burnt, foul, rotten or sewage-y, especially when tasting coffee, chocolate, and meat, prompting me to inquire, with full dedication to scientific inquiry, well what’s the point of living now? Researchers believe that as the damaged olfactory neurons are slowly regenerated or repaired, the distortions are a result of cross-wiring in the olfactory bulb. Exactly how this happens, though, remains a mystery. Why this happens during pregnancy, I didn’t look. Not really into baby stuff. But there’s always a silver lining if we look for it and sure enough, there are situations where being anosmic would come in handy. Take space travel, for example. Smells can be a real problem in a space ship or station. You have a finite amount of air and it’s not like you can open a window if chemicals in your experiment are off-gassing or someone rips an eggy fart. The Int’l Space Station is, according to one source, “smelly, noisy, messy, and awash in shed skin cells.” And that’s with NASA being really concerned about smells in space. Every single thing, no matter how small, is rigorously tested to see how they'll do in potentially hazardous environments. The job falls to a veritable army of professionals at NASA's White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico and for our purposes today, the Materials Flight Acceptance workforce. The MFA analyzes the space-suitability of different materials to make sure nothing bursts into flames, spews toxic gasses, or do anything else you don’t want to have happen in an awkward submarine falling around the earth, and that includes smells. NASA is concerned with way more than simple stinkiness. Bad smells are distractions and draw focus from the astronauts’ very expensive missions. But beyond the comfort of astronauts, which is important, “unnecessary smells” need to be kept at a minimum to ensure the astronauts can detect smells they really shouldn’t be smelling, like an ammonia leak or the distinct scent of overheated wiring or circuits, just before they release the magic blue smoke of failure. "Our first line of detection is our human sense of smell. So even though we have worked with companies, and there are certain types of detectors on board," says Susana Harper, the Materials Flight Acceptance standards testing manager at White Sands, "in the end we know that the human sense of smell is our most sensitive detector for those hazardous smells." Every item on every payload sent to the ISS must pass the smell test. Introducing the odor panel. Five volunteers go bloodhound on everything in the astronaut's habitable space, but this is NASA so they smell scientifically, not like you or I deciding whether or not we can get one more day out of this pair of jeans. The smell is captured in an air chamber and then injected through a syringe directly into masks worn by the volunteers. They then rank the smells on a scale of 0 to 4; anything that scored 2.5 or higher is grounded. The panel's most-decorated member is George Aldrich, a self-titled “nasalnaut.” This chemical specialist has been sniffing around NASA for over 40 years and more than 900 test sessions. Even though he’s done more sessions than anyone else in the world, he still has to qualify for the panel every four months by passing what is called the 10-bottle test. Applicants have to correctly select the three bottles with no smell and correctly identify the seven smells. Like you might get in a knock-off Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, they are musky, minty, floral, etherous, camphoraceous, pungent and putrid. Speaking of musk, anybody remember the perfume Malibu Musk, from the early 90’s? @ me on soc med if it all came flooding back to you. Hell, @ me even if you have no idea what I’m talking about. And never be shy about DMing me; I love to hear from listeners. You might think you need a big nose to do over 900 space smelling sessions, something in a nice Adrian Brody or Sarah Jessica Parker, but according to Aldrich "size don't matter." Aldrich was a member of the NASA fire department at White Sands when his boss told him about the odor panel. "I had no idea," he says now. "I just thought I was doing something great for the astronauts." Since then, he and the other members of the odor panel all sorts of materials to work with, including some truly awful bits – apparently Velcro being pulled apart gives off a very unpleasant odor. Pardon me a moment, I’ve just got to go to my sewing table, for science. You'll get no complaints from Aldrich, though. He’s happy and proud to stick his nose in the astronauts’ business, and they’re happy in return. Aldrich has received the Silver Snoopy award, which is given by astronauts to non-flight support staff who “significantly contributed to the human space flight program to ensure flight safety and mission success.” Silver Snoopy winners get a certificate and a silver lapel pin with the classic comic dog dressed like an astronaut, which has been taken up into space, complete with a letter of authenticity to prove it. What if you’re in space and you *do have a fully-functional sense of smell? What about space itself? Does space have a smell? It can’t, right? Space is a void, a vacuum, devoid of air. Well roll me in flour and fry for 2-3 minutes on each side, because space *does have a distinct odor. Hold up, you say. How are they smelling space? It’s not like you can do the B-movie sci-fi thing of taking off your helmet 5 minutes in and not die. You would die on the double. While we can’t smell outer space itself, we can smell the things that have come back from space. Space suits, for instance, smell differently after they’ve returned from space than they did before take-off. Astronauts returning from space claim that their suits smell, in a word, burnt. The lingering scent of space is “acrid” and “metallic,” reminding the astronauts of charred meat or welding fumes. How do you pick up a smell in the vacuum of space? Scientists believe that it could come from polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, high-powered particles that are released into space during the nuclear reactions that power stars and supernovae. But ‘tig-welded porterhouse’ isn’t the only aroma space could have. The universe is massive, like, really, really big, filled with as yet uncountable different elements and compounds. Most memorably, the dust cloud at the center of the Milky Way contains large amounts of ethyl formate. Here on Earth, that compound gives raspberries their flavor. And if ethyl formate is created from a reaction between acid and an alcohol, it smells like rum. This would be a terrible tease, because booze isn’t allowed in space. Not for American astronauts, anyway. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist, or even rocket adjacent, to make scratch with your sniffer. You could work with ham! Cinco Jotas, a 142-year old company in south-west Spain, specializes in traditional production methods of acorn-fed Iberian ham. Part of their quality-control protocol requires a team of specially-trained workers who smell every ham before it can be sold, and they could use a break. It’s not that the process is difficult – poke the meat, take a sniff, and make sure the ham cuts mustard in terms of Cinco Jotas high quality expectations. The trouble is the sheer volume of hams to handle. One calador, as they’re called, Manuel Vega Domínguez, who has been doing quality control since 1998, works year-round by himself, smelling around 200 hams -hand-clap emoji- a -hand-clap emoji- day. But as the year wanes close to the Christmas holiday, his ham-load quadruples, as are five seasonal sniffers. Each ham gets four sniffs, for a total of 3,200 sniffs per day. Domínguez says he’s pushed to "the limit of human possibility," but when duty calls, Domínguez and his nose are there. "I will find a way to sniff 801," he told WSJ. "Perhaps 802 is possible." If your intrigue and appetite are piqued and you’re thinking, Ima get me one of them hams, you might want to check your bank account first. All the expertise, care, and time in creating these Iberian hams means you can pay as much as $1,399 for a 14- to 15-pound bone-in ham. Plus shipping. If that’s too rich for your blood, you can spend a much more reasonable $32.50….for three ounces. Back to the Piggly Wiggly for me then! If that all’s too posh for you, and I know it’s too posh for me, this next one is considerably more down-market. Armpits. They stink. We want them to stink less. To make products that paliate the PU in your pits, you gotta smell the before and after. Meet Barrie Dewitt, who ironically could afford to buy that Iberian ham, thanks to your sweat stains. Barrie Drewitt is co-owner, COO, and chief scientist of Princeton Consumer Research, as well as their “odor guru.” As testament to the fact that there are no unskilled jobs, Drewitt says. “It took me about a year to get it up to an art form.” Using a little paper cone like the cups on the side of a water cooler, his job is to sniff armpits, breath, and feet, to rate how malodorous they are on a scale of 1 to 10 - 1 being effectively no smell at all and 10 being ‘call the Hague to convene a tribunal.’ Drewitt flies all over the world to do this for different companies and has become an international connoisseur of bad smells. Bad breath apparently has distinct styles in different parts of the world and not just from the foods we eat – flaming hot cheetos in the US, black pudding in Scotland, and tandoori chicken in India. Expert smell testers must learn to ignore these odors, along with the smells of pets, cigarettes (which is the most obstructive smell) and such like, and focus only on the halitosis caused by bacterial growth in the mouth. Bonus fact: halitosis origin There are not a lot of professional sniffers working and it’s not because it’s a job no one else. Not everyone has this talent, and Princeton Consumer Research looks for potential odor judges within the ranks of its employees by asking them to smell little jars of synthetic odors. A number of jars are lined up, and the sniffers have to rank them according to how powerful the smell is. If they are successful, they get to do it again, to prove it was skill and not dumb luck, before they can move on to becoming a full-fledged judge. Out of every 10 applicants, only 2-3 will make it through. Smell test training carries with it some surprising repercussions. “Once you’ve been trained to smell odor, you can’t help judging people. I’ll be sitting on the [subway], judging the people next to me from 1 to 10.” Plus you have to be ready to be asked, repeatedly, if you have a foot or body odor fetish. While he can’t speak for every sniffer, Drewitt says adamantly, “No, actually, I think they're quite gross, and the smell's horrendous on some people.” It’s not all toe jam and bad breath. Smell testers are also called upon to undertake more pleasant tasks too, such as evaluating the smells of scented soaps or perfumes, and picking out the best ones. And the money’s actually pretty good, with salaries starting around the $40,000 mark and going as high as $100,000. Being the owner of the company as well as chief smeller, Drewitt makes about $2mil a year. That’s a lot of scratch. I guess you could call it ‘scratch and sniff.’ [sfx rimshot] I’ll see myself out. There's a lot of money in deodorants and antiperspirants and big cosmetic companies can see the value in getting a product out there that people really want to buy and repeat-purchase buy. So, a client company might send Princeton Research 10 different strengths and concentrations of deodorant products with a certain active ingredient in them to find which one really does the trick. The company bases millions of dollars of manufacturing and marketing on what Drewitt and his colleagues say. So how does one register to do this? Go to their website, princetonconsumer.com (not a sponsor), go to the Volunteer section and enter your details, and they’ll contact you if a study comes up in your local area. Fingers crossed for your new career. I look forward to seeing your LinkedIn profile. And a little bonus fact about Dewitt – he and his partner were the first gay couple in the UK to have a child together with the aid of a surrogate in 1999, when they welcomed twins, a daughter they named Saffron and son Aspen. Both men are millionaires, which didn’t hurt the process. Ironically and maddeningly, I could find more articles about Drewitt’s personal life than his professional life — he and his now-ex still live together to raise their five kids, Drewitt’s boyfriend, and Saffron’s ex-boyfriend, who’s dating Drewitt’s ex-husband. There’s no way British papers with the word Daily in their name can resist crap like that. Have you ever smelled a roast turkey and immediately flashed back to the kids table at your grandma’s house, surrounded by your cousins? Or catch a whiff of Drakar Noir and are forced to confront the mixed bag of memories that was your first boyfriend? Last year, several studies looked closely at the connection between odors and powerful memories. One Northwestern Medicine study, published in Progress in Neurobiology, identified a neural basis for how the brain enables odors to trigger powerful memories. And researchers from the University of California, Irvine, discovered specific...
