Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to go your mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb, and welcome to the sadness
Speaker 1: that is the circus side show. Sadness looking with a
Speaker 1: lot of sadness, and yeah, it's general sadness to the circus,
Speaker 1: to the circus side show, I mean just to the
Speaker 1: straight up circus, the main attraction, as opposed to what
Speaker 1: exists in its shadows, the circus itself. You have, like,
Speaker 1: we have a lot of of animals that have been
Speaker 1: taken from their natural habitat and forced to perform inside
Speaker 1: of a dark tint for for locals so they can
Speaker 1: cheer and throw a popcorn at them. You have clowns
Speaker 1: prancing around, uh and engaging in various antics, um, some
Speaker 1: of which may be arguably perverse. You have you have singing,
Speaker 1: you have dancing, you have music, and then you walk
Speaker 1: outside and in the shadow of the tent there you
Speaker 1: have the side show. And that's where we encounter a
Speaker 1: number of things that are either um, outright disturbing or
Speaker 1: more subtly disturbing. Well, see that's the adult perspective. If
Speaker 1: you'll come with me to my eight year old self.
Speaker 1: Then you will be delighted and amazed by all of this,
Speaker 1: this rich symbolism present not just at the circus, but
Speaker 1: in the Carnie side show, right, because here the mysteries
Speaker 1: are revealed in front of your very eyes and the
Speaker 1: oddities of life, and you begin to question what is reality? Yes, yeah, definitely,
Speaker 1: I mean there's a lot of it it's about there's
Speaker 1: a lot of magic and law involved, a lot of illusion,
Speaker 1: and then a lot of outright examples of nature gune
Speaker 1: a little strange, and then that forces you to to a question, well,
Speaker 1: what is normal? What is what is what is wrong
Speaker 1: with me? Personally? Because I'm paying to see this, All
Speaker 1: of these factors come into play, and we are going
Speaker 1: to start out while we look at the secrets of
Speaker 1: the side shows more in uh in history here, because really,
Speaker 1: if you look at a current side show today, it's
Speaker 1: nothing like it was in the past. As you say,
Speaker 1: it was very dark terrain here, very dark psychological stuff
Speaker 1: that people were taking their families to. Yeah, and you know,
Speaker 1: there's still still a lot of love for it, a
Speaker 1: lot of nostalgia for it. And you can you can,
Speaker 1: certainly you can go to Coney Island and enjoy some
Speaker 1: of that there and then at various other points across
Speaker 1: the United States. But this was a time, you know,
Speaker 1: ni nineteen forties, nineteen fifties, where people didn't really have
Speaker 1: the understanding, um that we do now of the natural
Speaker 1: loss of science, let's say, and the fact that there
Speaker 1: couldn't maybe be a Fiji mermaid, that skeleton of Fiji
Speaker 1: mermaid that proved that mermaids do exist, because sometimes this
Speaker 1: was part and parcel. Everybody had the more or less
Speaker 1: the basic understanding of the natural world as that the
Speaker 1: common YouTube commenter basically perhaps perhaps it's very possible, but
Speaker 1: today we are We're definitely going to lift the canvas
Speaker 1: tent flap, look inside and see what's going on here.
Speaker 1: And to really understand that, you do need to kind
Speaker 1: of get into the world of the Carnie and the
Speaker 1: side show more specifically in something called ten in one
Speaker 1: and this is part of the circus that contained usually
Speaker 1: ten different side shows in one tent. Well, I don't
Speaker 1: know if it was one price, but I do understand
Speaker 1: from what I've read that you had a guide taking
Speaker 1: you through the sort of hall of horrors or mysteries.
Speaker 1: Um letting you know about all these fantastic things that
Speaker 1: exist in the world. Yeah, and then sometimes at the
Speaker 1: end there's an extra little bit, sort of a sort
Speaker 1: of an under the table bit for for the discerning
Speaker 1: gentleman in the audience. You're talking about some sort of
Speaker 1: like sexy lady thing. Sometimes it was sexy lady thing,
Speaker 1: but sometimes it was simply a stuff that was like
Speaker 1: a little grimmer or for instance, it was or sometimes
Speaker 1: it was just pickled pugs were of course, you know
Speaker 1: various um uh, still births and weird fetuses of animals
Speaker 1: that are preserved and and uh, then you got at
Speaker 1: sometimes that it would be that, and sometimes that would
Speaker 1: factor into an earlier part of the show. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: the Fiji Mermaid, which I had mentioned the bones of
Speaker 1: this supposed mermaid that existed. Um but yeah, there are
Speaker 1: a bunch of different oddities. They had some that were
Speaker 1: really kind of cheesy and and not to illusion heavy,
Speaker 1: Like there was a woman who's head stuck out of
Speaker 1: this board spider web, making it look as though she
Speaker 1: was a human spider and it's very obvious that our
Speaker 1: head is just sticking through something like it sounds like
Speaker 1: they were even doing any makeup on her human head.
Speaker 1: It was just straight up. Look it's a spider with
Speaker 1: a human head on it. And then there's the sword swallower,
Speaker 1: which is a real thing, right, I mean, people are
Speaker 1: actually pulling off this trick, and we'll talk more about
Speaker 1: that later, but all of this stuff is mixed in
Speaker 1: so that you do have some real tricks being pulled off,
Speaker 1: some some real like hey, we're pushing the edges of
Speaker 1: what's possible with our physiology, along with just pure like bunk.
