Your Brain on Facts

YBOF's gonna take a break for a month or two.

How hard was it to steal the Mona Lisa? What does the word "ponzi" actually mean? Links to all the research resources are on the website. Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.  Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi. Or buy the book and a shirt. Music: Kevin MacLeod, 

(Chronic health problems sometime require an encore performance of a past episode.) Hundreds dead, thousands homeless, entire communities wiped out, yet most of us have never heard of what happened in Rosewood 1923, Tulsa 1921, or Chicago 1919. Music by Kevin MacLeod   Read the full script. Reach out and touch Moxie on FB, Twit, the 'Gram or email.

What do limestone, leather, plastic and mulberry tree bark have in common? They've all been used to make money, plus lots of other materials besides! Join me for a quick jaunt around the world and through history and we look at a fraction of the history of currency. Shirt raising money for Ukraine Red Cross Links to all the research resources are on the website. Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.  Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi. Or buy the book and a shirt. Music: Kevin MacLeod, Steve Oxen

Who was General Tsao of chicken fame? Where do Danish pastries come from? Is pad Thai actually Thai food? All that and more in this patron-voted episode! 1-star review shirt! and shirt raising money for Ukraine Red Cross Links to all the research resources are on the website. Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.  Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi. Or buy the book and a shirt. Music: Kevin MacLeod, 

How did rubber ducks go from lumps of rubber that didn't even float to a cheerful childhood staple? Let's look at where they came from, where they're going, and why they keep showing up at violent political protests. 1-star review shirt! and shirt raising money for Ukraine Red Cross 00:38 Bit of backstory 07:13 Bert's best buddy 10:25 Review, patrons, thanks! 12:00 Ducks for charity or science 17:58 Giant ducks, wild and domestic 20:16 Can You Hear The Duckies Sing? 22:45 THE Rubber Duck Links to all the research resources are on the website. Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.  Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi. Or buy the book and a shirt. Music: Kevin MacLeod, 

Finally, I get to the subtopic that launched not one but two episodes, the Gentleman Pirate Stede Bonnet, as well as the most interesting boring thing I could find and why science didn't get a handle on scurvy until nearly WWII. (Apologies in advance because I was red-lining my mic throughout and I have no idea why -- I'd been doing VO jobs all day with no such issue.) 1-star review shirt! and shirt raising money for Ukraine Red Cross  01:03 Ye scurvy dog 08:27 Gratitude et al 11:30 The doldrums 15:49 Livestream for the Cure 17:46 The Gentleman Pirate, Stede Bonnet  Links to all the research resources are on the website. Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.  Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi. Or buy the book and a shirt. Music: Kevin MacLeod, 

What started as a need to tell the real story of "Gentleman Pirate" Stede Bonnet has turned into a myth vs history two-parter! I love when that happens. Hear about pirate pensions, the makeup of the mariners, and civil unions on the seven seas. Special thanks to Charlie and Jesse over the in Brainiac Breakroom for help with the title. 1-star review shirt! and shirt raising money for Ukraine Red Cross    Links to all the research resources are on the website. Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.  Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi. Or buy the book and a shirt. Music: Kevin MacLeod, and Tabletop Audio Calm History Podcast

It's the return of our occasional 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? 1-star review shirt! and shirt raising money for Ukraine Red Cross 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 website. Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.  Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi. Or buy the book and a shirt. Music: Kevin MacLeod, Bobby Richards .  

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? 1-star review shirt! and shirt raising money for Ukraine Red Cross 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 website. Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram.  Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi.  Or buy the book and a shirt. Music: Kevin MacLeod, Bobby Richards . 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 enjoy it.  Half of that would be handled if you won the contest offered by Radio Galaxy in Germany – they'd pay for your funeral, provided your funeral cost less than 3000 Euro and a modest one could.  Listeners sent in their own epitaphs, that being the words on their tombstone, like how Winston Churchill's says “I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.”  But you can't have a party without a party-pooper and the radio station was hit was a lawsuit from the Association of German Undertakers.  Also in Germany, station RTL 89.0 wanted to give away a Mini Cooper, but couldn't apparently be asked to put a lot of effort, or forethought, into it.  They just said, pull off the most amazing stunt.  Because that's safe.  Whatever the other entries were paled in comparison to the stunt submitted by the eventual winner – he would have the word mini tattooed on … how to put this delicately?... onto an appendage which most gentlemen would find distressing to have labeled “mini.”  The winner, Andreas Muller, went through with it, live on air with the female host looking on.  Can you imagine if the station refused to give him the car though?   That kind of personal touch would have been right up the alley of the folks at WDVE 102.5 in Pittsburgh.  Every year, for the festive holiday season, they hold a "Breast Christmas Ever."  Yep, they foot the bill for breast enhancement surgery.  To the surprise of no one, the event has come under fire from both feminist groups and health care advocates, who should like us to remember a boob job is surgery and surgery carries risk.  But sometimes, even the tackiest contest isn't as bad as it seems - there's always a silver lining if we look for it.  A Calgary station did a similar give-away and the winner, by popular vote, was a 19 year old trans-female listener who was quotes as saying having breast implants would mean she wouldn't "have to face so much bigotry on a daily basis."   Ottawa radio station Hot 89.9 looked at all that and said Hold My Molson's.  They put on a “Win a baby!” contest.  Specifically, they would pay for up to three rounds of in-vitro fertility treatment up to $35,000.  The contest drew criticism like jellowjackets at a cook-out, but it wasn't without redemption – it brought attention to the issue of IVF funding in Ontario just before voters head to the polls to vote if the provincial government should be required to pay it like other health care.   Said Beverly Hanck, executive director of the Infertility Awareness Association of Canada, “The station is clearly, clearly capitalizing on vulnerable patients that are desperate to have a family.”  The fact that couples have to turn to a radio contest at all points to a “sad state of affairs” in Ontario, she added.   Morning show host Jeff Mauler said the contest was intended to appeal to the station's 24 to 54 year old demographic, but that it has opened up a dialogue about an issue that is “more common than you think.”  “Anyone who complains is lucky enough to have kids or doesn't want kids,” Mauler said. “Anyone in the struggle doesn't slam the contest.” Common enough that more than 400 couples applied for the contest, which they launched on Labor Day.  Because of course they did.   If babies aren't your thing, how about a full-grown human woman?  Edmonton's the Bear FM also poked the bear with their contest to win a Russian bride.  The Bear partnered with an on-line matchmaking service that connects Russian women with foreign husbands.  Problem the first: eww.  Problem the close second: it's not uncommon for women you can meet through such services being exploited.  Employment and Immigration Minister Thomas Lukaszuk found the contest so offensive, he pulled his ministry's advertising from the station.  The prize included a free two-week trip to Russia, and $500 spending money.     New Zealand radio station The Rock FM sponsored their own contest in which the winner would be flown to the Ukraine to pick a bride from an agency, originally called “Win a Wife.”  When people complained, they changed it to “Win A Trip To Beautiful Ukraine For 12 Nights And Meet Eastern European Hot Lady Who Maybe One Day You Marry.”  Well, does what it says on the tin.  This is the same station that, when they needed a contest for Valentine's Day 2012, crab-walked around love and instead offered to cover all the costs of one lucky couple's divorce.  Asterisk, you had to drop the Big D bombshell on them live on the air.  Who says romance is dead?  No one who's watching OFMD on a binge loop for the last 9 days…not that I know anyone like that.  It's just a hypothetical.  An offly specific hypothetical   If you're thinking to yourself, it can't get worse than that, you haven't been paying attention.  Again in Canada (it's always the quiet ones), a Halifax radio station q104 put on a foreign bride contest.  The contest, which would send the winner to Prague, closed on March 8, International Women's Day.  The program director JC Douglad said firmly that there was no sexual connotatioin to the contest.  The men are promised dates with women in the Czech Republic, but they station made no warranty, express or implied, as to how those dates will go.  Okay, sure, but you've kind of undermined your position by calling it the "Male is in the Czech," didntcha?   And that's…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, so it was kind of the same thing.  While a lot of Calgarians vowed to stop listening, then went on to do it again, this time with $10,000. this podcast remember thanks  

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 1-star review shirt! and shirt raising money for Ukraine Red Cross at yourbrainonfacts.com/merch Links to all the research resources are on the website. Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram.  Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi.  Or buy the book and a shirt. Music: Kevin MacLeod, 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, 20-year-old James Vance and 18-year-old Raymond Belknap of Nevada, concluded a day of drinking, drugs, and heavy metal with an alleged suicide pact by means of self-inflicted shotgun fire.  Belknap died instantly, while Vance survived for a further three years, though without the lower half of his face, before eventually succumbing to complications.   The two families subsequently alleged that Priest had placed subliminal messages throughout 1978's Stained Class album, inciting fans to kill themselves.  The worst offender on the album was Better By You, Better Than Me, where messages like ‘Let's be dead' and ‘Do it' were smuggled in by means of backmasking.  Let's hop out of the shallow end for a deep dive here.  Backwards-masking or backmasking an intentional recording in which a message is recorded backward onto a track that is meant to be played forward.  It goes all the way back to the 70's, the 1870's, when Thomas Edison discovered the novelty of playing recorded music backwards.  The beat generation of the 50s started to purposely include reverse audio into their music and artists continued to play around with it for decades.  The Beatles deliberate [...].  This splashed fuel on the Paul-is-dead urban legend/conspiracy theory with supposed messages like “Paul is dead, miss him, miss him,” in “I'm So Tired” and “turn me on, dead man” in Revolution 9.  Audiophiles kept an ear out for it, but it didn't come to wide public knowledge until the 80's.  These days, Easter eggs and hidden goodies are shared on social media and YT, but back then, it was conservatives ruining cassettes and vinyl records by playing them backwards in church, community meetings, local access television, whatever venue they could get.  They claimed that the backwards speech could subliminally influence the listener when listening to the music in the normal way.  They found backmasking in everything from Elvis to Led Zepplin.  Supposedly Stairway to Heaven contained Satanic commands like “here's to my sweet Satan,” “serve me,” and “there's no escaping it.”     Audio Engineer Evan Olcott claims that backmasking or finding phonetic reversals is purely coincidental in which the spoken or sung phonemes, a fancy word for individual speech sounds, seem to form words.  Our brains make sense of our environment, or they try, any road, and that can mean convincing themselves that garbled sounds are actually words.  There's a key to claims of backmasking and it's priming, telling the listener what they're going to hear.  [sfx example]     Backmasking is supposed to work subliminally, meaning literally below the threshold of sensation of consciousness.  In theory, subliminal messages deliver an idea that the conscious mind doesn't detect.  For those too young to remember Tyler Durden's projectionist hobby, the prime example of subliminal messages is a single frame of text slipped into a video, which *has been used on TV by both corporations and political candidates.  Whenever one of these comes to light, there is always much contention, yet thoroughly negligible results.  If you can find a properly organized scientific study that bears out claims that messages you don't know you saw can influence people's behavior, call us here in the studio.  Until then, I plant my banner on the hill of It's Utter Crap.   At the time, Priest guitarist Glenn Tipton said: “It's a fact that if you play speech backwards, some of it will seem to make sense. So I asked permission to go into a studio and find some perfectly innocent phonetic flukes. The lawyers didn't want to do it, but I insisted. We bought a copy of the Stained Class album in a local record shop, went into the studio, recorded it to tape, turned it over and played it backwards. Right away we found ‘Hey ma, my chair's broken' and ‘Give me a peppermint' and ‘Help me keep a job'.”   At one point, frontman Rob Halford was called upon to actually sing part of the song while on the stand, which he looks really uncomfortable doing without so much as a metronome to accompany him.  “It tore us up emotionally hearing someone say to the judge and the cameras that this is a band that creates music that kills young people. We accept that some people don't like heavy metal, but we can't let them convince us that it's negative and destructive. Heavy metal is a friend that gives people great pleasure and enjoyment and helps them through hard times.”   Eventually, the case against Judas Priest and their label was dismissed.  The judge did agree that you could hear words other than the printed lyrics, but these were “only discernible after their location had been identified and after the sounds were isolated and amplified. The sounds would not be consciously discernible to the ordinary listener under normal listening conditions”.   And that's… Slipknot filed a copyright infringement suit claiming Burger King misappropriated their images. The King fired back that Slipknot didn't invent masked rockers, the post-apocalyptic gas masks aesthetic, or white guys with dreadlocks and, therefore, had no copyrights to claim. Ultimately, I guess they all realized they had more important things to do and the case was dropped. Sources: https://johndenver.com/about/biography/#:~:text=He%20then%20became%20a%20leading,during%20take%2Doff%20in%201986. https://www.ranker.com/list/dee-snyder-speech-parents-music-resource-center/melissa-sartore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_(Danzig_song) https://ultimateclassicrock.com/dee-snider-pmrc-interview-2015/ https://www.suicideinfo.ca/resource/musicandsuicide/ https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/judas-priest-suicide-lawsuit-subliminal-messages/ https://www.loudersound.com/features/how-a-suicide-pact-was-almost-the-end-of-judas-priest https://pop.inquirer.net/106559/the-auditory-phenomenon-called-backmasking-unmasked https://ultimateclassicrock.com/backward-message-songs/ https://www.livescience.com/does-subliminal-messaging-work.html https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/an-ozzy-osbourne-fan-commits-suicide https://www.kerrang.com/ozzy-osbourne-the-suicide-solution-controversy-and-what-the-song-actually-means https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-12-20-mn-4460-story.html https://apnews.com/article/05b56baebdc9ceaff3433f50fc941298 https://www.loudersound.com/features/how-a-suicide-pact-was-almost-the-end-of-judas-priest https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ca-court-of-appeal/1758714.html https://www.dreadcentral.com/news/287706/that-time-slipknot-sued-burger-king-over-coq-roq-chicken-fries-commercial https://loudwire.com/remember-when-slipknot-sued-burger-king/ https://ultimateclassicrock.com/backward-message-songs/

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 1-star review shirt! and shirt raising money for Ukraine Red Cross at yourbrainonfacts.com/merch Links to all the research resources are on the website. Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.  Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi. Or buy the book and a shirt. Music: Kevin MacLeod,  

1-star review shirt! and shirt raising money for Ukraine Red Cross. 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 website. Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram.  Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi.  Or buy the book and a shirt. Music: Kevin MacLeod, Tabletop Audio, and Steve Oxen.  Want to start a podcast or need a better podcast host?  Get up to TWO months hosting for free from Libsyn with coupon code "moxie." Sponsor: Starfleet Leadership Academy   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 region's industry.  The pacific northwest farmed Red Delicious apples like there was no tomorrow and in the 90's, tomorrow got real uncertain.  In the last three years of the decade, farmers lost around $760mil with fields full of fruit fewer and fewer folks wanted to fork over their funds for.  That was the problem that Barritt set out to solve.  They needed an apple that had it all - movie star good looks, full of flavor with a crunchy bit.  By the end of 2019, Washington farmers were growing 12,000 acres of Cosmic Crisp trees and there's talk of Cosmic Crisp's having a strong chance at taking over the market.   If you have a bit of land and want to grow your own Cosmic Crisp, you going to have to wait even longer than usual.  It's only available to grower in WA for the first ten years to give the growers an advantage.  Remember, you can't plant seeds and get a tree that gives you fruit like the one you ate to get the seeds.  Don't worry, just five more years.     But you can't, like, own a tree man.  I can but that's because I'm not a penniless hippie.  Sorry, Futurama moment, but the point still stands.  Because this is America and we've never seen a person, place, thing, or idea we didn't want to legally own and monetize.  We're talking about patents and before I go any further, do you have any idea what a pain it is to search for apple patents and *not get results about Apple the company.  According to the US Patent and Trademark Office, “a plant patent is granted …to an inventor … who has invented or discovered and asexually reproduced a distinct and new variety of plant, other than a tuber propagated plant or a plant found in an uncultivated state. The grant, which lasts for 20 years from the date of filing the application, protects the inventor's right to exclude others from asexually reproducing, selling, or using the plant so reproduced.”  So if you make a variety of plant that no one else has ever made, or at least no one has patented, you have ultra-dibs for 20 and no one else is supposed to breed, sell, or do anything else with plants of that variety.   Plant patents became a thing in the early 1930's, a fine time in American agriculture *sough*dustbowl*cough* first granted to Henry Bosenberg for a CLIMBING OR TRAILING ROSE (USPP1 P).  Since then, thousands of plant patents have been granted, and that includes apples.  Apples as intellectual property.  The beloved Honeycrisp was patented in the late 1980's by the University of Minnesota.  The Honeycrisp blossomed in popularity, pun allowed, among consumers, both grocery shoppers and growers.  Nurseries would sell the trees to anyone who called and ordered one, but since it was patented, buuuut growers would have to pay a royalty of one dollar per tree to the University of Minnesota until the patent has expired.  With an average size of 50 acres per orchard and 36 trees per acre, that only comes to $1800, which isn't too, too bad.  A much tighter rein was kept on University of Minnesota's patented MINNEISKA, which produces the SweeTango apple.  Only a small group of apple growers has been given license to grow this variety of apple and they have to pay royalties as well.  UM also has multiple trademarks registered, so anyone who tries to sell an apple under that name or a similar one may find themselves in court.  Now how about them apples?  Hey, at least I waited until the end. Sources: https://historicsites.nc.gov/all-sites/horne-creek-farm/southern-heritage-apple-orchard/apples/apple-history/origins-apples https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-mysterious-origin-of-the-sweet-apple https://www.theorchardproject.org.uk/blog/where-do-apples-come-from/ https://www.britannica.com/story/was-johnny-appleseed-a-real-person https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/real-johnny-appleseed-brought-applesand-booze-american-frontier-180953263/ https://www.nwpb.org/2017/05/03/want-to-grow-an-apple-tree-dont-start-with-apple-seeds/ https://www.popsci.com/story/diy/cosmic-crisp-apple-guide/ https://www.huffpost.com/entry/red-delicious-apples-suck_n_5b630199e4b0b15abaa061af https://suiter.com/how-do-you-like-them-apples-enough-to-patent-them/ https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/04/30/526069512/paradise-lost-how-the-apple-became-the-forbidden-fruit https://www.businessinsider.com/cosmic-crisp-apple-washington-state-scientists-2020-11 https://suiter.com/how-do-you-like-them-apples-enough-to-patent-them/  