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/22422818
info_outline
Witty, Wild Women (ep 186)
03/08/2022
Witty, Wild Women (ep 186)
(Get Surfshark VPN at - Enter promo code MOXIE for 83% off and 3 extra months free!) Why did no one tell me about Moms Mabley?!! Hear about her and other 'living loud and proud' ladies (Dorothy Parker, Mae West, Tallulah Bankhead) on this International Women's Day. 01:00 Tallulah Bankhead 13:00 Mae West 23:00 Moms Mabley Links to all the research resources are on the . with your fellow Brainiacs. Reach out and touch Moxie on , , or Become a patron of the podcast arts! or . Or and . Music: , , and/or . Sponsors: , , Want to start a podcast or need a better podcast host? Get up to TWO months hosting for free from with coupon code "moxie." Dorothy Parker was a famously wry, witty, and acerbic writer and critic, with a low opinion of relationships. Her wit was apparent from an early age, referring to her father’s second wife as “The Housekeeper.” She was described by journalist and critic Alexander Woolcott as “a combination of Little Nell and Lady MacBeth.” As a literary critic, she said of one book, "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force." The author of the book? Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. My name’s Moxie…. This episode drops on Intl Womens Day, and I’ve covered a lot of remarkable women on the show, for a number of remarkable reasons, but today we focus on ladies for their remarks, for their wit and their wild ways. Tallulah Bankhead is a name I’ve known for many years, but never really knew anything about her. Back in the day, going to the big “computer show and sale” at the raceway complex with my dad, circa 1996, I picked up some cd-roms of FVM video games and some educational stuff like Microsoft Encarta Musical Instruments and some reference that included hundred of famous quotes. Some of you I realize will have no idea what I just said, a few of you will be unclear what a cd-rom is, but a few of you just got a cold chill like someone walking across your grave. Tallulah Bankhead’s wit featured prominently with quotes like, "If I were well behaved, I'd die of boredom," “I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education," and "I'll come and make love to you at five o'clock. If I'm late, start without me." ‘I like her,’ I thought, but didn’t look into who she actually was until this week. Considering she’s the inspiration for one of Disney’s most iconic villains, you’d think I’d have come across something between then and now, but not. Bankhead, the daughter of an Alabama congressman and future speaker of the House, was named after her paternal grandmother, whose name was inspired by Tallulah Falls, Georgia. That grandmother would raise her when her mother died a few days after her birth and the loss sent her father into a pit of depression and alcoholism. Little Tallulah was… difficult. Tallulah discovered at an early age that theatrics were a viable outlet for gaining the attention, good or bad, that she craved. A series of throat and chest infections as a child had left her with a raspy voice which would later become her trademark. It also made her stand out from her classmates, but Tallulah was not the type to be bullied and soon became the terror or students and the bane of teachers. She would find herself sent to, and expelled from, two different convent schools, the first for once for throwing ink at a nun and the next time for making a pass at one. At 15, Bankhead submitted her own photo to film industry magazine Picture Play, winning a small part in a movie and a trip to New York. She was allowed to go only by promising her father, a Congressman, she'd abstain from men and alcohol, but as she famously put it in her autobiography, "He didn't say anything about women and cocaine." She was a self-described "technical virgin" until 20. Though she lacked training and discipline, she possessed a dazzling stage presence, her husky voice providing fascinating contrast with her good looks. Quickly ascending to stardom, she just as easily gained renown for her quick-witted outspokenness and indefatigable party going. In New York, Bankhead moved into the famous Algonquin Hotel, a hotspot for the artistic and literary elite of the era, and was quickly rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous. After several years starring in films and on stage in New York, Bankhole's acting was praised, but she had not yet scored a big commercial hit. So, she moved to London in 1923, where her stardom grew. Her fame heightened in 1924 when she played Amy in Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted. The show won the 1925 Pulitzer Prize. But Bankhead was best known for her antics off-stage. She’d drive her Bently recklessly through London and if she got lost, she’d hire a black cab to drive to where she was going and she’d follow him. She spent her nights at booze and drug-filled parties, partaking liberally, and reportedly smoked 120 cigarettes a day, which is kind of dubious because how would you have time for anything else. She also openly had a series of relationships with both men and women, including some very famous female personalities of the day. Names attached to her, with or without facts to back it included Greta Garbo, Hattie McDaniel, the first AfrAm actress to win an Oscar, and singer Billie Holiday. One thing that’s known with great certainty is that she talked openly about her vices, and women just weren’t supposed to do that. Hell, they weren’t supposed to *have vices. She found herself included in Hays' "Doom Book", which would help her inspire a Disney villain, since only the worst of the worst were in the Doom Book, but it didn’t do much for her career. Brief refresher on the Hays Code, and you can hear lots more about it in the episode Words You Can’t Say on TV or Radio, way back in Oct 2018 before I started numbering episodes, the Hays Code a set of strict guidelines all motion pictures companies operated under from 1934 to 1968. It prohibited profanity, suggestive nudity, sexual perversions like homosexuality, interracial relationships, any talk of reproductive anything, and, in case you were unclear where all this came from, it banned ridicule of authority in general and the clergy in particular. This is why married couples in black&white sitcoms slept in separate beds. The Doom Book, which was either a closely guarded secret or never physically existed, was said to have contained the names of over 150 thespians considered too morally tumultuous to be used in movies. So this is the law of the land when a gal like Tallulah Bankhead is running around in cursing like a sailor in hedonistic, drug-fueled, openly-bisexual glee. Giving up on Hollywood, Bankhead returned to Broadway for a decade or so, where she reached her zenith with her performances in The Little Foxes and The Skin of Our Teeth, both of which earned her the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and was briefly married to actor John Emery. [a la Sam O’Nella] Never heard of him? Me neither. What’s his story? I didn’t bother. In 1943 she decided to give Hollywood a second try, but Hollywood hadn’t had the same thought about her. There was one bright spot, being cast in and praised for Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat in 1944. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, Bankhead’s hedonistic lifestyle and excessive drinking had taken its toll. Critics complained that she had become a self-caricature, which feels like a real oof. She kept her career afloat by publishing a best-selling autobiography, touring in plays like Private Lives and Dear Charles, before headlining her own nightclub act. In 1965 she made her last *film appearance, playing a homicidal religious fanatic in the British thriller Die! Die! My Darling! Tallulah Bankhead’s final acting assignments included a “Special Guest Villain” stint on the TV series Batman. When she was advised that the series was considered “high camp,” her response was vintage Tallulah: “Don’t tell me about camp, dahling! I invented it!” Am I ever going to tell you which Disney villain she inspired? I supposed, if I must. Disney animator Marc Davis once told of his creative process when tasked to create the villain for an upcoming film. (It was 1961 if you want to try to guess.) The chaaracter would become iconic, instantly recognizable whether cartoon or real life. Davis looked to real-life "bad" women, and while he said there were a number of different people who he kept in mind while drawing her, one name rose to the top – Tallulah Bankhead. So no matter if her movie or Broadway career is forgotten, Bankhead will always live on as Cruella de Ville. Mae West When she was good, she was very good. But when she was bad, she made film history. Whether making films, writing plays or flirting with the camera, Mae West was undisputedly the most controversial sex siren of her time and she even landed in jail because of it. She was the queen of double entendres on and off screen, delivering some of the best-remembered quips in movie history. You know the line, "Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?", yeah, that was West In "She Done Him Wrong." in 1933. Mary Jane West was born on Aug. 17, 1893 in Queens, NY to a boxer turned cop and a former corset and fashion model. The acting bug bit the heck out of West when she was tiny, bringing home talent show prizes at age 5. At age 12, she became a professional vaudeville performer. She was secretly married at age 17, but only lived with her husband for a few weeks, though they didn't legally divorce for 31 years. The adult West was rumored to have secretly married another man, but on the whole she preferred younger men. Her long-term partner Paul Novak was 30 years her junior. West was also rumored to have worn custom 8 in platform shoes, because she was only 5’2”. Two tangents, I would have *massive respect for anyone who could even walk in 8in platform, and that’s something all the women in today’s discussion have in common - they’re all my size. In 1926, under the pen name "Jane Mast," West wrote, produced and starred in a play called Sex, about a sex worker named Margie La Monte who was looking to better her situation by finding a well-to-do man to marry well if not wisely. Mae West was sentenced to 10 days in prison and given a $500 fine, charged with “obscenity and corrupting the morals of youth.” The rumor mill went into overtime when she was behind bars – she was permitted to wear silk underpants instead of prison-issue or the warden wined and dined her every night. West was set free after serving eight of the ten days and remarked to reporters that it was “…the first time I ever got anything for good behavior.” Before the show was raided in February of 1927 around 325,000 people had come through the turnstiles. Buns in seats, laddie, buns in seat. Not bothered in the slightest, and probably keenly aware of all the free publicity she just got, West appeared in a string of successful plays, including "The Drag," a 1927 play that was banned from Broadway because of its homosexual theme. If you think people try to tell you what to say these days, imagine having to deal with the likes of the Hays Code or the Catholic Legion of Decency, which I maintain sounds like a pro-wrestling tag team. She was an advocate of gay and transgender rights, which were at the time generally throught to be the same thing, and her belief that "a gay man was actually a female soul housed in a male body" ran counter to the belief at that time that homosexuality was an illness. Her next play, The Pleasure Man ran for only one showing before also being shut down with the whole cast being arrested for obscenity, but this time getting off thanks to a hung jury. West continued to stir up controversy with her plays, including the Broadway smash "Diamond Lil" in 1928, about a loose woman of the 1890s. Dominating the Broadway scene was nice, but West had her eyes set to the, well, to the west and Hollywood. West was 38 years old at the time, which is the age when the phone stops ringing for many actresses, but Paramount Pictures offered West a contract at $5000 a week ($80,000 now) and –luckily for all of us or I might not be talking about her right now– they let her re-write her lines. Her first film, Night After Night, set the tone for her on-screen persona right from jump street, from her first line where a hat check girl says to her “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds.” To which West replied, “Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.” Within three years she was the second highest paid person in the United States. The only person earning more was the publishing magnate friggin’ William Randolph Hearst. West not only made her own career, she insisted a young Cary Grant be cast opposite her, putting Grant on the road to his Golden Age icon status. That was ‘33’s "She Done Him Wrong," which contained her most famous quote, but I’m sorry to tell you that you’ve been saying it wrong your whole life. Yes, your whole life. You’ve seen it parodied in cartoons. The line isn’t "Why don't you come up and seem me sometime?" "Why don't you come up some time and see me?" Am I being painfully pedantic to point this out? Yes. …. That’s all. The public loved Mae West, but her blunt sexuality onscreen rubbed censors the wrong way. In 1934, they began deleting overtly sexy lines and whole scenes from her films. Not about to take that lying down, West doubled up on double entendres, hoping that the censors would delete the most offensive lines and miss the subtler ones. More controversial films followed. West was already 50 when she made "The Heat's On," but her youthful look and performance made the film a cult favorite. She also got banned from the radio for a sketch about Adam and Eve opposite Don Ameche, was on TV a few times, and even recorded two successful rock albums, decades before the late Christopher Lee. Bonus facts: MIDROLL The script for this episode started with Bankhead, West, and Dorothy Parker. I recognized that they were demographically pretty similar, though Parker was Jewish and there’s a wild theory out there that West was mixed-race, so I started asking around for WOC/LGBT of that same era and one name came up again and again, a name I’d never heard of, an oversight I now know to be a damn shame if ever there was one. Presenting for the elucidation of many listeners, Moms Mabley. Moms, plural not possessive, had been a vaudeville star for half a century on what was called the Chitlin Circuit, before white audiences began to discover her. Her trademarks were her old lady persona, complete with house coat, dust cap and waddling shuffle, and her raunchy, man-hungry humor, which is funny in a few ways when you consider she was an out-and-proud lesbian. Although Moms spent her professional life making people laugh, her personal life had more than its share of grief. If you’re not in the mood for tragic backstory, I totally understand if you want to hit your jump-30 button. Born Loretta Mary Aiken in North Carolina in 1894, Moms was the grandaughter of a slave and one of 16 children. She was the victim of rape twice before the age of 14, once by an older black man and the other by the town’s white sheriff. Both rapes resulted in pregnancies; both babies were given away. Loretta's father, a volunteer fireman, had been killed when a fire engine exploded, and her mother was run over and killed by a truck while coming home from church on Christmas Day. Her stepfather forced her to marry a man she didn’t even like, one assumes to pare down the number of dependent minors in the house. At the age of 14, Loretta ran away to join a minstrel show. A young girl out in the world on her own would normally be a recipe for disaster, heartache and suffering, but Moms had already had enough of all those, thank you very much. She took the name Mabley from her first boyfriend and acquired the nickname Moms later on, though none of my sources, and they are regrettably few and superficial, recounted why. She was only in her early 20’s when she devised the old lady character and kept her persona up until her actual age exceeded the character. Like all who played vaudeville, she had multiple talents: dancing, singing, jokes. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she had a gift for crafting original material far stronger than the stock routines others toured with. At the prompting of the vaudeville team Butterbeans and Susie, she moved to New York City in the early 20’s and found herself in the the Harlem Renaissance. "I never went back across the Mason-Dixon line," recalled Mabley. "Not for another thirty years." Toward the end of her life, Moms would say “There were some horrible things done to me. I played every state in the Union except Mississippi. I won’t go there; they ain’t read.” She hardly needed to back then anyway, playing the Apollo so often she could probably have gotten her mail forwarded there. There used to be a showbiz expression, “It won’t play in Peoria,” meaning something will not be successful for a wide, Joe Everyman (read: white) audience, and Moms certainly fit that bill. Moms talked about sex constantly. That’s not surprising from female comics these days, though it still isn’t as acceptable as it is for male comics. But unlike the male comics of Mom’s day, she slid into the jokes sideways with a double-entendre or a well-placed pause, rather than the straightforward use of obscenity that would become popular with such later black comedians as Richard Pryor. Although Loretta herself was a lesbian, Moms was that of ''dirty old lady'' with a penchant for younger men. She made fun of older men, subtly ridiculing the ways they wielded authority over women as well as the declining of their sexual powers. Her signature line became: ''Ain't nothin' an old man can do for me but bring me a message from a young man.'' She moved from vaudeville into films, but Hollywood wasn’t exactly rolling out the red carpet for black actors and film-makers. That’s okay, they said, we’ll just do it ourselves. As early as 1929 there were over 460 "colored movie houses" across America. owned and operated by, and catering specifically to, African-Americans, with all-Black cast films, shorts, and even newsreels. But it would be fair to say that these were B-movies, filmed in a couple of days, with whatever equipment and people you could cobble together. Hell, scenes were usually shot in one take, because editing requires more time and money. Where they shone was in the musical numbers, crafting scenes that would have shamed MGM or Warner Brothers, if only they’d had any budget at all. Comedian Slappy White remembered, "It wasn't hard casting the actors. All of us were out of work before the picture started...
