Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 1: listener mail. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe
Speaker 1: McCormick in. It's Monday, the day of the week that
Speaker 1: we read back some of the messages that you have
Speaker 1: sent in recently. So Rob, if you don't mind today,
Speaker 1: I'm going to get us started with a message that
Speaker 1: came in from Chris in response to our episodes on
Speaker 1: natural flames and fire coming out of the earth. All right,
Speaker 1: all right, Chris says, Hi, Robert and Joe, I loved
Speaker 1: your episodes about eternal flames and thought you might want
Speaker 1: to see some images of Mount Chimera. And then Chris
Speaker 1: includes a description referring to one of the images they
Speaker 1: sent along, and also, yeah, Artash meaning the rock that
Speaker 1: lights up and Olympus, the modern town and the ruins
Speaker 1: of the Greco Roman city. Oh this is cool because
Speaker 1: this is a place that you actually brought up in
Speaker 1: that pair of episodes, Rob, I think you and Artas
Speaker 1: specifically is the one where it has the fire coming
Speaker 1: out of the rocks on the real side. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: But Chris goes on both the modern and ancient cities
Speaker 1: sit on the banks of the Achai River in antiquity,
Speaker 1: known as Harpasso's Right, where it empties into the Mediterranean
Speaker 1: on a beautiful pebble beach surrounded by high cliffs. There
Speaker 1: are a number of rustic pinsions or pincion as I
Speaker 1: think this just means like little houses or huts, where
Speaker 1: most tourists stay between the modern town and the ancient sites.
Speaker 1: There are ruins all along the river, including a Roman
Speaker 1: bath and numerous tombs, all covered in vines and moss
Speaker 1: and surrounded by bright red poppies. The grounds are not
Speaker 1: yet improved, so there are no trails and tourists are
Speaker 1: able to scramble all over the ancient structures. For better
Speaker 1: or worse. The whole place looks very Indiana Jones. Apparently
Speaker 1: the area was a pirate sanctuary for thousands of years,
Speaker 1: and you can feel why if you kayak around the
Speaker 1: cove among the sea turtles and ruins of the Genoese
Speaker 1: fortresses on the surrounding cliffs. You can hike directly dan
Speaker 1: our Touch from the beach, or you can take a
Speaker 1: tourist bus to the base of Mount Chimiro, which is
Speaker 1: what we did the hike from the base takes about
Speaker 1: thirty minutes. The trail has steps, but I can only
Speaker 1: describe them as cyclopean, and most people tried to walk
Speaker 1: around them. The path is littered with carved marble chunks
Speaker 1: of ancient monuments or temples. When you finally get to
Speaker 1: the top, it's a little bit of a letdown. At
Speaker 1: least during the day. Jean Artash is sort of a
Speaker 1: smallish clearing of ashy looking bare rocks, surrounded by forest
Speaker 1: and a few bits of what must have been a
Speaker 1: temple right at the tree line. As the sun goes down, though,
Speaker 1: the place takes on an eerie quality that you can
Speaker 1: imagine might inspire stories about monsters. We saw no lions
Speaker 1: or snakes, by the way. Oh this is referring I
Speaker 1: think Rob to uh you talking about those ancient writings
Speaker 1: about the different animals of the Camira monster being around
Speaker 1: the area. So Chris has no lions, no snakes. But
Speaker 1: picking up there are many domestic goats on the surrounding hillsides.
Speaker 1: The sound of their bleeding, the call of the goat herds,
Speaker 1: and the clanking of the bells around their necks instantly
Speaker 1: evoked the past. It's an amazing trip that I almost
Speaker 1: don't want to recommend so as not to spoil it.
Speaker 1: I only found out about it because my wife and
Speaker 1: I were teaching in Istanbul at the time and looking
Speaker 1: for something to do on our fall break. The host
Speaker 1: of our pincheon was very friendly and spent most nights
Speaker 1: chatting with guests of all ages from all over the world,
Speaker 1: drinking beer or tea around a fire pit in the
Speaker 1: front courtyard. Idyllic barely describes the experience. Thanks for letting
Speaker 1: me share. Hope you enjoy the photos. I'm the guy
Speaker 1: standing in the river, and then Chris attaches many photos,
Speaker 1: some of which are extremely beautiful. One indeed does have
Speaker 1: one standing in a river. H Well, awesome. It's great
Speaker 1: to hear some firsthand experience from from this fascinating location.