Speaker 1: It reminds me a lot of the Last Unicorn. You've
Speaker 1: seen the Last Unicorn, right, perhaps even read it. I've
Speaker 1: seen ten minutes. You've seen ten minutes of the Last Unicorn. Well, no,
Speaker 1: I tried to show my daughter. She's four years old,
Speaker 1: supersensitive to she saw danger of coming and we had
Speaker 1: to turn it off. It is it's I mean, it's
Speaker 1: really good, but yeah, maybe she's not ready for it
Speaker 1: just yet. But there's a scene in it where the
Speaker 1: unicorn is taken in by this this evil witch and
Speaker 1: she has this side show these various carts with cages
Speaker 1: and inside appears to be a different magical creature in
Speaker 1: each one, like a mantic core and a dragon etcetera.
Speaker 1: But the thing is that most of these cages are
Speaker 1: filled with just normal animals that she's cast a spell on,
Speaker 1: and the spell makes them seem to be like the
Speaker 1: the manticor is not a manticord. It's just a broken
Speaker 1: down old lion, but the spell makes it seem like
Speaker 1: something amazing and unreal. Uh. One of the animals actually
Speaker 1: is a dangerous, um crazy magical creature, the harpy. And
Speaker 1: then the unicorn. Uh. The horn is invisible to everyone else,
Speaker 1: so she still has even though the unicorn is real,
Speaker 1: she has to cast a spell on it to make
Speaker 1: it seem amazing to the individuals that are attending her
Speaker 1: little freak show. And you see varying degrees of that
Speaker 1: with with with some of these sides show acts that
Speaker 1: we're looking at, where you'll have things that there's really
Speaker 1: no trick to it at all. There's nothing amazing going on,
Speaker 1: it's just the illusion. Then you have a plenty of
Speaker 1: examples to where there is something really amazing, really dangerous
Speaker 1: going on, but you need to heighten the drama of
Speaker 1: it in order to sell it to the audience. And
Speaker 1: one of the best examples of this that you stumbled
Speaker 1: upon is the Headless Lady. The Headless Lady, Yes, this
Speaker 1: one uh um I may have encountered in passing before,
Speaker 1: but I really had not looked long and hard at
Speaker 1: it until just yesterday. Um. The Headless Lady act generally
Speaker 1: consists of the phone. Uh, they'll be, they'll they'll be
Speaker 1: a woman on the stage, so it's seeded up on
Speaker 1: a pedestal of some kind. But here's the the gimmick.
Speaker 1: She appears to have no head. Uh. There's just a
Speaker 1: stump where where at the neck where the head should be.
Speaker 1: And out of that stump there's like a tree emerging
Speaker 1: like a like a metal pipe with other tubes coming
Speaker 1: out of it, and the tubes are hooked up to
Speaker 1: um what what What's supposed to be a bunch of
Speaker 1: medical equipment but in reality maybe like a carburetor and
Speaker 1: an old octat tank. And who knows what I mean.
Speaker 1: I look at a number of pictures and it ranges
Speaker 1: from I could I could buy that as being some
Speaker 1: you know, typical mad science mumbo jumbo too that is
Speaker 1: totally like a carburetor or something. Um. So there'll be
Speaker 1: a doctor or scientist attending her, because you know, when
Speaker 1: you when you create the kind of scientific breakthrough that
Speaker 1: can keep a body alive without a head and make
Speaker 1: it do your your bidding. You want to showcase that
Speaker 1: at the at the local county fair or freak ship.
Speaker 1: And the doctor has to travel with this one ting
Speaker 1: to ensure that she continues to live. Yeah, so the
Speaker 1: cell on this is the miracles of modern science. Look
Speaker 1: what we can do now. And so the the ideas
Speaker 1: that this woman lost her head and the body's kept
Speaker 1: alive through this amazing mechanical of feet. And then the
Speaker 1: doctor will even go so far as to h to
Speaker 1: command the body to do certain things to do, like
Speaker 1: small tasks with its hands and uh. And then there
Speaker 1: may even be some sort of vaudevillian uh shenanigans going
Speaker 1: on in there as well, some you know, slapstick or
Speaker 1: what have you. Um, someone tickling her foot and so
Speaker 1: you see the legs moving, yeah, and the whole Yeah,
Speaker 1: the whole time you're seeing her at least twitch and move,
Speaker 1: and you're seeing her performed task. And they do the
Speaker 1: trick by having a real human woman set up there
Speaker 1: with a kind of tiara of mirrors that reflects the sides,
Speaker 1: the dark sides of the booth that she's in and
Speaker 1: makes it look like her head is gone and all
Speaker 1: you see is this tree of tubes that seem to
Speaker 1: be emerging from her neck. So everyone you know attends
Speaker 1: it and they're like, oh, this amazing. And at first
Speaker 1: I was thinking this is a cool thing to cover
Speaker 1: because it's kind of mad science e and it's kind
Speaker 1: of weird, and and it's generally the kind of thing
Speaker 1: I go for. But the closer I looked at it,
Speaker 1: the more disturbing it really was, right because here, in
Speaker 1: its essence, is the objectification of a woman, right. I mean,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter that she has a head, right, there's
Speaker 1: her body, we see her in pieces. Yeah, and this
Speaker 1: falls in line with a lot of advertising stuff I
Speaker 1: was looking at yesterday to where one author was making
Speaker 1: the point that anytime you see like a commercial advertisement, etcetera, uh,
Speaker 1: look to see if the woman's head is partially or
Speaker 1: completely cut off. Look to see if her feet or
Speaker 1: partially or or completely cut off. They were arguing that
Speaker 1: removing the head, rember, removing the feet, that's complete objectification.