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/22378340
info_outline
Dying for Your Art (ep. 185)
03/01/2022
Dying for Your Art (ep. 185)
Voted on by our , we dive into the deadly side of sculpture, painting, ballet and more! 01:36 Blucifer 04:00 Get the lead out 10:00 Ballet blazes 20:45 Death by a thousand face 26:43 The Conqueror and the conquered Links to all the research resources are on the . with your fellow Brainiacs. Reach out and touch Moxie on , , or Become a patron of the podcast arts! or . Or and . Music: , , and/or . Sponsors: , , Want to start a podcast or need a better podcast host? Get up to TWO months hosting for free from with coupon code "moxie." In 2013, Canadian artist Gillian Genser started to feel sick and for two years, no doctor one could determine why. Agitation, headaches, and vomiting gave way to hearing loss and memory problems. Finally, Genser was diagnosed with heavy metal poisoning. But she didn’t sculpt or work with metal; she worked with seashells. My name’s… Art is beauty, art is life, art is what breathes magic into the mundane. We’ve all seen the bumper sticker that say “without art, the Earth is eh.” But what that pithy bit of sticky-backed vinyl doesn’t tell you is that art is also absolutely fraught with danger and sometimes, art can be death, too. topic voted on by Patreon We opened with a sculptor, so let’s start there. It’s also the most obvious one, to my mind, and I like to get obvious stuff out of the way so we can get to that sweet, sweet obscura. If you’ve ever flown into Denver airport –perhaps to investigate for yourself the truly boggling number of conspiracy theories around it– you’d be hard-pressed to miss the 32 ft/9.7m tall blue fiberglass horse sculpture, complete with glowing red eyes. Love it or hate it (and many people do), the statue officially called The Mustang but colloquially known as “Blucifer” is eye-catching. And life-ending. The man behind this now iconic piece was Luis Jiménez, who grew up working in his father’s neon sign shop – Blucifer’s glowing red eyes are actually a hat-tip to his father – wanted the piece to feel more blue-collar and less artsy. The specific inspiration came from waking in the night to a noise in the living room, only to discover their blue Apolloosa horse had somehow gotten into the house. An actually blue Apolloosa isn’t as blue as Blucifer would be – that’s a nod to the art of Jimenez’s Latin-American forebears. The enormous sculpture is made up of three pieces – the head, torso and hindquarter – in total weighing 4.5 tons. The 65 year old Jimenez had just declared the head to be complete when a section being moved from his studio came loose and pinned him against a steel support, severing an artery in his leg, resulting in fatal exsanguination. Blucifer had to be finished posthumously by his family, friends, and professional lowriders and racecar painters Richard LaVato and Camillo Nuñez. I and we should really stop calling The Mustang “Blucifer,” btw the way. Jimenez widow and executor of his estate Susan keeps an understandably close eye and firm hand on how The Mustang is used, refusing almost all requests to license the image. Okay, sculpture is inherently dangerous. Maybe we should stick to something safer, like painting. C’mon, we’re three minutes into the episode, you know that’s a fake-out. Ah, I could never put anything past you. Paints have a long and storied history of being made out of things that are antithetical to good health and long life. Ancient Romans and medieval monks alike used cinnabar for its rich red color, never knowing the dangers of preparing and working with what is actually mercury ore. Similar problem with its replacement, vermillion, which can combine with elements in the air to form mercury chloride. It’s any wonder the moniker “mad monk” was still available when Rasputin came along. Even the cadmium red that you can buy today is not without concern, as authorities in Sweden want to see it banned for contaminating the water supply from artists washing their brushes. Fellow lovers of the macabre side of history will probably know about Scheele’s Green, an extremely popular dye used in wallpaper, dress fabric, toys and even food. Unfortunately for everyone caught up in this early 19th century fad, it got its vibrant color from an arsenic compound. There are adherents to the theory that Scheele’s Green wallpaper is what killed Napoleon Bonaparte in his exile-home on the island of Saint Helena. As the wallpaper molded from humidity, it released arsenic into the air. The more time Boney spent in bed, the sicker he got, and the more time he spent in bed. Lather, rinse, repeat until you have a dead former emperor. The grand-pappy of all paint problems is plumbum, aka lead. If you’ve purchased a house, at least in the US, built before 1970-whatever, you got a written warning about the possibility of lead-based paint. Lead in paint goes waaay back, like 4th century BCE way back, and the health risks to the artistic set have been known since the 1700s, though it would still take a century or two for people to connect the condition with the cause. It’s suspected that some of the great Western masters like Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and Goya suffered from some form of lead poisoning. Lead poisoning was in a tie with syphillis for suspected causes of Caravaggio’s death, until recent studies of his bones found he probably died of sepsis, having picked up staphylococcus from a sword wound, like you do. Ah the good old days, when life was simple, everyone ate local, organic food, and you died at the ripe old age of minor injury. At least, researchers are pretty sure the bones are his. Sometimes science isn’t an exact science. The 1834 London Medical and Surgical Journal describes this “painter’s colic” as sharp stomach pains occurring in patients with no other evidence of intestinal disease. Learned types called it saturnism, derives from the alchemic name for lead. While typesetters, tinkers, and, as anyone who’s learned five minutes of Roman history will attest, drinkers of leaded wine fell victim to saturnism, the disease was most widespread among those who worked with paint. What do those long hours slaving away over a hot canvas get you? Tell ‘em what they’ve won! A “cadaverous-looking” pallor, tooth loss, fatigue, painful stomach aches, partial paralysis, and gout! While you can’t and shouldn’t try to diagnose someone you’ve never examined(especially if you’re, you know, not a doctor), there are those who firmly believe that the troubled Vincent van Gogh suffered as pitifully as he did in life because of lead poisoning. He apparently had the habit of licking his paint brushes to get a fine tip, a technique that often carries a high cost. It mightn’t have been as unpleasant as it sounds to lick a brush that already has paint on it – lead has a sweet taste, hence its use in wine. Others think Van Gogh might have suffered from epilepsy and bipolar disorder, but Julio Montes-Santiago, a Spanish internist who evaluated the existing evidence of lead poisoning among artists across five centuries for his paper in Progress in Brain Research, argues that lead poisoning likely contributed to his delusions and hallucinations. Meanwhile, other scholars have disputed the lead poisoning hypothesis, arguing that the root of Van Gogh’s distress was porphyria, malnutrition, absinthe abuse or some combination thereof. The best evidence for lead poisoning among artists comes from the relatively recent case of, the 20th-century Brazilian painter Candido Portinari, creator of *massive murals. Portinari used paints that were similar to those used by Van Gogh and was diagnosed with saturnism after bleeding in his stomach put him in the hospital in 1954. His doctors strongly urged him to change to safer modern paints, but he dramatically complained, “They forbid me to live!” He did try other media, but ultimately returned to his old paints, dying 8 years later. You might think flat-out telling someone “that thing you make art with is literally killing you” would have some effect, but if you do, you don’t know human beings very well. We want what we want when we want it. Combine that with how the slightest taste of success drives us headlong down our chosen path, and you have conditions ripe for disaster. Don’t think dangers are confined to visual arts, either. Dance can be deadly too. Problem one: the nature of dance costumes in general and ballet costumes specifically. They’re meant to be flowy and ephemeral, often meant to invoke a sense of otherworldliness, and therein lies the problem. “If you imagine a sheet of newspaper and a hunk of wood, essentially, chemically, they are the same. But one will catch light way more quickly than the other,” says Martin Bide, a professor in the textiles, fashion merchandising, and design department at the University of Rhode Island. “So if you have a very flimsy, flowing something that mixes well with air, it will burn quite readily.” Problem two: the specific fabrics that were popular when spontaneous dancer combustion was an issue. Bobbinet, cotton muslin, gauze, and tarlatan were all diaphanous materials that could be made more cheaply thanks to the machines of the industrial revolution, helping to make them more common on stage and off. But their open weave also made them super flammable. They caught readily and burned *quickly. So it was less like “Mais non, Lisette’s tutu has caught fire. Let us help her put it out.” and more like “Mon Dieu, Lisette– now I’m on fire too!” In one instance in 1861, at least six ballet dancers died when they tried to help one dancer whose costume caught fire backstage. Sometimes entire theaters would burn down from a single piece of clothing catching. Problem three: the lights. We’re talking about the era where candles were giving way to gas footlights, neither one of which is good to have sitting at the ankles of someone flitting about in a flowy dress. Bonus fact: the term “to gaslight” may seem like it came out of nowhere five years ago, but it actually dates back to a play in 1938 called Gas Light, in which a husband messes with the lights in the house and tells his wife she’s seeing things when she comments. Perhaps the most famous case of this tragic accident was Emma Livry who made her Paris Opéra debut in 1858 at age 16. She was a prodigy and immediately rose to great fame. In 185*9, imperial decree demanded that all sets and costumes be flameproofed with the best method available at the time, carteronizing, treating the fabric with flame-retardant chemicals. This would make them relatively safe. But the ballerinas refused to use it. Many refused to perform in costumes or tutus that had been treated, as the process left the fabric dingy-looking and stuffer. “I insist, sir, on dancing at all first performances of the ballet in my ordinary ballet skirt,” Livry wrote to the Paris Opéra’s director in 1860 in a formal declaration of independence. This wasn’t a point she’d be able to argue for too long. On Nov. 15, 1862, Livry fluffed her skirts too close to a gas lamp and nearly instantly was engulfed in flames. Another dancer and a fireman tried to save her as she ran frantically around, but by the time they smothered the flames with a blanket, she had suffered burns to 40% percent of her body. The heat was so intense that her corset fused into her flesh. She would die of sepsis while recovering. Many dance scholars pinpoint Livry’s demise as the end of France’s dominant role in ballet, but it also inspired better safety measures: new designs for gas lamps, the invention of flame-retardant gauze and wet blankets hung in the wings just in case. It wasn’t only dancers whose lives were fraught with flames. The fashions and materials of the time put all women of middling-and-higher socio-economic status in extraordinary danger. In 1860, British medical journal the Lancet estimated that 3,000 women died by fire in a single year. It wasn’t just the fabric, but also the shape of the dresses that caused women’s clothing to erupt in flames. The popular silhouette in the 1850s was a giant bell shape, like Scarlett O’Hara in her curtain dress. To get that voluminous shape, women used a cage crinoline, a contraption introduced in the 1850s generally made from hoops that were attached with tape and then fastened around the waist. The crinoline allowed women to shed layers of petticoats they used to have to wear to get that shape, creating freedom of movement for their legs, as well as creating a boundary around them, letting them take up space in the world. Unfortunately, this full skirt, and the air underneath it, created a funnel for fire, essentially a chimney, with you standing in the middle of it. MIDROLL? Lon Chaney, the first real horror movie star, was known as "The Man Of A Thousand Faces," and he earned it. He was a pioneer in movie makeup, and in behind the scenes suffering. For Chaney, the art of acting was the art of continual transformation, from pirate to Chinese shipwreck survivor, Russian revolution peasant to circus clown, to crusty railroad engineer to bell tower hunchback. People used to joke, “Don't step on that spider! It might be Lon Chaney!” In his efforts to bring his characters to screen with the greatest realism, Chaney employed painful techniques to distort and obscure his physical features, like a special harness to keep his legs bound tightly behind him to play a double amputation in The Penalty, which caused broken blood vessels. His Quaisomodo costume didn’t include the 70 or 90lb rubber hump of the urban legend, just a 20 pound hump made of plaster that he had to carry on one shoulder all day, but the role did cause permanent partial vision loss in one eye due to the putty and adhesive tape. In a 1991 interview with Patsy Ruth Miller, The Hunchback of Notre Dame's Esmerelda, the actress conjectured that pain was part of Chaney's process. "I felt that he almost relished that pain," Miller said. "...It gave him that feeling he wanted to have of a tortured creature." The Phantom of the Opera's wire-frame nasal appliance left him bleeding. The primitive contact lenses he used to simulate blindness caused real damage to his eyes, necessitating glasses. If I didn’t list a role and its accompanying injury here specifically, it’s safe to assume that it did some damage to his back or joints, either through weight, constriction or being twisted into an unnatural position for long periods of time. In 1929, filming the movie Thunder, a piece of artificial snow lodged in his throat and worsened an already nasty infection. Doctors took his tonsils out, but his throat continued to bother him. Despite this, he filmed his first talkie, The Unholy Three, a film about three circus performers who decide to go into the crime business together, in 1930. When filming was complete, he traveled to New York where it was discovered he had bronchial cancer, then came pneumonia and it was a sadly rapid deterioration until his death that August. Now if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a dozen times, correlation doesn’t equal causation, so why do I mention a piece of fake snow in a way that clearly implies the snow is to blame for causing or at least hastening Chaney’s death? Because, while that fake snow *could have been feathers, cotton, paper, gypsum or even instant potato flakes, right up until the end of the 1950’s Hollywood’s favorite fake snow… was asbestos. Quick science lesson: Asbestos, once considered the “Magic Mineral” for its flexible fibers that are resistant to heat, electricity, and corrosion, was highly sought after in the early twentieth century. It made for the perfect fake snow on movie sets because it was water- and fireproof, lightweight, didn’t melt, and was easy to handle. But it was far from safe. There is no safe level of exposure to asbestos, which causes deadly illnesses including mesothelioma and cancers of the lung, larynx, and ovaries. In order to create winter scenes in many old Hollywood movies, film makers used pure white asbestos fibers to replicate the look of snow. As the fake snow consisted of pure white asbestos fibers, it proved very dangerous when inhaled, which becomes extremely likely when you’re dropping it from the rafters on people or blowing it around with industrial fans. The use of asbestos was actually a suggestion from, I promise you you’ll never guess, the LA fire department, as an alternative to the inherently flammable cotton being used at the time. The asbestos snow had brand names like ‘White Magic’, ‘Snow Drift’ and ‘Pure White’. And yes, it absolutely was used in The Wizard of Oz, though ironically it probably wouldn’t make the top ten of awful things that happened to that cast, or even to Judy Garland alone. Hearing about how the studio execs treated her would break your heart. The biggest name you’d probably recognize who died from the asbestos related lung disease, mesothelioma was the king of cool, Steve McQueen. He was diagnosed in 1979 and died in 1980, fully sure in his heart that stage insulation and stunt clothing he often wore, which were made of asbestos fibers, were responsible for his illness. I could easily do a whole episode on accidentals on movie sets – I was a hormone-ravaged teenager when Brandon Lee died tragically on the set of The Crow (and I’ve wondered ever since if anyone would have seen or remembered the movie if it had gone off without a hitch). And while sudden deaths fit the brief and you can read about several in the YBOF book chapter Lights, Curses, Action, I prefer the slow burn. There are a lot of factors to consider when making a movie and choosing the right location to shoot a film is a pivotal decision. You have to take into account things like lighting conditions, availability of utilities, and proximity to noisy things such as airports. What you should not have to consider is the radiation level, but you should not ignore it either. The producers of the film 1956 movie The Conqueror chose an area of Utah desert a hundred miles away from the Nevada Test Site. (They also chose to cast John Wayne as Genghis Khan.) Throughout the 1950’s, approximately 100 nuclear bombs of varying intensities were detonated at the Nevada Test Site. The mushroom clouds could reach tens of thousands of feet high; desert winds would carry radioactive particles all the way to Utah. The area in which The Conqueror filmed was likely blanketed in this dust. The Conqueror, co-starring Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, and Pedro Armendáriz, was a moderate box office success, but a critical failure and soon found itself on ‘worst films of all time’ lists. The true legacy of the film had yet to be revealed. Of the 220 people who worked on...