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 website. Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram.  Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi.  Or buy the book and a shirt. Music: Kevin MacLeod,  Want to start a podcast or need a better podcast host?  Get up to TWO months hosting for free from Libsyn 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 wasn't “seen by Peary”—as later expeditions would prove, the explorer had invented it out of the thin Arctic air.   By 1906, Peary was the hardened veteran of five expeditions to the Arctic Circle. Desperate to be the first to the North Pole, he left New York in the summer of 1905 in a state-of-the-art ice-breaking vessel, the Roosevelt—named in honor of one of the principal backers of the expedition, President Theodore Roosevelt. The mission to set foot on the top of the world ended in failure, however: Peary said he sledged to within 175 miles of the pole (a claim others would later question), but was forced to turn back by storms and dwindling supplies.   Peary immediately began planning another attempt, but found himself short of cash. He apparently tried to coax funds from one of his previous backers, San Francisco financier George Crocker—who had donated $50,000 to the 1905-'06 mission—by naming a previously undiscovered landmass after him. In his 1907 book Nearest the Pole, Peary claimed that during his 1906 mission he'd spotted “the faint white summits” of previously undiscovered land 130 miles northwest of Cape Thomas Hubbard, one of the most northerly parts of Canada. Peary named this newfound island “Crocker Land” in his benefactor's honor, hoping to secure another $50,000 for the next expedition.   His efforts were for naught: Crocker diverted much of his resources to helping San Francisco rebuild after the 1906 earthquake, with little apparently free for funding Arctic exploration. But Peary did make another attempt at the North Pole after securing backing from the National Geographic Society, and on April 6, 1909, he stood on the roof of the planet—at least by his own account. “The Pole at last!!!" the explorer wrote in his journal. "The prize of 3 centuries, my dream and ambition for 23 years. Mine at last."   Peary wouldn't celebrate his achievement for long, though: When the explorer returned home, he discovered that Frederick Cook—who had served under Peary on his 1891 North Greenland expedition—was claiming he'd been the first to reach the pole a full year earlier. For a time, a debate over the two men's claims raged—and Crocker Land became part of the fight. Cook claimed that on his way to the North Pole he'd traveled to the area where the island was supposed to be, but had seen nothing there. Crocker Land, he said, didn't exist.   Peary's supporters began to counter-attack, and one of his assistants on the 1909 trip, Donald MacMillan, announced that he would lead an expedition to prove the existence of Crocker Land, vindicating Peary and forever ruining the reputation of Cook.   There was also, of course, the glory of being the first to set foot on the previously unexplored island. Historian David Welky, author of A Wretched and Precarious Situation: In Search of the Last Arctic Frontier, recently explained to National Geographic that with both poles conquered, Crocker Land was “the last great unknown place in the world.” American Geographical Society Library. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries. After receiving backing from the American Museum of Natural History, the University of Illinois, and the American Geographical Society, the MacMillan expedition departed from the Brooklyn Navy Yard in July 1913. MacMillan and his team took provisions, dogs, a cook, “a moving picture machine,” and wireless equipment, with the grand plan of making a radio broadcast live to the United States from the island.   But almost immediately, the expedition was met with misfortune: MacMillan's ship, the Diana, was wrecked on the voyage to Greenland by her allegedly drunken captain, so MacMillan transferred to another ship, the Erik, to continue his journey. By early 1914, with the seas frozen, MacMillan set out to attempt a 1200-mile long sled journey from Etah, Greenland, through one of the most inhospitable and harshest landscapes on Earth, in search of Peary's phantom island.   Though initially inspired by their mission to find Crocker Land, MacMillan's team grew disheartened as they sledged through the Arctic landscape without finding it. “You can imagine how earnestly we scanned every foot of that horizon—not a thing in sight,” MacMillan wrote in his 1918 book, Four Years In The White North.   But a discovery one April day by Fitzhugh Green, a 25-year-old ensign in the US Navy, gave them hope. As MacMillan later recounted, Green was “no sooner out of the igloo than he came running back, calling in through the door, ‘We have it!' Following Green, we ran to the top of the highest mound. There could be no doubt about it. Great heavens! What a land! Hills, valleys, snow-capped peaks extending through at least one hundred and twenty degrees of the horizon.”   But visions of the fame brought by being the first to step foot on Crocker Land quickly evaporated. “I turned to Pee-a-wah-to,” wrote MacMillan of his Inuit guide (also referred to by some explorers as Piugaattog). “After critically examining the supposed landfall for a few minutes, he astounded me by replying that he thought it was a ‘poo-jok' (mist).”   Indeed, MacMillan recorded that “the landscape gradually changed its appearance and varied in extent with the swinging around of the Sun; finally at night it disappeared altogether.” For five more days, the explorers pressed on, until it became clear that what Green had seen was a mirage, a polar fata morgana. Named for the sorceress Morgana le Fay in the legends of King Arthur, these powerful illusions are produced when light bends as it passes through the freezing air, leading to mysterious images of apparent mountains, islands, and sometimes even floating ships.   Fata morganas are a common occurrence in polar regions, but would a man like Peary have been fooled? “As we drank our hot tea and gnawed the pemmican, we did a good deal of thinking,” MacMillan wrote. “Could Peary with all his experience have been mistaken? Was this mirage which had deceived us the very thing which had deceived him eight years before? If he did see Crocker Land, then it was considerably more than 120 miles away, for we were now at least 100 miles from shore, with nothing in sight.”   MacMillan's mission was forced to accept the unthinkable and turn back. “My dreams of the last four years were merely dreams; my hopes had ended in bitter disappointment,” MacMillan wrote. But the despair at realizing that Crocker Land didn't exist was merely the beginning of the ordeal.   MacMillan sent Fitzhugh Green and the Inuit guide Piugaattog west to explore a possible route back to their base camp in Etah. The two became trapped in the ice, and one of their dog teams died. Fighting over the remaining dogs, Green—with alarming lack of remorse—explained in his diary what happened next: “I shot once in the air ... I then killed [Piugaattog] with a shot through the shoulder and another through the head.” Green returned to the main party and confessed to MacMillan. Rather than reveal the murder, the expedition leader told the Inuit members of the mission that Piugaattog had perished in the blizzard.   Several members of the MacMillan mission would remain trapped in the ice for another three years, victims of the Arctic weather. Two attempts by the American Museum of Natural History to rescue them met with failure, and it wasn't until 1917 that MacMillan and his party were finally saved by the steamer Neptune, captained by seasoned Arctic sailor Robert Bartlett.   While stranded in the ice, the men put their time to good use; they studied glaciers, astronomy, the tides, Inuit culture, and anything else that attracted their curiosity. They eventually returned with over 5000 photographs, thousands of specimens, and some of the earliest film taken of the Arctic (much of which can be seen today in the repositories of the American Geographical Society at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee).   It's unclear whether MacMillan ever confronted Peary about Crocker Land—about what exactly the explorer had seen in 1906, and perhaps what his motives were. When MacMillan's news about not having found Crocker Land reached the United States, Peary defended himself to the press by noting how difficult spotting land in the Arctic could be, telling reporters, “Seen from a distance ... an iceberg with earth and stones may be taken for a rock, a cliff-walled valley filled with fog for a fjord, and the dense low clouds above a patch of open water for land.” (He maintained, however, that "physical indications and theory" still pointed to land somewhere in the area.) Yet later researchers have noted that Peary's notes from his 1905-'06 expedition don't mention Crocker Land at all. As Welky told National Geographic, “He talks about a hunting trip that day, climbing the hills to get this view, but says absolutely nothing about seeing Crocker Land. Several crewmembers also kept diaries, and according to those he never mentioned anything about seeing a new continent.”   There's no mention of Crocker Land in early drafts of Nearest the Pole, either—it's only mentioned in the final manuscript. That suggests Peary had a deliberate reason for the the inclusion of the island.   Crocker, meanwhile, wouldn't live to see if he was immortalized by this mysterious new land mass: He died in December 1909 of stomach cancer, a year after Peary had set out in the Roosevelt again in search of the Pole, and before MacMillan's expedition.   Any remnants of the legend of Crocker Land were put to bed in 1938, when Isaac Schlossbach flew over where the mysterious island was supposed to be, looked down from his cockpit, and saw nothing. Bradley Land was the name Frederick Cook gave to a mass of land which he claimed to have seen between (84°20′N 102°0′W) and (85°11′N 102°0′W) during a 1909 expedition. He described it as two masses of land with a break, a strait, or an indentation between.[1] The land was named for John R. Bradley, who had sponsored Cook's expedition.   Cook published two photographs of the land and described it thus: "The lower coast resembled Heiberg Island, with mountains and high valleys. The upper coast I estimated as being about one thousand feet high, flat, and covered with a thin sheet ice."[2]   It is now known there is no land at that location and Cook's observations were based on either a misidentification of sea ice or an outright fabrication. Cook's Inuit companions reported that the photographs were actually taken near the coast of Axel Heiberg Island.[   Cook described two islands lying at about 85 degrees North, which he named Bradley Land.  These islands, like Peary's “Crocker Land,” do not exist, yet Cook's partisans have tried to resuscitate Cook's credibility by linking “Bradley Land” to a discovery made in the Arctic only since Dr. Cook's death.      After World War II, aerial reconnaissance revealed a number of large tabular bergs drifting slowly clockwise in the arctic basin north of Ellesmere Island. Several arctic researchers and scientists have suggested these so-called ice islands—breakaway pieces of its ancient ice shelf—are probably what Cook mistook for “Bradley Land,” and Cook's advocates have repeated these statements to support the doctor's claim.       Cook gave this description of “Bradley Land”: “The lower coast resembled Heiberg Island, with mountains and high valleys. The upper coast I estimated as being about one thousand feet high, flat, and covered with a thin sheet ice.”      Ice islands are no more than 100 to 200 feet thick, total. They are nearly flat with only rolling undulations and rise only about 25 feet above sea level. Cook's “Bradley Land” therefore does not remotely resemble an ice island, or even an ice island magnified by mirage. And Cook published two pictures of the high, mountainous land he called “Bradley Land.”        Cook's Inuit companions are reported to have said these pictures were of two small islands off the northwest coast of Axel Heiberg Island; others believe they are of the coast of Heiberg Island itself, though the pictures have never been duplicated.      Ren Bay  has been suggested as the site.  Ellesmere trekker Jerry Kobalenko reports he could not match the picture exactly to that site, but Cook might have taken it at a time when fog obscured prominent landmarks, as he did in Alaska, making it impossible to duplicate now.  In each picture the photographer is standing on a point above the flat ice.  Kobalenko's was taken off a ten-foot hillock.   Sources: https://www.jetsetter.com/magazine/islands-to-visit-before-they-disappear/ Brigadoon https://www.history.com/news/the-con-man-who-invented-his-own-country https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sandy-island-doesnt-exist_n_2184535 https://interestingengineering.com/10-islands-on-maps-that-never-actually-existed https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/8350278/mysterious-island-that-didnt-exist-four-years-ago-is-now-teeming-with-life-sea-volcano/ https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160127-the-conman-who-pulled-off-historys-most-audaciou s-scam https://www.spurlock.illinois.edu/collections/notable-collections/profiles/crocker-land.html https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/crocker-land-peary-arctic-continent https://research.bowdoin.edu/crocker-land-expedition/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th_KQOeh-Co http://humbug.polarhist.com/bland.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Island,_New_Caledonia https://www.historytoday.com/miscellanies/gregor-macgregor-prince-poyais   There are Islands that have disappeared and not in the global warming, vanishing coastline type of way. These Islands are called Phantom Islands. To be considered a Phantom Island, a piece of land must have been agreed to exist at one point before eventually being undiscovered or corrected. Basically, academics and cartographers thought an island was real and then eventually found out it wasn't. For example, Atlantis would not be considered a Phantom Island because it was always considered a legend. But perhaps the best example of a Phantom Island is Burmeja. Bermeja first appeared on maps in the year 1539, and for nearly 400 years, it was accepted as a real island located in the Gulf of Mexico. But in the 2000s, the United States and Mexico were in a dispute over an oil field in the Gulf of Mexico. Basically, Burmeja marked the outermost limit of Mexico's economic territory. The oil field would have been within that border marked by Burmeja, thus making it Mexico's property. But when the Mexican government set a team to verify the island's position, it was gone. The team had the exact coordinates for the island, and Bermeja had appeared on maps for 400 years, but it just wasn't there. The team searched all over the Gulf of Mexico and concluded that Bermeja simply no longer existed. There are a few theories about how Bermer disappeared. One is that it vanished into the ocean as a result of natural geographic shifts. This has happened elsewhere in the world, so it's entirely plausible. There's also a theory that Birmingham was intentionally destroyed by the United States so they could gain access to the oil field. It's a bold strategy, and you would think someone would have noticed an entire island being blown up. But America has done worse things in the name of oil. Some people say early Mexican officials may have added it to the map in an effort to just expand their borders. This, again, would be a pretty bold strategy, but perhaps an effective one in the 15th century. The most likely explanation is that Burmeja never existed. It was a mistake by some cartographer in the 1500s, and everyone just went with it. Early cartographers were also known to add fake Islands to their maps to prevent plagiarism. These fake Islands would tip them off if their map was ever copied. But Burmeja has appeared in various ships, logs, and inventories, some of which were official documents from the Mexican government. Ultimately, Burmette was never found, and no one really knows why. But Bermuda has not been the only Phantom Island. The Baja Peninsula was believed to be the island of California for years before it was corrected. A fictitious place called Sandy Island appeared on maps for over a century near Australia. It was even on Google maps. Today, scientists think early explorers just saw a large piece of pumice stone floating in the ocean. Arctic Explorer Robert E. Pierre made up the Island Crocker land in an effort to scam some money from one of his investors. There have been dozens more of these Phantom Islands over the years with each having been undiscovered for different reasons. Today, though, thanks to satellite imagery, Phantom Islands are probably a thing of the past you. Con artists have long recognised that persuasion must appeal to two very particular aspects of human motivation – the drive that will get people to do something, and the inertia that prevents them from wanting to do it. In 2003, two social psychologists, Eric Knowles at the University of Arkansas and Jay Linn at Widener University, formalised this idea by naming two types of persuasive tactics. The first, alpha, was far more frequent: increasing the appeal of something. The second, omega, decreased the resistance surrounding something. In the one, you do what you can to make your proposition, whatever it may be, more attractive. You rev up the backstory – why this is such a wonderful opportunity, why you are the perfect person to do it, how much everyone will gain, and the like. In the other, you make a request or offer seem so easy as to be a no-brainer – why wouldn't I do this? What do I have to lose? Psychologists call it the ‘approach-avoidance' model of persuasion They called the juxtaposition the approach-avoidance model of persuasion: you can convince me of something by making me want to approach it and decreasing any reasons I might have to avoid it. According to Columbia University psychologist Tory Higgins, people are usually more likely to be swayed by one or other of the two motivational lines: some people are promotion-focused (they think of possible positive gains), and some, prevention-focused (they focus on losses and avoiding mistakes). An approach that unites the alpha with the omega appeals to both mindsets, however, giving it universal appeal – and it is easy to see how MacGregor's proposition offered this potent combination.  

(Get Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MOXIE - Enter promo code MOXIE for 83% off and 3 extra months free!) T-shirt for Ukraine, all proceeds and matching donation to Ukraine Red Cross at yourbrainonfacts.com/merch 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: Vlado from It's Not Rocket Surgery Promo: Remnant Stew Links to all the research resources are on the website. Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram.  Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi.  Or buy the book and a shirt. Music: Dan Lebowitz,  Kevin MacLeod,  Want to start a podcast or need a better podcast host?  Get up to TWO months hosting for free from Libsyn 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 of in time, they instead put little signs with the Latin name of the plant in the weeds, so it kind of looks like it was meant to be there.  Turn a liability into an asset, I always say.  Returning to the topic of bathrooms, there was a plumber's strike going on during construction; Walt basically had to decide between working water fountains or working toilets.  Florida heat notwithstanding, he chose to have the toilets working, and I'd say that was probably a good call.  If you've ever played theme park tycoon or any of those games now, you know that a lack of water fountains means people *have to pay for drinks now…  Or they would… if the park's concessions had been fully stocked.  The overabundance of people meant that the food and drink sold out completely in just a couple of hours.  Did I mention it was literally 100 deg freedom/38C that day?  The asphalt had been finished so close to opening that it began sticking to people's shoes.  Some people even claimed to have gotten their shoes completely stuck to the pavement on Main Street, where lots of people spent lots of time, because the rides, kind of a big deal at a theme park, they were not ready.  A number of rides, like Peter Pan's Flight, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Submarine Voyage, and the famous Flying Dumbo either broke down or never opened at all.   Disney's Black Sunday lasted for weeks.  A Stagecoach ride in Frontierland permanently closed when it became clear that they were as safe against rollovers as a Bronco II with a roof rack loaded with building supplies.  36 cars in Autopia crashed due to aggressive driving on the part of the patrons.  I'm starting to wonder if Disney ever met people.  Ironically, the ride was designed to help children learn to be respectful drivers on the road.  There were a number of live animals in a circus attraction, which was not great when a Tiger and a Panther escaped, which resulted in a furious death struggle on Main Street, USA.  Now that's an attraction you can't pay for, like Baghera vs Sher Khan, 8 years before The Jungle Book.  Like the park, the Mark Twain Riverboat was over capacity on opening day with over 500 people cramming onto the boat, causing it to jump its tracks and sink in the mud.  It took about half an hour to get it back onto the rail, and as soon as it pulled up to the landing, everyone rushed to one side of the boat to get off…. and tipped it over.  Thankfully, the water was shallow and there were no injuries.  There was, however, a gas leak inside Sleeping Beauty's Castle, which could have been a serious problem and prompted the closing of Adventureland, Fantasyland and Frontierland for a few hours because, whoopsie-doodles, Sleeping Beauty's Castle is on fire.  Well, trying to catch fire.  Reports vary as to how severe it actually was.  Walt was so busy handling the press that he didn't even learn about the fire until the following day.  That's how chaotic things were.     Disney was a shrewd and clever businessman, so he thought, I am opening this park. Let's make this into a big live television event.  He partnered with ABC, which had also helped provide nearly a third of the funding.  In return, Walt Disney would host a weekly TV show about what people could expect to see in Disneyland for the year before it opened.  So on opening day, Walt hosted a 90 minutes live TV special with Art Linkletter and future President Ronald Reagan.  90 million people tuned in to see the happiest place on Earth and that kind of ratings was no mean feat for the 50's.  The cameras showed all of the fun and excitement of Disneyland, completely obscuring all of the disasters and unhappiness that was actually happening.  But if you think the live broadcast would go off without a hitch, you may have pattern-recognition problems.  It was riddled with technical difficulties.  Parkgoers kept tripping over camera cables that snaked all over the park.  They were on-air flubs, mics that didn't work, people who forgot their mic *did work, and unexpected moments caught on camera, such as co host Bob Cummings caught making out with one of the dancers.  “This is not so much a show as is a special event,” Art Linkletter said during the broadcast.  “The rehearsal went about the way you'd expect a rehearsal to go if you were covering three volcanoes, all erupting at the same time and you didn't expect any of them. So from time to time, if I say we take you now by camera to the snapping crocodiles in adventure land and instead somebody pushes the wrong button and we catch Irene done adjusting her bustle on the Mark Twain. Don't be too surprised.”  And that's…. The train system is essential for the airport to function at its full capacity since it provides the only passenger access to Concourses B and C. In rare instances of the train system being out of service, shuttle buses have been used. While the system is highly reliable, one major system failure took place on April 26, 1998. A routing cable in the train tunnel was damaged by a loose wheel on one of the trains, cutting the entire system's power. The system was out of service for about seven hours. United Airlines, DIA's largest airline (who operates a large hub out of Concourse B), reported that about 30 percent of their flights and about 5,000 passengers were affected by the failure.     Sources: find sources for Disney https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2013/11/historical-echoes-what-color-is-my-day-of-the-week/ https://www.history.com/news/remembering-black-sunday https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/black-sunday-1938-hundreds-washed-out-to-sea-on-bondi-beach-as-freak-waves-kill-five-injure-dozens/news-story/2f584af7365abc298d039d42e5f2ddf1 https://bondisurfclub.com/the-club/history/black-sunday/ https://www.history.com/news/dust-bowl-migrants-california https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnEErB6sPRY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1925%E2%80%9326_Victorian_bushfire_season https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sunday_bushfires https://web.archive.org/web/20110927091319/http://www.waverley.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/19553/Black_Sunday.pdf https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/black-sunday-1938-hundreds-washed-out-to-sea-on-bondi-beach-as-freak-waves-kill-five-injure-dozens/news-story/2f584af7365abc298d039d42e5f2ddf1 http://www.waverley.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/159183/Bondis_Black_Sunday,_1938_rev.pdf https://bondisurfclub.com/the-club/history/black-sunday/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110927091319/http://www.waverley.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/19553/Black_Sunday.pdf https://www.history.com/news/remembering-black-sunday https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/1000-mile-long-storm-showed-horror-life-dust-bowl-180962847/ https://alchetron.com/Denver-International-Airport-Automated-Guideway-Transit-System  

(Get Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MOXIE - Enter promo code MOXIE for 83% off and 3 extra months free!) T-shirt for Ukraine, all proceeds and matching donation to Ukraine Red Cross at yourbrainonfacts.com/merch 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 website. Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram.  Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi.  Or buy the book and a shirt. Music: Kevin MacLeod,  Want to start a podcast or need a better podcast host?  Get up to TWO months hosting for free from Libsyn 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 couldn't turn up anything on that because of the sabotage lawsuit sucking up all the search results.   X-MEN It's not all foodie fact fun today.  I'm going to risk a copyright strike to play 15 seconds of a song that will make everyone near me in age go “aw yeah!” [sfx Xmen theme]  For the young or those who had social lives in high school, that's the theme song to the 90's Xmen cartoon, and it slaps, as they kids used to say.  For the truly uninitiated, and c'mon even my mom knows who the Xmen are, the story centers on a group of superheroes who get their powers from genetic mutations…and government experiments, time travel, by dint of being aliens – it's a comic book, what do you want.   Ever since their introduction to the Marvel Universe in 1963, the X-Men have always had to deal with questions about their humanity.  While their enemies will stop at nothing to cast them as monsters, the team continues to fight for a world where they are treated just like humans.  That's in-universe.  In the broader reality, it's actually in the X-Men's best interest not to be considered humans.  Well, Marvel comics financial bottom line, anyway, and they went to court over it.   In 1993, international trade lawyers Sherry Singer and Indie Singh found an interesting provision in a book of federal tariff classifications – “dolls” are taxed at 12% on import while “toys” are only taxed 6.8%.  The devil is in the details, or in this case, the definition.  A “toy” can be any shape, representing any thing, but a "doll" can only be a representation of a human being, like Barbie or GI Joe.  [tik tok Joe's thumbnail]  Singer and Singh knew this distinction could be a sizable financial benefit for their client, Marvel Entertainment, who had an ownership stake in ToyBiz at the time.  For years, Marvel had been importing action figures that were taxed as dolls, despite their wide panoply of brightly colored characters often being anything but human.  Taking a direct approach, the two lawyers gathered up a literal bag full of action figures and went to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection headquarters in Washington, D.C. to try and convince them that Marvel wasn't importing humanlike “dolls,” but instead very non-human “toys.”   The Customs staff's reaction to the bag of toys is not recorded, but their official response was that the “non-human characteristics” of the X-Men and other action figures “fall far short of transforming [these figures] into something other than the human beings which they represent.”  Singer and Singh were locked onto this tactic and pursued it for a decade.  A judge considered various figures from Marvel's whole line to decide whether or not individual characters were human or not.  Rippling pecs, long claws, blue skin, red eyes, all were scrutinized, as lawyers on both sides expostulated on the philosophical ramifications of what it means to be human.  How can these action figures be human if they have "tentacles, claws, wings, or robotic limbs?"     I'd loved to have been there to hear people with expensive educations in tailored suits, stand before a learned jurist in a wood-paneled courtroom and say things like,  "The figure of 'Kingpin' resembles a man in a suit carrying a staff. Nothing in the storyline indicates that Kingpin possesses superhuman powers.  Yet, Kingpin is known to have exceedingly great strength (however 'naturally' achieved) and the figure itself has a large and stout body with a disproportionately small head and disproportionately large hands. Even though 'dolls' can be caricatures of human beings, the court is of the opinion that the freakishness of the figure's appearance coupled with the fabled 'Spider-Man' storyline to which it belongs does not warrant a finding that the figure represents a human being."   In 2003, Judge Judith Barzilay ruled that Marvel characters aren't quite human enough to taxed as dolls.  “They are more than (or different than) humans. These fabulous characters use their extraordinary and unnatural physical and psychic powers on the side of either good or evil. The figures' shapes and features, as well as their costumes and accessories, are designed to communicate such powers."   Yay, a victory for the giant multimillion dollar corporation!  But a slap in the face for diehard X-Men fans.  Chuck Austen, one of the writers for Uncanny X-Men at the time, said his whole goal in the story was to show the team's humanity.  The nerds grew restless and Marvel had to issue a statement that read, "Don't fret, Marvel fans, our heroes are living, breathing human beings—but humans who have extraordinary abilities ... A decision that the X-Men figures indeed do have 'nonhuman' characteristics further proves our characters have special, out-of-this world powers." And that's… To protect the public from contaminated oil, New York State law required that all fish oil be gauged, inspected and branded, with a penalty of $25 per barrel on those who failed to comply.  Samuel Judd purchased three barrels of whale oil that had not been inspected, and James Maurice, a fish oil inspector, sought to collect the penalty from him.  Judd pleaded that the barrels contained whale oil, not fish oil, and so were not subject to the fish oil legislation. At trial, one side said the term "fish oil" was commonly understood to include whale oil, and the other side plead the obvious science that whales are mammals.  The jury deliberated for 15 minutes and returned a verdict in favor of the fish oil inspector.    Mr. Judd, dissatisfied with the verdict, moved for a new trial. By then, the Legislature was in session and the Recorder, knowing that a new fish oil bill was pending, delayed his decision on the motion. The new enactment limited the inspection to fish liver oil, and the Recorder took the view that this implicitly confirmed that the earlier legislation covered whale oil. Accordingly, he refused to grant Judd's motion for a new trial.   James Maurice resigned his position as fish oil inspector because he considered that the position under the new law had too little value or importance.     Sources: https://www.constantpodcast.com/episodes/are-whales-fish https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/12/26/256586055/when-the-supreme-court-decided-tomatoes-were-vegetables https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/10/18/the-obscure-supreme-court-case-that-decided-tomatoes-are-vegetables/ https://www.insider.com/interesting-facts-about-oreo-2018-7#oreo-first-appeared-on-the-market-in-1912-1 https://www.mashed.com/223360/the-strange-history-of-the-oreo-and-hydrox-cookie-rivalry/ https://www.mashed.com/702384/why-this-snack-food-giant-is-being-sued-over-an-oreo-flavor/?utm_campaign=clip http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/10/time-company-baked-giant-cake-win-court-case/  https://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/read-this/is-a-jaffa-cake-a-cake-or-a-biscuit-heres-the-definitive-answer-as-decided-by-a-court-1379222 https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/92007/why-us-federal-court-ruled-marvels-x-men-arent-humans https://www.polygon.com/comics/2019/9/12/20862474/x-men-series-toys-human-legal-issue-marvel-comics https://observer.com/2007/12/thar-she-blows-19thcentury-court-case-harpoons-a-whale-of-a-story/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nix_v._Hedden https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtpJFEBcKoE

(Get Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MOXIE - Enter promo code MOXIE for 83% off and 3 extra months free!) T-shirt for Ukraine, all proceeds and matching donation to Ukraine Red Cross 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 website. Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram.  Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi.  Or buy the book and a shirt. Music: Kevin MacLeod, and The Mini Vandals. Sponsors:  Gen X This is Why Want to start a podcast or need a better podcast host?  Get up to TWO months hosting for free from Libsyn 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 types of neurons within the memory center of the brain that are responsible for acquiring new associative memories, i.e., memories triggered by unrelated items, such as an odor.   The stronger emotional memory connection with odor than other sensory experiences appears to be due to the privileged access of the central brain structures of the olfactory system to the limbic system structures—such as the amygdala and hippocampus, which are involved in regulating emotion and emotional memories.  A 2010 study published in The American Journal of Psychology found that memories associated with smells were not necessarily more accurate, but tended to be more emotionally evocative.3   Typically the most salient odors are ones that are infrequently experienced, so when they are smelled they have a specific association. “They often are ones that were initially experienced at a younger age,” Dalton says. However, she points out that because everyone's experience with odor is so idiosyncratic and personal, the actual olfactory trigger can vary enormously from person to person, so I might smell fried foods on a crisp breeze and be transported back to the state fair, but none of my sisters, of which I have five, would have the same memory triggered.     Regardless of why it happens, we can use the connection between smell and memory to our advantage.  An exercise that helps anosmics to regain their sense of smell is “smell training”. Researchers believe that systematically exercising the olfactory neurons stimulates growth and repair, much in the same way that physiotherapy promotes injury healing. The technique was pioneered in Germany and involves actively sniffing (and concentrating) on different smells at least twice a day for several months.   In a recent study of older people, smell training was shown not just to improve their olfactory function but also their verbal function and overall wellbeing, demonstrating that smell training is a good way to improve the quality of life in older people. What is remarkable is the fact that the control group was given sudoku puzzles to complete twice a day during the experiment, suggesting that smell training is more effective than sudoku on these measures.   “It's worth saying that episodic memories, or memories of specific events from a first-person point of view, are where the sense of smell is best connected to memories,” says Theresa L. White, PhD, professor and chair in the department of psychology at Le Moyne College in Syracuse. “Odors are not very good in terms of other types of memory. For example, if I gave you seven words to remember and seven smells to remember, there is no question that you'd do better with the list of words.”   White explains that associative memory can work for any sense, and smell is no exception. “Imagine that you always relax in a hot lavender–scented bubble bath at the end of the day,” she says. “You'll come to associate the smell of lavender with the feeling of relaxation. This means that over time, when you smell lavender and you're not in the bath, you'll still have the feeling of relaxation.”   On the topic of lavender, show of hands if you find that smell relaxing.  Me, I don't, but many people do, so it was a flagship scent back in the days when I raised goats and made goatmilk soap and skin care products.  Customers would say to me that they wanted lavender because it relaxes you, as if were aerosolized xanax, to which I always shrugged and said I think whatever smell you feel is relaxing, is relaxing.  I've never really gone in for aromatherapy, but should I?  Is it scientifically supportable?   There's no question that aromatherapy is popular.  The market value of essential oils worldwide is expected to grow from around 17 billion U.S. dollars in 2017 to about 27 billion dollars by 2022. Europe accounts for the largest share of the global essential oils market, with the Asia Pacific region and North America tying for second place.  But “popular” doesn't mean “good.”  One need only turn on top-40 radio to see that.  Does aromatherapy do anything or is it all placebo effect?  (Not to take away from the placebo effect and the mind's incredible ability to change the body, but that's a topic for another show.)  In a word, maybe?Research on the effectiveness of aromatherapy — the therapeutic use of essential oils extracted from plants — is limited.   However, some studies have shown that aromatherapy might have health benefits, including:   Relief from anxiety and depression Improved quality of life, particularly for people with chronic health conditions Improved sleep Smaller studies suggest that aromatherapy with lavender oil may help:   Reduce pain for people with osteoarthritis of the knee Improve quality of life for people with dementia Reduce pain for people with kidney stones Essential oils used in aromatherapy are typically extracted from various parts of plants and then distilled. The highly concentrated oils may be inhaled directly or indirectly or applied to the skin through massage, lotions or bath salts. Some essential oil manufacturers have oils that can be taken internally, but research on the safety and efficacy of this method is extremely limited.  Many essential oils have been shown to be safe when used as directed.  However, essential oils used in aromatherapy aren't regulated by the Food and Drug Administration and many that are safe for humans can be harmful to our pets, especially cats.  Steer clear of wintergreen, oil of sweet birch, citrus oil (d-limonene), pine oils, Ylang Ylang oil, peppermint oil, cinnamon oil, pennyroyal oil, clove oil, eucalyptus oil, and tea tree oil, especially in applications that put them into the air.  Your pussy will thank you.     And that's…. It's a classic feature of crime dramas and documentaries, the telltale scent of bitter almonds associated with death by a cyanide-containing compound, but as an investigator, you wouldn't want to go relying on it.  The gene needed to detect the odor of cyanide is recessive and carried on the X chromosome, so women are more likely to be able to smell it since we have two X's.   Remember…   Sources: https://www.thrillist.com/news/nation/premium-iberian-ham-sniffers-are-tired-from-sniffing-so-much-ham https://www.rd.com/article/outer-space-smell/ https://www.gentside.co.uk/food/spains-ham-sniffers-prepare-for-a-hectic-season-sniffing-800-hams-daily_art8817.html https://www.rd.com/article/outer-space-smell/ https://www.rd.com/list/foods-banned-space/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EBdhpSh7_I&ab_channel=Mashable https://www.health.ny.gov/environmental/emergency/chemical_terrorism/cyanide_tech.htm https://science.howstuffworks.com/nasas-sniffer-job.htm https://theconversation.com/six-curious-facts-about-smell-128533 https://www.verywellmind.com/why-do-we-associate-memories-so-strongly-with-specific-smells-5203963 https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/smell-disorders https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/why-does-food-taste-bad-on-airplanes.html https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/heo/sfa/aac/silver-snoopy-award https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/smell-disorders#2 https://theplaidzebra.com/odour-tester-chocolate-taster-strange-careers-diverge-traditional-9-5/ https://www.communitynews.org/princetoninfo/coverstories/this-job-stinks-from-one-who-knows/article_66ce8eb0-7066-51be-8081-be9bcc24c8be.html https://www.statista.com/topics/5174/essential-oils/ https://www.verywellmind.com/why-do-we-associate-memories-so-strongly-with-specific-smells-5203963 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-smelling-test-the-genetics-of-olfaction-2192370.html https://www.petpoisonhelpline.com/blog/essential-oils-cats/ https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/consumer-health/expert-answers/aromatherapy/faq-20058566

(Get Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MOXIE - Enter promo code MOXIE for 83% off and 3 extra months free!) T-shirt for Ukraine 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 website. Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram.  Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi.  Or buy the book and a shirt. Music: Kevin MacLeod, David Fesilyan, Dan Henig. and/or Chris Haugen. Sponsors:  Dumb People with Terrible Ideas, History Obscura, Sambucol Want to start a podcast or need a better podcast host?  Get up to TWO months hosting for free from Libsyn 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: Cassandra Peterson, aka Elvira Mistress of the Dark, was once the lead singer of an Italian punk rock band.     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 [and we] would all be out of work again as soon as it was finished."   Moms starred in 1948's Boarding House Blues where she played landlord to a building of rent-dodging vaudeville performers, which is an amazing premise. The film also showcased "Crip" Heard, a tap dancer with only one arm and one leg. And the best thing about Boarding House Blues?  You can actually see it!  It's on the free Tubi app, link in the show notes, not a sponsor, and I plan to watch it as soon as I can make myself sit still for 1.5 hours.  Watch-party anyone?   Film was nice and everything, but it was vinyl records that gave Moms the boost she needed to expand her audience.  Comedy records were *the thing in the early 60's.Her first vinyl appearance came a few years prior with the 1956 Vanguard Records release A Night at the Apollo. The album is a fascinating social document with liner notes written by Langston Hughes.  Of the many other noteworthy things about that album is the fact that Moms wasn't paid for her part in it.  So she was understandably reluctant when the Chess brothers asked her to cut an album with them.  Phil and Leonard Chess were Jewish immigrants who arrived in Chicago a few months prior to the stock market crash who were able to buy some South Side bars after the end of prohibition.  Their Macomba Lounge became a hot spot when they started booking live music, mostly rhythm and blues, which drew in the biggest crowds.  The brothers noticed this, and that the acts who had people lining up around the block, weren't available on records, so they started a record company.  Chess Records signed names like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley, and Chuck Berry.  These records delivered new found joys for the white public and offered posterity for Chicago's African-American crowd.  Always on the lookout for what was popular with their original Black audience, Chess Records asked Moms Mabley to sign, but she understandably didn't want to get screwed again.  Luckily her manager was able to persuade her and Moms Mabley on Stage (also known under the name Moms Mabley: The Funniest Woman Alive) was produced.    Chicago was host to Hugh Hefner's Playboy Club, a venue that always featured a strong roster of Black performers and plenty of white bohemians, and that's where she recorded Moms Mabley at The Playboy Club.  Y'all gotta see this album cover, link in the shownotes.  If you were to listen to On Stage and then Playboy Club, you'd notice something…different between the two albums.  On Stage was recorded at The Apollo and opens with a thunderous cacophony of cheerings.  Playboy Club, not as much, because that album was recorded in front of an all-white audience.  It was time for a cross-over.  It was also the time for civil rights –lunch counters, fire hoses, marches.  Mabley's act became increasingly political, but her benevolent old grandma persona made her non-threatening and more accessible to white crowds. Moms knew white audiences needed to hear her message now, and that they might actually hear her.  She was just a little old lady, shuffling onto the stage, how threatening could she be?  Plus she was on the biggest TV shows of the day –Merv Griffin, Johnny Carson, Flip Wilson, Mike Douglas, the Smothers Brothers– and they were okay, so she must be okay.   Moms had crossed over.  She played Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center.  She put out more albums, including my favorite title, Young Men Si, Old Men No.  She began acting in big studio films, like The Cincinatti Kid, with Steve McQueen.  In 1966 Moms returned to the South for the first time in over three decades.  It, uh, didn't go great.  In the middle of her show, five shots rang out in the theater and Moms scrambled off-stage.  Thankfully, the shots went nowhere near her, originating apparently from a fight between audience members.  Regardless, a story made the rounds that one of the bullets went straight through her floppy hat.  "I hadn't been in Columbia, South Carolina, for thirty-five years," explained Moms, "and [now] bullets ran me out of town."    Music became a regular part of her act, and a cover version of "Abraham, Martin and John" hit No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100 on July 19, 1969, making Mabley, at 75, the oldest living person to have a U.S. Top 40 hit.  Mabley continued performing in the 1970s. In 1971, she appeared on The Pearl Bailey Show. Later that year, she opened for Ike & Tina Turner at the Greek Theatre and sang a tribute to Louis Armstrong as part of her set.[24] While filming the 1974 film Amazing Grace, (her only film starring role)[1] Mabley suffered a heart attack. She returned to work three weeks later, after receiving a pacemaker.  She is survived not only by her children (she had four other children as an adult), but by more contemporary comedians who remember her and want to keep her story alive.  She was the subject of a Broadway play by Clarice Taylor, who played one of the grandma's on the Cosby Show; two projects from Whoopi Goldberg, one being the comedy show that put Goldberg on the map in 1984 and a documentary in 2013, and in season 3 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, where she was portrayed by lifelong fan Wanda Sykes.   And that's… Dorothy Parker's wit was, deservedly, the stuff of legend.  Of the Yale prom, she said, “ If all the girls attending it were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised.”  It was that saucy humor that got her fired from her job as a staff writer at Vanity Fair.  Parker spoke openly about having had an abortion, a thing that simply was not done in the 1920's, saying, “It serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard.” A firm believer in civil rights, she bequeathed her literary estate to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Remember   Sources: https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/person/204532%7C103917/Mae-West/#biography https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mae-West https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/52283/13-things-you-might-not-know-about-mae-west http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/04/this-day-in-history-mae-west-is-sentenced-to-10-days-in-prison-for-writing-directing-and-performing-in-the-broadway-play-sex/ https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tallulah-Bankhead https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/05/real-cruella-de-vil-tallulah-bankhead https://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/09/theater/theater-the-pain-behind-the-laughter-of-moms-mabley.html https://dorothyparker.com/gallery/biography https://bookshop.org/books/your-brain-on-facts-things-you-didn-t-know-things-you-thought-you-knew-and-things-you-never-knew-you-never-knew-trivia-quizzes-fun-fa/9781642502534?aid=14459&listref=books-based-on-podcasts https://www.mamamia.com.au/tallulah-bankhead-cruella/  

Voted on by our Patreon, 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 website. Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram.  Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi.  Or buy the book and a shirt. Music: Kevin MacLeod, David Fesilyan, Dan Henig. and/or Chris Haugen. Sponsors:  Dumb People with Terrible Ideas, History Obscura, Sambucol Want to start a podcast or need a better podcast host?  Get up to TWO months hosting for free from Libsyn 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 the production, 92 developed some form of cancer, with 46 dying of it, including Wayne, Hayward, Moorehead, and Armendáriz.  The director, Dick Powell, died of lymphoma in 1963.  Wayne developed lung cancer and then the stomach cancer that would ultimately kill him in 1979.  Wayne would remain convinced that his chain-smoking was to blame for the cancers, even as friends tried to convince him it was from exposure to radiation.  Wayne's sons, who visited the set during filming and actually played with Geiger counters among the contaminated rocks, both developed tumors.  Susan Hayward died from brain cancer in 1975 at 57.   The authorities in 1954 had declared the area to be safe from radioactive fallout, even though abnormal levels of radiation were detected.  However, modern research has shown that the soil in some areas near the filming site would have remained radioactive for sixty years.  Howard Hughes, producer of The Conqueror, came to realize in the early 1970's that people who have been involved with the production were dying.   As the person who approved the filming location, Hughes felt culpable and paid $12 million to buy all existing copies of the film.  Though the link between the location and the cancers that cannot be definitely proven, experts argue that the preponderance of cases goes beyond mere coincidence.   And that's… Sculptor Gillian Genser used mussel shells in her work, sanding and grinding them, and they likely came from water contaminated with industrial waste.  After 15 years, she had built up high levels of arsenic and lead in her blood.  She will "never fully recover," in her own words, but she did complete her mussel-sculpture, a depiction of the biblical Adam, link in the show notes. She calls him her "beautiful death." Sources: https://www.ozy.com/true-and-stories/the-ballet-girls-who-burned-to-death/71244/ https://www.racked.com/2017/12/19/16710276/burning-dresses-history https://www.oddee.com/item_99203.aspx https://bookshop.org/books/your-brain-on-facts-things-you-didn-t-know-things-you-thought-you-knew-and-things-you-never-knew-you-never-knew-trivia-quizzes-fun-fa/9781642502534 https://www.armco.org.uk/asbestos-survey-news/asbestos-was-used-as-fake-snow-in-many-old-hollywood-movies/ https://www.grunge.com/267772/the-amazing-life-and-tragic-death-of-lon-chaney/ https://www.dogfordstudios.com/killer-art-art-that-has-actually-killed-people/ https://news.artnet.com/art-world/7-deadly-art-materials-to-watch-out-for-1081526 https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/11/how-important-is-lead-poisoning-to-becoming-a-legendary-artist/281734/ https://noahchemicals.com/blog/the-toxic-histories-of-five-famous-pigments/ https://www.dogfordstudios.com/killer-art-art-that-has-actually-killed-people/ https://owlcation.com/stem/Cinnabar-A-Beautiful-But-Toxic-Mineral-Ore-and-Pigment https://www.asbestosdiseaseawareness.org/newsroom/blogs/its-snowing-asbestos-the-haunting-truth-about-the-white-christmas-killer-set-and-continued-imports-and-use/ https://www.cpr.org/2019/11/04/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-blucifer-the-demon-horse-of-dia https://www.burlington-record.com/2021/06/11/blucifer-just-turned-13-but-the-family-of-the-artist-who-died-creating-it-would-prefer-you-dont-call-it-that/ https://www.livescience.com/64224-sculptor-unknowingly-poisons-herself-with-her-own-art.html