Speaker 1: In that case, you're like, look at this woman, but
Speaker 1: don't worry, she has no brain. She can't look at
Speaker 1: you or speak to you or hear you. And also
Speaker 1: she can't run away, so we can just it's just
Speaker 1: all they are for you. Yeah, every little troop about
Speaker 1: women is contained in this one sideshow act. And what's
Speaker 1: interesting about the sideshow act is that this is the
Speaker 1: age of the artificial lung, artificial heart, and so, you know,
Speaker 1: no doubt there there weren't a lot of people who
Speaker 1: were taken by this. I'm sure most people went through
Speaker 1: it and knew that there was some sort of trick
Speaker 1: at play. And yet it arrests that the imagination because
Speaker 1: you know, there's just a period where it must have
Speaker 1: felt like cutting edge science was going on. Maybe just
Speaker 1: maybe someone could lose their head in an accident and
Speaker 1: a German doctor could somehow PLoP all of these hoses
Speaker 1: into her neck stump and make her live. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: seemed possible, and a little illusion makes it seem completely real.
Speaker 1: But but yeah, just so disturbing, especially when you look
Speaker 1: at some of these photos. There was one photo that
Speaker 1: we're looking at yesterday was actually apparently by your Dora Wealthy,
Speaker 1: and this one that showed it was like really creepy
Speaker 1: because the woman, the headless woman's not up on her
Speaker 1: pedestal in a booth. The drawing shows her standing with
Speaker 1: an arm around one gentleman, shaking the hand of another gentleman,
Speaker 1: and in the text promises you a thousand dollars if
Speaker 1: she is not alive. And that's just it was just
Speaker 1: so grim and gross, and just like the implied molestation
Speaker 1: of a headless woman was just really really weird. It's
Speaker 1: pretty creepy. And I have to say that you know,
Speaker 1: that's not such a crazy bet. She's clearly alive. They're
Speaker 1: not gonna lose money, Yeah, you don't. You don't offer
Speaker 1: that unless you can falter but it. But it also
Speaker 1: falls right in line with a two thousand twelve study
Speaker 1: that that you you also sent me, and this is
Speaker 1: published in the European Journal of Social Psychology titled seeing
Speaker 1: Women as Objects the sexual body part recognition Bias, And
Speaker 1: simply put, the study found that men and women tend
Speaker 1: to see women is an assembolage of various parts rather
Speaker 1: than a complete whole. That's right. They had them look
Speaker 1: at a several different pictures and try to figure out
Speaker 1: if the body part was belonged to this specific person
Speaker 1: and so on and so forth, and they called it
Speaker 1: was it global and local cognitive processing, and so it
Speaker 1: didn't matter if you were a male or a female.
Speaker 1: Overwhelmingly people would look at the photos of women in
Speaker 1: a global perspective, meaning that they there's a lot of
Speaker 1: space between how they saw her, and they saw her
Speaker 1: more in pieces as opposed to the pictures of the men,
Speaker 1: which they saw more as a whole. So what that
Speaker 1: is pointing to is again this idea that um, it's
Speaker 1: sort of written into the code of of society that
Speaker 1: you look at women piece meal. Yeah, um, and that
Speaker 1: you can't help to cut them up at least in
Speaker 1: your psyche. Oh God, that's awful. It is awful, And
Speaker 1: that one of the the awful things about this is
Speaker 1: I wanted to use that Aurora a wealthy uh photo
Speaker 1: in a blog post yesterday. It wasn't available. So I
Speaker 1: did a like a Getty Images and a Corbus Images
Speaker 1: search for headless woman and it was really horrifying. Not
Speaker 1: that I was saying like a bunch of like decapitation photos,
Speaker 1: because the decapitation like art that which intended to be
Speaker 1: uh depictions of the biblical Judith, which was actually rather
Speaker 1: encouraging in light of the other results which were all
Speaker 1: just a bunch of fashion e artsy shots of women, um,
Speaker 1: you know, with their head cut off in the photo
Speaker 1: I cut off via the photography, and it was just
Speaker 1: a really, a really dark afternoon. I'm glad you brought
Speaker 1: that up, because anytime I've done searches in in various
Speaker 1: stock photo systems and it could be like, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe my search keywords are like mouse baby, eventually a
Speaker 1: naked female torso is going to show up in that
Speaker 1: batch for some reason or another. Yeah, well, and you
Speaker 1: can turn off the nudity results on some of those
Speaker 1: search engines. But but then again, if you turn that off,
Speaker 1: you're still going to get a buch of ridiculous images.
Speaker 1: So my view is, well, they might as well be
Speaker 1: naked if I'm gonna have to put up with a
Speaker 1: bunch of stupidity in these results. On a side note,
Speaker 1: have you ever seen the collection of stock photos of
Speaker 1: women eating salad? Very funny, It's like women laughing and
Speaker 1: smiling while eating stuck and picture in my mind for sure,
Speaker 1: because I know I've seen that a million times and
Speaker 1: advertising Yeah, you know exactly what I'm talking about. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's interesting to go into those vaults of of pictures
Speaker 1: of humans and see all these tropes played out. Um,
Speaker 1: but we're gonna we're gonna get to some some other
Speaker 1: good circus side show stuff here. Yeah, step with, step
Speaker 1: with with more science behind it than the fox science
Speaker 1: of the Headless Woman. Should we take a quick break
Speaker 1: before we go into swords swallowing? Yes, indeed, we'll be
Speaker 1: right back. All right, we're back, and we're talking a
Speaker 1: little bit now about sword swallowing, another another staple of
Speaker 1: the of the side show world and a real thing. Right.