Speaker 1: All right, here's another one when comes to us from
Speaker 1: Stephen in response to our star Gazer in the well episode,
Speaker 1: Dear Joe and Rob, I really enjoyed your recent podcast
Speaker 1: on stargazing in the daytime through wells. I thought i'd
Speaker 1: point your attention to a way the real life, bona
Speaker 1: fide modern day astronomers use wells of a sort to
Speaker 1: observe the night sky. The super Kamio Kandi is a
Speaker 1: massive artificial body of water buried deep in an old
Speaker 1: mine under Japan. This is, in a loose sense, a well,
Speaker 1: though it doesn't have any shafts leading from the water
Speaker 1: straight to the air. Instead, the mind acts as a
Speaker 1: shield against cosmic radiation, allowing only neutrinos to pass through
Speaker 1: into the water below to be picked up by the
Speaker 1: super ai S detectors. Of course, most of the newtrinos
Speaker 1: come for our son, though there are records of neutrinos
Speaker 1: coming from supernova things that would normally only be observable
Speaker 1: in the night sky. Thanks for a great show, much appreciated, Stephen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I believe I've seen photographs of of this before the right.
Speaker 1: It's quite captivating. It looks very sci fi. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know how much I already knew about this one,
Speaker 1: because I realized, um at first I thought I knew
Speaker 1: what he was talking about, but then I realized I
Speaker 1: was thinking of the South Pole Neutrino Observatory, the Ice
Speaker 1: Cube Observatory, which is like a subterranean facility UH in Antarctica,
Speaker 1: but this one in a mine in Japan also sounds fascinating.
Speaker 1: So yeah, really good on that connection. I did not
Speaker 1: make that. Yeah, I believe I wrote an article about
Speaker 1: like top ten Amazing telescopes or something like ten years
Speaker 1: ago for our stuff Works, And uh, I remember looking
Speaker 1: at a lot of photographs of these various installations, and
Speaker 1: I believe some of the some of the the images
Speaker 1: I saw of this one. Uh, it reminded me of
Speaker 1: of of yeah, just pure science fiction. It's any of
Speaker 1: these vast spaces with you know, these kind of like
Speaker 1: golden looking lights in it. Quite fascinating. Yeah. The detector
Speaker 1: room looks like a set from two thousand one of
Speaker 1: Space Odyssey. Dave awakens in it and he speaks to
Speaker 1: some being inside his head or something. Yeah. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: so you know, it's, like Steven said, not a direct
Speaker 1: comparison to be made between this in a well, but
Speaker 1: some things line up, so it's worth noting. So thanks
Speaker 1: for writing in about that. All right. This next message
Speaker 1: comes to us from Lauren. It is about our series
Speaker 1: of episodes on document duplication and fact Simile. Lauren says, Hello,
Speaker 1: Robin Joe. I was just listening to your second episode
Speaker 1: on the Facts Simile and had some personal life experiences
Speaker 1: to share about carbon paper and how it is still
Speaker 1: slinking around in the shadows of everyday life. Though it
Speaker 1: feels like it should be obsolete in our modern age,
Speaker 1: carbon copy paper is not quite a curiosity of the past.
Speaker 1: It is still frequently used, especially in restaurants settings. As
Speaker 1: soon as you said this, I knew what you were
Speaker 1: talking about. I have worked in restaurants myself. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: But Lauren also says occasionally in the form of receipts,
Speaker 1: but predominantly so that both the kitchen staff and the
Speaker 1: servers have access to the order information. So Rob, do
Speaker 1: you know what she's talking about. Here, you have the
Speaker 1: pad and the carbon paper on it. One one copy
Speaker 1: stays in your hand, and one copy goes to the kitchen. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this this springs about I. I don't have the restaurant
Speaker 1: experience that you have, but but of course I've seen
Speaker 1: now they've been brought to my attention. I've seen this
Speaker 1: take place, and basically it comes down to the fact
Speaker 1: that the kitchen needs to know what the food is
Speaker 1: going to be, but also the front of the restaurant
Speaker 1: needs to know as well. I think another way it
Speaker 1: works sometimes is that one copy goes to the kitchen
Speaker 1: so they can see what to make, and the other
Speaker 1: copy gets like spiked on a stack so they can
Speaker 1: be counted up at the end of the night, so like,
Speaker 1: you know, all the things that got ordered. Funny enough,
Speaker 1: I also have experience with carbon paper for receipts because
Speaker 1: in my days working in the tourist industry, where I
Speaker 1: was a ticket seller for for an attraction in Tennessee,
Speaker 1: when we don't know if it was in power outages
Speaker 1: or something, we'd have some kind of utility problem, power
Speaker 1: internet or something and we couldn't the credit card machines
Speaker 1: wouldn't work electronically. We would still sell tickets with credit cards,
Speaker 1: but we would use these ancient machines that uh that
Speaker 1: like made an impression of the credit card information, so
Speaker 1: you'd like swipe something over the card physically and it
Speaker 1: would punch the carbon paper. Yeah, I distinctly remember that
Speaker 1: one from when I would go shopping with my mom
Speaker 1: when I was a little kid, and you know, should
Speaker 1: be buying clothing for us or whatnot at the you know,
Speaker 1: the mall or sears or whatever, and that was how
Speaker 1: she would pay and they would use that device. And
Speaker 1: I can still hear that sound that it makes in
Speaker 1: my head. That is it as they bear down on
Speaker 1: it and roll it over the paper and then back.