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 website. Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram.  Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi.  Or buy the book and a shirt. Music: Kevin MacLeod, David Fesilyan, Dan Henig. and/or Chris Haugen. Sponsors:  What Was That Like, Reddit on Wiki, Sambucol Want to start a podcast or need a better podcast host?  Get up to TWO months hosting for free from Libsyn 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 sold to Robert Smith and his wife Rebecca in Mississippi in the 1840s.  Biddy had three children, Ellen, Ann, and Harriet.  Their paternity is unknown, but it's been speculated that Ann and Harriet were fathered by Smith.   Smith, a Mormon convert, followed the call of church leaders to settle in the West to establish a new Mormon community in what would become Salt Lake City, Utah in what was at the time still part of Mexico.  The Mormon church was a-okay with slavery, encouraging people to treat the enslaved kindly, as they were lesser beings who needed the white man's protection.  In 1848, 30-year-old Mason *walked 1,700 miles behind a 300-wagon caravan. Along the route west Mason's responsibilities included setting up and breaking camp, cooking the meals, herding livestock, and serving as a midwife as well as taking care of her three young daughters aged ten, four, and an infant.  Utah didn't last long for the Smiths and 3 years later, they set out in a 150-wagon caravan for San Bernardino, California to establish another Mormon community.  Ignoring warnings that slavery was illegal in California, Smith gathered his livestock and people they treated like livestock and schlepped them along.  Although California joined the United States as a free state in 1850, the laws around slavery were complicated and there was a lot of forced labor to be found.  Indigenous people could be forced to work as "contract laborers."  How, you ask?  Well this made we swear loudly when I read it.  Every weekend, local authorities would arrest intoxicated Natives on dubious charges and take them to what was essentially a slave mart and auction off their labor for the coming week. If they were paid at the end of that week, they were usually paid in alcohol so they could get drunk and be arrested to be auctioned off again.   Along the way, biddy Mason met free blacks who urged her to legally contest her slave status once she reached California, a free state.  When they got to Cali, Mason met more free blacks, like her lifelong friends Robert and Minnie Owens, who told her the same thing.  Smith must have noticed this, because a few years later, fearing the loss of his slaves, he decided to move the whole kit and caboodle to Texas, a slave state.  This was obviously real bad news for Mason and the other enslaved people, but thankfully Mason had the Owens on her side, particularly since her now 17 year old daughter was in love with their son.  The law was on her side, too.  The California Fugitive Slave Act, enacted in 1852, allowed slave owners to temporarily hold enslaved persons in California and transport them back to their home state, but this law wouldn't have covered Smith because he wasn't from Texas.  When Robert Owens told the Los Angeles County Sheriff that there were people being illegally held in bondage and being taken back to a slave state, the sheriff gathered a posse, including Owens, his sons, and cattleman from Owens' ranch, and cut Smith off at the pass, literally Cajon Pass, and prevented him from leaving the state.  The sheriff was armed with a legal document, a writ of habeus corpus, signed by Judge Benjamin Hayes.   On January 19, 1856 she petitioned the court for freedom for herself and her extended family of 13 women and children.  Their fate was now in the hands of Judge Hayes.  You wouldn't expect Hayes to be on Mason's side in a dispute against Smith.  Hayes hailed from a slave state and had owned slaves himself, plus in his time as a journalist, he's written pro-Mormon articles.  The trial started with a damning statement from Biddy's eldest daughter Hannah, herself a mother of a newborn, saying she wanted to go to Texas.  The sheriff spoke to her afterwards and found she was terrified of Smith and had said what she was told to say.  She wasn't wrong to be scared.  Smith threatened Mason's lawyer and bribed him to leave the case.  Smith's son and hired men trail hands went to the jail where Mason and her family were being kept safe and tried to intimidate the jailer.  They also threatened the Owens family and a neighborhood grocer and a doctor. They said 'If this case isn't resolved on Southern principles, you'll all pay the price, all people of color.'    Judge Hayes…he wasn't having any of this.  Technically, Mason and her children had also become free the minute they stepped into California. The new California constitution stated that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude unless for the punishment of crimes shall ever be tolerated in this state.” However, lacking options and probably unaware of her full rights, Mason continued to serve in the Smith household.  Smith claimed Mason and the others had stayed because they were “members of his family” who voluntarily offered to go with him to Texas.  Mason, as a non-white person, was legally barred from testifying against the white Smith in court, so Judge Hayes took her into his chambers along with two trustworthy local gentlemen who acted as observers to depose her.  He asked her only whether she was going voluntarily, and what she said was, 'I always do what I have been told, but I have always been afraid of this trip to Texas."    Smith fled to Texas before the trial could conclude.  On January 19, Judge Hays ruled in favor of Mason.  "And it further appearing by satisfactory proof to the Judge here, that all the said persons of color are entitled to their freedom and are free and cannot be held in slavery or involuntary servitude, it is therefore argued that they are entitled to their freedom and are free forever."  He hoped they would “become settled and go to work for themselves—in peace and without fear.”   Okay, now we're getting to the part of Biddy Mason's story that the listicle writer used to include her in a gallery of inventrixes.  Mason and her family moved to Los Angeles, then a dusty little town of only 2,000 or so residents, less than 20 of whom were black, where she worked as midwife and nurse.  As the town grew, so did her business.  Basically, if you were having a baby, Biddy Mason was delivering it.  Well, her friend Dr. Griffin probably helped, but we're hear to talk about Biddy.  After tending to hundreds of births and illnesses, she was known about town as Aunt Biddy.  As a midwife, Mason was able to cross class and color lines and she viewed everyone as part of her extended family.  In her big black medicine bag, she carried the tools of her trade, and the papers Judge Hayes had given her affirming that she was free, just in case.    By 1866, she had saved enough money to buy a property on Spring Street.  Her daughter Ellen remembered that her mother firmly told her family that “the first homestead must never be sold.”  She wanted her family to always have a home to call their own.  My family is the same way – if you can own land, even if it's an empty lot, do.  Mason's small wood frame house at 311 Spring Street was not just a family home, it became a “refuge for stranded and needy settlers,” a daycare center for working women, and a civic meeting place.  In 1872, a group of black Angelenos founded the First African Methodist Episcopal Church at her house and they met there until they were able to move to their own building.     She also continued to invest in real estate, while always making sure to give back. According to the Los Angeles Times: “She was a frequent visitor to the jail, speaking a word of cheer and leaving some token and a prayerful hope with every prisoner. In the slums of the city, she was known as “Grandma Mason,” and did much active service toward uplifting the worst element in Los Angeles. She paid taxes and all expenses on church property to hold it for her people. During the flood of the early eighties, she gave an open order to a little grocery store, which was located on Fourth and Spring Streets. By the terms of this order, all families made homeless by the flood were to be supplied with groceries, while Biddy Mason cheerfully paid the bill.”   Eventually she was able to buy 10 acres, on which she built rental homes and eventually a larger commercial building she rented out.  That land she invested in and developed is now the heart of downtown L.A. three substantial plots near what is now Grand Central Market as well as land on San Pedro Street in Little Tokyo.  Mason was a shrewd businesswoman too.  Los Angeles was booming, and rural Spring Street was becoming crowded with shops and boarding houses. In 1884, she sold the north half of her Spring Street property for $1,500 and had a mixed-use building built on the other half.  She sold a lot she had purchased on Olive Street for $2,800, turning a tidy profit considering she'd bought it for less than $400.  In 1885, she deeded a portion of her remaining Spring Street property to her grandsons “for the sum of love and affection and ten dollars.”  She signed the deed with her customary flourished “X.” Though she was a successful real estate pioneer and nurse, who stressed the importance of education for her children and grandchildren, and taught herself Spanish, she had never learned to read or write.   Bridget “Biddy” Mason died 1891, one of the wealthiest women in Los Angeles.  For reasons never fully explained, she was buried in an unmarked grave at Evergreen Cemetery.  While you can't visit her grave, you can visit the mini-park created in her honor.  Designed by landscape architects Katherine Spitz and Pamela Burton, an 80-foot-long poured concrete wall, created by artist Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, displays a timeline of Biddy's life, illustrated with images like wagon wheels and a midwife's bag, as well as images such as an early survey map of Los Angeles and Biddy's freedom papers, from the northernmost end of the wall with the text “Biddy Mason born a slave,” all the way down to “Los Angeles mourns and reveres Grandma Mason.”  If you're ever down near the Bradbury Building on Spring street, get some pictures for me.   Sources: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/mason-bridget-biddy-1818-1891/ https://la.curbed.com/2017/3/1/14756308/biddy-mason-california-black-history https://www.laconservancy.org/locations/biddy-mason-memorial-park https://alliesforracialjustice.org/shark-tank-in-the-1800s-black-women-reigned-in-household-inventions/ https://interestingengineering.com/black-inventors-the-complete-list-of-genius-black-american-african-american-inventors-scientists-and-engineers-with-their-revolutionary-inventions-that-changed-the-world-and-impacted-history-part-two https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2021/02/08/revolutionizing-cooking-mary-jones-de-leon/id=129701/ https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/lyda-newman https://interestingengineering.com/black-inventors-the-complete-list-of-genius-black-american-african-american-inventors-scientists-and-engineers-with-their-revolutionary-inventions-that-changed-the-world-and-impacted-history-part-two https://laist.com/news/la-history/biddy-mason-free-forever-the-contentious-hearing-that-made-her-a-legend-los-angeles-black-history  

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 website. Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram.  Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi.  Or buy the book and a shirt. Music: Kevin MacLeod, David Fesilyan, Dan Henig. Sponsors: History's Trainwrecks, What Was That Like, Sambucol Want to start a podcast or need a better podcast host?  Get up to TWO months hosting for free from Libsyn 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 Copy-wrong, 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 home was welcoming to the needy as well.  Henry Boyd passed away at the age of 83 and was laid to rest in an unmarked grave in Spring Grove Cemetery.  While you may not be able to find Boyd's grave, you can easily find original Boy bedsteads fetching high prices in antique stores and auctions.   And that's…You might have noticed today's episode was a bit of a sausage party so it's a good thing we'll pick up again next week with the stories, triumphs and tribulations of female inventors of color.  The world has so many fascinating facts in it and I am just a humble weekly half-hour podcaster, so see you next week for part two.  Remember…Thanks     Sources: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/with-patents-or-without-black-inventors-reshaped-american-industry-180962201 https://atlantablackstar.com/2014/02/11/5-inventions-by-enslaved-black-men-blocked-by-us-patent-office/4/ https://www.blackenterprise.com/black-history-month-inventions-black-slaves-denied-patents/ https://amsterdamnews.com/news/2021/08/05/sarah-boone-inventor-ironing-board-and-first-black/ https://theconversation.com/americas-always-had-black-inventors-even-when-the-patent-system-explicitly-excluded-them-72619 https://www.blackenterprise.com/black-history-month-inventions-black-slaves-denied-patents/ http://www.blackpast.org/aah/reed-judy-w-c-1826 https://web.archive.org/web/20180802193123/https://www.uspto.gov/about-us/news-updates/uspto-recognizes-inventive-women-during-womens-history-month https://www.yesmagazine.org/health-happiness/2016/03/21/10-black-women-innovators-and-the-awesome-things-they-brought-us https://www.nkytribune.com/2019/02/our-rich-history-henry-boyd-once-a-slave-became-a-prominent-african-american-furniture-maker/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/first-african-american-hold-patent-invented-dry-scouring-180971394/ https://blackinventor.com/benjamin-bradley/ https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/goode-sarah-e-c-1855-1905/

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 (though only two of them for good reasons). Links to all the research resources are on the website. 3:06 Moremi of Ife 10:54 Amanirena of Kush 23:00 Ranavalona I of Madagascar  Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram.  Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi.  Or buy the book and a shirt. Music: Kevin MacLeod, David Fesilyan, Dan Henig. Sponsors: What Was That Like, Sly Fox Trivia, Sambucol Want to start a podcast or need a better podcast host?  Get up to TWO months hosting for free from Libsyn 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 beaches.  The Queen soon turned her attention to her Christian subjects and a few European missionaries and traders who remained.  If you were caught practicing Christianity. you could expect to be beaten and hundreds were arrested.  Once imprisoned, they face torture and starvation, which beats being hung from a cliff and left to die of exposure in the tropical heat.  Whatever horrific fate they chose for you, your family had to watch.  Rana was not a nice lady, I really can't stress that enough.  Though there were some Christians who kept themselves to themselves and managed to outlive her.     If you were up on charges of treason, you'd face an ordeal by food.  You'd be forced to eat three servings of chicken skin and a poisonous nute from the tangena tree.  If you threw up all of the chicken, and just the chicken, you were free to go.  But it you didn't vomit up all three pieces, you'd be executed, or probably dead from the poison, six of one.  For every other crime, you'll be treated to a nice boiling, either water or oil, depending on the day, or, and here's a phrase, incremental dismemberment.  Queen Rana, I should mention, also did away with trial by jury, because that was a European thing.     Whilst the Queen was fiercely anti European,she was very much aware of her need to modernize.  Madagascar needed industry of its own.  In 1831, a French industrialist and adventurer named Jean Laborde presented himself to the queen after he found himself shipwrecked on Madagascar.  Labardi was soon made the chief engineer to the court, and possibly father of Rana's son Rakoto, charged with building a giant factory to turn out cannons, weapons, soap, ceramics and cement, with the “help” of 20,000 enslaved laborers.  Her military was paid by the kingdom, but not well, but they had a benefit to offset that – official permission to pillage, loot, and extract any value from her subjects.     In 1845, new laws meant that all foreigners on the island would be forced to take part in the public work, many were able to leave Madagascar to avoid such servitude, but the people who lived there weren't so lucky.  These works were usually performed by slaves or by those who hadn't paid their taxes and would find themselves in bondage for the remainder of their lives.  That may not be too long, when you consider how many people they literally worked to death, tens of thousands.  Per year.  To make sure there would always be enough expendable labor in Madagascar, Queen Rana abolished the export of enslaved people.  Importing them, still A-ok.     The public works were bad enough, but the enslaved could never have imagined the horror that would come with the 1845 buffalo hunt.  Have you ever heard of the extravagant boar or deer hunting expeditions/parties of ye olde times and thought they sounded completely extra and nuts?  They look like a carpool to the grocery store in comparison.  The Queen ordered the royal court to embark on a buffalo hunt through the malaria infested swamps and jungles.  In order to allow the royal party to travel more comfortably, some 20,000 forced laborers were sent into the jungles to build a road.  Not a road to one place or between two places, a road that existed solely for this trip.  An estimated 10,000 enslaved men, women and children died due to disease and the harsh conditions.  Mosquitos and bacteria have no care for rank and many of their 50,000 strong hunting party would die in the jungles.  I mean, it was still *mainly servants and slaves dying.  who died by the end of the hunting trip.  And how many innocent buffalo got wiped out in this boondogle debacle? [sfx paper rustling] Let me check.  In round figures, zero.  [in different languages]  1000s died on a buffalo hunt that killed no buffalo, all because the Queen wanted to go on a buffalo hunt.    It is not surprising that many within the Queen's Own court were eager to dispose of her, but the closest anyone got was when her Son Rakoto gave French businessman Joseph-François Lambert exclusive rights to the lumber, minerals, lumber and unused land on the 4th largest island in the world.  All Lambert had to do on his end was get rid of the Queen and make room for Prince Rakoto to become King Radama II.  Lambert attempted to obtain support from the French and British governments, to no avail.  In 1855, the Prince wrote in secret to Napoleon III of France, but Boni III left him on read.  It was not until 1857 that the coup was actually attempted and you might surmise by my use of the word “attempted” that it did not work.  Queen Rana responded by expelling all Europeans from Madagascar and seizing all of their assets.  With their oppressors gone, the enslaved worked in the factories burned those mothers down.  The prince faced no consequences and his actions were downplayed, as though he had been led astray by smooth-talking Europeans eager to exploit their country.    Speaking of no consequences, Queen Ranavalona I died peacefully in her sleep at the impressive-even-today age of 83. While she was one of the few African rulers to keep Europe at bay, but more than half million suffered and died during her 33 year rule.  Per her orders, the country entered into the official mourning period.  The bloodiest queen in history was dead, but she wasn't off-brand.  12,000 zebu cattle were slaughtered, though the meat was distributed to the people; and during the burial, a stray spark ignited a barrel of gunpowder destined for use in the ceremony, which caused an explosion and fire that destroyed many of the surrounding buildings and killed many people.   And that's… The Hausa Queen Amina reigned spectacularly for 34 years, winning wars, enlarging her territory, introducing kola nut cultivation and metal armor, and making sure her traders had safe passage throughout the Sahara region.  Today, she is remembered not only for her bravery, but also for building fortification walls called “ganuwar Amina” around her cities.  Remember…Thanks..   Sources: https://www.pulse.ng/bi/lifestyle/7-most-powerful-african-queens-in-history-you-need-to-know/dwhncf5 https://www.rejectedprincesses.com/princesses/amanirenas https://artsandculture.google.com/story/queen-amanirenas-the-story-of-the-white-nile-nubi-archeress/bALSN3WTK_YEJA https://wonderopolis.org/wonder/Who-Was-the-One-Eyed-Queen-Who-Defeated-Caesar https://face2faceafrica.com/article/amanirenas-the-brave-one-eyed-african-queen-who-led-an-army-against-the-romans-in-24bc https://historyofyesterday.com/madagascars-mad-queen-that-you-ve-never-heard-of-25e27ebe121d https://www.madamagazine.com/en/die-schreckensherrschaft-ranavalonas-i/ https://oldnaija.com/2019/11/06/moremi-ajasoro-history-of-the-brave-queen-of-ile-ife/ https://www.pulse.ng/lifestyle/food-travel/queen-moremi-did-you-know-about-the-courageous-legend-whose-statue-is-the-tallest-in/hr4llg4 https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/hausa-queen-amina-51267.php TikTok: https://africanpoems.net/modern-poetry-in-oral-manner/moremi-ajasoro/  

I thought you might also like the show "What Was That Like?," real people in unreal situations.  

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 website. 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 Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram. Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi.  Or buy the book and a shirt. Music: Kevin MacLeod, David Fesilyan, RKCVC, and Chris Haugen. Sponsors: Sly Fox Trivia, Sambucol Want to start a podcast or need a better podcast host?  Get up to TWO months hosting for free from Libsynwith 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 demo, a fallen river spirit, a white dragon horse, and a regular human monk– for an epic adventure.   Sun Wukong was born from a rock on the summit of Flower Fruit Mountain and becomes king of the monkeys that live there.  He finds more than one way to make himself immortal and goes off on adventures.  The idea of living forever really appeals to Sun, so when he returns, he trains the monkeys into an army to take down the Eastern Dragon King by force, so he can take his and all monkeys' names from the Book of Life and Death, releasing them from the cycle of death and rebirth.  He then defeats some Heavenly warriors sent to capture him, gets a post in Heaven only to rage quit when he finds out it has no actual power whatsoever, returning yet again as The Great Sage Equal of Heaven, and committing a series of monkey-shines and outright crimes.  He steals quite a variety of things, including the Heavenly Empress's peaches, the dishes prepared for an important banquet, all the holy wine, and the pills of immortality created by Lao Tzu, which kicks off a war between Heaven and Flower Fruit Mountain, whoopsie-doodles.  Wu Kong is captured, but As no weapon or even lighting can scratch him, he is burnt in Lao Tzu's furnace for 49 days.  This backfires on the Jade Emperor of Heaven giving him new powers and making him really angry.  When the furnace is opened, he leaps out of it and proceeds to wreck total havoc in Heaven, fighting thousands of Heavenly soldiers by himself.  The Heavenly Emperor asks the Buddha for help, and the Buddha outwits and outperforms the egomaniacal monkey king and traps the cheeky monkey underneath the Mountain of Five Elements.  Sun Wukong stayed trapped there for 500 years, and we still haven't gotten to the journeying part of Journey to the West.   The story was not only entertainment, but effectively Buddhist propaganda.  Sun Wukong is far and away the most powerful power character in the story, more powerful than the Jade Emperor and all his armies, but he was no match for the Buddha.  It's like if you've been reading Deadpool comics for months, then suddenly Deadpool gets beaten the spirit of Bob Ross, so that you'll want to take up painting and generally be pleasant and soft-spoken and keep a squirrel in your pocket, I don't know, this analogy got away from me pretty quickly.  The story spread with the religion, as well as independent of it, becoming a touchstone throughout Asia.  In Japan, the Monkey King is known as Son Goku, for example, while in Korea his name is Son Oh Gong. The story is popular throughout the rest of Asia as well, all the way to Vietnam, Thailand, and even Malaysia and Indonesia.   So just how powerful is Sun Wukong?  How about the strongest non-omnipotent character in all of fiction?  Here are just a few of his greatest hits.  He could run “with the speed of a meteor” and cover 34,000mi/54,000km in one leap, so Superman better watch his back.  Sun Wukong carries a staff that can be as small as a pin or as big as a mountain, but always weighs 8 tons.  He can freeze people in mid-fight, not that he needs to, control the weather, and make copies of himself.  One of his abilities is called the 72 earthly transformations And that… In another myth, designed to explain their name ("tail-men" in Greek), Zeus changed the Cercopes into monkeys (from this we have the genus Cercopithecus). In still another myth, Zeus turned them to stone for trying to deceive even him, the stone was shown to visitors to Thermopylae. Acmon, companion of Diomede, insulted Aphrodite and is turned into a bird. In Greek mythology, Cercopes were two demigods brothers. They were thieves and they even attempted to steal Heracles' weapons. Zeus changed them into monkeys. This myth, inspired zoologists to name the genus of monkeys depicted in Minoan frescoes as Cercopithecus.   Sources: https://www.wilderutopia.com/environment/wildlife/howler-monkeys-among-the-maya-divine-patrons-to-the-artisans/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howler_monkey_gods Hart, George (2005). The Routledge Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses (PDF) (2nd ed.). Routledge. p. 44. ISBN 978-0-415-34495-1.  http://africancreationenergy.blogspot.com/2015/12/african-monkey-gods.html https://yokai.com/sarugami/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babi_(mythology) https://symbolsage.com/sun-wukong-monkey-king/ https://symbolsage.com/three-wise-monkeys/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapi_(Son_of_Horus) https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hanuman https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/monkeys-india-delhi-parliament-video-rhesus-macaques-government-offices-a8679151.html https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-monkeys/monkeys-run-amok-in-indias-corridors-of-power-idUSKBN1OA01R https://mythopedia.com/topics/sun-wukong https://www.vbtutor.net/Xiyouji/summary.htm https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-29175870 https://www.theoi.com/Georgikos/Kerkopes.html http://www.hellenicaworld.com/Greece/Mythology/en/Cercopes.html  

Javier Leiva from Pretend did a podcast with me!!!!  Like what you hear?  Become a patron of the arts for as little as $2 a month!   Or buy the book or some merch.   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! Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram. Sponsors: Sly Fox Trivia, Sambucol 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.  