Speaker 1: This is not an illusion. This is something that someone
Speaker 1: is doing methodically and obviously they have practiced so many times,
Speaker 1: have gotten to know their digestive system really well before
Speaker 1: attempting this in front of an audience. Yeah, there's some
Speaker 1: myths out there about it, um, and some of these
Speaker 1: are you know, you'll find I think some of them
Speaker 1: even have been repeated in major Encyclopedia's Harry Hudeny even
Speaker 1: reported that sword swallowers would actually a swallow low a
Speaker 1: metal sheath first before inserting the sword, which for starters,
Speaker 1: does not sound like it would make it any easier.
Speaker 1: It's it's like, oh, don't worry, they're not They're not
Speaker 1: really swallowing a sharp sword. They've secretly inserted a really
Speaker 1: long sword sheath into their into their down their throat,
Speaker 1: and into their stomach. And that's how they're getting away
Speaker 1: with this. Yeah, it just seems like it would complicate things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and as certainly as we explain how it's actually done,
Speaker 1: you'll see that that's good. That's completely silly, Yeah, because
Speaker 1: I mean, honestly, it's just I wouldn't say it's easy,
Speaker 1: but it's something that you can control and with practice
Speaker 1: you can do. Um. If you want to see or
Speaker 1: if you want to read more about this, check out
Speaker 1: our sword swallowing article by tricy View Wilson of history stuff.
Speaker 1: It's really great. But let's look at the g I
Speaker 1: tracked before we delve into the actual blade into the
Speaker 1: digestive system. Yeah. Now we've covered some of this before
Speaker 1: because we did that that epic journey through the digestive system,
Speaker 1: and we're just talking about the initial jaunt here. You
Speaker 1: remember from that episode that we chew up our food,
Speaker 1: we form this bolus, and the bolus travels down the
Speaker 1: throat and into the stomach, and that's you know, the
Speaker 1: territory we're dealing with here the upper g I track
Speaker 1: because of course a series of connected living organs. It
Speaker 1: includes the throat, uh, the esophagus, and the stomach. And
Speaker 1: it's relatively soft, has several pronounced curves and uh that's
Speaker 1: in a relaxed state. Um. And it's on the surface
Speaker 1: of things, not a perfect sheath in which to insert
Speaker 1: a blade of any kind. No, because it's a regular
Speaker 1: shaped right, and so there are some things that you
Speaker 1: have to do to manipulate it down your throat. But
Speaker 1: I wanted to point out that skeletal muscle is presence
Speaker 1: in the upper g I as well as smooth muscle.
Speaker 1: Skeletal muscle is under voluntary control, so you can just say, hey,
Speaker 1: that's I don't need to contract this right now. I
Speaker 1: need to contract my throat or my mouth. But your
Speaker 1: smooth muscle is involuntary. And this is what is involved
Speaker 1: in paristalsis, and this is that movement of that bullus
Speaker 1: down into the stomach. So what we're talking about here
Speaker 1: is really trying to control those gag reflexes and that
Speaker 1: smooth muscle movement when you're performing this trick. Because there
Speaker 1: are a couple of different things that happen when you're
Speaker 1: inserting the blade. So imagine you have this this sword
Speaker 1: about fifteen inches long, anywhere from fifteen inches to two
Speaker 1: inches by the way, and there's an actual like limit
Speaker 1: that is set forth by the Sword Swallowing Association. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like they they're generally cool with you not having it
Speaker 1: enter the stomach, but it's okay if it does a
Speaker 1: little bit. However, you don't want to use a sword
Speaker 1: so long that it like winds up in your boot
Speaker 1: because then then you're doing it wrong. There's gonna be
Speaker 1: some puncturing going on with that. So yeah, there's actually
Speaker 1: a Sword Swallowers International Association that that sort of police
Speaker 1: is this, if you will, And what happens if you
Speaker 1: have that blade what stays twenty inches long? It passes
Speaker 1: by the teeth and then the eases into the up
Speaker 1: esophageal sphincter scrapes over the teeth even I think that
Speaker 1: makes it even grizzly or so yeah, yeah, okay, now
Speaker 1: I'm like having some physiological responses here to that. Um So,
Speaker 1: then it's coated and saliva at this point, and that
Speaker 1: helps to lubricate it, and it goes deeper into the esophagus. Now,
Speaker 1: the blade as it is traveling down into the esophagus
Speaker 1: is sort of straightening it out this long tube and
Speaker 1: occasionally is actually nudging organs out of the way as
Speaker 1: it passes by, because there's a lot of stuff that
Speaker 1: could potentially get pierced if you do it wrong. We're
Speaker 1: talking about the trachy of the heart, the order, the vannakava,
Speaker 1: the diaphragm, and you can get it all on one
Speaker 1: big shish kebab. It's true you could. And here's the
Speaker 1: thing you need to know your digestive system. You need
Speaker 1: to know whether or not the lower esophagus curves as
Speaker 1: it meets the stomach or if it's just a straight shoot,
Speaker 1: because if it curves, then you're not going to be
Speaker 1: able to insert or plunge that sword as deeply as
Speaker 1: you could if it was just a straight shoot. As
Speaker 1: you mentioned already, one of the big things you want
Speaker 1: to be able to do is suppress the gag reflects
Speaker 1: because we're we're naturally inclined not to let swords climb
Speaker 1: down our throats. Uh. It gets into our regular bodi's
Speaker 1: defenses against choking, et cetera. And uh, and so all
Speaker 1: you have to do now, you know, as you're listening
Speaker 1: to this podcast, is if you hang out and I
Speaker 1: got hope that you'll start to gag a little bit, unless,
Speaker 1: of course, you suppress it. Now, suppressing the gag reflex
Speaker 1: is something that doesn't really it's not going on off switch.