Speaker 1: It's like the pump action on a shotgun. But this
Speaker 1: is getting your tickets to the Imax theater. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: that the shotgun sound of this. The spike receipts and
Speaker 1: processing payment used to be so much more violent. Now
Speaker 1: you just swipe a card. Okay, sorry, we got sidetracked,
Speaker 1: Lauren continues. Also, I can buy carbon copy paper at
Speaker 1: the local discount store a block away, sort of like
Speaker 1: a dollar store, And because I pay my landlord the
Speaker 1: monthly rent and bills in sketchy, cold hard cash, she
Speaker 1: gives me a receipt for the transaction using a carbon
Speaker 1: paper copy pad, especially formatted for monetary transactions. And it
Speaker 1: doesn't stop there, Lauren says, on a final note, though
Speaker 1: my memories are vague, I've also had to sign paperwork
Speaker 1: and official documents at certain places of business and or
Speaker 1: in employment situations on carbon paper. But certainly I always
Speaker 1: felt like I was dealing with an establishment without enough
Speaker 1: money or foresight to upgrade their technology. Have a wonderful week,
Speaker 1: and thank you for the always stimulating podcasts. Lauren, very nice. Well,
Speaker 1: thanks for writing in. Lauren. Again, we always appreciate these
Speaker 1: firsthand tidbits about the various places and devices and and
Speaker 1: other things we discussed on the show. My fingertips feel
Speaker 1: weirdly dusty after reading this email. What was that feeling?
Speaker 1: You know, that handling carbon paper feeling? You know what
Speaker 1: I'm talking about. I guess I don't know. I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't have a distinct memory of that, no sense
Speaker 1: memory of that. Okay, maybe it's a kind of a
Speaker 1: kind of dusty, kind of waxy strange. Now, before we
Speaker 1: get into Weird House Cinema, we just want to call
Speaker 1: attention to a couple of of tidbits from first the
Speaker 1: Stuff to Bow your Mind discussion module, which you can
Speaker 1: join on Facebook. Look it up and you have to
Speaker 1: you know, like apply and then we let you in
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. But UM listener by the name
Speaker 1: of William just shared a post that said toad dug
Speaker 1: out vegetables the fastest, which when I read that at
Speaker 1: the end of the day one day, I was I
Speaker 1: just I was like, what is this craziness? Is there?
Speaker 1: Should I report? This is somebody in crisis here or something?
Speaker 1: UM and I think I even asked them. I was like, wait, what, like,
Speaker 1: what are you talking about? And then they reminded me
Speaker 1: that we had asked what was Toads special ability in
Speaker 1: Super Mario Brothers Too. It's apparently the Toad dugout vegetables
Speaker 1: the fastest, right, so you pull those radishes out of
Speaker 1: the ground, Toad does it faster than Mario Luigian Peach
Speaker 1: because Peach could float. That was peaches thing, right, and
Speaker 1: Mario was just even distributed. Now the other bit I
Speaker 1: want to call attention to on the stuff to blow
Speaker 1: your mind discord page, which if you want the link
Speaker 1: for that, just email us and we'll send you the link.
Speaker 1: That seems to be the only way to really make
Speaker 1: this work. But Fletch wrote in and says the episode
Speaker 1: on creatures with transparent bodies reminded me of this novel
Speaker 1: that I read as a teenager Legacy of the Stars.
Speaker 1: No idea if it still holds up. But the central
Speaker 1: concept was that aliens had attempted to colonize Earth in
Speaker 1: the Ice Age, leaving behind some technology that a group
Speaker 1: of prehistoric humans discovered and were able to exploit. Living
Speaker 1: underground in total isolation only to be recontacted in modern times.
Speaker 1: Because of millennia subterranean living, they had become almost completely translucent.
Speaker 1: I don't remember much more about it, since it must
Speaker 1: be thirty years since I read it, but I remember
Speaker 1: the idea capturing my imagination at the time. Also, like
Speaker 1: the humans turned into glow worms or something. I guess, yeah. This,
Speaker 1: and then the title of this book is The Legacy
Speaker 1: of the Stars by John Gregory. I'm not familiar with that.