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! Like what you hear?  Become a patron of the arts for as little as $2 a month!   Or buy the book or some merch.  Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram. 00:25 RP and Wilfred Pickles (voiced by Simon Jackson) 04:26 The cast of Futurama work a lot! 08:17 Voiceover is easy! (right?) 11:30 #moxiemillion 12:30 Trying to find a job 13:55 Props and accessories 15:55 AI (even worse than the movie) 18:24 Bev Standing vs TikTok 20:50 sponsors: Sly Fox Trivia, Sambucol 23:06 Susan Bennett, the voice of Siri 27:53 It's in the game Music: Kevin MacLeod, Track Tribe . Links to all the research resources are on the website.   Back when the BBC was first launched in 1922, the first General Manager of the corporation, Sir John Reith, insisted the BBC be as formal and quintessentially British as possible, and he created a number of rules towards this end.  One thing he stressed in particular was that the newscasters spoke the “King's English.“  He felt it was “a style or quality of English that would not be laughed at in any part of the country”.  He also assumed RP would be easier for people across the empire to understand versus a regional accent, of which the tiny land mass of the UK has dozens.  Reish wanted things to be ‘just so,' even ordering that any newscaster reading the news after 8PM had to wear a dinner jacket while on air, on the radio, where no one could see them.    The BBC didn't create Received Pronunciation, though.  We can trace the origins of RP back to the secondary schools and universities of nineteenth-century Britain, making it the accent of a certain social class, the one with money.  Their speech patterns - based loosely on the local accent of the south-east Midlands, roughly London, Oxford and Cambridge, soon came to be associated with ‘The Establishment.'   although one of Reith's goals in using RP was to appeal to the widest audience possible, many listeners still felt alienated by the broadcasts being beamed into their homes because of this “upper class” accent being used. Despite this, newscasters were required to use Received Pronunciation right up until World War 2.   Why change it during the war?  Didn't they have bigger things to worry about?  Well, the Ministry of Information was worried about the Nazis hijacking the radio waves.  During World War 2, Nazi Germany invested a lot of time and money to train spies and propagandists to speak using perfect Received Pronunciation so that they could pass as British.  If they pulled it off, the Nazis could potentially issue orders over the radio in a thoroughly convincing and official-sounding newscaster voice.  Therefor, the BBC hired several newscasters possessed of broad regional accents that would be more difficult for Nazis to perfectly copy, and as a bonus might also appeal to the “common man”.   The first person to read the news on the BBC with a regional accent was one Wilfred Pickles in 1941.  [sfx clip]  The public trusted that he was in fact British, but they didn't trust, or couldn't ignore his accent to pay attention to, a word he said.  Far from being popular, his mild Yorkshire accent offended many listeners so much that they wrote letters to the BBC, blasting them for having the audacity to sully the news that way.  Nonetheless, after the end of World War 2, the BBC continued to loosen its guidelines and began to hire more people who spoke with the respective accent of the region they were being broadcast.  That said, the BBC does continue to select newscasters with the most mild accents for international broadcasts.   You can't please everyone, but if you can get in good in the voicework industry, you can do a staggering number of roles.  How many?  Here are some examples, pulling only from the cast of one of my favorite shows, Futurama.  You might say my husband and I are fans; we had a Hypnotoad wedding cake.  Billy West, the voice of Fry, Prof. Farnsworth, and Zoidberg, as well as both Ren and Stimpy, has 266 acting credits on his IMDB page.  Maurice LaMarche, who did Calculon, Morbo and Kiff and is the go-to guy for Orson Welles impressions like Brain from Animaniacs, has 390 roles listed.  Tress MacNeille, who did basically every female who wasn't Amy or Leela, as well as Dot on Animaniacs and Agnes Skinner on The Simpsons has 398 roles to her name.  Bender's voice actor, John DiMaggio, without whom the Gears of War video games wouldn't be the same, has worked on some 424 projects.  The man who made Hermes Conrad Jamaican, and gave us Samurai Jack, Phil LaMarr, is the most prolific voice actor on that cast, with a whopping 495 credits to his name.  Still, he falls short of the resume of Rob Paulsen, who did the voices of Yakko and Pinky on Animaniacs, and other examples too numerous to list here, because his IMDB pages lists 541 voice acting credits.  And did I mention they're bringing Animaniacs back? [cheer]  Paulsen is trailing behind Tara Strong, though.  The actress who voiced Bubbles on Powerpuff Girls, Raven on Teen Titans, and Timmy on Fairly Oddparents has 609 roles in her 35 year career, or an average of 17 a year.  That may not sound impressive, but have you've ever tried getting *one acting job?  Strong can't hold a candle to a man whose voice I can identify from two rooms away, a man who will always be Spike Spiegel from Cowboy Bebop no matter who he's playing, Steve Blum, who has racked up 798 voice roles.  And those are just a sampling of voice actors I can name off the top of my head.  So when career day rolls around, maybe skip doctor and firefighter and suggest your kid become a voice actor.  Not everyone who does voice work has a face for radio, so I put pictures of all the actors up on the Vodacast app so you can se what Fry, Yakko, and Raven really look like ..   “Sure,” you say, “that sounds like a sweet gig.  Walk in, say a few things, and cash the check.”  Oh my sweet summer child.  If it was that easy, everyone would do it.  For starters, there is no “got it in one take” in voice acting.  Be prepared to do your lines over and over again, with different emphasis, different inflection, different pacing, or sometimes simply saying it over and over again until, even though each take sounds the same to you, the director gets the subtle difference they're looking for.  Bonus fact: the feeling you get when you say a word or phrase so many times that it stops sounding like a word and becomes a meaningless noise is called semantic satiation.   You may be standing in a little booth all day, but that doesn't mean it won't be physically taxing.  Actors dubbing anime in particular are required to do a lot of screaming.  Chris Sabat, who voices Vegeta in the Dragonball series, says that even with his background in opera and the vocal control that taught him, “I will literally be sick the next day. I will have flu-like symptoms. Because you have to use so much energy, and use up so much of your voice to put power into those scenes, that it will make you sick. That's not an exaggeration; I will be bedridden sometimes after screaming for too long.”   That is, if you can get a gig.  Remember how I rattled off actors who've had hundreds of roles each?  That's because, in rough figures, 5% of the actors get 95% of the work. So unless you're a Tara Strong or Phil LaMarr, noteworthy roles will be hard to come by.  One plus side is you get paid by the word, as well as by the tag.  A tag is part of a recording that can be swapped out, like recording a commercial, and recording the phrases “coming soon,” “opening this Monday,” and “open now.”  The clients gets three distinct commercials from one recording sessions, so you get more money.  Assuming the client actually orders the session.  You may find yourself on stand-by or “avail,” as it's called in the industry.  You may be asked to set aside a few hours or even consecutive days for a recording session.  The problem is, the client isn't actually obligated to use you during that time and no one else can book you during that time until they release you from it.    But it's a job you can do in your pj's, and I often do, and that's always a plus.  Even though no one can see the actors, voice work still uses props and accessories.  While computers can be used to speed up or slow down dialogue (which is more of a concern in dubbing Japanese animation, where the visuals are already done), certain vocal changes can easily be achieved using random items in the studio. “If the character is in a hollowed-out tree, I might stick my head in a wastebasket,” veteran voice actor Corey Burton told Mental Floss. “If it doesn't sound quite right, I can throw some wadded-up Kleenex in there for better acoustics.”  Burton, like Mel Blanc, prefers to eat real food when the moment calls for it. “They want you to sometimes just go, ‘Nom, nom, nom.' No! I want a carrot, a cookie. I don't want to make a dry slurping noise when I could be sipping a drink.”   Pencils also play an important role, not for making notes on the script or creating any sort of convincing sound effect.  The plague of these performers is plosives.  You've probably heard them on podcasts; they've definitely been on mine.  A plosive is the noise you get when a consonant that is produced by stopping the airflow using the lips, teeth, or palate, followed by a sudden release of air.  It's also called popping your p's, since that's the worst culprit.  A round mesh screen in front of the mic helps, but the old-school trick to stop plosives actually uses a pencil.  If they're getting p-pops on the recording, voice actors will hold a pencil or similar linear object upright against the lips.  This disrupts the air enough to avoid the giant, sharp spike in the soundwave.  Now if only there were some cheap and easy trick to get rid of mouth noises and lip smacks.  You may hear a few on this podcast, but for everyone you hear, I cut twenty out.   The most sure-fire way to avoid mouth noises and breathing when ordering a recording is to use a computer-generated or AI voice.  Now this is a sticky wicket in the VO community, a real burr under a lot of saddles.  Whenever it comes up in message groups, a third of people turn into South Park characters [sfx they took our jobs].  I won't get too Insider Baseball here, but here's the scoop.  AI voices are cheap, fast, and they're getting really good.  Have you ever gotten a robodialer call where it took you a moment to realize it was not a live person?  There are companies offering entire audiobooks in AI voices.  There is even an AI voice that can cry!  So why am I not bothered?  The way I see it, the people who will buy the cheapest possible option, in this case an AI voice, weren't going to pay even my Fiverr rate, and invariably, the cheaper a client is, the more working with them makes you regret ever starting this business in the first place.  It's an irony a lot of freelancers and business owners are familiar with -- the $5k client pays you the day you submit the invoice; the $50 client makes you hound them for six weeks and then they say they want you to do it over or come down on the price.  So I'm fine with letting those gigs go.  The other reason is that while AI applications and devices such as smart speakers and digital assistants like Siri are powered by computer-generated voices, those voices actually originate from real actors!  In fact, I just wrapped an AI-generation job this week.    In most cases, even computerized voices need a human voice as a foundation for the development of the vocal database. Nevertheless, AI is creating new work for a wide range of voice actors. Are these actors putting themselves out of a job in future?  Maybe. Maybe not.  It's definitely something I had to wrestle with before accepting the job.  But I figured, AI is coming whether we like it or not, so it's best to be involved to help steer the ship rather than be capsized by its wake.   When I took the AI-generation job, there were two questions I had for the client: what control do I have over how my voice is used, and what happens if you sell the company?  I asked these two questions for two good reasons, Bev Standing and Susan Bennett.  Bev Standing, a VO and coach from Canada, was surprised to hear her own voice being used on peoples' videos when friends and colleagues told her to log onto Tiktok.  For one, people could use her voice to say whatever they liked, no matter how vile, and she'd never worked with, been paid by, or given permission for use of her voice to TikTok.   According to Standing, who I've taken classes with and is a really nice lady, the audio in question was recorded as a job for the Chinese Institute of Acoustics four years ago, ostensibly for translations.  “The only people I've worked with are the people I was hired by, which was for translations... My agreement is not what it's being used for, and it's not with the company that's using my voice,” Standing said in an interview.   Standing files a lawsuit against TikTok's parent company ByteDance on the grounds of intellectual property theft.  She hasn't consented to her performance being used by TikTok, and had very real concerns that the content created using her audio would hurt her ability to get work in the future.  Imagine if Jan 6 insurrectionists and other such hateful wackaloons used your voice on their videos.  Good luck getting hired after that.  TikTok and ByteDance stayed pretty mum, both publicly and to Standing and her lawyer, also a VO, but they did change the AI voice, which certainly looks like they done wrong.  The lawsuit was settled a few months ago, but it's all sealed up in NDAs, so I can't tell you the details, but I'm calling it a win.   The other name I dropped was Susan Bennett, but that's not the name you'd recognize her as.  Though she was training to be a teacher, it soon became clear to Susan Bennet that her voice was destined for more than saying “eyes on your own paper.”  She acted in the theater, was a member of a jazz band, an a cappella group, and she was a backup singer for Burt Bacharac and Roy Orbison.  That background helped her land gigs doing VO and singing jingles for the likes of Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Macy's, Goodyear, Papa John's, IBM, and more.  In 1974, she became the voice of First National Bank of Atlanta's Tillie the All-Time Teller, one of the first bank ATMs.  Her voice made the new technology more user-friendly for a computer-unfamiliar public.     Bonus fact: one of the earliest ATMs in NYC printed the security picture of the user on their receipts.  According to the man who sold them to the bank, “The only people using the machines were prostitutes and gamblers who didn't want to deal with tellers face to face.”  Or it could be the hours they keep.  I can neither confirm nor deny this, but I like to think that sex workers are the underappreciated early-adopters that helped the rest of us to be able to hit the cash machine on the way out of town (or the Mac machine, as my mom called it well into the 90's).  Bennet also became the voice of Delta Airlines announcements, GPS's, and phone systems.   But even with all that, that's not where you know her voice from.  “Hey, Siri, how big is the Serengeti?” [sfx if Google was]  Susan Bennet was the original voice of Siri on the iphone, but she never actually worked for Apple.  In 2005, she recorded a wealth of words and wordy-sounding non-words for a company called ScanSoft or Nuance, I've been seeing either listed.   For four hours a day, every day, in July 2005, Bennett holed up in her home recording booth, saying thousands of phrases and sentences of mostly-to-completely nonsense, which the “ubergeeks” as she called them, could use for generating AI speech.  According to Bennet, “I was reading sentences like 'cow hoist in the tub hut today.' 'Militia oy hallucinate buckra okra ooze.' Then I would read these really tedious things that were the same word, but changing out the vowel. 'Say the shrayding again, say the shreeding again, say the shriding again, say the shredding again, say the shrudding again.' “  These snippets were then synthesized in a process called concatenation that builds words, sentences, paragraphs. And that is how voices like hers find their way into GPS and telephone systems.   The job was done, the check cleared, and life went on, then 2011 rolled around and Siri was unveiled as an integrated feature of the Apple iPhone 4S.  The actors who'd worked for Nuance had no idea until well after it happened.  Bennett found out that her voice is actually Siri after a friend emailed: ”Hey, we've been playing around with this new Apple phone. Isn't this you?'  Apple had bought SoftScan/Nuance and all of its assets.  “Apple bought our voices from Nuance without our knowing it.”  As a voiceactor, this turn of events was problematic for a few reasons.  Typecasting and stereotyping, for one.  The downside of being successful in a role can be that that's all people want you for after that, like Sean Bean and a character who dies.  So Bennett kept her identity close to her vest until 2013, when Apple switched voices.  “My voice was just the original voice on the 4s and the 5. But now it no longer sounds like Apple because [Siri] sounds like everyone else. The original Siri voice had a lot of character; she had a lot of attitude.   Bennet has never said how much she made from Nuance, but we know how much she's made from Apple.  In round figures, give or take for inflation, [sfx calculator] she made $0.  Her voice was on something like 17 million phones.  Even a penny per phone would have been a handsome payday, but no, no penny for you.  “We were paid for the amount of time we spent recording but not at all for usage. The only way I've been able to get any payment for it, really, is through my speaking events, but I'm very grateful to have been the voice of Siri. She's very iconic; it's led to a whole new career for me.”   Another widespread voice that didn't get commensurate royalties is known for a single phrase, barely a full sentence. [sfx clip]  From FIFA and Madden to UFC and NBA, Andrew Anthony's voice has opened EA Sports video games for 30 years now and let us all have a collective shiver of mortality at that fact.  Anthony had a friend who ran a small ad sales company, who had taken on the not-yet-industry-cornerstone Electronic Arts as a client.  "My friend then called me up in Toronto and said 'Hey will you do this thing... for free?' I said 'yeah, of course, I will! I don't even know what this is but I get a free trip down to see you, so for sure'.  So Anthony went to visit his friend, read the line, which was originally “If it's in the game, it's in the game,” and assumed he would never, ever hear anything about it again.  Call that an underestimation.  EA is valued at $37B, with the Sports being a big chunk of that.  And Anthony has seen exactly none of that money, and he's pretty okay with that.  Over the years, Anthony has met plenty of other gaming fans and happily agreed to do his EA Sports voice impression on camera.    Not every screen actor's able to do voice work successfully; we've all heard flat, lackluster performances from big name stars in animated features.  Looking at you, Sarah Michelle Gellar from the recent HeMan cartoon.  Not so with the person who arguably kicked off the trends of booking big names stars for voice work, Robin Williams in his role as Genie.  Williams recorded 30 hours of dialogue, most of it improvised, for the 90 minute movie.  He took the role for *9% of the fee he normally commanded with the condition that the recordings not be used to merchandise products.  He wanted to “leave something wonderful behind for this kids.”  Thanks for spending part of your day with me.   And that's where we run out of ideas, at least for today.  So a wife overheard her boss saying he wanted a voice to notify people when they received email and volunteered her husband. “I recorded it on a cassette deck in my living room,” Edwards told the New York Post on November 7.  “Most people think I'm retired and own an island.”  Instead, he works at WKYC-TV from 3:30 a.m. to noon, and drives an Uber from noon to 6 p.m.  In 2014, Edwards told CNBC that he pranks people by standing behind their computers and booming, “You've got mail!”  Explained the voice-over actor, “I have fun with it!”  He's not bothered by not getting royalties, so I guess we shouldn't be either. 