Speaker 1: You can't just you know, go into his end like
Speaker 1: state and be like, I got it. It comes from
Speaker 1: a lot of gagging yourself and possibly vomiting as you
Speaker 1: do it. And and then you need not use a
Speaker 1: sword to do it to to actually prepare yourself. Uh,
Speaker 1: And generally they're using like something you're like a chopstick
Speaker 1: or something, or just good old fingers or your toothbrush, right,
Speaker 1: or your toothbrush. Yeah, I mean this is something you'd
Speaker 1: have to do over and over and over again until
Speaker 1: your mind could get comfortable with this feeling and you
Speaker 1: could kind of say, I need you to suppress this
Speaker 1: because what's happening here. You've got receptors or nerve endings
Speaker 1: that are coming into contact with that blade, and then
Speaker 1: the nerves or the neurons carry the receptors information to
Speaker 1: your central nervous system, and then the integration center says, hey,
Speaker 1: there's there's something going on here, maybe we need to
Speaker 1: have a response. And then right back the motor neuron
Speaker 1: carries the integrating center's instructions to that part of your
Speaker 1: body to say, hey, you need to do something about this,
Speaker 1: and then something called the effect or makes a necessary
Speaker 1: change to what's going on your body, namely this gag reflex.
Speaker 1: So it's a it's a bit of a process, yeah,
Speaker 1: because eventually you kind of have to break down the
Speaker 1: brain and convince it no, it's totally cool that a
Speaker 1: saber is going down my throat and like this is
Speaker 1: something that is in place for your survival, right, So
Speaker 1: you have to convince your brain like, look, there really
Speaker 1: is no threat here, even though it's hard wired to say, really,
Speaker 1: that's a that's a blade coming after us. So, as
Speaker 1: an audience member watching somebody swallow a sword, well, a
Speaker 1: few of the different aspects that really make it a
Speaker 1: memorable show is, first of all, you're not is counting
Speaker 1: on the the audience not having a really thorough understanding
Speaker 1: of the digestive tract and how it's working. Because again,
Speaker 1: as where we point out here, it's totally possible to
Speaker 1: get that more or less straight line, get it lined up.
Speaker 1: It's it's totally possible to suppress the gag reflect over time.
Speaker 1: So we're they're doing something that isn't completely crazy from
Speaker 1: a physiological standpoint, but then still is risky. Certainly. It's
Speaker 1: it's it's very easy to injure yourself, if not severely,
Speaker 1: then you know, certainly you can. You can have mild
Speaker 1: internal bleeding, you can have you can you can aggravate
Speaker 1: um any number of tissues on the way down. So it's, uh,
Speaker 1: it's at once not that big of a deal and
Speaker 1: still completely nuts exactly, Yeah, because the person the audience
Speaker 1: cannot imagine pulling this feed off for him or herself.
Speaker 1: And when you think about swallowing a sword, you immediately
Speaker 1: think of just sticking it straight to your mouth, right,
Speaker 1: And you don't even realize that the performer is hyper
Speaker 1: flexing his or her neck in order to get that
Speaker 1: straight shoot down, So you're not thinking about the mechanics
Speaker 1: of like, okay, now, they're just creating a very straight
Speaker 1: tube to insert this into. Yeah, And it's really if
Speaker 1: you don't know how it works, it is easier to
Speaker 1: imagine the ways you could fake it rather than to
Speaker 1: imagine the ways you could actually do it. Now, my
Speaker 1: mind wouldn't instantly go to like fake, I mean to
Speaker 1: metal sheets inserted in the throat, because that seems like
Speaker 1: you're doing that would be doing the same trick twice
Speaker 1: you get out of doing it once or something, you know.
Speaker 1: But I always kind of imagine, well, they must have
Speaker 1: some sort of a sword that collapses so that there
Speaker 1: may be not sticking it all the way down, like
Speaker 1: maybe just you know, it's like one of those toy
Speaker 1: um you know, plastic swords that pops out, except it's
Speaker 1: made out of metal. But but no, it's the it's
Speaker 1: an actual sword going down your actual throat, maybe even
Speaker 1: a little bit into your actual stomach. But that's not
Speaker 1: required according to the source Wallers Association International. But I
Speaker 1: don't know, maybe it helps you never know, I mean,
Speaker 1: you might want to push your boundaries a bit if
Speaker 1: you're the performer. Yeah, see how good you can get
Speaker 1: and how dangerous it could be, right, because I imagine
Speaker 1: that if you're doing this over and over and over again,
Speaker 1: it becomes pretty normal. Uh in quotation marks, I suppose, well,
Speaker 1: and then some of these uh these profetic because the
Speaker 1: thing is, as we've outlined it, it's a. It's a
Speaker 1: totally learnable thing. You can you can train yourself and
Speaker 1: train your body to do it, and then you're an
Speaker 1: accomplished sword swallower. And then you're you're having to compete
Speaker 1: with other sword swallows. So what do you have to do?