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/22270037
info_outline
Earth's Unsungest Heroes: Black Inventors, pt 4 (ep 184)
02/22/2022
Earth's Unsungest Heroes: Black Inventors, pt 4 (ep 184)
Congrats to Adam Bomb, who won week 3 of #moxiemillion, by sharing the show to help it reach 1 million downloads this month! Necessity is the mother of invention and these inventions had real mothers! Hear about Black female inventors, the tribulations of research, and a story I didn't expect to find and couldn't pass up. 01:00 L'histoire 06:36 Martha Jones's corn husker 07:55 Mary Jones de Leon's cooking apparatus 08:56 Judy Reed's dough kneader-roller 10:30 Sarah Goode's folding bed-desk 11:40 Sarah Boon's ironing board 17:15 Lyda Newman's hairbrush 19:33 Madam CJ Walker's Wonderful Hair-grower 22:03 Biddy Mason Links to all the research resources are on the . with your fellow Brainiacs. Reach out and touch Moxie on , , or Become a patron of the podcast arts! or . Or and . Music: , , and/or . Sponsors: , , Want to start a podcast or need a better podcast host? Get up to TWO months hosting for free from with coupon code "moxie." The first Africans arrived at Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. They were recorded as “20 and odd Negroes.” These Africans had been stolen from a Portuguese slave ship, transported to an English warship flying a Dutch flag and sold to colonial settlers in American. The schooner Clotilda (often misspelled Clotilde) was the last known U.S. slave ship to bring captives from Africa to the United States, arriving at Mobile Bay, in autumn 1859[1] or July 9, 1860 The end of the Civil War and the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments meant that all black inventors now had the right to apply for patents. The result over the next few decades was a virtual explosion of patented inventions by black mechanics, blacksmiths, domestic workers, and farm laborers — many of them ex-slaves. By 1895 the U.S. Patent Office was able to advertise a special exhibit of inventions patented by black inventors. The list of new inventions patented by blacks after the Civil War reveals what kinds of occupations they held and in which sectors of the labor force they were concentrated. Agricultural implements, devices for easing domestic chores, and devices related to the railroad industry were common subjects for black inventors. Some patented inventions developed in the course of operating businesses like barbershops, restaurants, and tailoring shops. started here Researching African-American history is far tougher than it should be. Marginalized stories don’t get written down, and then there was the whole Lost Cause thing, actively eradicating what stories had been recorded. For those in far-flung parts fortunate enough not to have have attended a school whose history books were written or chosen by these [sfx bleep], the Lost Cause was people like the Daughters of the Confederacy purposefully rewriting history. Their version of events was that civil war generals were heroes, slaves were generally treated well and were happy to work for their enslavers, and that the war was about state’s rights, not the immorality of owning another human being. It was from this movement that my hometown of Richmond, VA got a beautiful tree-lined avenue of expensive row houses and every third block had a statue of a civil war general. the number of Confederate memorial installations peaked around 1910 — 50 years after the end of the Civil War and at the height of Jim Crow, an era defined by segregation and disenfranchisement laws against black Americans. Confederate installations spiked again in the 1950s and 1960s, during the Civil Rights Movement. It weren’t nothing to do with celebrating ancestors who fought for what they believed in, which you shouldn’t do if your ancestor was so stunningly wrong in their beliefs, it was about telling African-Americans that you haven’t forgotten when they were under your boot and you’d bring all that back tomorrow if you could. The statues are on my mind today because I was just in a networking event with Noah Scalin and Mark Cheatham, the artists who created a now iconic (regionally) iconic image of the empty plinth where the Robert E Lee statue stood. Scalin was the guy that started the Skull A Day website, if you ever saw that, and my husband helped him do an art installation in Times Square. But my squirrel brain was talking about the inherent difficulty of researching this topic. Details were sparse for the male inventors and it wasn’t uncommon for me to find the same photo used on articles about different people, and if I ever, say, shared an image of Benjamin Montgomery with the caption Henry Boyd, many many apologies for the inconvenience. But in researching black *women inventors, I’d be lucking to *find a picture, misattributed or otherwise. Or their story or even enough of a bio to fill out aa 3x5 index card. I got nothing, bupkis, el zilcho. Well, not nothing-nothing, but not a fraction of what I wanted to present to you. One of my goals with YBOF is to amplify the stories of POC, women, and the LGBT (see my recent Tiktok about the amazing Gladys Bently for the trifecta), but I guess if I really mean to do that, I’m going to have to abandon Google in favor of an actual library, when I no longer have to be wary of strangers trying to kill me with their selfishness. That aside, I love a library. I used to spend summer afternoons at the one by my house in high school – it was cool, quiet, full of amazing knowledge and new stories, and best of all, my 4 little sisters had no interest in going. When you come from a herd of six kids, anything you can have exclusively to yourself, even if it’s because no one else wants it, immediately becomes your favorite thing. So I don’t have as much as I wanted about Black female inventors of the pre-Civil War era, but I did find one real gem that I almost gave the entire episode to, but we’ll come to her. As with male inventors, it can be a little sketch to say this one was first or that one was first. There are a number of reasons for this. Black people kept in bondage were expressly prohibited from being issued patents by a law in 18??. Some would change their names in an attempt to hide their race, some would use white proxies, and of course many Black inventors had their ideas stolen, often by their enslavers, who believed that they owned not only the person, but all of their work output, that they owned the inventor’s ideas as much as they owned the crops he harvested, the horseshoes he applied, or the goods he built. The other big thing that makes early patent history tricky is something I’ve dealt with personally, twice - a good ol’ fashioned structure fire. A fire broke out in a temporary patent office and even though there was a fire station right next door, 10,000 early patents were lost, as were about 7000 patent models, which used to be part of the application process. Long story short, we don’t, and probably can’t, know definitively who was the first, second, and third Black woman to receive a patent, so I’m going to take what names I *can find and put them in chronological order, though surely there are some inventors whose names have been lost, possibly forever. Martha Jones is believed to be the first Black woman to receive a U.S. patent in 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War, for her improvement to the “Corn Husker, Sheller.” Her invention made it possible to husk, shell, cut and separate corn all in one step, saving time and labor. This would be for dry or field corn, the kind used to make cornbread, not sweet corn, the kind you eat on the bone in the summer. This invention laid a foundation stone for advancements in automatic agricultural processes that are still in use today. I can show you the schematics from Jones’ patent, but as for Jones herself, I’ve got sweet Fanny Adams. But I can tell you that her patent came 59 years after the first white woman got hers in 1809, for a weaving process for bonnets, which I think also illustrates what constituted a “problem” in each woman’s life. On the gender side of things, Jones’ patent came 47 years after Thomas Jennings became the first black man to receive a U.S. Patent in 1821 for the precursor to dry-cleaning, whose details we lost in that fire. Next up, or so it is believed, was another Jones (it’s like Wales in here today), Mary Jones De Leon. In 1873, De Leon was granted U.S. patent No. 140,253 for her invention titled ”Cooking Apparatus.” De Leon, who lived in Baltimore, Maryland, and is buried outside Atlanta, GA, created an apparatus for heating or cooking food either by dry heat or steam, or both. It was an early precursor to the steam tables now used in buffets and cafeterias. Remember buffets? We’ll be explaining them to our grandkids. You’d go to a restaurant and eat out of communal troughs with strangers for $10. By the way, if I were to say ‘chafing dish’ and you thought of a throw-away line from the 1991 movie Hot Shot, “No, a crock pot is for cooking all day,” that’s why we’re friends. If you didn’t, don‘t worry, we’re still friends. The third patent in our particular pattern went to Judy Woodford Reed, and that patent is about the only records we have for her. She improved existing machines for working bread dough with her "Dough Kneader and Roller" in 1884. Her design mixed the dough more evenly, while keeping it covered, which would basically constitute sterile conditions back then. Reed appears in the 1870 Federal Census as a 44 year old seamstress near Charlottesville, Virginia, along with her husband Allen, a gardener, and their five children. Sometime between 1880 and 1885, Allen Reed died, and Judy W. Reed, calling herself "widow of Allen," moved to Washington, D. C. It is unlikely that Reed was able to read, write, or even sign her name. The census refers to Judy and Allen both as illiterate, and her patent is signed with an "X". That might have actually worked to her favor. Lots of whites, about 1 in 5, were illiterate back then, too, and an X reveals neither race nor gender. The first African-American woman to fully sign a patent was Sarah E. Goode of Chicago. Bonus fact: illiteracy is why we use an X to mean a kiss at the bottom of a letter or greeting card. People who couldn’t sign their name to a contract or legal document would mark it with an X and kiss it to seal their oath. Tracing the origin of O meaning hug is entirely unclear, though, and theories abound. Sarah Elisabeth Goode obtained a patent in 1885 for a Cabinet-bed, a "sectional bedsteads adapted to be folded together when not in use, so as to occupy less space, and made generally to resemble some article of furniture when so folded." Details continue to be sparse, but we know that as of age 5 in 1860, she was free and living in Ohio. She moved to Chicago 10 years later and 10 years after that, married a man named Archibald, who was a carpenter, as her father had been. They had some kids, as people often do, though we don’t know how many. If they had many kids or lived in a small space for the number of kids they had, that could have been what motivated Goode to create a very early version of the cool desk that turns into a bed things you can see online that sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars. Goode’s invention had hinged sections that were easily raised or lowered. When not functioning as a bed, the invention could easily be used as a desk with small compartments for storage, ideal for a small city apartment, especially if there were hella kids in there. We have a bit more on another Sarah inventor, this time Sarah Boone of NC. Born into bondage in 1832, Sarah may have acquired her freedom by marrying James Boone, a free Black man, in 1847. Together, they had eight children and worked to help the Underground Railroad. Soon the family, along with Sarah’s widowed mother, made their way north to New Haven, Connecticut. Sarah worked as a dressmaker and James as a bricklayer until his death in the 1870s. They’d done well enough for themselves to purchase their own home. Far removed from the strictures and structures of enslavement, Sarah became a valued member of her community and began taking reading and writing lessons. It was through her workaday life as a dressmaker that she invented a product you might well have in your home today, the modern-day ironing board. Quick personal aside in an episode that’s already chock-full of them–did anyone else marry military or former military and make your spouse do all the ironing because you assume they’d be better at it from having to do their uniforms? I can’t be the only one. Back to Sarah Boone, who wanted “to produce a cheap, simple, convenient and highly effective device, particularly adapted to be used in ironing the sleeves and bodies of ladies garments.” You might think the ironing board didn’t *need to be “invented,” that it was just one of those things everybody kinda just had, but no. Prior to Boone, you’d put bits of wood between the backs of two chairs, like a makeshift sawhorse. And anyone who’s ever used a makeshift sawhorse only to have it slide apart out from under them or end up sawing into their dining room table will attest that there was indeed room for improvement. She began by creating a narrower, curved board that could slip into the sleeves of dresses and shirts, with padding to stop the texture of the wooden base from being imprinted onto the fabric, and the whole thing collapsed for easy storage. With a bit of help from other dressmakers, she finalized the design for which she’d be awarded her patent in 1892. Such a simple device was a boon to many a homemaker, though there remains the extent to which she profited from the invention, particularly as they became a product for mass distribution by companies. Even so, we know that it was soon an indispensable household device and made manufacturers wealthy. MIDROLL Lyda Newman is remembered for two things, patented the first hairbrush with synthetic bristles in 1898 and her activism in the women’s voting rights movement of the early 20th century – she was a key organizer of a Black branch of the Woman Suffrage Party, which was trying to give women the legal right to vote. We know she was born in Ohio sometime between 1865 and 1885, which is a helluva range for history so relatively recent, and that she spent most of her life living in New York City, working as a hairdresser. As a hairdresser, and an owner of a head of hair herself, Newman wanted the process of brushing hair to be more hygienic and efficient. Most hairbrushes at the time were made using animal hair, the same kind you might get in shaving brushes or paint brushes. Now imagine trying to get knots out with a shaving brush. Animal-based bristles were too soft for the job, which is where we get the old trope/advice of 100 strokes – it took that many to get the job done. And that was for white woman. These brushes were practically useless for the thicker textures of African American hair. Animal hair also harbored bacteria like it’s nobody’s business, which is unfortunate since it was also used to bristle toothbrushes and, oh yeah, back in the day, you’d have a single household toothbrush that everyone shared. Newman’s brush used synthetic fibers, which were more durable and easier to clean, in evenly spaced rows of bristles with open slots to clear debris away from the hair into a recessed compartment. The back could be opened with a button for cleaning out the compartment. This wasn’t a gimmick or fly-by-night idea. Newman’s invention changed the hair-care industry by making hairbrushes less expensive and easier to manufacture. This paved the way for other Black inventors in the hair-care space to actually *create the black hair care industry, chief among them, Sarah Breedlove. Don’t recognize the name? What if I call her Madam C.J. Walker? Well, I’m gonna tell you about her either way. Breedlove, born in 1867 in Louisiana, was the first child in her family born into freedom, but found herself an orphan at age seven after both parents died of yellow fever. She lived with a brother-in-law, who abused her, before marrying Moses McWilliams at age 14 to get away from him. Sarah was a mother at 17 and a widow at 20, so on the whole, not having a good time of it. And to top it all off, her hair was falling out. She developed a product to treat the unspecified scalp disease that caused it, made of petroleum jelly, sulfur, and a little perfume to make it smell better. And it worked! She called it Madame C.J.Walker Wonderful Hair Grower (she was now married to Charles Walker) and along with Madame C.J.Walker Vegetable Shampoo, began selling door-to-door to other African-American women suffering from the same disease. 5 years later, she set up the Madame C.J.Walker Manufacturing Company in the US, and later expanded her business to Central America and the Caribbean. She recruited 25,000 black women by the early 1900s to act as door-to-door beauty consultants across North and Central America, and the Caribbean. Walker was the first one using the method known today as direct sales marketing to distribute and sell her products, a method adopted later on by Avon, TupperWare, and others. And she paid well, too! You could earn $25 a week with Walker, a damn site better than $2 per week as a domestic servant. Her workforce would grow to be 40,000 strong. So don’t be telling me that paying a living wage is bad for business. Walker didn’t keep her success to herself, but used her wealth to support African-American institutions, the black YMCA, helped people with their mortgages, donated to orphanages and senior citizens homes, and was a believer in the power of education. Now be sure you don’t do as I am wont to do and accidentally conflate Madame CJ Walker with Maggie Walker, the first African American woman to charter a bank and the first African American woman to serve as a bank president, and an advocate for the disabled, because she deserves coverage of her own. As I was searching for black female inventors, I came across one listicle with a paragraph on a woman the author claimed helped “invent” the city of Los Angeles. That’s a bit of a stretch, I thought to myself, but as I read the story of Bridget “Biddy” Mason, I became so utterly fascinated, I almost flipped the script to do the episode entirely about her. I did not, as you’ve plainly noticed, since I’d already done primary research for the first six pages of an eight page script. Biddy was born into slavery in 1818 in Georgia, maybe. We do know she spent most of her early life on a plantation owned by Robert Smithson. During her teenage years, she learned domestic and agricultural skills, as well as herbal medicine and midwifery from African, Caribbean, and Native American traditions of other female slaves. Her knowledge and skill made her beneficial to both the slaves and the plantation owners. According to some authors, Biddy was either given to or...