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!)  Like what you hear?  Become a patron of the arts for as little as $2 a month!   Or buy the book or some merch.  Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram. Music: Kevin MacLeod, David Fesliyan.   Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Links to all the research resources are on the website.   If you logged onto the internet between say ‘95-2005, you'd inevitably hear two things, the shriek of a modem, like a robot orgy in a combine harvester, and a cheery man's voice saying, “Welcome” and “You've got mail.”  Elward Edwards recorded those phrases for $200 in 1989, when his wife worked for Quantum Computer Services, the company that later became AOL. At its peak, AOL had 23 million users, all hearing Edwards' voice.  He briefly returned to public attention when a video of him saying the iconic line was posted on social media, by one of his Uber passengers.  My name's …   Every topic I cover on YBOF is interesting to me, anywhere from a little ‘huh' to an all-consuming passion that dictates everything from my daily schedule to my podcast listening.  This is one of those, because I do voiceovers for a living.  Hire me today, no job too small.  With a chronic idiopathic pulmonary condition, covid provided a real kick in the pants to finally get out of retail.  What I discovered, apart from how it's not as easy as you think, or at least as easy as I thought with two years of podcasting already under my belt, is that VO is everywhere!  It's not just cartoons and dubbing movies.  Phone menus, kids toys, GPS, pre-roll ads on YT, website explainer videos, e-learning/training, continuing education, audiobooks, podcasts of course, guided meditations, seriously we could be here all day.  Even computerized voices usually start with a real person, more on that later.   Kids these days may not hear a voice that was unbelievably common in the lives of many of us.  [sfx “At the tone, the time will be 7:22 and 40 seconds,” “I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is no longer in service”]  That's the authoritative voice of Jane Barbe, one of the most widely-heard voices ever.  Barbe was the queen of telephone recordings, estimated to have been heard 40 million times a day in the 1980s and early 1990s, everything from automated time and weather messages to hotel wake-up calls.  She wasn't the only person who recorded automated phone messages, but she practically had the market cornered.    Barbe did most of her recordings for Atlanta-based Electronic Telecommunications Inc., which at one time produced as many as 2,000 voice messaging systems for businesses and government agencies, and for Octel Communications, which is now a part of Bell Labs/Lucent.  She was heard on 90% of “intercept messages” -- the recording played when something is wrong with a phone number -- and 60% of automated time and temperature calling programs.  You see, children, before you had the exact time and the collective knowledge of humanity to take to the toilet with you, you might go to the nearest telephone and dial a number you had committed to memory, probably the wildest part of this story, so a recording could tell you the time and temperature.   While I still haven't encountered my own voice in the wild, which was especially disappointing after I voiced a local political ad, Jane Barbe misdialed her calls as much as the rest of us, an experience she described as “really weird.”  One time she overheard her mother dialing a number and getting her on a recorded message.  ‘Oh, shut up, Jane!' her mom groused before slamming down the receiver in exasperation.   The story of how our go-go tech-driven lives became infused with voiceovers well predates YT and phone menus.  We have to go back over a century, to the night of Christmas eve 1906.  Up to that moment, the ship wireless operators for the United Fruit Company, along with the US Navy, had only heard Morse codes coming through their headphones.  But suddenly, they heard a human voice singing “O Holy Night” with violin accompaniment and afterwards a reading from the Bible.  This was heard by ships along the Atlantic northeast coast and from shore stations as far south as Norfolk, Virginia.  A repeat broadcast was heard on New Year's Eve as far south as the West Indies.  The voice was that of Canadian inventor and mathematician Reginald Fessenden, who was responsible for establishing the first transatlantic wireless telegraphic communication and what is considered to be the first voice work.  Fessneden was excited by Alexander Graham Bell's new device, the telephone, and set out to create a way to remotely communicate without wires.  In 1900, working for the United States Weather Bureau, Fessenden recorded the very first voice over: a test he made reporting the weather.  The following year, Guglielmo Marconi, who is often credited as the father and inventor of the radio became the first person to transmit signals across the Atlantic Ocean.   Though wireless communication was invaluable in WWI, broadcasts to the public were largely regional, amateur affairs.  The first radio news program was broadcast August 31, 1920 by station 8MK in Detroit, Michigan, which survives today as all-news CBS station.  The first college radio station began broadcasting two months later from Union College, Schenectady, New York.  Around the same time, station 2ADD (call letters were weird in the beginning), aired what is believed to be the first public entertainment broadcast in the United States, a series of Thursday night concerts that could initially only be heard within a 100-mile (160 km) radius and later for a 1,000-mile (1,600 km) radius. It wasn't much, but it was the start of broadcast voice work.   The average person knows off-hand that the first movie with diegetic, or native, sound was The Jazz Singer in 1927, but the biggest event in voice work came the following year -- the first talkie cartoon.  It was Steamboat Willie, with the prototype for Mickey Mouse voiced by none other than creator Walt Disney.  Hot on its heels came next year's Looney Tunes the following year.  And that's t-u-n-e-s like music, not t-o-o-n-s like cartoon.   In the early days of animation, Disney produced short animated films called “Silly Symphonies,” to promote and sell music, in the form of records and sheet music.  As Silly Symphonies gained popularity, Warner Brothers created its own equivalents, “Merrie Melodies”“Looney Tunes.” As for the “looney” part of the title, Warner Brothers wanted to indicate that “[their] cartoons were a little wackier than the sweeter characters of Disney.”  Cartoons quickly solidified their place as entertainment for children and adults alike.   One man in particular made Looney Tunes a powerhouse, “the man of a thousand voices” - Mel Blanc.  He is considered to be the first outstanding voice actor in the industry and voiced Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Tweety Bird, Sylvester the Cat, Yosemite Sam, the Tasmanian Devil, Marvin the Martian, Pepé Le Pew, Speedy Gonzales, and many others.  Raised in Portland, Oregon, he worked at KGW as an announcer and as one of the Hoot Owls in the mid-1930s, where he specialized in comic voices. It took him a year and a half to land an audition with Leon Schlesinger's company, where he began in 1937. He also worked for Walter Lantz, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Columbia, and even Walt Disney until Schlesinger signed him to an exclusive contract.   One of Mel Blanc's most important contributions to the voice over industry is the recognition that voice artists now get to enjoy. Originally, voice artists were not given screen credit on animated cartoons. After he was turned down for a raise by tight-fisted producer Leon Schlesinger, Blanc suggested they add his name as Vocal Characterizationist to the credits as a compromise. Not only did it give a greater recognition to voice artists but also from then on, it helped to bring Blanc to the public eye and quickly brought him more work in radio.   We almost didn't have as much Mel Blanc voice-work as we did.  On January 24th, 1961, Blanc was in a near-fatal car accident on Sunset Boulevard.  He suffered multiple fracture to both legs and his pelvis, as well as triple skull bone displacements.  He lay in a coma, unresponsive, for two weeks.  After many doctors' attempts to bring him out of the deep unconsciousness, one of his neurologists tried a different approach and asked Blanc, “How are you feeling today, Bugs Bunny?”  After a moment, in a low voice, he replied, “Eh… just fine, Doc. What's up?”  The doctor then asked if Tweety was in there too, to which Blanc replied: “I tot I taw a puddy tat.”  Mel Blanc recovered shortly after and continued to do what he did best, until his death at age 81.  His tombstone in Hollywood Forever Cemetery reads “That's all, folks.”   Bonus fact: Bugs Bunny's habit of eating carrots while delivering one-liners was based on a scene in the film It Happened One Night, in which Clark Gable's character leans against a fence, eating carrots rapidly and talking with his mouth full to Claudette Colbert's character.  The trouble was, Mel Blanc didn't like carrots.  He would bite and chew the carrots to get the sound needed and immediately spit it out.   MIDROLL   Hopping back to Disney, the house of mouse also pioneered the full-length animated feature, to much soon-to-be-disproven skepticism and derision, with Snow White in 1937.  Adriana Caselotti was the daughter of Italian immigrants living in Connecticut.  Both her mother and older sister sang opera and her father gave voice lessons, so making best use of one's voice was sort of their thing.  After a brief stint as a chorus girl, when she was only 18, Caselotti was hired to provide the voice of Snow White.  She was paid $970, equivalent to $17K today, typical for the non-union times.  In most Hollywood stories, this would be step one of a meteoric rise.  The movie was certainly a success, even briefly hold the title of highest grossing sound film, so why isn't Adriana Caselotti a household name?  All my research indicates that Disney did it on purpose.  Caselotti was under contract with Disney, so she couldn't work for other studios, but Disney never provided her with any other roles.  Even radio and TV legend Jack Benny was turned away, with the explanation, “That voice can't be used anywhere.  I don't want to spoil the illusion of Snow White.”  It's the same reason Disney didn't credit voice actors for the first six years of feature films; he didn't want anything to remind the buying public that the characters are just make-believe.  Caselotti's only other cinematic contribution, for which she was paid $100, was to sing the falsetto line "Wherefore Art Thou, Romeo", in the Tin Man's song in The Wizard of Oz.  She was a lovely girl; you can see pictures of her if you're listening to the show on the Vodacast app.   I've actually got a few bullet points on the dark secrets behind the happiest place on earth.  There's enough to fill a movie.  I can see the trailer now.  “In a world…”  I can't do the voice.  Only one man could, the epic movie trailer guy, Don LaFontaine.  Donald LaFontaine was called, “The King,” "Thunder Throat" and "The Voice of God."  His CV includes 5,000 movie trailers and over 350,000 television commercials, network promotions, and video game trailers.  His signature phrase, "in a world...", is so well known and parodied, LaFontaine parodied it himself in a Geico ad. [sfx]   LaFontaine was born in 1940 in Duluth, Minnesota. to Alfred and Ruby LaFontaine.  At age 13, his voice changed, all at once, mid-sentence, and never went back.  He began his career as a recording engineer at the National Recording Studios producing commercial spots for Dr. Strangelove: Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.  LaFontaine worked behind the mic until 1964, when he had to fill in for a missing voice actor to finish a promo spot for 1964's Gunfighters of Casa Grande for a client's presentation.  The client bought the spots, and LaFontaine's career as a voice actor began.  LaFontaine developed his signature style of a strong narrative approach, and heavy melodramatic coloration of his voice work.  In 1976 LaFontaine started his own company producing movie trailers.  He moved to Los Angeles in 1981 and was contacted by an agent, launching a career that spanned three decades.  LaFontaine's signature voice came with a busy schedule.  He could have voiced about 60 promotions a week, sometimes more than 3 in a single day.  Most studios were willing to pay a premium for his service.  It has been said that his voice-over added prestige and excitement, a certain gravitas, to what might otherwise have been a box office failure.    In a 2007 interview, LaFontaine explained the strategy behind his signature catch phrase, "in a world where...": "We have to very rapidly establish the world we are transporting them to. That's very easily done by saying, `In a world where ... violence rules.' `In a world where ... men are slaves and women are the conquerors.' You very rapidly set the scene."  Wait, what movie wa that second one?  LaFontaine became so successful that he arrived at his voice-over jobs in a personalized limo with a full time driver, until he began recording from his palatial estate in the Hollywood Hills, thanks to the internet and ISDN.  It's hardly worth talking about ISDN as a voiceover today, as it's rapidly on its way out, but as a podcaster, I'm happy to.  ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) is a system of digital telephone connections, which enables recording studios anywhere in the United States, Canada and abroad to connect digitally with voice over talent working remotely in their home recording studio.  It's as clear as being in the same room.  It makes a Zoom call look like two Solo cups and an old shoelace.  But nobody's having a dedicated ISDN line installed these days.  It costs at least $1500 for the unit, plus anywhere from $75 to a few hundred dollars per month for the service, so [sfx raspberry] onto the rubbish heap of rapidly-outdated technology it goes!   LaFontaine died suddenly in 2008 and  now all we're left with is the Inception noise. [sfx]  I mean, it was cool at first, but now … meh.  You can also hear shades of LaFontaine in the work of a Barbadian-British VO known professionally as Redd Pepper.  His legal name is on wikipedia, but I don't like when mine comes up, so I won't use his.  (Also, if you find out someone goes by a name other than the one on their passport, just leave it, will you?  Be they trans, an actor, an exotic dancer, or a check-out girl, don't matter.  You don't need to know what my “real name” is unless you're writing me a check.)  Anyway, Pepper has voiced over 100 trailers, including blockbusters like Jurassic Park, Men in Black and Space Jam, so you've probably heard him, even if you thought he was the old “in a world” guy.  Here's LaFontaine [sfx] and here's Pepper [sfx].   Speaking of signature sounds, if you've ever heard old movies or newsreels from the thirties or forties, then you've probably heard that weird old-timey voice.  It sounds a little like a blend between American English and a form of British English.  Did everyone talk that way between the world wars?  Not everyone, no, only the people being recorded and they did it on purpose.   This type of pronunciation is called the Transatlantic, or Mid-Atlantic, accent.  Not mid-Atlantic like Virginia and Maryland, but like in the middle of the Atlantic.  Unlike most accents, instead of naturally evolving, the Transatlantic accent was acquired.  People in the United States were taught to speak in this voice.  Historically, Transatlantic speech was the hallmark of American aristocracy and by extension the theatre.  In upper-class boarding schools across New England, students learned the Transatlantic accent as an international norm for communication, similar to the way posh British society used Received Pronunciation, which we'll get to in a minute.  Mid-Atlantic English was the dominant dialect among the Northeastern American upper class through the first half of the 20th century. As such, it was popular in the theatre and other forms of elite culture in that region….   Transatlantic has several quasi-British elements, such a lack of rhoticity.  This means that Mid-Atlantic speakers dropped their “r's” at the end of words like “winner” or “clear”.  They'll also use softer, British vowels – dahnce, fahst.  While those sounds were reduce, emphasis was put on t's.  In American English we often pronounce the “t” in words like “writer” and “water” as d's. Transatlantic speakers pounce on their T's, writer, water.     This speech pattern isn't completely British, nor completely American.  Instead, it's a form of English that's hard to place and that's part of why Hollywood loved it.  With the evolution of talkies in the late 1920s, voice was first heard in motion pictures.  It was then that the majority of audiences first heard Hollywood actors speaking predominantly in Mid-Atlantic English.  But why do so many speakers have such a high, nasal quality?  There's a theory that technological constraints, combined with the schooled accent, created this iconic speech.  According to Duke university professor Jay O'Berski, this sound is an artifact from the early days of radio.  Radio receivers had very little bass technology at the time, and it was very difficult, if not impossible, to hear bass tones on your home device.  Speakers with pleasing full baritones were no good on early radio.    The Transatlantic accent made Americans sound vaguely British, but how can you make British people sound more British, like, the maximum amount of Britishness, like a cup of earl grey tea served with a dry scone smeared with marmalade and imperialism.  You teach them Received Pronunciation.  Received Pronunciation, or RP, is the instantly recognisable super-British accent often described as The Queen's English', ‘Oxford English' or ‘BBC English.'  RP is described as “the standard form of British English pronunciation,” though only 2% or so of Brits speak it.   So where did Transatlantic pronunciation go?  Linguist William Labov noted that Mid-Atlantic speech fell out of favor after World War II, as fewer teachers taught it to their students and radio and movie sound technology evolved to handle bass.  It's not gone entirely, though.  British expats like Anthony Hopkins still use it and it pops up in place of actors' natural British accents in movies.  The example that leaps to my mind is Warwick Davis.  You also know him as The Leprechaun, Professor Fliwick in Harry Potter, among 80 other roles.  For his first major film role as the titular Willow in 1988, he was taught the Transatlantic accent because the studio heads thought that Americans wouldn't be able to understand his British accent.  *sigh*  I could probably do a whole episode on executives thinking the average person was sub-moronic.  Did you ever once have a problem with Warwick Davis' accent, or anything less clear than Brad Pitt in Snatch?  Pop on to our social media…

I thought you might also like the show Everything Everywhere Daily.  It's like YBOF, but shorter and more often.

Happy new year!  Or is it?  It depends on which calendar you're using. Like what you hear?  Become a patron of the arts for as little as $2 a month!   Or buy the book or some merch.  Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram. Music: Kevin MacLeod, David Fesliyan.   Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Links to all the research resources are on the website.   On Monday this December 30th past, I clocked in at my retail jobs, put on my headset, and played the morning messages.  There was one from my manager telling us what to expect in terms of sales volume that day and one from corporate welcoming us to the first day of 2020.  The didn't get their dates mixed up.  December 30th 2019 was the first day of 2020 in a way that once crashed Twitter for hours.  My name…   When we think of the calendar, we think of it as singular and exclusive.  “The” calendar.  Sure, there were other calendars, but those were for old-timey people in old-timey times.  If you've ever listened to the show before, you'll know I'm about to disabuse you of that notion; it's kinda my schtick.  The calendar we think of as the end all and be all of organizing time into little squares is the Gregorian calendar, but it's just one of many that have been used and still are used today.   For example, at the time of this recording, it's currently the 27th day of the month of Tevet in the year 5782 for those who follow the Hebrew calendar.  The Hebrew calendar, also known as the Jewish calendar, was originally created before the year 10 CE.  It first used lunar months, which will surprise no one who has had to google when Passover or Easter are each year.  A standard Jewish year has twelve months; six twenty-nine-day months, and six thirty-day months, for a total of 354 days.  This is because the months follow the lunar orbit, which is on average 29.5 days.  Due to variations in the Jewish calendar, the year could also be 353 or 355 days.  It also used standard calendar years, but these two methods don't line up perfectly, and this posed a problem.  As time went on, the shorter lunar calendar would result in holy days shifting forward in time from year to year.  That simply wouldn't do as certain holidays have to be celebrated in a certain season, like Passover in the spring, Tu B'Shevat, the Jewish 'New Year for Trees,' which  needs to fall around the time that trees in the Middle East come out of their winter dormancy, or Sukkot, the festival that calls adherents to build and live in huts in their yard to commemorate Isrealites taking shelter in the wilderness, which is meant to fall in autumn.  So a thirteenth month had to be added every 3 to 4 years in order to make up for the difference.  Such a year is called a shanah meuberet ("pregnant year") in Hebrew; in English we call it a leap year, and it makes up all the lunar calendar's lost days.  The month is added to Adar, the last of the twelve months. On leap years we observe two Adars — Adar I and Adar II.  Today, the Hebrew calendar is used primarily to determine the dates for Jewish religious holidays and to select appropriate religious readings for the day.   Similar in usage is the Hijri calendar, or Islamic calendar.  It's based on lunar phases, using a system of 12 months and either 354 or 355 days every year.  The first Islamic year was 622 CE when the prophet Muhammad emigrated from Mecca to Medina, meaning today is the Jumada I 28, 1443 .  The Hijri calendar is used to identify Islamic holidays and festivals.  The Islamic New Year marks the journey of the prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina.  However, the occasion and the sacred month of Muharram are observed differently by the two largest branches of Islam, Shiite and Sunni.  Shiite pilgrims journey to their holiest sites to commemorate a seventh-century battle, while Sunnis fast to celebrate the victory of Moses over an Egyptian pharaoh.  Also known as the Persian calendar, it's the official calendar used in Iran and Afghanistan, and it's the most accurate calendar system going, but more on that later.   Further east you'll encounter the Buddhist calendar, which is used throughout Southeast Asia.  This uses the sidereal year, the time it takes Earth to orbit the sun, as the solar year.  Like other systems, the calendar does not try to stay in sync with this time measurement, but unlike the others, no extra days or months have been added, so the Buddhist calendar is slowly moving out of alignment at a pace of around one day every century.  Today, the traditional Buddhist lunisolar calendar is used mainly for Theravada Buddhist festivals, and no longer has the official calendar status anywhere. The Thai Buddhist Era, a renumbered Gregorian calendar, is the official calendar in Thailand.  The Buddhist calendar is based on an older Hindu calendar, of which there are actually three -- Vikram Samvat, Shaka Samvat, and Kali Yuga.  The Vikram Samvat is used in Nepal and some Indian states, and uses lunar months and the sidereal year to track time.  Sidereal means based on fixed stars and constellations, rather than celestial things on the move, like planets.  The Shaka Samvat, used officially in India and by Hindus in Java and Bali, has months based around the tropical zodiac signs rather than the sidereal year.  The Kali Yuga is a different sort of calendar altogether.  It meters out the last of the four stages (or ages or yugas) the world goes through as part of a 'cycle of yugas' (i.e. mahayuga) described in the Sanskrit scriptures. The Kali Yuga, began at midnight (00:00) on 18 February 3102 BCE,  is the final cycle within the 4-cycle Yuga era. The first cycle is the age of truth and perfection, the second cycle is the age of emperors and war, the third stage is the age of disease and discontent, and the third stage (the Kali Yuga) is the age of ignorance and darkness.  If you're worried because you already missed 5,000 years of the Yuga, don't fret; you have upwards of 467,000 years left.     You've probably heard of Chinese New Year, so you won't be surprised that there is a Chinese calendar.  According to this system, each month begins on the day when the moon is in the "new moon" phase. The beginning of a new year is also marked by the position of the moon and occurs when the moon is midway between the winter solstice and spring equinox.  China uses the Gregorian calendar for official things, but still uses the Chinese calendar is used to celebrate holidays.   You might be surprised to learn about the Ethiopian calendar.  The Ethiopian calendar is quite similar to the Julian calendar, the predecessor to the Gregorian calendar most countries use today.  Like the other calendars we've discussed, it's intertwined with the faith of the people.  The first day of the week for instance, called Ehud, translates as ‘the first day‘ in the ancient Ge'ez language, the liturgical language of the Ethiopian church.  It is meant to show that Ehud is the first day on which God started creating the heavens and the earth.  The calendar system starts with the idea that Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden for seven years before they were banished for 5,500 for their sins.  Both the Gregorian and Ethiopian use the birthdate of Jesus Christ as a starting point, what Eddie Izzard called “the big BC/AD change-over,” though the Ethiopian Orthodox Church believes Jesus was born 7 years earlier than the Gregorian calendar says.  The Ethiopian calendar has 13 months in a year, 12 of which have 30 days. The last month, called Pagume, has five days, and six days in a leap year.   Not only do the months have names, so do the years.  The first year after an Ethiopian leap year is named the John year, and is followed by the Matthew year, then Mark, then Luke.  Sept. 11 marks the day of the new year in Ethiopia.  By this time, the lengthy rainy season has come to a close, leaving behind a countryside flourishing in yellow daisies. That's fitting because Enkutatash in Amharic, the native language of Ethiopia, translates to “gift of jewels.” To celebrate New Year's, Ethiopians sing songs unique to the day and exchange bouquets of flowers. Of course, there is plenty of eating and drinking, too.   So what about this Gregorian calendar I keep mentioning?  The Gregorian calendar was created in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII, who made some changes to the previously used Julian calendar.  Okay, so what was the Julian calendar?  It should shock no one that the Julian calendar was ordered by and named after Julius Caesar.  By the 40s BCE the Roman civic calendar was three months ahead of the solar calendar.  The Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes, introduced the Egyptian solar calendar, taking the length of the solar year as 365 1/4 days.  The year was divided into 12 months, all of which had either 30 or 31 days except February, which contained 28 days in common (365 day) years and 29 in every fourth year (a leap year, of 366 days).  That 29th day wasn't February 29th, it was February 23rd a second time.  What a mess that would make, though that conflagration of confusion probably paled in comparison to to what Caesar did to align the civic and solar calendars--he added days to the year 46 BCE, so that it contained 445 days.  Unsurprisingly when you try to make such a large change to the daily lives of so many people in the days before electronic communication, it took over fifty years to get everybody on board.   Sosigenes had overestimated the length of the year by 11 minutes 14 seconds.  11 minutes doesn't mean much in a given year, but after, say, 1500 years, the seasons on your calendar no longer line up with the seasons of reality.  That matters when your most important holy day needs to happen at a certain time of year.  Enter Pope Gregory XIII, who wanted to stop Easter, which had been celebrated on March 21, from drifting any farther away from the spring Equinox.  Aloysus Lilius, the Italian scientist who developed the system Pope Gregory would unveil in 1582, realized that the addition of so many February 23rds made the calendar slightly too long. He devised a variation that adds leap days in years divisible by four, unless the year is also divisible by 100. If the year is also divisible by 400, a leap day is added regardless. [OS crash noise] Sorry about that.  While this formula may sound confusing, it did resolve the lag created by Caesar's earlier scheme—almost; Lilius' system was still off by 26 seconds.  As a result, in the years since Gregory introduced his calendar in 1582, a discrepancy of several hours has arisen.  We have some time before that really becomes an issue for the average person.  It will take until the year 4909 before the Gregorian calendar will be a full day ahead of the solar year.   Maths aside, not everyone was keen on Pope Gregory's plan.  His proclamation was what's known as a papal bull, an order that applies to the church by has no authority over non-Catholics.  That being said, the new calendar was quickly adopted by predominantly Catholic countries like Spain, Portugal and Italy, major world players at the time.  European Protestants, however, feared it was an attempt to silence their movement, a conspiracy to keep them down.  Maybe by making it hard to remember when meetings and protests were supposed to be, I'm not sure.  It wasn't until 1700 that Protestant Germany switched over, and England held out until 1752.  Those transitions didn't go smooth.  English citizens didn't take kindly to the act of Parliament that advanced their calendars from September 2 to September 14, overnight.  There are apocryphal tales of rioters in the streets, demanding that the government “give us our 11 days.” However, most historians now believe that these protests never occurred or were greatly exaggerated.  Some countries took even longer than Britain--the USSR didn't convert to the Gregorian calendar until 1918, even later than countries like Egypt and Japan.  On the other side of the Atlantic from the British non-protests, meanwhile, Benjamin Franklin welcomed the change, writing, “It is pleasant for an old man to be able to go to bed on September 2, and not have to get up until September 14.”   When Julius Caesar's reformed the calendar in 46 B.C., he established January 1 as the first of the year.  During the Middle Ages, however, European countries replaced it with days that carried greater religious significance, such as December 25 and March 25 (the Feast of the Annunciation).  I didn't google that one.  After my mom listens to this episode, she'll send me a gloriously incorrect speech-to-text message explaining it.  Different calendars mean different New Years days even now, and the ways in which people celebrate as as splendidly diverse as the people themselves.   The Coptic Egyptian Church celebrates the Coptic New Year (Anno Martyrus), or year of the martyrs on 11th of September. The Coptic calendar is the ancient Egyptian one of twelve 30-day months plus a "small" five-day month—six-day in a leap year.  The months retain their ancient Egyptian names which denote the gods and godesses of the Egyptians, and the year's three seasons, the inundation, cultivation, and harvest, are related to the Nile and the annual agricultural cycle.  But the Copts chose the year 284AD to mark the beginning of the calendar, since this year saw the seating of Diocletian as Rome's emperor and the consequent martyrdom of thousands upon thousands of Egypt's Christians.  Apart from the Church's celebration, Copts celebrate the New Year by eating red dates, which are in season, believing the red symbolises the martyrs' blood and the white date heart the martyrs' pure hearts.  Also, dates are delicious.    Bonus fact: You know that guy, Pope Francis?  He's not actually the pope.  The pope's proper title, according to the Vatican's website, is Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, Sovereign of the State of Vatican City, Servant of the Servants of God.  'Pope' comes from the Italian 'papa.'  Francis is the Sancta Papa, the Holy Father.  The title of pope belongs to the head of the Coptic church.  So if anyone uses the rhetorical question “Is the pope Catholic?” to imply a ‘yes' answer, you have my authorization to bring the conversation to a screeching halt by saying “No.  No, he's not.”  Double points if you simply walk away without explaining yourself.