Speaker 1: You have to swallow more swords. So you see acts
Speaker 1: where an individual will will have like seven swords uh
Speaker 1: down their throat at a given moment, and so just
Speaker 1: ups the annie until somebody winds up a shisha and
Speaker 1: then you know, then everybody just goes home. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: there's still some sort of awful delight from that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's just admit it. Yeah, because it's yeah, there's the
Speaker 1: shadow side of this whole thing, as you had said
Speaker 1: at the top. All right, so we are patting down
Speaker 1: the hall of wonder here and what do we come
Speaker 1: upon next? Oh? The bed of nails. Yes, now, this
Speaker 1: one is this one has always been a favorite of
Speaker 1: mine because it's on the surface of things. It's it's
Speaker 1: clearly a torture instrument. It's it's nefarious. You've taken something
Speaker 1: completely comfortable and mundane and wonderful. The bed the place
Speaker 1: where where where where people find their rest, where they
Speaker 1: find their enjoyment where they may read a book. It's
Speaker 1: a it's supposed to be a safe place. And what
Speaker 1: have you done. You've turned it into an instrument of torment.
Speaker 1: You've replaced that comfy mattress with with hundreds of razor
Speaker 1: sharp nails and they're just poking up. And so clearly
Speaker 1: if one were to lay on this, it would just
Speaker 1: be just unequal torment. And you know, if you you
Speaker 1: color it up a bit in your presentation and you
Speaker 1: you describe how this, uh, the the origin of the
Speaker 1: u the bed of nails like dates back to some
Speaker 1: you know, twisted civilization, or it's it's an import from
Speaker 1: some strange country on the other side of the world.
Speaker 1: Then all the better. It's exotic, it's got aggon. It
Speaker 1: looks like a medieval torture device. Yes, but if you
Speaker 1: put mind over matter or somehow use a little magical
Speaker 1: who do in there there's a way to lay upon
Speaker 1: the bed of nails and suffer no injury, miraculously. But
Speaker 1: all of this actually has a lot to do with
Speaker 1: it seems odd, but say stilettos and an elephant's foot, okay,
Speaker 1: Because this is this idea that a bed of nails
Speaker 1: is providing surface area, and your body is the force
Speaker 1: or the weight that is going to lay upon this
Speaker 1: area or ly upon this area. So if you okay,
Speaker 1: so let me just go back to this, the stiletto
Speaker 1: and this elephant. If you are to be stepped on
Speaker 1: by an elephant, you would actually find out that it
Speaker 1: is much less painful than the stiletto. And the reason
Speaker 1: is because all of that padding, that surface area of
Speaker 1: that that elephant's foot is actually helping to distribute the weight,
Speaker 1: whereas that that stiletto has just that little bit of
Speaker 1: surface are and there's a ton of pressure coming down.
Speaker 1: In fact, a person in high heels is going to
Speaker 1: exert fifteen times more pressure than that elephant's foot because
Speaker 1: all of it is is completely isolated into that one
Speaker 1: little tip, all the weight and that one little tip,
Speaker 1: whereas in the elephant foot it's spread out, it's distributed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So imagine if there was a piece of plywood, you know,
Speaker 1: the size of a bed, and it had only one
Speaker 1: nail in it, much like that stiletto, and you threw
Speaker 1: your body on top of that, You're gonna puncture yourself, yes,
Speaker 1: But if you have six hundred nails that are spread
Speaker 1: across it, low and behold. It's going to support your
Speaker 1: weight and you're going to come out of that experience
Speaker 1: completely unscathed. But the audience is going to think, what
Speaker 1: sort of superpowers do you have? Yeah, because it's first
Speaker 1: of all, again it's the presentation of the thing. And
Speaker 1: then most people do not have, or at least did
Speaker 1: not have access to a bed of nails to try
Speaker 1: this out for themselves. They had no real frame of
Speaker 1: reference other than one nail is bad, so clearly hundreds
Speaker 1: of nails would be even work. But you have given
Speaker 1: the choice between laying on a bed of nails and
Speaker 1: laying on a bed of nail, always go with the nails,
Speaker 1: That's right, go with the plural and um. What I
Speaker 1: love about this is that this sideshow act has actually
Speaker 1: been taken into schools by the University of Virginia and
Speaker 1: their fun uh fun science section I believe, excuse me,
Speaker 1: their division of science. It's I can't remember the name
Speaker 1: of it it, like fun fun physics, excuse me, and it's
Speaker 1: p h U N fun. But they go into elementary
Speaker 1: and high school students with this bed of nails and
Speaker 1: then they have the teacher lie on top of it,
Speaker 1: and they teach children this whole idea about force and pressure.
Speaker 1: And um, what they had said actually in some of
Speaker 1: their materials that they have online, that is that an
Speaker 1: average human of a hundred fifty pounds, when they're spread
Speaker 1: out over the six hundred nails, they'll feel only point
Speaker 1: to five pounds of force per nail. So if you
Speaker 1: have this bed of nails, um, they're not getting or
Speaker 1: I should say, they're not going to get that experience
Speaker 1: of pain because they would have to experience something like
Speaker 1: two pounds of pressure per nail. But if only your
Speaker 1: teacher could fire breathe. Ah, yes, fire breathing is another
Speaker 1: another great carnival act, and of course this one is
Speaker 1: often generally flavored up with lots of lots of information
Speaker 1: about how it's like a you know, far Eastern art
Speaker 1: that is being brought to you and uh, and certainly
Speaker 1: it's an old practice. An individual will sometimes drink something
Speaker 1: or sometimes they'll sort of do that a little surreptitiously.
Speaker 1: You'll have an open flame and you'll just and you'll
Speaker 1: breathe out this, uh, this fiery goodness. Let's write a
Speaker 1: fun mist will cover this flame source and then yeah,
Speaker 1: you'll get that huge plume of flame. And it is
Speaker 1: pretty simple, I mean in in theory, right, you just
Speaker 1: switch something around in your mouth and fuel source and
Speaker 1: then you spew it out. Look, what could possibly go wrong? Yeah? Right,
Speaker 1: that's that's so straightforward. What Why isn't everyone a fire
Speaker 1: breather worst worst case? Why not worse? But if things
Speaker 1: go wrong, you can always join the freak show. Right?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's true. Yeah. Well, I was reading some
Speaker 1: examples of one quote unquote freak in in particular, who's
Speaker 1: in a gasoline accident and burned up lower portion of
Speaker 1: his face and he had a prosthetic that he could
Speaker 1: wear that looked fine and you know, in the right lighting.