Speaker 1: I don't think I've read anything by John Gregory, but
Speaker 1: that this sounds sounds very very interesting. Uh you know
Speaker 1: what one of those um one of those sci fi
Speaker 1: novel concepts that very much speaks at the time, Like
Speaker 1: you can imagine, uh how cool the the cover art
Speaker 1: probably looks without even looking it up, you know. All right, well,
Speaker 1: let's move on into the Weird House Cinema feedback. All right,
Speaker 1: let's see, Uh, this first one comes from Nan uh
Speaker 1: the I think both of our Weird House messages today
Speaker 1: are about Jason takes Manhattan. But Nan says, Hi, guys
Speaker 1: just wanted to say that today's Weird House Cinema episode
Speaker 1: on j t M needs to go in the stuff
Speaker 1: to blow your mind. Hall of Fame if one exists.
Speaker 1: This was the funniest and most nostalgia inducing episode ever,
Speaker 1: with some surprisingly insightful cinematic analysis and uh I think.
Speaker 1: She mentions rob your comparison between James Bond and Jason
Speaker 1: Vorhees the striking number of similarities between these two franchises. Uh.
Speaker 1: And she also calls out the appeal of Tina's quote
Speaker 1: telekinetic home alone. Oh yeah, Tina's great. The new podcast
Speaker 1: format took some getting used to, but I'm really loving
Speaker 1: the rhythm and variety of episodes. Now keep up the
Speaker 1: great work. Nan uh Nan says that this is the
Speaker 1: same Nan who wrote the email about landfill goats. Oh,
Speaker 1: I remember that one. And then finally Nan says, ps,
Speaker 1: my Canadian husband says he's never heard of Danger Bay,
Speaker 1: but the show name sounds very Canadian. What was that?
Speaker 1: There were actors in jt M that we're in something
Speaker 1: called Danger Bay. Oh yeah, a lot of Canadian actors
Speaker 1: and and so some of at least one of them
Speaker 1: had a connection to Danger Bay, maybe a couple of them. Uh.
Speaker 1: And Danger Bay was a show that when I when
Speaker 1: I was a small child and lived in Canada for
Speaker 1: you know, a year or so. Um. I distinctly remember
Speaker 1: we had one TV channel, and so whatever was on
Speaker 1: TV we would, you know, sometimes watch, especially it was
Speaker 1: cold out obvious, and two shows I distinctly remember, We're
Speaker 1: Danger Bay, which had like seaplanes and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: sea life in it. And then there was a show
Speaker 1: called Seeing Things that had a really catchy tune theme
Speaker 1: song to it, and it starred the guy whose head
Speaker 1: blows up at the beginning of Scanners. Yeah, yeah, the
Speaker 1: the the bald head kind of I think it had
Speaker 1: a mustache, kind of looks like Frank Oz. But I
Speaker 1: have no idea how truly memorable either of these shows
Speaker 1: are two true Canadians. They're just you know, two shows
Speaker 1: that were on TV that I caught sometimes when I
Speaker 1: was like in kindergarten. Nice, all right. This next one
Speaker 1: comes to us from Dan. It is also about Jason
Speaker 1: Takes Manhattan. Hello, Robert and Joe. I listened to your
Speaker 1: Weird House Cinema episode on Jason Takes Manhattan, and I
Speaker 1: think this might be one of your best weird House episodes.
Speaker 1: I've never been much of a fan of the Friday
Speaker 1: the Thirteenth movies. I've only seen the original the Cronenberg
Speaker 1: scenes of Jason X and the two thousand nine reboot.
Speaker 1: I really enjoyed Joe's passionate analysis of the series, and
Speaker 1: I especially loved your commentary on the trailer. Maybe this
Speaker 1: is something you could explore in a future of special
Speaker 1: episode where you do a commentary track on an entire
Speaker 1: film attack of the Crab Monsters or it conquered the World.
Speaker 1: Perhaps he learned too late that man is a feeling creature.
Speaker 1: When Joe said Jason is a nature spirit, I was
Speaker 1: reminded of something you may have brought up in a
Speaker 1: stuff Toble your Mind episode from a few years ago.
Speaker 1: Unless I'm misremembering, I don't remember who said it, but
Speaker 1: you were waxing about how Jason is a pagan god
Speaker 1: who demands human sacrifice of teenagers in order to appease
Speaker 1: his bloodthirst. I thought that this could make for an
Speaker 1: interesting spin that could take the series into Cabin in
Speaker 1: the Woods territory, where the longtime residents of Crystal Lake
Speaker 1: must every few years provide teenagers to be sacrificed to
Speaker 1: He who never died lest he turned his sights on them.