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/22197323
info_outline
Earth's Unsung-est Heroes: Black Inventors, pt. 3 (ep. 183)
02/15/2022
Earth's Unsung-est Heroes: Black Inventors, pt. 3 (ep. 183)
Congrats to Hearts & Wheels, who won week 2 of #moxiemillion, by sharing the show to help it reach 1 million downloads this month! Necessity is the mother of invention and who was in a more necessitous position than victims of the Atlantic slave trade? You may revolutionize industries, but good luck getting a patent. 00:47 Patents and law 06:40 Benjamin Bradley 09:10 Benjamin Montgomery 16:30 Thomas Jennings 23:15 Henry Boyd Links to all the research resources are on the . with your fellow Brainiacs. Reach out and touch Moxie on , , or Become a patron of the podcast arts! or . Or and . Music: , , Sponsors: , , Want to start a podcast or need a better podcast host? Get up to TWO months hosting for free from with coupon code "moxie." The U.S. legal system has both helped and hindered racial justice through our history. – high points like Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, which said that separate but equal inherently isn’t equal, and one of my favorites, Loving v. Virginia. This aptly titled ruling finally overturned laws against interracial marriage, and low points like the notorious Dredd Scott decision, which said that no Black person could be a citizen or sue someone in court. It’s not just the Supreme Court. As above, so below and that trickles all the way down to the USPTO. My name’s Moxie… Real quick before we get stuck in: what is a patent? A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a set period of time. Not to be confused with trademark or copyright, which you can hear more about in the episode , link in the show notes. Do you *need a patent to sell an invention? No, but you need one if you want to be the only one to sell your invention. A patent can’t actually stop other people before they steal your idea, as anyone whose had to deal with cheap foreign knockoffs knows. (That happened to a fellow who designed these amazing motion-sensing LED eyelashes I bought back in my burlesque days; the Chinese knockoffs hit Amazon before his Kickstarter had even finished.) What the patent does is gives you ammo to go to court for legal remedy… if going to court is fiscally feasible and for most people it’s not. Patents are a form of property, a thing you can own. When you live in a place were certain people, specifically those from Africa and their descendants kept in bondage in the US, are barred from *having property, that means no patents for enslaved people. A 19th century law specified that patent applicants had to sign a Patent Oath that, among other things, attested to their country of citizenship. When the Dredd Scott decision effectively denied Black Americans any citizenship at all, that meant an automatic dismissal of patent applications by slaves. Nonetheless, Black inventors persisted and were often successful at the patent office despite staggering legal impediments. As a well known example, George Washington Carver was born a slave but was still issued three patents in his lifetime, a number that is but a shadow of his inventive genius. The first known patent to a Black inventor was issued to Thomas Jennings in 1821 for a dry cleaning method. And the first known patent to a Black woman inventor was issued to Martha Jones in 1868 for an improved corn husker and sheller. Well, she might be the first, she might not be; more on that later and by later I mean next week, because my research exceeded my grasp again. Despite being removed from their homes, intentionally mixed with people from other regions with whom they had no common language, denied an education or even the right to educate themselves, and of course all the outright abuse and atrocities, the enslaved people of America were no less clever than their white counterparts and no less driven to improve their lives. More so, likely. When a white man invented a new farming tool, it was saving his tired back. When a black slave invented a new and improved tool, he was saving his family. The new idea could save him from lashings, spare his wife working herself to death, save the limbs of his children from the machines of the time. And of course making yourself more valuable to the person who dictates your fate doesn’t hurt. You’ll notice a certain pattern to the stories today, not that that means the stories need telling any less. And there are always individual details, though most of them will make you face-palm so hard you’ll get a cyst. That’s a real thing that happened to my sister back in like 1990 when you made fun of someone else’s intelligence with a dramatic slap to your own forehead. And my husband thinks I’m the critical one. There are face-palmy stories like a man named Ned, who invented the cotton scraper. The man who kept Ned in bondage, Oscar Stuart, tried to patent Ned’s invention, but was denied because he couldn’t prove he was the inventor, because he wasn’t. Stuart went as far as to write to the Secretary of Interior in 1858, asserting that “the master is the owner of the fruits of the labor of the slave, both manual and intellectual.” Enslaved people weren’t actually barred from getting a patent…until later that year, when it was codified that enslaved Blacks were barred from applying for patents, as were the plantation owners. Undeterred by his lack of patent, Stuart began manufacturing the cotton scraper and reportedly used this testimonial from a fellow plantation owner, and this is the bit where you might do yourself a minor battery: “I am glad to know that your implement is the invention of a Negro slave — thus giving the lie to the abolition cry that slavery dwarfs the mind of the Negro. When did a free Negro ever invent anything?” Oy vey. Free Blacks invented *tons of things. For further reading, look up Granville T Woods, often called “the black Edison,” Woods was a self-taught engineer who received over 50 patents, which is over 50 more than most of us have, but he was clearly able to get patents, so he’s outside our focus today. We’re looking at people like Benjamin Bradley, born a slave around 1830 as a slave in Maryland. Unusually, and illegally, he was able to read and write. While being made to work in a print shop as a teenager, Bradley began working with some scrap materials, modeling a small ship. He quickly built his skills until he’d graduated from model ships to building a working steam engine from a piece of a gun-barrel and some random handy junk. You can’t not be impressed by that and the people around Bradley suitably were. He was placed in a new job, this time at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland as a classroom assistant in the science department. He helped to set up and conduct experiments, working with chemical gases. The faculty were also impressed with Bradley in his understanding of the subject matter and also with his preparedness in readying the experiments. Praise is nice, but a paycheck is even nicer. Bradley was given a salary but he still “belonged” to a white man, who took most of his money; Bradley was allowed to keep about $5.00 a month, or about $180 today. Despite having a pretty good set-up at Annapolis, Bradley had not forgotten his steam engine. He’d sold an early prototype to a student and used that and the money he’d been able to squirrel away from his pay to build a larger model. He worked his way up to an engine large enough that his engine became the first to propel a steam-powered warship, he was with Navy types after all, at 16 knots, which is about 18 mi/29km. Because Benjamin Bradley was a slave, he was unable to secure a patent for his engine. His master did, however, allow him to sell the engine and he used that money to purchase his freedom. So if you have an idea you really believe in, stick with it. Another Benjamin with a penchant for tinkering was Benjamin Montgomery, born in 1819 in Loudon County, Virginia. A *lot of these stories start in my home state. He was sold to Joseph E. Davis of Mississippi planter, the older brother of Jefferson Davis, future President of the Confederate States of America. Joseph must have been more liberal than Jefferson, because he recognized Montgomery’s intelligence and tasked him to run the general store on the Davis Bend plantation. Montgomery, who’d been taught to read and write by Davis’ children, excelled at retail management and Davis promoted Montgomery to overseeing the entirety of his purchasing and shipping operations. Montgomery also learned a number of other difficult tasks, including land surveying, flood control, drafting, and mechanics. The golden spike wouldn’t be driven in the transcontinental railroad until four years after the end of the civil war, so that meant that natural waterways were still the best and most important way to get widgets, kajiggers, and doodads from A to B. This wasn’t as as simple as those of us of the interstate highway system epoch might imagine. Nature, in her beauty, is inconsistent and varying and variable depths of rivers made them difficult to navigate. Heavy spring rains could cause sand bars to shift and, boom, now the boat is stuck and your cargo is delayed. They lacked the benefit of the comparatively tiny backhoe that tried to dig the Ever Given out of the Suez canal. Montgomery set out to address that problem – he was in shipping & receiving after all – and created a propellor that could cut into the water at different angles. With it, boats could easily and reliably navigate through shallow water. Joseph Davis attempted to patent the device in 1858, but the patent was denied, not because Davis wasn’t the inventor, but because Montgomery, as a slave, was not a citizen of the United States, and thus could not apply for a patent. If this were a YT video, I’d use that clip from Naked Gun of a whole stadium of people slapping their foreheads. You can actually listen to the podcast on YT, btw. Later, both Joseph *and Jefferson Davis attempted to patent the device in their names but were denied again. Ironically and surprisingly, when Jefferson Davis later assumed the Presidency of the Confederacy, he signed into law the legislation that would allow a slaves to receive patent protection for their inventions. It’s like the opposite of a silver lining and honestly a bad place for an ad-break, but here we are. MIDROLL After the civil war and the emancipation proclamation, when Montgomery, no longer a slave, he filed his own patent application… but was once again rejected. Joseph Davis sold his plantation as well as other properties to Montgomery and his son Isaiah on a long-term loan in the amount of $300,000.00. That’s a big chunk of change if that’s in today dollars, but back then? Benjamin and Isaiah wanted to use the property to establish a community of freed slaves, but natural disasters decimated their crops, leaving them unable to pay off the loan. The Davis Bend property reverted back to the Davis family and Benjamin died the following year. Undeterred, Isaiah took up his father’s dream and later purchased 840 acres of land where he and other former slaves founded the town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi in 1887, with Isaiah as its first mayor. My research didn’t indicate why the free Montgomery’s application was refused, but oe assumes racism. The new language of patent law was written to be color-blind, but it’s humans reading the applications, so some black inventors hid their race by doing things like using initals instead of their name if their name “sounded black.” Others “used their white partners as proxies,” writes Brian L. Frye, a professor at the University of Kentucky’s College of Law, in his article Invention of a Slave. This makes it difficult to know how many African-Americans were actually involved in early patents. Though free black Americans like Jennings were able to patent their inventions, in practice obtaining a patent was difficult and expensive, and defending your patent? Fuggedaboutit. “If the legal system was biased against black inventors, they wouldn’t have been able to defend their patents,” says Petra Moser, a professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “Also, you need capital to defend your patent, and black inventors generally had less access to capital.” If an issue were raised, credibility would automatically go to the white man. It’s impossible to know how many inventions between the 1790 establishment of the patent office and the 1865 end of the Civil war were stolen from slaves. For one thing, in 1836, all the patents were being kept in Washington’s Blodget's Hotel temporarily while a new facility was being built, when a fire broke out, which is bad. There was a fire station next door, which is good, but it was winter and the firefighters’ leather hoses had cracked in the cold, which is bad. They tried to do a bucket brigade, but it wasn’t enough, and all 10k patents and 7,000 related patent models were lost. These are called X-patents not only because they’d been lost but because, before the fire, patents weren’t numbered, just their name and issue date, like a library without the Dewey decimal system. They were able to replace some patents by asking inventors for their copy, after which they were numbered for sure. As of 2004, about 2,800 of the X-patents have been recovered. The first patent issued to a black inventor was not one of them. That patent belonged to one Thomas Jennings, and you owe him a big ol’ thank you card if you’ve ever spilled food on your favorite fancy formalwear and had it *not been irrevocably ruined. Jennings invented a process called ‘dry scouring,’ a forerunner of modern dry cleaning. He patented the process in 1821, to wit he is widely believed to be the first black person in America to receive a patent, but it can’t really be proved or disproved on account of the fire. Whether he was first or not, Jennings was only able to do this because he was born free in New York City. According to The Inventive Spirit of African-Americans by Patricia Carter Sluby, Jennings started out as an apprentice to a prominent New York tailor before opening his own clothing shop in Lower Manhattan, a large and successful concern. He secured a patent for his “dry scouring” method of removing dirt and grease from clothing in 1821, or as the New York Gazette reported it, a method of “Dry Scouring Clothes, and Woolen Fabrics in general, so that they keep their original shape, and have the polish and appearance of new.” I’ll take eight! What was this revolutionary new method? No freaking clue. Because fire. But we do know Jennings kept his patent letter, signed by then Secretary of State and future president John Quincy Adams, in a gold frame over his bed. And that Jennings put much of his earnings from the invention towards the fight for abolition, funding a number of charities and legal aid societies, the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and Freedom’s Journal, the first black-owned newspaper in America. Dry-scouring put all of his children through school and they became successful in their careers and prominent in the abolition movement. His daughter Elizabeth, a schoolteacher, rose to national attention in 1854 when she boarded a whites-only horse-drawn streetcar in New York and refused to get off, like Rosa Parks 101 years before Rosa Parks, except she fought bodily the effort of the conductor to throw her off, hanging on to the window frame. A letter she wrote about the incident was published in several abolitionist papers, and her father hired a lawyer to fight the streetcar company. Amazingly, they won – again this was before the civil war, let alone civil rights. The judge ruled that it was unlawful to eject black people from public transportation so long as they were “sober, well behaved, and free from disease.” Their lawyer was a young Chester A. Arthur, who would later be the 21st president. [segue] review Henry Boyd’s story began like the others we’ve heard, but in Kentucky in 1802. He was apprenticed out to a cabinet maker, where he displayed a tremendous talent for carpentry. So proficient and hard-working was Boyd that he was allowed to take on other work of his own, a side hustle as we say these days, and earn his own money and Boyd eventually made enough to buy his freedom at age 18. At 24-years-old, a nearly-penniless Boyd moved to Cincinnati. Ohio *was a free state, but Cincinnati sat too close to slave state of Kentucky to be a welcoming city for blacks, and I’m sure a few Cincinnatians would say it’s too close to KY for their liking nowadays too. Our skilled carpenter Boyd couldn’t find anyone willing to hire him. One shop had considered hiring him, but all the white employees threatened to quit, so no joy there. Boyd finally found work on the riverfront, with the African Americans and Irish immigrants working as stevedores and laborers; Boyd himself was a janitor in a store. One day, when a white carpenter showed up too drunk to work, Boyd built a counter for the storekeeper. This impressed his boss so much that he contracted him for other construction projects. Through word of mouth, Boyd’s talent began to bring him some of the respect he deserved and a good amount of work. He diligently saved up to buy his brother and a sister out of bondage too and purchase his own woodshop. Not just a corner garage space; his workshop grew to spread across four buildings. This was where came up with his next big idea - a bedframe. Wait, it’s interesting, I promise. Everybody needs a bed and a bed needs a frame. The Boyd Bedstead was a sturdier, better designed bedframe that was an immediate success…that he couldn’t a patent for. But a white cabinetmaker named George Porter did. It is not known if Boyd was working with Porter and Porter was his white face for the patent office or if Porter ripped Boyd off. Either way, the Boyd bedstead became extremely popular, with prominent citizens and hotels clamoring to get them. The H. Boyd Company name was stamped on each one to set them apart from the knockoffs that such success inevitably breeds. Not only was his bedstead breaking new ground, but his shop of up to 50 employees was racially integrated. This social advance was, politely put, not popular. The factory was the target of arsonists and was burnt to the ground. Twice. Twice Boyd rebuilt, but after a third fire, no insurance company would cover him and in 1862 the doors closed for good. But don’t worry about Boyd. He’d saved enough to live out his retirement comfortably, but he wasn’t lounging around. Boyd had been active in the Underground Railroad and housed runaway slaves in a secret room. His...