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.

Voted on by our Patreon, we look at the what, how, and for-gods-sake-why of some of those most hated holiday songs! 02:40 Banned songs 08:09 Wonderful Christmastime 10:45 Chipmunks Song 16:36 Little Drummer Boy (Peace on Earth) Like what you hear?  Become a patron of the arts for as little as $2 a month!   Or buy the book or some merch.  Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram. Music: Kevin MacLeod, David Fesliyan.   Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Links to all the research resources are on the website. In the early 80's, drought caused a famine that crippled the nation of Ethiopia.  It was a bad scene.  Half of the mortality rate is said to be attributable to “human rights violations.”  People around the world were moved, like Irish singer-songwriter Bob Geldof, who along with Midge Ure, wrote a fundraiser song.  Who could they get to sing it?  How about “everybody”?  The likes of Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Boy George, Bono, and Sting joined forces as Band Aid to record the fast-selling single in UK history, asking us the question “Do They Know It's Christmas?”  My name's… Some songs rub us the wrong way because they're sung by shrieking children on now-oudated equipment was was not kind to female and higher-pitched voices, songs like I'm Getting Nuthin for Christmas and All I Want for Christmas is my Two Front Teeth, standards which I think think would have died away if we weren't all made to sing them in elementary school.  Some are painfully goofy, like Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer, but you almost have to give them a pass since it seems they accomplished what they set out to do.  Some songs make us their enemy by borrowing into our brains and setting up shop for hours or days on end, the dreaded holiday earworm, like Jingle Bell Rock and Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree.  The mere mention of the title is enough to activate them like a sleeper cell of obnoxious holiday cheer.   Banned You might be able to forbid people in your own home from playing songs that irritate you –and I stress “might”-- but if you can find yourself with a bit of authority and a big enough humbug up your butt, you can try to make it so nobody has to hear the song either.  For instance, the 1952 classic “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” sung by 13-year-old Jimmy Boyd from Mississippi.  Did you realize the song was about the little boy not realizing that his Dad was dressed as Santa?  It had to be pointed out to me, and embarrassingly recently.  People were *scandalized by the musical marriage of sex and Christmas, with one churchgoer stating “mockery of decent family life as well as Christ's birthday.”  Many pearls were clutched.  They'd probably clutch them pearls twice as hard if I'd been there to tell them Jesus wasn't born on 12/25, but that's another show.  Boston's Catholic Archdiocese denounced it and the young Boyd had to meet with church leaders to explain that Mommy and Santa were properly, sanctily married.  A West Virginia broadcasting company prohibited its radio stations from playing this “insult to Santa Claus.”  The same thing happened to one of my husband's favorite songs, Lou Monte's “Dominick the Donkey,” but the people of WV went to bat for the little donkey who could take the Italian hills that were too much for the reindeer.  The public protested the ban so forcefully that it was repealed after less than two weeks; and this was in 1960, when 20% of homes in the US still didn't have a telephone.   For every time the hubs plays Dominick the Donkey, I play the Pogue's Fairytale of New York at least twice.  A lot of folks don't like, and I respect our difference of opinions, and think it's the farthest thing from a cheery Xmas song, and I agree with y'all there.  The 1987 duet with singer Kirsty MacColl, quickly became a UK holiday classic, famous then infamous in turn.  It tells the story of a toxic couple who seem to love each deep down, but should probably not be allowed within 200m of each other.  There's talk of drug use and insults, including a certain homophobic slur to rhyme with the word “maggot.”  In December 2019, BBC radio DJ Alex Dyke said he was cutting the song from his program.  The BBC had previously censored the song in 2007 with an unconvincing word-swap, but this brought more backlash than the original version had.  The BBC reversed course for a few years, then put the censored version back up.  What do you think?  soc med   Some songs we consider absolute standards, impeccable and indispensable, made people in their day as prickly as holl and less than jolly.  The BBC worried that “I'll Be Home for Christmas” could damage British morale during World War II, so no air-play for you!  In an amazingly blunt statement that would definitely trend on Twitter today:  “We have recently adopted a policy of excluding sickly sentimentality which, particularly when sung by certain vocalists, can become nauseating and not at all in keeping with what we feel to be the need of the public in this country.”   One of the most frequently cover and burlesqued-to songs, Santa Baby, wouldn't have become the classic it did if it had been sung by anyone other than the utterly incomparable Eartha Kitt.  Who doesn't love a Christmas song dripping in sexuality, sung by a loudly self-confident mixed race woman?  In 1953, a lot of people.   Radio stations refused to play it and political officials gnashed their teeth after Kitt performed Santa Baby at a dinner for the king and queen of Greece that November.  That was an unusual sentence and I'm stalling for time to let you process it.  However, Billboard magazine reported “Neither the King nor his Queen were one whit disturbed by the chantress's performance, nor by the song.”  Kitt was quoted as saying it was ‘inconceivable that anyone would question the ingenious poetry of the song.'”  I don't know about poetry, but I do know I don't want to hear any version other than hers.   Chipmunks My hatred for this next song cannot be overstated.  I almost hired an editor just for this section. It's shrill, it's pointless, and it's been playing for 63 freaking years.  It's the goddamn Chipmunks' song aka Christmas Don't Be Late.  I'm mad already.  Named after the president, chief engineer, and founder of Liberty Records, the furry little characters are the members of a “band”, called Alvin And The Chipmunks, while a “man” named David Seville functions as their human manager, catapulting them to super stardom.  The Chipmunks, three singing cartoon rodents in Victorian nightdresses apparently, or maybe ill-fitted sweater dresses, were the brainchild of a songwriter named Ross Bagdasarian, though he was better known by the pseudonym of David Seville, the name that would be immortalized as The Chipmunk's fictitious manager.  Bagdasarian was the son of Armenian immigrants to California, who served in the Army Air Force in WWII, which is how he came to find himself stationed in Seville, Spain.  He did a bit of acting, landing minor roles in Rear Window and Stalag 17.  Songwriting played out considerably better.  In 1951, he used the melody of an Armenian folk song to write Rosemary Clooney's hit, Come On-a My House. [sfx clip]    Bagdasarian-cum-Seville began toying around with voice distortion effects, speeding up and slowing down his voice to achieve the cute high pitched sound of the little animal's voices.  Consumer tape decks at the time had changeable speeds, but usually only in simple binary multiples, doubling or halving the speed, creating sounds an octave apart. Changing speeds of voices in these limited multiples creates extremely high or low pitches that sound too extreme for most purposes.  Disney used half-speed recording for his Chip ‘n Dale cartoon characters, making the extremely fast dialogue difficult to understand. As a result, dialog recorded at that speed had to consist of very short phrases.  Seville's chief innovation was to use tape machines that could vary speeds in between these extremes, creating more understandable and thus emotionally accessible voices that worked well for both singing and spoken dialogue.   The Chipmunk Song made its debut on Christmas 1958 and immediately became a smash hit, reaching No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 Pop Singles chart.  It would be the “band's” first and only #1 song, as well as Seville's second and final, No. 1 single.  The first was the song Witch Doctor, wanna hear it here it goes [sfx clip]  I guess when you have a hammer…    A write-up in Life magazine in 1959, noted that Bagdasarian/Seville was the first case in the "annals of popular music that one man has served as writer, composer, publisher, conductor and multiple vocalist of a hit record, thereby directing all possible revenues from the song back into his pocket."  That'd be impressive enough even if you didn't know that Seville couldn't read or write music, nor play any instruments, but now you do know that, so you should be quite impressed.   The Chipmunk Song earned them three Grammy Awards at the very first Grammy's the following May.  I'm going to say that again, because I don't think you heard me.  The Chipmunks song won three Grammy's.  In fairness, one is for best children's song.  A few years later, The Chipmunks landed their own television show as cartoon characters, but it did not command the same success their music career.  After Bagdasarian passed away unexpectedly in 1972, his son and daughter-in-law took over the voices of The Chipmunks, but it would take nearly ten years for The Chipmunks made it back to TV, with their 1981 Christmas special, the ingeniously named “A Chipmunk Christmas.”     Like a holiday Jason Vorhees, "The Chipmunk Song" re-entered the Billboard Hot 100 in 2007 with the CGI Alvin and Chipmunks movie.  As of December 25, 2011, Nielsen SoundScan estimated total sales of the digital track at 867,000 downloads, making it third on the list of all-time best-selling Christmas/holiday digital singles.  #3 was Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24 from Trans-Siberian Orchestra, who I've had the mixed blessing to see live – the performance was great but the stage light swept over the audience constantly; it was like having a camera flash go off in your face several times a minute.  #1 is, to the surprise of no one, Mariah Carey's 1994 "All I Want for Christmas Is You" and that's all the more attention she's getting from me.  If you ever want a real smdh moment, Google Mariah Carey's requirements to appear on camera for interviews.  The word “diva” doesn't begin to describe it.  Wonderful Now this one depends on the day.  Some days, it's so bad it's good and some days, and for some people all days, it's the regular kind of bad.  [sfx clip] Say what you will about it, you can't say Paul McCartney didn't put in the work.  Wonderful Christmastime features McCartney on guitar, bass, keyboards, drums and vocals, even the creepy-sounding ‘choir of children.'  Makes one wonder why he even kept a band around.  You see the other members of Wings in the video, but the song was all McCartney.   Like a number of holiday classics that you heard about in the episode #92, The Jews Who Wrote Christmas, Wonderful Christmastime was written on a ‘boiling hot day in July', and recorded during sessions for the McCartney II album.  It apparently took the former Beatle just ten minutes to pen the song which – some of us find that more readily-believable than others.  One of the most memorable elements of the song is the odd synthesiser sound that punctuates it throughout.  That is, if you care to know, a Sequential Circuits Prophet-5, which was also used on the hit songs Bette Davis Eyes and What a Fool Believes.  Though I suppose it's still a Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 even if you don't care to know.   It peaked at number six on the UK Singles Chart and has since become of the most widely played Christmas songs on radio.   Bonus fact: The Beatles only really had one Christmas release – Christmas Time Is Here Again, which was distributed to their fan club in 1967.  I imagine that would fetch a pretty pence on the secondary market. [sfx typing] checking ebay…Oh, they're actually pretty cheap.     If you don't like the song, you're not alone.  McCartney himself isn't all that keen on it, but he has begun playing it on UK tours in recent years.  You gotta give the people what they want and clearly enough people want Wonderful Christmastime.  According to the Forbes website, McCartney earns over $400,000 royalties from the song every year, though other sources claim that figure is probably the cumulative total. Little Drummer Boy As time passes, tastes change, culture shifts, new things are created and old things fall away.  We rarely ride in one-horse open sleighs –I can't remember the last time I was even in a closed one-horse sleigh– and it seems really strange to us that people sat about telling ghost stories.  So maybe that's why I don't understand The Little Drummer Boy.  How is a drum solo an appropriate gift for a sleeping infant and the woman who just squoze him out in a cow-shed?  The ox and lamb kept time?  That's literally the drummer's only job.  Well, that and making the rest of the band's drinking problem look reasonable.  Hey, what's the difference between a drummer and a drum machine?  You only have to punch the info into the drum machine once.  [sfx rimshot] What do you call a drummer who broke up with his girlfriend?  Homeless.  [sfx rimshot]  Don't worry, drummers, this abuse isn't exclusive.  What do you call the pretty girl on a bassist's arm?  A tattoo.  That's my time, good night!   How old do you think this slow, plodding song is?  I couldn't have put a year to my guess, but for some reason it surprised me that it was written in 1941.  The composure was a teacher named Katherine Kennicott Davis.  Originally called "Carol of the Drum" –does what it says on the tin– was based on an unidentified Czech carol and intended for choirs.  One group of singers took a liking to it and propelled it to success in 1951 - The Trapp Family Singers.   As boring as it is, The Little Drummer Boy lets us draw a straight line between the Trapp Family and ‘the lad insane' David Bowie.  In 1977, Bowie was 'actively trying to normalize' his career.  Debilitating drug addiction and accusations of Nazi-sympathizing threatened to sink his earning potential, so it was a no-brainer for him to appear on Bing Crosby's Merrie Olde Christmas.  Crosby was a crooner and golden age Hollywood icon and seemed like a means to the end because, as Bowie said later, “my mom likes him.”  The promise by producers to promote the video for Bowie's single Heroes, fitting as poorly as it did in the middle of a holiday special, certainly didn't hurt either.  The special starred Crosby, his actual family, and stars of the day like the model Twiggy, who my mother has still not forgiven for coming along and making curvy, busty figures unpopular.     So Bing Crosby and David Bowie.  On paper, it made no sense.  But in reality…it made even less sense.  A negative amount of sense, if that's mathematically possible.  I mean, just look at this juxtaposition.  You can see the two together on the Vodacast app… Bowie arrived in a mink coat, an earring, and bright red lipstick….to appear alongside Bing Crosby.  Bowie agreed to producers' demands to tone his look down, but asked/begged the producers if there was anything else, anything at all, he could sing, letting them know in no uncertain terms that he hated the song.   "Ian Fraser, who co-wrote the 'Peace on Earth' portion, told The Washington Post in 2006. 'We didn't know quite what to do.' Instead of panicking, he and two other men working on the special — Buz Kohan and Larry Grossman — hunkered down at a piano in the studio basement and spent 75 minutes working up the tune.  Ever professionals, Bowie and Crosby perfected the new song in less than an hour."  It was that professionalism that actually brought the men together.  According to Crosby's daughter, Mary, who was 18 at the time and a big Bowie fan,  "Eventually, Dad realized David was this amazing musician, and David realized Dad was an amazing musician. You could see them both collectively relax and then magic was made."  Bonus fact: Mary went on to become an actress, starring in the hit TV show Dallas, but she isn't the only thespian the Crosby legacy produced.  Bing's granddaughter Denise will always have a place in my heart as Tasha Yar, first chief of security on the Enterprise D and if you don't know what I'm talking about, maybe *you're* not cool enough to sit with *us* at lunch.   The special was recorded in mid-September, but Crosby would not see it released.  He died of a massive heart attack after a day of golfing in mid-October, so the special was aired posthumously at the end of November in the U.S. and on Christmas Eve in England.  Bizarrely, The single proved to be one of Bowie's fastest-selling singles, selling over 250,000 copies within its first month and being certified silver by the British Phonographic Industry one month after its release.  And what does it say about me that I had to do a second take, beause I read it as British Pornographic Industry.  They certify very different records.  One thing that helped propel that success was the fledgeling Music Television network, which in its original primitive state actually played music videos.  When it launched in 1981, there weren't really enough videos to fill up an entire channel, so they played what they had, including the 'Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy' clip, a lot.  This prompted RCA to issue an official release in 1982 with the arbitrary single B-side of "Fantastic Voyage" from The Lodger album.  Bowie was annoyed with that move, contributing to his departure from the label soon after.  Still, it was a high-charting single for Bowie in the post-Scary Monsters era, at least until Let's Dance came out three months later.   And that's…So the question was “Do they know it's Christmas?”.  Since Ethiopia is ⅔ Christian, yes.  I'd go out on a limb and say even the ⅓ that's Muslim knows. But the important thing is that 100% of the royalties go to the cause, and that figure sits north of $250 million.  Among the luminary names involved was a pre-beard George Michaels.  This was in his Wham days when he also recorded the song you're hearing now.  Recognize it?  To anyone who just lost Whamageddon… [sfx laughter]  Worth it.  Just passing it on after Red from Overly Sarcastic took me out during a video last year.  For everyone else, as the nearest Gen-X'er.  Remember…Thanks..     And that's…So the question was “Do they know it's Christmas?”.  Since Ethiopia is ⅔ Christian, yes.  I'd go out on a limb and say even the ⅓ that's Muslim knows. But the important thing is that 100% of the royalties go to the cause, and that figure sits north of $250 million.  Among the luminary names involved was a pre-beard George Michaels.  This was in his Wham days when he also recorded the song you're hearing now.  Recognize it?  To anyone who just lost Whamageddon… [sfx laughter]  Worth it.  Just passing it on after Red from Overly Sarcastic took me out during a video last year.  For everyone else, as the nearest Gen-X'er.  Remember…Thanks..    Sources: https://www.cbc.ca/music/read/david-bowie-bing-crosby-and-the-story-of-the-strangest-christmas-duet-ever-1.5008343 https://theconversation.com/christmas-earworms-the-science-behind-our-love-hate-relationship-with-festive-songs-89268 https://www.slantmagazine.com/music/worst-christmas-songs-of-all-time/3/ https://www.sundaypost.com/fp/story-behind-the-christmas-song-paul-mccartneys-wonderful-christmastime/ https://www.songfacts.com/facts/paul-mccartney/wonderful-christmastime https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/637970/banned-christmas-songs-past https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chipmunk_Song_(Christmas_Don%27t_Be_Late) http://www.christmassongs.net/chipmunks-christmas-song https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Bagdasarian https://nowweknowem.wordpress.com/2013/05/04/david-sevilles-the-chipmunk-song-won-three-grammy-awards-today-in-1959-the-top-winner-at-the-inaugural-grammy-awards-now-we-know-em/ https://holidappy.com/holidays/History-of-Christmas-Carols-Little-Drummer-Boy https://www.newsweek.com/story-behind-bowie-bings-unlikely-holiday-duet-sends-welcome-message-divided-times-opinion-1478295