Speaker 1: And then so he began a career as a side
Speaker 1: show freak, as like a two faced van where you
Speaker 1: would see him with the prosthetic and then without. Okay, again,
Speaker 1: it's sad, it's dark, but I know it is. It's
Speaker 1: can clouds the fire breathing. Now, all right, so let
Speaker 1: me let's talk about how it could go awry here.
Speaker 1: You've got to have direction and consistency. So what fibruy
Speaker 1: theres usually do is they practice pretty extensively with water
Speaker 1: first to make sure that they can get that mist
Speaker 1: going in the right direction um and that they can
Speaker 1: get it traveling for the distance that they needed too,
Speaker 1: so it doesn't basically like fall The fuel doesn't fall
Speaker 1: back on them right, never do it into the wind exactly.
Speaker 1: And they have to have a specific angle that they're
Speaker 1: shooting for about between sixty and eighty degrees. This angle,
Speaker 1: if it's lower, it can make that flame come up
Speaker 1: on a body part, and higher can cause that fuel
Speaker 1: to fall back onto the face. And the choice of
Speaker 1: fuel is really important because you have a flash point
Speaker 1: and this is the point at which the fuel like
Speaker 1: nites you cannicknite at a higher or a low temperature,
Speaker 1: You have toxicity, You have the taste in the smell,
Speaker 1: you have the color and the visibility of the flame,
Speaker 1: which is for the audience, right, you want to be
Speaker 1: huge and big, and then you have the amount of
Speaker 1: um and the thickness of smoke. So kerosene is most
Speaker 1: often used, but I will tell you that gasoline in
Speaker 1: methyl ethyl alcohol, they those are things that are avoided
Speaker 1: like the plague because first first of all, they really
Speaker 1: really uh flammable, highly flammable instead of hard to control,
Speaker 1: but they're also really toxic and with methyl ethel you
Speaker 1: could actually become drunk off of the fumes. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: there's two things you don't want to mix there for sure.
Speaker 1: So fire breathing not something you just want to pick
Speaker 1: up on a whim and think, all right, it's simple.
Speaker 1: I just need fuel in my mouth and then an
Speaker 1: open flame and then I just do it and then
Speaker 1: people will cheer me and I get paid. Not so fast,
Speaker 1: you're saying, yeah, and this is not easy money, folks. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the stakes are pretty high. In fact, I have seen
Speaker 1: recommendations where if people are curious about this, they should
Speaker 1: start with corn storch instead of an actual fuel in
Speaker 1: their mouth. Well, you know, just spitting a fine miss
Speaker 1: can be plenty of enjoyment. Of course, as everyone knows,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm a fan of the pro wrestling, and there's
Speaker 1: a long tradition of of some wrestlers using a green
Speaker 1: miss or sometimes a red mist as an I legal
Speaker 1: move and it's generally uh. It has kind of a
Speaker 1: side show mentality to it as well, because it's a
Speaker 1: it's something mysterious, generally from from the East, and it
Speaker 1: will often be used by a historically used a lot
Speaker 1: by by Japanese wrestlers uh or wrestlers claiming to be
Speaker 1: Japanese performing the United States. Uh. And so you would
Speaker 1: have like a die in the mouth and then you
Speaker 1: spit this mist in someone's face and they're blinded. You know.
Speaker 1: I was thinking a lot about wrestling in our Capabe
Speaker 1: episode that we did about the shadow self, yeah, and
Speaker 1: about all of all of what it takes to create
Speaker 1: this illusion. It's not just the mechanics of it. They're
Speaker 1: sci fi films, yeah, not just in in spirit, but
Speaker 1: I mean also historically, I mean they're both carnival businesses,
Speaker 1: and there's still a lot of Carney uh to wrestling,
Speaker 1: and just as there's of course a lot of Carney
Speaker 1: to actually being a Carney. So it's true. Yeah, all right.
Speaker 1: Up next another favorite of mine, the human blockhead. Now,
Speaker 1: this act is generally pretty uh, pretty simple on the
Speaker 1: on the surface of things. And you'll just you'll have
Speaker 1: a geek cool come forth and they will take a
Speaker 1: nail and they'll angle it into their nostrils. Generally, they'll
Speaker 1: they'll sort of their nose will sort of go up
Speaker 1: like a pig snows that as they get in a position,
Speaker 1: and then they'll tap on it with a hammer and
Speaker 1: uh and just so these this nice pink, pink pink
Speaker 1: noises that the nail thinks a little deeper into the
Speaker 1: into the into the face, into the head of the individual,
Speaker 1: and uh. And then they'll turn the hammer around, use
Speaker 1: the client to pull it out, and and everyone will
Speaker 1: go nuts. Sometimes they'll up the annie though you maybe
Speaker 1: they use a screw driver, or they'll use even a
Speaker 1: power drill in more recent years, and it's just grizzly
Speaker 1: to look at, uh and and then and they're generally
Speaker 1: approaching them with a certain amount of humor that makes
Speaker 1: it all the more entertaining. Now it's a lot like
Speaker 1: swords wallowing, actually, so sports sorting sorts wallowing, as we discussed,
Speaker 1: is basically taking advantage of an existing orifice, that is
Speaker 1: and and putting a rigid object into that non rigid orifice, okay,
Speaker 1: and also overcoming your gag instinct uh and involutary reflex
Speaker 1: in order to pull it off. And we see much
Speaker 1: the same thing with the human blockhead act. And a
Speaker 1: lot of it comes down to the shape of the
Speaker 1: nasal cavity. If you look at a cross section of
Speaker 1: the human heads. You realize or you at least reminded
Speaker 1: of the fact that your your mouth nasal cavity, it
Speaker 1: takes up a lot of real estate in the head.