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/22132322
info_outline
The African Queens (ep 182)
02/08/2022
The African Queens (ep 182)
Congrats to Richard Enriquez, who won week 1 of #moxiemillion, by sharing the show to help it reach 1 million downloads this month! Cleopatra-schmeopatra! Hear the stories of three queens of Africa who should also be household names. Starring the clever queen Moremi, the fierce queen Amanirenas, and the terrifying queen Ranavalona. Links to all the research resources are on the . 3:06 Moremi of Ife 10:54 Amanirena of Kush 23:00 Ranavalona I of Madagascar with your fellow Brainiacs. Reach out and touch Moxie on , , or Become a patron of the podcast arts! or . Or and . Music: , , Sponsors: , , Want to start a podcast or need a better podcast host? Get up to TWO months hosting for free from with coupon code "moxie." When King Karam of Zazzau, a Hausa city-state in what would become Nigeria, died in 1576, he successor has already been waiting to take the throne for 28 years. After being schooled in political and military matters and proving themselves a skilled warrior, they had been named ‘Magajiya’ or heir apparent at age 16. King Kurama’s favorite grandchild would eventually become Queen Aminatu. My name… History and folklore have a tendency to intertwine. This can happen especially when the history has been systematically eradicated. You’ll hear me mention or notice on your own a lot of gaps and uncertainty in today’s stories. The history of Africa is the least well-known or widespread of any continents. The cause for this is as sad as it is obvious. Europeans in Africa saw no great libraries or troves of history books, so they assumed the peoples of Africa had kept no history. In fact, their histories were kept orally, a system that worked out fine until some whitey, the blue-eyed devil, paddy-o, fay gray boy, honkey melon-farmers showed up and started kidnapping and killing people en masse. Victims of the Atlantic slave trade would be intentionally removed from their families and neighbords and mixed together with people from other communities. This meant a lack of common language, which was meant to stymie unrest and uprisings on New World plantations. It also meant that those who knew their history had no one else of their nation to pass it on to, as well as all the gaps created in the collective knowledge back home. But let’s start well before Columbus “discovered” an island with half a million people living on it. In the 12th century, life was nice for the Yoruba people in what is modern Nigeria, ruled by the beautiful and benevolent Queen Moremi Ajasoro, wife of Oranmiyan, the King of Ife-Ife, and mother to Oluorogbo. But there was one small problem, and it’s a big one. Their neighbors, the Igbo, literally Forest People, had a persistent habit of raiding their villages to loot, pillage, and kidnap people into slavery, either for their own use or to sell. This is *not the same as the Igbo ethnic group, and if my friend Phoenix is listening, did I say it right this time? The raiders were not only terrifying for their violence, but also their strange, alien-like appearance. So otherwordly were the Igbo that the Ife people thought they’d been sent by the gods as punishment. The Ifes offered sacrifices to the gods, but all for naught. The raids continued and the land was thrown into a state of panic. Not one to sit idly by while her people suffered, Moremi hatched a plan, but she was going to need help and a lot of it. She would allow herself to be taken prisoner by the Igbo so she could learn about them. But before she put herself in such a precarious position, Moremi went to the river Esimirin and begged the goddess who lived there to help her save her people. As the story goes, the river goddess said that she *would help, but only if Moremi would sacrifice that which was most precious and valuable to her. Moremi was a queen, to wit, rollin’ in dough, so she didn’t hesitate to agree. Whatever the river goddess wanted, surely she could spare it, and her people needed saving. During the next Igbo raid Moremi allowed herself to be captured. On account of her beauty, she was given to the King of the Igbos as a slave, but it was her keen intellect that allowed her to move up the ranks until she was made the anointed queen. No idea how long that took or how many more raids happened in the meantime. If you want to learn about a group of people, you need to infiltrate them and gain access to what they know. Moremi was not only among the Igbo, she was their queen. As spy-craft goes, that’s S-tier work. This was how she learned that the terrifying appearance of the raiders that had tormented her people was battle dress made from raffia palm and other grasses. It made them look monster-y and demoralized their victims with pante-wetting terror, but if you know anything about dry grass and vegetation, you know that those costumes were extremely flammable. The Ife didn’t need spears and weapons to protect themselves. All they needed was a bit of the old “How about a little fire, Scarecrow?” She probably picked up tactics and such-like as well, but nobody who’s written about her seems bothered to have written that down. Same with her escape from the Igbo and return to Ife-Ife, which I’m sure was harrowing and adventuresome. Either way, she returned to her people and said “You know those supernatural beings who’ve been pillaging and kidnapping us? Yeah, they’re just dudes and it turns out they’re also covered in kindling.” During the next Igbo raid, the Ife armed themselves with torches rather than weapons and were finally able to repel the invaders. [sfx cheer] One assumes the Igbo backed off after that. I mean, you didn’t see Michael Jackson doing any more Pepsi commercials. [sfx unhappy crowd] “Too soon”? It was 1984. Now that her people were safe, it was time to repay the river goddess for her help, so Moremi assembled a flock of cattle and other livestock, as well as cowrie shells and other valuables, a veritable lifetime’s fortune, which she was glad to give up now. But that wasn’t what the goddess wanted, not even close. As anyone who’s ever heard a fairy tale can probably guess, the goddess wanted something much more valuable, more precious than all the commodities even a queen had to offer. The river goddess demanded the life of Moremi’s only son, Ela Oluorogbo. To go back on her word would be to tempt an even worse fate for the Ife, so Moremi had no choice but to sacrifice Ela Oluorogbo to the river. The Ifes wept to see this and vowed to their queen that they would all be her sons and daughters forever to repay and console her. To this day, the Yoruba people mourn with her and hold her in the highest esteem of any women in the Kingdom. According to sources, anyway. If, like my friend Phoenix, you have family from that region and no better, not only do I not mind being corrected, I appreciate and even enjoy it, because it means I learned something. You can always slide into my DM [soc med]. Queen Moremi is recognised by the Yoruba people because of this bravery and celebrated with the Edi Festival as well as with a 42ft/13m statue, popularly known as the "Queen Moremi Statue of Liberty," which is the tallest statue in Nigeria, and the fourth tallest in Africa. [segue] While the word “Nubian” is used broadly by many and incorrectly by most of those to refer to all things African or African-American, it refers to a specific region and its people. In what is today Sudan, south of Egypt along the Nile, was the kingdom of Kush. I’ll wait while the stoners giggle. By the way, if you work in the cannabis or CBD industry, I’d love to talk to you about doing voiceovers for your business. My NPR voice, as we call it around the house, is just dripping with credibility. The Kushites’ northern neighbors, the Egyptians, referred to Nubia as, “Ta-Seti” which means the “Land of Bows,” in honor of the Nubian hunters’ and warriors’ prowess as archers. Archery was not limited to men, an egalitarianism that gave rise to a number of women Nubian warriors and queens, the most famous of whom was Queen Amanirenas of Nubia, conqueror of the Romans. Since 1071 BC, the peoples of East Africa had established a small realm along the Nile River valley south of Egypt known as the Kingdom of Kush. Prior to their autonomy, the peoples of this region had been living under foreign occupation since around 1550 BC when they were absorbed by the Egyptian New Kingdom. It was during that period that they adopted many aspects of Egyptian culture. It was only during the catastrophic Bronze Age collapse that the Kushites were able to reassert their independence. By 754 BC, the Kushites actually managed to conquer their former overlords in the campaigns of King Piye and ruled them as the Pharaoh of the “Twenty-Fifth Dynasty.” they were eventually pushed out of Egypt by the Assyrians by 674 BC, but still maintained independent rule over the region of Nubia. For many centuries, this small autonomous kingdom had successfully coexisted alongside neighboring foreign dynasties that had been occupying the provincial territories of Egypt, such as the Achaemenid Persians and the Greeks of the Ptolemaic Dynasty. It was at the end of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, after the death of Cleopatra VII, the one we think of as Cleoptra, that things started to get a little hinky. When the Roman Empire rose in prominence and annexed the territories of the House of Ptolemy by 30 BC, the Prefect, or appointed provincial governor for Egypt, Cornelius Gallus, attempted to make further incursions into the territories south of Egypt and impose taxation on the Kushites. The Kushites said, collectively and officially, yeah, no. They launched counter-attack raids against Roman settlements in southern Egypt in 27 BC The armies were led by the ruling Kushite monarchs at the time King Teriteqas and Queen (or Candace, meaning great woman) Amanirenas. They began the campaign by launching [more] successful raids on Roman settlements Shortly after the war began, King Teriteqas was killed in battle, and was succeeded by his son Prince Akinidad, but Amanirenas was really in charge as queen regent. In 24 BC, the Kushites launched another round of invasions into Roman Egypt after the new Prefect of Egypt Aelius Gallus was ordered by Emperor Augustus to launch an expedition into the province of Arabia Felix (now part of modern-day Yemen) against the Arabic Kingdom of Saba. According to Strabo, the Kushites “sacked Aswan with an army of 30,000 men and destroyed imperial statues at the city of Philae.” The Greek historian Strabo refers to Amanirenas as the “fierce one-eyed queen Candace.” Oh yeah, did I forget to mention that? Sorry, buried the lede there. Amanirenas didn’t lead her soldiers from the throne room, war room, or even a tent camp well behind the lines. She was in the vanguard, properly leading as leaders these days can’t be asked to. Maybe if we required all the kings, presidents, prime ministers, dictators and their generals fight on the front lines with their sole heir beside them, things would be a little more chill up in this bish. Amanirenas lost her eye to a nameless Roman soldier and I’m ready and willing to assume she immediately slew him in a single epic, slow-motion swing of her short-sword. The Kushites had also met and engaged a Roman detachment outside the city of Syene. The battle was another astounding victory for the Kushites, but these successes would be short-lived That same year, in a battle at Dakka, Prince Akinidad fell, just as his father had, and the Kushites fell back, but took with them all of the riches and slaves they had acquired. The expedition of Aelius Gallus proved disastrous, as the movement of the army depended on a guide named Syllaeus, who deliberately misdirected them, costing them months of marching. When they finally reached the capital city of Ma’rib, Sabean, Gallus’ siege lasted only a week before he was forced to withdraw due to a combination of disease, the harsh desert climate, and the over-extension of supply lines. That’s basically the trifecta of reasons behind a larger army’s retreat. The Roman navy did better, occupying and then destroying the port of Eudaemon, thus securing the naval merchant trade route to India through the Red Sea, which was no small yams. Having failed utterly at bringing the Kushite’s to heel, Gallus lost his Prefect job to Publius Petronius, who then took his legions and marched directly into Kushite territory, looting and pillaging villages and towns before finally reaching the capital of Napata in 23 BC. The Kushites attempted to get their own back with a siege of Primis, but Petronius broke through. It was at this point that the Kushites sued for peace. You might be thinking that Rome had Kush on the back foot and this was a desperate surrender to save their skins. Well you can put that out of your mind right now. The Kushites *did send negotiators to Augustus in 21 BC and a peace treaty *was negotiated, but it was remarkably very favorable to the Kushites. Rome would pull its soldiers from the southern region called the Thirty-Mile Strip, including the city of Primis, and the Kushites were exempt from paying tribute. More importantly, they had managed to secure their autonomy and remain free from Roman occupation. When have you ever heard of Rome, or any conquering army, giving terms like that? That leads historians and armchair historians alike, myself included, to conclude that Rome was shaking in their sandals at the prospect of having to continue to fight Amanirena and her warriors on their home turf. It was worth giving up whole cities and forgoing tribute to stop being beaten by them. Although the Kushites had managed to retain their independence, Rome’s monopoly on Mediterranean trade plus their newly established trade route to India, greatly diminished Kush’s economic influence during the 1st and 2nd century CE. The rising Kingdom of Axum in Ethiopia managed to push the Kushites out of the Red Sea trade which led to even further decline that resulted in the Axumites invading the kingdom and sacking Meroë around 350 AD and that was pretty much that for the kingdom of Kush. But I’ve saved my favorite part of Amanirenas’ story for last: the souvenir. When Kush troops moved through an area that had already been conquered by Rome, the warriors would destroy anything Roman that they found, chiefly buildings and statues. With Augustus being emperor, there were a lot of statues of him about and the Kushites said “get rekt, son” to every last one of them. The head of one bronze statue was taken back to Meroe, where it was discovered during an archeological dig in 1912, positioned directly below the feet of a Kushite monarch on a wall mural. Apart from the sick burn, the head was also significant for being the only head of a statue of Augustus ever found that still had the bright white inlays for the eyes, so when you look at it, link in the show notes, Augustus looks like he’s permanently, perpetually surprised to have been beaten by a widowed queen with one eye. MIDROLL While I’d happily humor debate, especially over a pint and a basket of fries, I’ll stake my position Queen Ranavalona I of Madagascar is the bloodiest queen in world history. People should think of her, not Lady MacBeth or Elizabeth Bathory, when they need an icon for ‘woman with blood on her hands.’ From the start of her reign, she tortured and killed her rivals and presided over the untold suffering of her own people. In those 33 years, while also successfully repelling European attempts to dominate the country, her orders reduced the population of Madagascar by half, or *more. Born with a commoner with the name Rabodoandrianampoinimerina in 1778, Princess Ranavalona found upward mobility quickly when her father helped foil an assassination plot being assembled by the king’s uncle. As a reward, King Andrianampoinimerina (y’all should see these names) betrothed Ranavalona to his son and heir Prince Ra and declared that any child from this union would be first in the line of succession after Radama. Talk about a glow-up. Ranavalona wasn’t the only wife, nor was she the favorite, though at least she was the first, and it probably didn’t help their relationship when Radama became king and immediately executed all potential rivals, as was the custom, which included some of Ranavalona’s relatives. When Radama died in 1828, possibly of syphilis, possibly of poison, having not managed to get one child from his dozen wives, according to local custom, the rightful heir was Rakotobe, the eldest son of Radama's eldest sister. Rakatobe was considered to be intelligent, as he was the first people to have studied at the first school established by the London mission, which also made him sympathetic to the ambitions and efforts of the European missionaries and businessmen who sought to establish themselves on the island. R was still a threat, though, as any child she bore would be the heir before Rakatobe, so she had to go. The military supported R and helped to secure her place on the throne. Rakatobe, his family, and supporters were put to death, the men with spears and the women starved in prison. R then ceremonially bathed in the blood of a ceremonial bull. For anyone who wants a sense of how the rest of this story is going to go, that sets the tone pretty accurately. At her coronation, she gave a warning to those who would seek to undermine her authority. “Never say ‘she is only a feeble and ignorant woman, how can she rule such a vast empire?’ I will rule here to the good fortune of my people and the glory of my name, I will worship no gods, but those of my ancestors, the ocean shall be the boundary of my realm, and I will not cede the thickness of one hair of my realm.” So Rana woke up this morning and chose violence, huh? The late king had attempted to modernize the military by building modern forts and cribbing Napoleonic tactics. To achieve this, he’d signed treaties with the British and French for supplies and arms, as well as allowing Christian missions to be built. In turn, the European powers sought to establish dominance over the nation, which is information I will find under W for ‘Who could ever have foreseen that comma sarcastic.’ From the very beginning of her reign, Rona walked that back,ending treaties with the British and restricting the activities of the missions, just little stuff like banning the teaching of Christianity in the missionary schools. Three years into her reign, King Charles the 10th of France ordered the invasion of Madagascar, but the malaria and political strife back home forced them to pack it in, a big check in Rana’s win column. But just for good measure, she ordered the heads of the dead French soldiers to be placed on spikes along the...