Speaker 1: Does this sound familiar of all the work you do Dan, Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not positive, but I think that older
Speaker 1: episode you're remembering may have been the one where we
Speaker 1: talked about the masked killer in It was like a
Speaker 1: Halloween season episode, and we we talked about how Jason
Speaker 1: strangely connects back to uh multiple older traditions, Like there
Speaker 1: have been some scholars who argued that Jason emerges from
Speaker 1: the traditions of like the public execution or you know,
Speaker 1: he's like the hooded axe man. But then the other
Speaker 1: half is, yeah, that he's like the God who must
Speaker 1: be sacrificed too, And I think that is in fact
Speaker 1: being pretty directly lampooned in Kevin in the Woods. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Kevin in the Woods fun flick. By the way, Dan
Speaker 1: watched all of Jason X. It's worth seeing from beginning
Speaker 1: to end, aunds pretty solid. The Cronenberg David Cronenberg's canny
Speaker 1: alway is also a lot of fun. I think the
Speaker 1: most brilliant moment in Jason X is whoever came up
Speaker 1: with the idea of putting Jason into a hollow deck. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, it's firmly established at this point that Jason
Speaker 1: cannot be killed, but I that just awoke. My mind
Speaker 1: was like, how creative a solution to Jason. You just
Speaker 1: put him in a hollow deck with infinite fake victims,
Speaker 1: so then no real person is harmed. He's just entertained
Speaker 1: forever being in there, and that's a win win. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's It's a film that totally embraces the silliness of
Speaker 1: the concept and his orders of magnitude better than any
Speaker 1: of the other horror franchises Go to Space Films. Oh
Speaker 1: and as for commentary tracks, yeah, yeah, we could do
Speaker 1: a commentary track sometime. I don't know. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you're if you're putting out one of these classic
Speaker 1: horror movies with crab monsters in it on Blu Ray
Speaker 1: or something, and you need somebody to do, uh do
Speaker 1: a commentary track. I don't know. Let's talk, let's see,
Speaker 1: le's see what we can work out. That's how you
Speaker 1: make the big bucks. That's that's what we're angling for.
Speaker 1: That's the big bucks. The commentary track Monday. Uh oh oh.
Speaker 1: Speaking of Weird House, by the way, if you are
Speaker 1: interested in Weird House merchandise, you can get it along
Speaker 1: with stuff to Blow your Mind merchandise in our T
Speaker 1: shirt store. You can go to stuff to Blow your
Speaker 1: Mind dot com and there's a tab over to your
Speaker 1: right that says like store or whatnot. You go there
Speaker 1: and you can look at some of these designs, including
Speaker 1: the new design rubbed the Fur. Joe said it, we
Speaker 1: believe it, and now it is in merch form for
Speaker 1: you to purchase. Where stick to the side of a bus,
Speaker 1: you name it all right, right, I gotta get me
Speaker 1: some of our merch Yeah, yeah, merch hub. I Um,
Speaker 1: I don't think I currently have one of our merch shirts.
Speaker 1: My my son has a couple of them though, Like
Speaker 1: the last few times where we had like a new
Speaker 1: shirt design, I was like, Okay, I'll get I'll get
Speaker 1: one for him. I'm gonna I have too many T
Speaker 1: shirts right now. I get him for him. Hey, he
Speaker 1: looks good at him. Yeah, we get some some cool
Speaker 1: designs in there, so check them out. I don't likewise
Speaker 1: right in, if you there's like a certain design, you're like, oh,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't wear any of these, but I would wear this.
Speaker 1: This would be fun, because ultimately that's what the merch
Speaker 1: store is about. It is just if something is if
Speaker 1: you have a fun idea. Right in let's talk, let's
Speaker 1: figure it out. All right, We're gonna go and close
Speaker 1: up the mail bag there, but hey, we'd love to
Speaker 1: hear from you. Do you have thoughts on anything we
Speaker 1: discussed here recent episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind
Speaker 1: or Monster Fact or Artifact or UM. Of course, the
Speaker 1: core episodes UM, in addition to Weird House Cinema, were
Speaker 1: right in. We would love to hear from you. As always,
Speaker 1: you can find all this and the Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind podcast feed where and you can get that
Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts. If it serves you a podcast,
Speaker 1: it is probably a place where you can find our shows.
Speaker 1: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Speaker 1: Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
Speaker 1: with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
Speaker 1: to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
Speaker 1: say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your
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