Speaker 1: So behind your nose there's actually a lot of room
Speaker 1: for a long nail or screwdriver, what have you to
Speaker 1: go in You've just got too again, You've got to
Speaker 1: you sort of angle the nose up and get it
Speaker 1: sort of lined upright, and then add a little theatrics
Speaker 1: about you know, so that you're having hammered in and
Speaker 1: creating the illusion that this that this nail is being
Speaker 1: driven into solid mass or even brain. Yeah, it's true
Speaker 1: because if you look at the nose, you assume that
Speaker 1: the nasal passage is sort of a perpendicular structure, but
Speaker 1: it's not. It's at a horizontal That nasal cavity is
Speaker 1: actually connecting the nose in the throat and it goes
Speaker 1: almost straight back. So that's why when the performer is
Speaker 1: inserting the nail, they kind of lift up the nostril
Speaker 1: a bit like you said, like sort of the pick
Speaker 1: nose in order to get the angle too straight shoot
Speaker 1: back into that hole in their skull. Yeah, because think
Speaker 1: of the skull. Think of there's a straight up picture
Speaker 1: of the skull and the vertical slit that you would
Speaker 1: see where the nose would be. I mean, there you go,
Speaker 1: there's the nose hole right there, and it's uh and
Speaker 1: you could totally drive nails into that all day. Now.
Speaker 1: The other thing about the reflex you're having to overcome
Speaker 1: in this particular situation, it's the urge to sneeze one
Speaker 1: has to deal with because what happens when you start
Speaker 1: sticking stuff around in your nose, you're going to trigger
Speaker 1: that sneeze reflex. Sneeze reflex, of course, is about ridding
Speaker 1: the nasal cavity of potentially harmful material by ejecting it
Speaker 1: in a brilliant spray, not unlike the spray of a
Speaker 1: of a of a fire breather. It's true. So it's
Speaker 1: that reflex arc that you have to suppress, much like
Speaker 1: with the sword with the gag reflex, because you know,
Speaker 1: in this case you have that the nerves that are
Speaker 1: sending the signal to the brain, and then your eyes
Speaker 1: start to water and your nasal passages start to secrete fluid,
Speaker 1: and your diaphragm moves abruptly and is causing you to
Speaker 1: take a deep breath and get ready to eject that
Speaker 1: foreign object or that irritant from your nose. So you
Speaker 1: don't want to just be blasting nails of the audience,
Speaker 1: I mean not most that's your deal. And if you do,
Speaker 1: or if that is your deal, you want to at
Speaker 1: least have control of when it happens. That would be
Speaker 1: a very interesting sort of like low tech pneumatic nail gun. Well,
Speaker 1: that would be actually a very interesting side show on it. Son,
Speaker 1: I wonder if anyone's done that. Imagine like a superhero
Speaker 1: who is the human blockhead and then he's struck by
Speaker 1: lightning during an act and it gives him the power
Speaker 1: to blast nails out of his nose. That would be
Speaker 1: kind of neat wow to summon like a supercharged reaction. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I like it now. Of course, you might also want
Speaker 1: to avoid looking at the lights while doing this particular
Speaker 1: act because you want to avoid photo sneeze reflex, which
Speaker 1: of course is we've all had that thing where it's like,
Speaker 1: if you feel like you're about to sneeze and you
Speaker 1: want to get it over with, they say, stare at
Speaker 1: the sun. Well, don't stare at the sun. But but
Speaker 1: let's sort of look in the direction of a bright
Speaker 1: light and and it will cause the sneeze to happen.
Speaker 1: You know, that's really interesting. The researchers aren't exactly sure
Speaker 1: why it happens, but something like of the population when
Speaker 1: they go out into this from their house or some
Speaker 1: other dark area, um, maybe it's a sneeze, And thought
Speaker 1: that the sensors in our the light sensors in our
Speaker 1: optic nerves are so close to the sensors for our
Speaker 1: nose that it's a little bit of a misfire of
Speaker 1: the brain which is detecting that that the nose um
Speaker 1: sensors are basically detecting that light and interpreting it as
Speaker 1: an irritant. It's one of those things that I didn't
Speaker 1: really know about until not too long ago, when I
Speaker 1: don't think maybe it was my wife that pointed out
Speaker 1: that if you're about to sneeze and you just want
Speaker 1: to go and get it over with, you know, look
Speaker 1: to a bright light and that'll do it without My
Speaker 1: daughter does it every single time she leaves the house
Speaker 1: son sneezing. Yeah. Interesting, Well, you know, maybe we have
Speaker 1: some swords swallowers out there in the audience. That can
Speaker 1: hope we do. Yeah, they can let us know fire breathers,
Speaker 1: fire breathing human blockheads or even just you know, carnival
Speaker 1: sideshow officionados. We'd love to hear, crom Um. You can
Speaker 1: certainly find us in any of the normal means. You
Speaker 1: can check out our main website, stuff to Blow your
Speaker 1: Mind dot com. You can go to find us on
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