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/22041809
info_outline
Gods and Monkeys (ep. 181)
02/01/2022
Gods and Monkeys (ep. 181)
With half the world's continents being home to a panoply of monkey species, it's no wonder the people of Center & South America, Asia, and Africa hold monkeys in high esteems as mythological and religious figures. Hear about Hanuman, howlers, Hapi, and a helluva lot more (and yes, Sun Wukong, obviously). Links to all the research resources are on the . 04:45 Japan: Sarugami 09:57 Central/South America: howler monkey god 13:50 Africa: Gbekre Hapi, Babi 17:35 India: Hanuman 27:00 China: Sun Wukong with your fellow Brainiacs. Reach out and touch Moxie on , , or Become a patron of the podcast arts! or . Or and . Music: , , , and Sponsors: , Want to start a podcast or need a better podcast host? Get up to TWO months hosting for free from with coupon code "moxie." The Kerkopes were sons of the Titan Okeanos (Oceanus) by Theia, a daughter of the Aithiopian (Ethiopian) king Memnon. They were proverbial as liars, cheats, and accomplished knaves. They once stole Heracles' weapons, during the time he was the penitent servant of Omphale. He punished them by tying them to a pole he slung over his shoulder with their faces pointing downwards, the only way they appear on Greek vases. The sight of Heracles' dark-tanned butt set them all to laughing, so that Heracles let them go free. But it’s all fun and games until you tick off Zeus. My name’s… You know what I love about humans? The contrary coincidence that we are as complimentary as we are [contrary]. In normal person speak, that is to say, we’re as alike as we are different. And how is that manifesting in your earballs today? Monkey gods! My nerd brethren will be extra excited to know it’s not just Sun Wu Kong. Monkeys inhabit the tropical rainforests of Africa, Central America, South America and Asia, and so the peoples of Africa, Central America, South America and Asia have monkeys in their faiths and folklores. Monkey mythology is an important part of both Hindu / Buddhist lore (India) and Zodiac / Taoist / Buddhist lore (China). In the various tales... the monkey is portrayed initially as foolish, vain, and mischievous. Yet, in each tradition, the monkey learns valuable lessons along the way, makes changes, and eventually gains redemption. The monkey thus embodies the themes of repentance, responsibility, devotion, and the promise of salvation to all who sincerely seek it. Monkey lore in India dates to at least 500 BCE and the monkey god Hanuman. Revered for his bravery, strength, and dedication to justice, he is connected to the sun, the wind, and thunder. Monkeys in general are revered in several parts of India. Monkey lore in China predates Buddhism, for the Monkey appears in the Chinese Zodiacal beliefs, believed by scholars to date to around 1100 BCE. In some parts of China, the Monkey is the "Great Sage Equal to Heaven." In Chinese mythology, the monkey god was the afore-mentioned Sun-Wukong, the Monkey King and trickster god who stars in the 16th-century book Journey To The West. Sun-Wukong is the basis for Goku in Dragonball, only one of the biggest anime franchises in the world. Monkey lore in Japan took hold after the arrival of Buddhism in the mid-6th century CE and the monkey was alternately a messenger to the gods or a physical manifestation of a god. The Monkey was thought to protect against demons as well as disease and is a patron of fertility, safe childbirth, and harmonious marriages. But not all monkeys, or thing that looked like monkeys, were your friend, though I would probably still try to pet it, regardless because -let’s face it- I’m going to die trying to pet something I should have (fingers crossed). If you find yourself in the land of the rising sun, once the world reopens for safe travel, obviously, you’ll want to keep a keen eye out for sarugami. According to folklorist Yanagita Kunio, sarugami are a prime example of “fallen” gods—spirits once revered as gods, but who have since been forgotten. I would have called them forsaken gods, which is twice as accurate and five times as metal. These beliefs never entirely vanish, though, and such spirits often remain as degenerate versions of their former selves, i.e. yōkai or demon. Sarugami look just like the wild monkeys, only bigger and more vicious, a subtle distinction. They can speak, and sometimes they are seen wearing human clothes as well, two less subtle distinctions. Long ago, before Buddhism arrived, monkeys were worshiped as gods in parts of Japan. The southern part of Lake Biwa in modern-day Shiga Prefecture was an important center of monkey worship, based at Hiyoshi Taisha. Monkeys were seen as messengers and servants of the sun, in part because they become most active at sunrise and sunset. Because of this, monkey worship was popular among farmers, who also awoke and retired with the sun. Over the centuries, as farming technology improved, people became less reliant on subsistence farming. More and more people took up professions other than farming. As a result, monkey worship began to fade away, and the monkey gods were forgotten. Today, monkeys are viewed as pests by farmers, as they dig up crops, steal food from gardens, and sometimes even attack pets and small children. Sarugami behave for the most part like wild monkeys. They live in the mountains and tend to stay away from human-inhabited areas. Buuut, when sarugami does interact with humans, it almost always ends in violence. Most legends follow a pattern: a sarugami kidnaps a young village woman and heroes are called upon to go out into the wilderness, kill the monster and save the girl. This puts sarugami on the same keel as trolls and brainless monsters, quite a demotion indeed. It’s not all bad for the sarugami, though. While the early monkey cults had vanished, sarugami worship continued throughout the middle ages in esoteric religions such as Kōshin. In Koshin, monkeys came to be viewed as servants of the mountain deities, or as mountain deities themselves, acting as intermediaries between the world we live in and the heavens. The famous three wise monkey statues—mizaru, kikazaru, and iwazaru (“see no evil, hear no evil, say no evil”)—come from Kōshin and are a prime example of sarugami worship. Three rather famous monkeys hail from the land of the rising sun, usually referred to as "Speak No Evil, Hear No Evil, See No Evil." By the time of Tokugawa/Edo period, from 1603 to 1867, the three monkeys were portrayed in Buddhist sculptures. The message is that we should protect ourselves by not letting evil enter our sight, not allowing evil words to enter our hearing, and finally to not speak and engage in evil words and thoughts, but a lot of folks, especially in the West, take it to mean to ignore or turn a blind eye to something that’s wrong. Legend has it, long ago the Buddha appeared at Hiyoshi Taisha, a Shinto shrine located in the city of Ōtsu, Shiga Prefecture, about the same time a large gathering of monkeys arrived in the area. The collective noun for a group of monkeys is a troop, btw, or a tribe, or because we have the option, a carload and, yes, a barrel. You can say a barrel of monkeys. So the Buddha took the form of a monkey, and foretold the fortunes of the faithful worshipers at Hiyoshi Taisha. This appearance had been foreseen thousands of years prior by Cang Jie, the legendary inventor of Chinese writing, in the neighborhood of 2650 BCE. Of course, the legend also says Legend has it that he had four eyes, and that when he invented the characters, the deities and ghosts cried and the sky rained millet. When Cang Jei invented the word for god (神), [sfx forvo] he constructed it out of characters meaning indicate (示) [sfx] and monkey (申) [sfx] to foretell this event. In other words, “monkey indicates god.” Isn’t that an intersting etymology? To reference a Twitter trend, red flag emoji, red flag emoji, red flag emoji. It’s not that words *never have good backstories like that; it’s that words *almost never have coold backstories. Also, if someone tells you a common word is actually an anagram, tell ‘em I said “Bless your heart,” because that’s even more rare. In the Americas, the Mayans of Guatemala and Mexico worshiped a howler monkey god, or maybe a pair of twin gods, depending on the story, patron of the arts; music, scribes and sculptors. The Howler Monkey also corresponds to knowledge of history and rituals, as well as prophecy. There is a fabled lost "Ciudad Blanca" or white city in Honduras is supposedly dedicated to the Monkey God. Pre-Columbian Toltec and Maya texts call it "The ancient place where the aurora originates." In Aztec mythology of Mexico, the monkey was connected to the sun, and was guarded by Cochipilli, the god of flowers, fertility, and fun! My kinda Among the Classic Mayas, the howler monkey god was a major deity of the arts, both visual and musical. Two monkey gods or two versions of the same god, I’m not sure, have been depicted on classical vases in the act of writing books and sculpting busts. This may be a depiction of a creation story, with the book containing the birth signs and the head the life principle or 'soul.' Copán in western Honduras in particular is famous for its representations of Howler Monkey Gods. Spanish friar Bartolomé de las Casas stated that in the region of Alta Verapaz, the two monkeys were two of the thirteen sons of the upper god, and were celebrated as cosmogonic creator deities. Among the Quiché Mayas in the midwestern highlands, they were held in somewhat less esteem. They’d been turned into monkeys after getting in a scrap with their half-brothers, the Maya Hero Twins, who had top billing as far as the mythos was concerned. MIDROLL While African-Americans have had to deal with “monkey” as an epithet, peoples in Africa traditionally held primates in high esteem. The root of the word Primate, is Prime, which means first, chief, excellent, and best. Of all the wild things in the wild woods, monkeys and apes were seen as the most intelligent animals, and so they became symbols of wisdom. That’s why Rafiki in “The Lion King” is a baboon, based on the baboon depiction of the god of wisdom Djehuti, Tehuti, or Thoth. Yes, Thoth is usually depicted with the head of an Ibis bird, such as on the fabulous Crash Course Mythology series, but the baboon form was popular too. In the Ivory Coast, The role of Monkeys as guardians of the crossroads or gateways to the Ancestors can also be found in the God Ghekre or Gbekre of the Baule people of the Ivory Coast. Gbekre or Mbotumbo is both judge of hell and helper of the living against their enemies. Skillfully-carved wooden statues of Ghekre were common and combined animal and human traits. Over in the old kingdom, you hope it will be a while before you meet the Egyptian monkey god Hapi. Not to be confused with another Egyptian god named Hapi, who was ostensibly a human figure expressing both male and female characteristics. One of the four sons of Horus, Hapi is depicted protecting the throne of Osiris in the Underworld. He is commonly depicted with the head of a hamadryas baboon, and it’s Hapi’s job to protect the lungs of deceased persons being mummified, which is why the canopic jar the holds the lungs is often topped with a a hamadryas baboon head motif lid. When embalming practices changed in the Third Intermediate Period about the 3k years ago, the mummified organs were placed back inside the body, so an amulet of Hapi would be added to the mix to still invoke his protection. When his image appears on the side of a coffin, he is usually aligned with the side intended to face north. Lung-loving Hapi wasn’t the only baboon about in ancient Egypt, but he was definitely the nicer of the two. The other tended to be a little…. murdery….and a bit problematic. Babi ‘bull (i.e. dominant male) of the baboons’ lives on human entrails, which is not outlandish for a baboon, as they are omnivores with tremendous fangs and a well-earned reputation for carnivoration. He also kills all humans on sight, so be sure you know the right prayers and spells to protect yourself, especially after death. Your heart will be weighed against a feather in the Hall of the Two Truths to see if you can get a seat upgrade to paradise. To his credit, though, Babi can use his immense power to ward off dangers like snakes and control turbulent waters, so, like the rest of us, a mixed bag. Baboons also have libidos turned up to 11, so send the kids out of the room now. Babi was considered the god of virility of the dead. One spell in a funerary text identifies the deceased person's phallus with Babi, ensuring that the deceased will be able to get down, make love in the afterlife. He was usually portrayed with an erection, and that erection is also the bolt of the gate between the night and day *and the mast of the ferry which conveyed the righteous to the Field of Reeds to chill with Osiris. Why, I cannot say and do not wish to Google. There’s lots of good googling if you look up Hanuman, the Hindu primate deity. Hanuman, depicted as a bipedal monkey with a red face, is worshipped both in his own shrines and as a secondary figure in temples to Rama. You’ll know if you’re at a Hanuman-exclusive temple, because it will be absolutely alive with monkeys. You can’t mistreat a monkey in or around a temple of the monkey god, which the monkeys figured out centuries ago. Hanuman was the child of the wind god and a nymph. As a little god-ling, he tried to fly up and grab the sun, which he mistook for a fruit. The king of the gods Indra struck Hanuman with a thunderbolt on the jaw, the word for which is hanu, hence his name. Unable or unwilling to behave, Hanuman was cursed by powerful sages to forget his magic powers, cool powers like flight and the ability to become massively large at will, until he was reminded of them. Hanuman led the monkeys to help Rama, an incarnation of Vishnu, recover his wife from the demon king of Lanka, which is surprisingly *not modern-day Sri Lanka. Jambavan, the king of the bears, reminded Hanuman of his powers, which allowed him to cross the water demoness-filled strait between India and Lanka in one leap. The Lankans discovered Hanuman and set his tail on fire, but he used that fire to burn Lanka to the ground. He then flew to the Himalayas and returned with enough medicinal herbs to tend to all the wounded in Rama’s army. For his service to Rama, Hanuman is upheld as a model for all human devotion. Hanuman is also a popular figure among Buddhists in most of Asia, with temples and even whole districts of towns bearing his name. Like a game of telephone, the farther you get from India, the more Hanuman’s story changes. For example, the original Sanskirt telling portrays him as effortlessly chaste, whereas he has wives and children in other traditions. And if his exploits sounded a tiny drill bit familiar, you won’t be surprised to know that he has been identified as the inspiration for the monkey hero Sun Wu Kong of the great Chinese poem Xiyouji “Journey to the West,” and Sun Wo Kong is the inspiration for Sun Goku in Dragonball, so in a way, Dragonball is based on a Hindu god. There is a wrinkle in our tale of Hanuman, and that’s actual monkeys. Monkeys are wild in India, like deer, racoons, and pigeons. You might rightly surmise by the animals I’ve grouped them with that monkeys are routinely pests, and what pest they are. Think about how clever a racoon is, then make it an acrobat who can understand a train schedule. In Delhi, rhesus macaques have become a menace. Government buildings are practically under siege. Macaques use Delhi’s tree-lined streets to swing between the buildings, damaging power lines in the process. If you’re walking around outside with food, you can almost expect to have a fight on your hands. And you thought seagulls at the beach were bad. Being inside is no safe bet either. The macaques like to enter offices through open windows and destroy paperwork and generally being chaos Muppets. There are an estimated 40,000 monkeys living in Delhi. That is a pre-covid number, so it wouldn’t surprise me if the macaques have been making hay while the sun shines. But then I suppose you have to factor how dependent they are on robbing humans for food, in which case their numbers may have gone down during proper lock-down, though there would have been a terrifying period of too many monkeys and not enough pack lunches. Many solutions to keep monkey and man separate have been tried and many solutions have failed. For a time, the city employed a crack squadron of the larger black-faced langur monkeys to scare away the macaques. It worked a treat, but the unit was disbanded after animal rights activists protested against keeping the langurs captive. Thankfully for the workers in the area, there is no such concern for the three dozen men who are hired to pretend to be langurs. Before you form the image in your mind, no, they’re not wearing costumes, but I would pay money to see that. They mimic the langurs’ barks and howls to scare the macaques away. Unfortunately, the monkeys return as soon as the primate-impressionists leave. One complication, which you see in urban animal control the world over, is that people feed the macaques. They are associated with a god, after all. The fact that feeding the macaques is against the guidelines passed by Parliament doesn’t seem to enter into it. You also can’t work on the monkey problem on Tuesdays. That’s the day Hanuman is worshipped, so all monkeys get a free pass, and a free meal, every week. So what can be done? In a few words, not much. The government warns citizens not to make eye contact with the monkeys, as they interpret it as threatening, and avoid getting between a mother and child. If you didn’t go looking for trouble but it found you anyway, the official circular recommends: “Do not ever hit any monkey. Keep hitting the ground with a big stick to make [the] monkey leave.” Bonus fact: In 2014, the government of India found that Hanuman had been issued a biometric ID card. The card lists a mobile phone number and an address in the western state of Rajasthan. The picture looks like it’s from a painting and it’s not clear whose iris scan and fingerprints were associated with the card. MIDROLL 2 Okay, okay, we’re finally going to talk about the monkey in the room. I saved the best for last, the first name that would come to many minds if you asked them to name a monkey god, though he’s not really a god, he’s just incredibly powerful, or OP as the kids say, the one, the only, the triple-immortal monkey king Sun Wukong. [sfx wrestler walk-on music] Sun Wukong is the main and most enduring character from the 500 year old novel, Journey to the West. The 1900 page book about the 36000 mile journey starts with Sun Wukong’s origin story, then sees him gather a five-man band --a pig...
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/21954854
info_outline
Cons, Scams, and Flim-Flams with Pretend (ep. 180)
01/25/2022
Cons, Scams, and Flim-Flams with Pretend (ep. 180)
Javier Leiva from did a podcast with me!!!! Like what you hear? Become a for as little as $2 a month! Or or . We teach each other about: 03:10 a pig in a poke 06:30 salting a mine 10:00 melon drop 14:50 vanity awards 21:55 Baltimore stock-broker 25:00 fake casting agents Plus learn the three most interesting things about me! with your fellow Brainiacs. Reach out and touch Moxie on , , or Sponsors: , Pig in a Poke (Cat in a bag) Have you ever heard the expression “a pig in a poke” or “don’t let the cat out of the bag?” You might be surprised at the origins of this cliche. A pig in a poke is a thing that is bought without first being inspected, and thus of unknown authenticity or quality. The idiom is attested in 1555 in the writings of John Haywood: I wyll neuer bye the pyg in the poke, Thers many a foule pyg in a feyre cloke. A "poke," I should explain, is a bag, so you can’t actually see the pig. How it would work… But the piglet would often turn out to be a bundle of rags or some inanimate object that gve the huckster away, so they shifted tack to stuffing stray cats in the poke so there were be movement. When the buyer opened the bag after the con man has absconded with their money, they would let hte cat out of the bag, which is where we get that expression which means to reveal a secret, though it’s usually used in a positive context. Idioms in other cultures: Italian comprare a scatola chiusa to buy in a sealed box Catalan Donar/Prendre gat per llebre to give/to take cat instead of hare Chinese 隔山买老牛 buy a cow over there in another mountain Maltese xtara l-ħut fil-baħar to buy fish in the sea Salting Salting a gold mine How do you make a worthless mine a little more valuable? Take a shotgun, stuff it with gold dust, blast the walls, and bedazzle it with gold. That's precisely what some Mine owners would do to turn a profit. But I can imagine that this confidence trick can only last for so long. Some buyers would ask to blast the mine before the sale's closing. The huckster seller would sometimes stuff gold in the stick of dynamite. After the explosion, the mine shimmered with gold. — Source 1871 was the year of the Great Diamond Hoax. Two cousins named Philip Arnold and John Slack returned to San Francisco with a bag full of diamonds. As a result, salivating investors wanted to know where they found the gems. So then, the cousins led the group of investors on a four-day goose chase through the wilderness until they finally arrived at a vast field with brilliant gems. Cha-ching! But when geologists studied the diamonds, they quickly discovered that this diamond-filled field was an elaborate con. It turns out the cousins purchased chat diamonds for about $35,000 and scattered them around the ground. Salting the tip jar Have you ever noticed the jar full of money at your favorite coffee shop or on the bar counter? Do you feel like a jerk when you don't drop in a few dollars or coins? This technique of "salting the tip jar" works almost every time. Psychologists call it "social proof." It turns out that humans want to mimic what other people do. For example, when someone claps, others clap too. And you even reluctantly stand during "the wave" at a baseball game. Social proof is used in advertising all the time. Nine out of ten dentists can't be wrong, right? Melon Drop Melon drop The mechanics of the melon drop scam are pretty simple, but it does require one specific thing: foreign tourists, specifically Japanese ones. This is because melons in Japan tend to be very expensive, sometimes costing upward of $60 USD, far more pricey than they are in the States. Presumably in the days before the internet put the sum of all human information in our pockets, hustling New York con men decided they could use this information to their advantage by pulling a fast one on Japanese visitors. According to Ask Men, the scam works like this: First, acquire a watermelon for the low price of a couple bucks here in the U.S. of A. Step two, carry the melon around until you find your mark. Then, bump into them, drop the watermelon, so it shatters, blame them for the collision, and finally demand they pay up to the exorbitant tune of up to $100 to compensate you for your broken, "expensive" produce. Although skeptics may say the melon drop scam might be a myth, at least some version of this scam is still alive and well in New York City. According to some Reddit users, NYC scammers are still pulling off the melon drop hustle, only the updated version involves expensive booze and targets anyone, not just foreign tourists. But the mechanics are pretty much the same. "That still happens in some parts of NYC with expensive liquor like Hennessy, for example. They bump into you and drop and break a bottle with water and try to guilt you into paying them back. You know when you're in the right or wrong. If you're in the right, just walk away fast," advised one Reddit user. Others shared stories of similar encounters, while still more people said they had experienced the same basic scam, only with expensive sunglasses instead of alcohol or fruit. So although some may say the melon drop is just a New York City myth, like the alligators in the sewers or the mole people, others are well aware that it is best to keep an eye out for any shifty looking strangers carrying fruit or fancy-looking bottles. Baltimore stockbroker / Psychic Sports Picks The Baltimore stockbroker scam relies on mass-mailing or emailing. The scammer begins with a large pool of marks, numbering ideally a power of two such as 1024. The scammer divides the pool into two halves, and sends all the members of each half a prediction about the future outcome of an event with a binary outcome (such as a stock price rising or falling, or the win/loss outcome of a sporting event). One half receives a prediction that the stock price will rise (or a team will win, etc.), and the other half receives the opposite prediction. After the event occurs, the scammer repeats the process with the group that received a correct prediction, again dividing the group in half and sending each half new predictions. After several iterations, the "surviving" group of marks has received a remarkable sequence of correct predictions, whereupon the scammer then offers these marks another prediction, this time for a fee. The next prediction is, of course, no better than a random guess, but the previous record of success makes it seem to the mark to be a prediction worth great value. For gambling propositions with more than two outcomes, for example in horse racing, the scammer begins with a pool of marks with number equal to a power of the number of outcomes. The scam relies on selection bias (the selection of individuals, groups, or data for analysis in such a way that proper randomization is not achieved, thereby failing to ensure that the sample obtained is representative of the population intended to be analyzed), and more specifically survivorship bias (concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not) and is similar to publication bias (a type of bias that occurs in published academic research. It occurs when the outcome of an experiment or research study influences the decision whether to publish or otherwise distribute it). This particular scam received its name as a result of Frank Deford's book "Cut N' Run", where a stockbroker in Baltimore goes to several different bars and predicts the outcome of the upcoming Johnny Unitas-era Baltimore Colts' next game. Several authors mention the scam: Daniel C. Dennett in Elbow Room (where he calls it the touting pyramid); David Hand in The Improbability Principle; and Jordan Ellenberg in How Not to Be Wrong. Ellenberg reports often hearing of the scam told as an illustrative parable, but he could not find a real-world example of anyone carrying it out as an actual scam. The closest he found was when illusionist Derren Brown presented it in his television special The System in 2008. Brown's intent was merely to convince his mark that he had a foolproof horse race betting system rather than to scam the mark out of money. However, Ellenberg goes on to describe how investment firms do something similar by starting many in-house investment funds, and closing the funds that show the lowest returns before offering the surviving funds (with their record of high returns) for sale to the public. The selection bias inherent in the surviving funds makes them unlikely to sustain their previous high returns. Vanity publications and awards schemes Do you want to be famous and successful? It's easy. All you have to do is hand over your money. But unfortunately, scammers and con artists have cooked up schemes to pray on your vanity and need for acceptance and recognition throughout history. Vanity press Trying to get your book published can seem impossible. But there's a sure-fire way of getting your book out there. Scammers know that desperate writers will do almost anything to get their books printed. Vanity publishers make their money from publishers, not readers purchasing books. Therefore, they have no financial interest in promoting the book, leaving the author with a financial burden. 2022 Golden Globes controversy Vanity awards are pay-to-play awards given to the highest bidder. Did you know that NBC dropped the Golden Globes broadcast in 2022? Instead, the awards results were posted live on Twitter. Not only is the Hollywood Foreign Press Association accused of not having a single black voter, but they're also accused of taking bribes from studios, production companies, and publicists. Winning a Golden Globe award can equate millions of dollars in box office earnings and elevate an actor's career. Since the scandal broke out, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced new rules and added new members of color. — source Fake casting agent scam A well-connected casting director or agent can instantly make you a celebrity. However, one thing a casting agent will never do is charge you. Most casting agents make money only when you do—typically about 10%. A casting agent will never guarantee work, they make you take their classes, and they don't really care if you have prior modeling or acting experience. Finally, you should never feel rushed or pressured into doing something you don't feel comfortable with. Does your child want to be a Disney Channel Star? There is no fast track to Hollywood. If you hear or watch an ad that says, "Does your child want to be a Disney Channel Star? Auditions are being held this weekend. Call some number and book your slot."— It's a scam. Most of these so-called agencies charge an exorbitant amount of money and have no affiliation with Disney or Nickelodeon.
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/21884285
info_outline
Voice Over The Moon, pt 2 (ep 179
01/18/2022
Voice Over The Moon, pt 2 (ep 179
How'd it go for the first BBC announcer with an accent? How much work can you get if you "make it" in voiceover? How much did the woman behind Siri make? And what's a pencil got to do with any of this? All this and more in part 2!
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/21803150
info_outline
Voice Over the Moon, vol. 1 (ep. 178)
01/11/2022
Voice Over the Moon, vol. 1 (ep. 178)
From a rogue radio operator, to Bugs Bunny, to the lady who recorded all the time and temperature message for the phone company, we look at some history and notable names in voicework (which is what I do for a living, hire me!)
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/21736877
info_outline
Featuring: Everything Everywhere Daily
01/07/2022
Featuring: Everything Everywhere Daily
I thought you might also like the show Everything Everywhere Daily. It's like YBOF, but shorter and more often.
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/21708575
info_outline
Very New Year (ep. 177)
01/04/2022
Very New Year (ep. 177)
Happy new year! Or is it? It depends on which calendar you're using.
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/21670985
info_outline
The Christmas Truce
12/24/2021
The Christmas Truce
Happy holidays to all my beautiful Brainiacs! Enjoy this bonus mini episode on a bit of history that, while not obscure, should be better-known (and taken to heart) by more people -- the WWI Christmas Truce.
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/21595214
info_outline
Worst. Christmas Song. Ever. (ep. 176)
12/21/2021
Worst. Christmas Song. Ever. (ep. 176)
Voted on by our Patreon, we look at the what, how, and for-gods-sake-why of some of those most hated holiday songs!
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/21533492
info_outline
Take That to the Bank (ep. 175)
12/14/2021
Take That to the Bank (ep. 175)
Strategic reserves -- everything from Canadian maple syrup to seeds -- are intended to stabilize prices or to help us survive, in both the short and long term. So what are we keeping and why? (and what happens if someone steals it?!)
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/21458180
info_outline
From Panto to Python (do-over, ep. 174)
12/07/2021
From Panto to Python (do-over, ep. 174)
From music hall to Red Dwarf, pantomime to Absolutely Fabulous, we look at the history of British comedy, the names, shows, and historical events that made it what it is today.
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/21402002
info_outline
This Land is Our Land (ep 173)
12/01/2021
This Land is Our Land (ep 173)
In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and it's been downhill for New World peoples ever since. Today we look at residential schools, the occupation of Alcatraz by Indians of All Tribes, the Oka crisis (aka the Mohawk resistance), and Sacheen Littlefeather's Oscar speech.
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/21342413
info_outline
Best Served Loud (do-over, ep. 172))
11/24/2021
Best Served Loud (do-over, ep. 172))
A microphone is a good enough platform for getting back at people, but an entire recording studio is even better. Popular music is littered with songs getting back at an ex lover, from Waylon Jennings to Taylor Swift, but a fair number of the tracks you know by heart are actually clap-backs to the people in the mixing booth or the record label offices.
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/21266873
info_outline
Amazing Races (do-over, ep. 171)
11/17/2021
Amazing Races (do-over, ep. 171)
From using a train in a car race to marathon doping with deadly poison, there's far more excitement in racing than simply declaring a winner.
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/21200681
info_outline
Secret Cities (do-over, ep 170)
11/10/2021
Secret Cities (do-over, ep 170)
We all lose things -- keys, wallets, patience -- but how do you lose an entire city? Hear about three American towns kept off the maps, Soviet enclaves known by their post codes, and ancient cities found by modern technology.
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/21115112
info_outline
Jack of the Lantern
10/30/2021
Jack of the Lantern
As a special treat and thank-you to all my gracious and kind supporters, I present my take on the origin of the jack-o-lantern from its Irish folklore roots.
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/20991509
info_outline
This Is (still) Halloween
10/26/2021
This Is (still) Halloween
♪♫This is Halloween! This is Halloween!♫♪ Supporters on our Patreon and fans in our FB group chose the topics for today's episode: sorting Dracula fact from fiction; how horror stars got their stars; when did clowns become scary; the history behind zombies; and movie monster fast facts!
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/20944133
info_outline
Twins Remix (ep. 169)
10/13/2021
Twins Remix (ep. 169)
Twins, synchronicity, science, anomalies, and dark mysteries.
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/20809364
info_outline
Shapeshifters (encore and personal update)
10/06/2021
Shapeshifters (encore and personal update)
From Irish selkies to Japanese kitsune, from Navajo skin-walkers to Ethiopian werehyenas, there doesn't seem to be a culture in the world that doesn't have at least one shape-shifter in its folklore or mythology.
/episode/index/show/yourbrainonfacts/id/20725811