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?!) Like what you hear?  Become a patron of the arts for as little as $2 a month!   Or buy the book or some merch.  Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram. Music: Kevin MacLeod, David Fesliyan.   Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Links to all the research resources are on the website.   In the latter half of the 20th century, American wines finally began to come into their own on the global scene.  It was no longer a social faux pas to be seen drinking California chardonnay.  Hastened by a global recession, consumption of European wines by Europeans dropped precipitously, by nearly 1/2 in France and by almost ⅔ in Italy.  What's a vineyard to do if they've produced more wine than the public is buying?  Put it in the wine lake, of course.  My name's…   A strategic reserve is the reserve of a commodity or items that is held back from normal use by governments, organisations, or businesses in pursuance of a particular strategy or to cope with unexpected events.  Your mind may go immediately to the 35 million barrels or so of crude oil that the US has in storage, but there are all kinds of strategic reserves, sometimes called stockpiles, throughout the world.  Most of those stockpiles are intended to guard against price fluctuations.  Today will trend more toward survival necessities, but if you've ever done any kind of research, you know that start off thinking you're going down one road and wind up goodness knows where.    The rationing, deprivation, and economic collapse that were part and parcel to WWII affected the lives of Europeans so profoundly that the European Economic Community, a precursor to the European Union, began subsidizing farmers.  Farmers have never been raking in the big bucks, even when the are outstanding in their field [rimshot], but they were no longer able to rely on it to support their families, especially on land pock-marked with those pesky bomb craters.  Under-production was endemic to the 1950's.  The Common Agricultural Policy was created in 1962 to pay guaranteed, artificially high prices to dairy farmers for surplus products.  These products were then sold the European public for higher prices, causing a drop in sales.  Attempts by non-EU dairies to get in on these high sale prices were kiboshed by heavy taxes.  A certain portion of products were stockpiled, to guard against crop failures, natural disasters, or in case someone got a wild hair and started WWIII.  In 1986 alone, the EU bought 1.23 million tons of leftover butter.  That's 9,840,000,000 sticks of creamy saturated fat goodness.  While this may sound like a dairy-lover's dream, the general public was not so enthusiastic when word got out of what was termed the “butter mountain,” nor were they keen to learn they were paying inflated prices for their dairy goods.  This program actually cost a lot of taxpayer money, almost 90% of the European Economic Communities entire budget.  Even as recently as 2003, these payments are approximately half of the EU budget, even though farming is only 3% of the overall economy.   It still took until the ‘90s for something to be done about it, however. Instead of paying farmers for their unwanted butter, the EEC switched to paying them to not produce it.  To move away from paying farmers guaranteed minimum prices for surplus goods, the government has shifted to paying to farmers so they won't produce as much.  While it seems counter-intuitive, it's not uncommon for governments to pay farmers not farm.  It's been done here in the US since the 1930's.  Some of the prohibitively high import taxes were rescinded as well.  In 2007, the butter surplus was liquidated, figuratively speaking.  In 2009, however, the global recession did require some of the old policies to be reinstated.  The EU claimed it was only a temporary measure that would result in a smaller butter reserve than before, a butter hill rather than a mountain.  A grass-fed knoll, if you will.  This was no magic butter, of course.  Critics argue that farming subsidies in first-world nations hurt developing countries whose farmers can't compete with the artificial prices.   The 300,000 tons of butter the government bought cost taxpayers a whopping €280,000,000, or about a third of a billion dollars, and public pressure quickly rose to get rid of it again.  As of 2011, a portion of the butter had been donated to the worldwide Food Aid for the Needy program.  They don't have this down pat, though.  Changing medical views about fat are leading people to return to butter rather than vegetable oils or margarine, at a rate that's outpacing production.   Oh, Canada, the great white north, full of polite people, ice hockey, geese, and maple syrup.  There are worse reputations for a country to have.  What a pleasant and wholesome thing maple syrup is, drizzled on pancakes on a sunny Sunday morning.  It lands strangely on the brain to learn that there is a Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve.   The Canadian maple syrup industry produces approximately 80% of the world's pure maple syrup and is the leading global producer of maple products.  The province of Quebec alone has almost 8,000 farms, fulfilling 72% of the worlds sticky sweet needs.   Maple syrup is harvested from the sap of maple trees, shockingly, but the process is even more fickle than your average crop.  Maple trees require nights below freezing and days that are in the low thirties but above freezing to  relinquish their sap in useful quantities.  If the nights are too warm or the days are too cold, production levels can vary wildly based on the weather.  That isn't good news if you're trying to maintain a large-scale industry.  It takes 40 units of sap to get one unit of syrup, though a long boiling process called sugaring off.  Corporate buyers depend on a consist supply.  Since 2000, the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers has been squirreling away barrels of surplus syrup in rich times, in preparation for poor harvests.  The Federation's warehouses have a capacity of 10 million kilos / 22.2 million pounds of syrup, or about two million gallons.  Each barrel weighs about 620 pounds and commands a price of $1,650, almost 20 times the cost of crude oil.     Speaking of oil, some producers claim the Federation runs their operation like OPEC.  Those producers who don't cooperate with the quota system, those with the temerity to find their own buyers, are dealt with harshly.  Small producer Angèle Grenier told reporter Leyland Cecco she will face criminal charges if she doesn't stop selling to a private broker after the courts ordered her to hand her syrup over.  She has three choices: give the Federation her syrup crop, face jail time, or shut down.  “The federation's goal by taking our maple syrup is that by taking our income, we cannot pay our lawyers,” says Grenier.  “If one year we make 45 barrels, and the next year is a very good year and we make 60, we want to get paid for the 60,” she says. Once a producer fills the quota, the surplus, no matter how large, is retained until it is sold.  That lag-time can run into years.  According to Grenier, a neighboring producer is owed almost 100,000 Canadian dollars in unsold syrup.  According to Al Jazeera America, a small Quebec producer described what happened to his family's business: “The agent who came here to seize our syrup said, ‘If you were growing pot, we wouldn't be giving you as much trouble.'    When an accountant went to inventory the barrels in the warehouse in Saint-Louis-de-Blanford, he was alarms to find a number of the barrels filled with water, while others were plain empty. Because of the sheer volume of syrup, it would take two months to even determine how much was missing.  About 60 percent of the reserve, worth about $18 million at that time, had been stolen.  The thieves had rented space in the same warehouse and when the security guards were out of sight, siphoned the syrup from the barrels over the course of 11 months.  A multi-agency search began.  Hundreds of people were questioned and dozens of search warrants were issued.  It took a year for the 26 people believed to be involved in the robbery to be arrested.  About ⅓ of the syrup would never be recovered.  The mastermind, Richard Vallieres, received an eight-year prison sentence, which will be increased to 14 years if he doesn't pay $9.4 million in fines, the CBC reports.  Vallières was found guilty of theft, fraud and trafficking stolen goods.  His father, Raymond, and syrup reseller Etienne St-Pierre, have also been found guilty.  Speaking of Canada, I'm 100% serious about a virtual watch-party for the Letterkenny season 10 premier, soc med.   To quote the show to make a clunky segue, what's a Mennonite's favorite kind of raisin?  Barn-raisin'.  Yes, Virginia, there is a national raisin reserve.  That's right, raisins, those polarizing wrinkly former grapes.  While most stockpiles are created to protect against shortage, the National Raisin Reserve came to be for the opposite reason.  We were up to our epaulets in raisins, apparently.   During World War II, both the government and civilians bought raisins en masse to send to soldiers overseas, as a sweet, shelf stable taste of home.  Increased demand led to increased production, but when the war ended and the care packages stopped, the raisin market was flooded.   In 1949, Marketing Order 989 was passed which created the reserve and the Raisin Administrative Committee to oversee it, under the supervision of the USDA.  The Committee was empowered to take a varying percentage of American raisin farmers' produce, sometimes almost half, in an effort to create a raisin shortage and artificially drive up the market price. The reserved raisins didn't go to waste.  Much of it was used in school lunches, fed to livestock, or sold to other countries.  If the raisins were sold, the profit was supposed to be shared with the farmers, but those monies could easily be eaten up by operating expenses, leaving nothing for the people who actually grew the grapes.   This program stayed in place, business as usual, for 53 years, until 2002.  That's when farmer Marvin Horne decided that he would rather sell the product he had grown and processed instead of giving it away to the government. The government took exception to this idea.  Private detectives were dispatched to put his farm under surveillance, then trucks were sent to collect the raisins. When Horne refused to let the trucks on his property, he was slapped with a bill for about $680,000, the value of the raisins plus a penalty.  Not one to roll over that easily, Horne sued the government, claiming the forced forfeiture of his crop was unconstitutional.  For years, the case was volleyed from one court to another.  Eventually, it appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court, not once but twice.  The first time was to settle the issue of jurisdiction.  Justice Elena Kagan suggested that the question was “whether the marketing order is a Taking or it's just the world's most outdated law.”  The second time was the core issue - was the seizure of raisins a violation of the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits the government taking personal property without just compensation?  In 2015, thirteen years after the farce began, the court ruled 8:1 in favor of Horne: For seizures to continue, compensation would have to be paid, that the confiscation of a portion of a farmer's crops without market price compensation was unconstitutional.    While many growers supports Horne in his efforts, even contributing to his legal fees, not everyone thinks of him as a champion of the little guy.  Some who followed the government's orders while Horne defied them resent him for it.  “I lost a lot of my land, following the rules,” said Eddie Wayne Albrecht, a raisin grower in nearby Del Rey, Calif.   He lost so much money in turning in as much as 47% of his crop that his farm, once 1,700 acres strong, is now only 100 acres.  “He got 100 percent, while I was getting 53 percent,” Albrecht said. “The criminal is winning right now.”   What's happening with the raisin reserve now?  The Agriculture Department could abolish it, but they have only hit pause on it, saying “Due to a recent United States Supreme Court decision, [the Volume Control] provisions are currently suspended, being reviewed, and will be amended.” At least that means that in the meantime, no more raisins should be put into the reserve and farmers are free to sell what's theirs.   Bonus fact the first: Golden raisins aren't dried white grapes.  Both regular and golden raisins are made from the same kind of grapes, but with slightly different processes.     MIDROLL   Do you remember how, after like the third time Futurama got cancelled, they did a quartet of movies, which went back and forth in quality like the Star Trek films.  The one, Into the Wild Green Yonder, featured a creature called the Encyclopod, who preserved the DNA of all endangered species.  It's not news that animal species are disappearing at an increasing rate, with a quarter of all known mammals and a tenth of all birds facing possible extinction within the next generation.  Global biodiversity is declining at an overwhelming speed. With each species that disappears, vast amounts of information about their biology, ecology and evolutionary history is irreplaceably lost.  In 2004, three British organizations decided to join forces and combat the issue.  The Natural History Museum, the Zoological Society of London, and Nottingham University joined forces, like highly-educated Planeteers, to create the Frozen Ark Project.     To do this, they gathered and preserved DNA and living tissue samples from all the endangered species they could get their hands on (literally), so that future generations can study the genetic material far into the future.  No, not like Jurassic Park.  I think it's been established that that's a bad idea.  So far, the Frozen Ark has over 700 samples stored at the University of Nottingham in England and participating consortium members in the U.S., Germany, Australia,India, South Africa, Norway, and others.  DNA donations come from museums, university laboratories, and zoos.  Their mission has four component: to coordinating global efforts in animal biobanking; to share expertise; to help to organisations and governments set up biobanks in their own countries; and to provide the physical and informatics infrastructure that will allow conservationists and researchers to search for, locate, and use this material wherever possible without having to resample from wild populations.   The Frozen Ark Project was founded in 2004 by Professor Bryan Clarke, a geneticist at the University of Nottingham, his wife Dr Ann Clarke, an immunologist with experience in reproductive biology, and their friend Dame Anne McLaren, a leading figure in developmental biology.  Starting in the 1960's, Clarke carried out comprehensive studies on land snails of the genus Partula, which are endemic to the volcanic islands of French Polynesia.  Almost all Partula species disappeared within just 15 years, because of a governmental biological control plan that went horribly wrong.  In the late '60s, the giant African land snail, a mollusk the size of a puppy, was introduced to the islands as a delicacy, but soon turned into a serious agricultural pest, because, as seems to happen 100% of the time humans think they know better, the giant snail had no natural predators.  To control the African land snails, the carnivorous Florida rosy wolfsnail was introduced in the '70s, but it annihilated the native snails instead.  As a last resort, Clarke's team managed to collect live specimens of the remaining 12 Partula species and bring them back to Britain.  Tissue samples were frozen to preserve their DNA and an international captive breeding program was established.  Currently, there are Partula species, including some that later became extinct in the wild, in a dozen zoos and a there few been a few promising reintroductions.   The extinction story of the Partula snails resonated with the Clarkes, who realised that systematic collection and preservation of tissue, DNA, and viable cells of endangered species should become standard practice, ultimately inspiring the birth of Frozen Ark.  The Frozen Ark Project operates as a federated model, building partnerships with organisations worldwide that share the same vision and goals.  The Frozen Ark consortium has grown steadily since the project's launch, with new national and international organisations joining every year.  There are now 27 partners, distributed across five continents.  Biological samples like tissue or blood from animals in zoos and aquariums can be taken from live animals during routine veterinary work or from dead animals.  Bonus fact: more of a nitpick, the post-mortem examination of an animal is a necropsy.  Autopsy means examining the self.  The biobanks can provide a safe storage for many types of biological material, particularly the highly valuable germ cells (sperm and eggs).     Their work isn't merely theoretical for some distant day in the future.  One success story of the Frozen Ark, which illustrates the benefits of combining cryobanked material, effective management, and a captive breeding program, is the alarmingly adorable black-footed ferret. The species was listed as “extinct in the wild” in 1996, but has since been reintroduced back to its habitat and is now gradually recovering.  More recently, researchers were able to improve the  genetic diversity to the wild population by using 20-year-old cryopreserved sperm and artificial insemination.     There are many organizations around the world who have taken up the banner of seed preservation, nearly 2,000 in fact.  Most of us have heard of the seed vault at Svalbard, the cool-looking tower sticking out of a Norwegian mountain, where the permafrost ensures the seeds are preserved without need for electricity.  But that's not the seed vault I want to talk about today and fair warning, this one's gonna get heavy, but it's one of those stories I find endlessly fascinating and in a strange way, uplifting.   In September 1941, German forces began to push into Leningrad, before and since called St Petersburg.  They laid siege to the city, choking off the supply of food and other necessities to the city's two million residents.  The siege of Leningrad didn't last a month, or two, or even six.  The siege lasted nearly 900 days.  Among the two million Soviet citizens struggling to survive were a group of scientists ready to make the ultimate sacrifice for the good of mankind.  While they did, their leader, Nikolay Vavilov, Russian geneticist and plant geographer, lay dying in a Soviet prison a thousand miles away.    Vavilov had travelled the world on what he called “a mission for all humanity.”   Vavilov led 115 expeditions to 64 countries, to collect seeds of crop varieties and their wild ancestors. Based on his notes, modern biologists following in Vavilov's footsteps are able to document changes in the cultural and physical landscapes and the crop patterns in these places.  To study the global food ecosystem, he conducted experiments in genetics to improve productivity for farmers.  “He was one of the first scientists to really listen to farmers – traditional farmers, peasant farmers around the world – and why they felt seed diversity was important in their fields,” says Gary Paul Nabhan, ethnobiologist and author of ‘Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine', continues: “All of our notions about biological diversity and needing diversity of foods on our plates to keep us healthy sprung from his work 80 years ago.”  His hope was that one day science could work with agriculture to increase each farm's productivity and to create plants that would grow in any environment and bring an end to hunger.  As Russia fought to find its way through undergoing revolutions, anarchy, and, most importantly to Vavilov, famines, he went about storing seeds at the Institute of Plant Industry, also known as the Pavlovsk Experimental Station.  The scientists there collected thousands of varieties of fruits, vegetables, grains, and tubers.  Unlike Svalbard and Kew Garden, the seeds a Pavlovsk weren't just stored as seeds, but some were perpetuated as plants in the field.  This is because some varieties do not breed true from seeds, so can't be stored as seeds to get those plants in the future.   There was one obstacle in Vavilo's way.  Two, really, but one was much greater a threat, that being Joseph Stalin.  The other threat was Stalin's favorite scientist, Trofim Lysenkoly.  Lysenko was a dangerously mis-informed scientist.  Rather than survival of the fittest, where the genes that help an organism survive long enough to reproduce are the ones that are passed on, Lysenko believed that organisms could inherit traits the parent acquired during its lifespan.  Instead of believing that the giraffe with the longest neck was able to reach the food and live to have babies, he believed that the giraffe stretched its neck up and its baby would have a longer neck because of that.  He also believed that if you grafted a branch from a desirable tree onto a less desirable tree, the base tree would improve.  His theories about seeds and flowers were equally backwards.  It was garbage science at best.  At worst, well, we don't need to speculate on that.  We saw it happen.  Crops failed under his now-mandatory systems on the new collectivized farms, which themselves reduced productivity.  Lysenko's policies brought on a famine.  But he was in Stalin's favor and in the Soviet Union, that was all that mattered.  In August 1948 when the Politburo outlawed the teaching of and research into classical Mendelian genetics, the pea plant-based genetics we learn about in middle school.  This disastrous government interference in the face of widely-accepted science and its outcomes are called the Lysenko Effect.     There was no way Stalin's favorite scientist was going to take the fall, so Stalin singled out Vavilov, who had been openly critical of Lysenko.  He claimed Vavilov was responsible for the famines because his process of carefully selecting the best specimens of plants took too long to produce results.  Vavilov was collecting seeds near Russia's border when he was arrested and subjected to 1700 hours of savage interrogation.  World War II was in full swing and it was impossible for his family to find out what had happened to him.  Vavilov, who spent his life trying to end famine, starved to death in the gulag.   Back in Leningrad, some scientists from the Institute of Plant Industry were able to get the bulk of the tuber collection, and themselves, to another location within the city.  A dozen of Vavilov's scientists stayed behind to safeguard the seed collection.  At first, it seemed as though they'd only have to contend with marauding enemy troops breeching the city, seeking to steal the seeds or simply destroy the building.  The red army pushed the Germans back as long as they could.  Nothing moved in or out of the city.  “Leningrad must die of starvation”, Hitler declared in a speech at Munich on November 8, 1941.  As the siege dragged on, the scientists then had to contend with protecting the seeds from their own countrymen.  Food was rationed, but once it ran out, people ate anything they could to survive--vermin, dogs, leather, sawdust, and as so often happens in such dark hours, some at the dead.  The scientists barricaded themselves inside with hundreds of thousands of seeds, a quarter of which were edible just as they were, along with rice and grains.   But they did not eat them.  They took turns guarding the store room in shifts, even as they grew weaker, even as they heard the Germans looting and destroying out in the streets.  The only thing that mattered was guarding the collection, safeguarding both the botanical past and future for mankind, and the work of their fallen Vavilov.  One by one, the scientist began to die of starvation.  One man died at his desk; another died surrounded by bags of rice.  In the end, nine of the twelve scientists did not live to see the end of the siege.  But not a single grain, seed, or tuber was eaten.  According to Nabhan, “One of them said it was hard to wake up, it was hard to get on your feet and put on your clothes in the morning, but no, it was not hard to protect the seeds once you had your wits about you.  Saving those seeds for future generations and helping the world recover after war was more important than a single person's comfort.”   Unlike many of the 85 million deaths in WWII, those nine scientists' lives were not wasted.  Today, many of the crops that we eat came from cross-breeding with varieties the scientists saved from destruction.  As much as 80% of all the pre-collapse Soviet Union's fields were sown with varieties that originated in Vavilov's collection.  It's a sad tale, I know, but also an amazing one that so few of us hear.  Which is odd when you consider the thousands of hours of WWII documentaries out there.  The world nearly lost Vavilov's collection a second time, though.  In 2010, the land it sits on was being sold to a developer who planned to build private homes on the site.  The collection can't just be moved; there are all sorts of complex legal and technical issues, including quarantines.  The public called for the site to be preserved and in 2012, the Russian government took formal action to prevent the land from being conveyed to private buyers.  As far as I can find, it stands safely still.    Much to my lasting disappointment, the wine lake was not a physical lake of wine, like Willy Wonka's chocolate river for women with Live, Laugh, Love decor.  In addition to subsidies equivalent to $1.7 billion per year, the EU purchased the vineyards' lower-quality grapes for what it called “crisis distillation,” turning the grapes into industrial alcohol and biofuels, rather than for drinking.  This unfortunately encouraged some growers to produce more inferior grapes, so in 2008, the government just paid growers to dig up vines and abandon fields of surplus grapes.  In 2015, all of the previously enacted programs were phased out, meaning wineries would once again be responsible for their own excesses.  Remember…Thanks…    https://listverse.com/2015/12/14/10-of-the-strangest-items-governments-are-stockpiling/ http://theweek.com/articles/454970/logic-behind-worlds-4-weirdest-strategic-reserves https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/12/20/why-maple-syrup-is-controlled-by-a-quebec-cartel/?utm_term=.8628802d4fe2 http://mentalfloss.com/article/87144/15-strategic-reserves-unusual-products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butter_mountain https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-27/europeans-eat-into-butter-mountain-in-sign-high-prices-to-linger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omBxXzdBR2Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiZ75XbG7YA https://verdict.justia.com/2015/07/15/raisins-regulations-and-politics-in-the-supreme-court https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Raisin_Reserve https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/one-growers-grapes-of-wrath/2013/07/07/ebebcfd8-e380-11e2-80eb-3145e2994a55_story.html?utm_term=.74d6dccd2110 http://www.agr.gc.ca/eng/industry-markets-and-trade/market-information-by-sector/horticulture/horticulture-sector-reports/statistical-overview-of-the-canadian-maple-industry-2015/?id=1475692913659 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-01-02/the-great-canadian-maple-syrup-heist https://explorepartsunknown.com/quebec/canadas-maple-syrup-cartel-puts-the-squeeze-on-small-producers/ https://modernfarmer.com/2014/01/illustrated-account-great-maple-syrup-heist/ http://time.com/4760432/maple-syrup-heist-prison-fine/ http://www.ediblegeography.com/syrup-stockpiles-wine-lakes-butter-mountains-and-other-strategic-food-reserves/ http://www.ediblegeography.com/syrup-stockpiles-wine-lakes-butter-mountains-and-other-strategic-food-reserves/ https://www.ft.com/content/982ed0e4-8a1d-11e4-9b5f-00144feabdc0 https://www.guildsomm.com/public_content/features/articles/b/guest_blog/posts/confeusion-a-quick-summary-of-the-eu-wine-reforms http://mentalfloss.com/article/87144/15-strategic-reserves-unusual-products https://listverse.com/2015/12/14/10-of-the-strangest-items-governments-are-stockpiling/ http://www.nww2m.com/2015/06/scitech-tuesday-when-the-rubber-meets-the-road/ https://insideecology.com/2018/01/12/the-frozen-ark-project-biobanking-endangered-animal-samples-for-conservation-and-research/ https://www.researchitaly.it/en/news/the-ice-memory-project-is-underway/#null https://www.arctictoday.com/ice-cores-best-link-ancient-climates-scientists-racing-preserve-still-can/ https://www.rbth.com/blogs/2014/05/12/the_men_who_starved_to_death_to_save_the_worlds_seeds_35135 https://www.amusingplanet.com/2018/08/the-scientists-who-starved-to-death.html

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. Like what you hear?  Become a patron of the arts for as little as $2 a month!   Or buy the book or some merch.  Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram. Music: Kevin MacLeod, Steve Oxen, David Fesliyan.  . Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Links to all the research resources are on the website. Podchaser: Moxie got me through 2,500 miles. I listened to every episode regardless of audio quality from the vault. I got my fix of facts with a personality that kept me entertained the entire time. I shared it with everyone I knew that would appreciate the facts, wit and hilariously subtle segues. Profile avatar 2 months ago byBoredatwork23 Book: David Nowlin 5.0 out of 5 stars Be prepared to be amazed at what you needed know, but did not. Reviewed in the United States on October 31, 2021 Great book. Read it cover to cover, but am planning to reread it again and again. It is so full of such wonderful pieces of information that I use to interject conversations whenever I can. Thank you Moxie for such a wonderful gift, and the book is great too Gift and merch “The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created.  This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”  Thus begins Douglas Adams' Restaurant at the End of the Universe, sequel to his culture touchstone The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  That's the book that gave us the answer to life, the universe and everything, though not the question.  Welcome to episode number 42, which I have decided to devote to [drumroll] the history of British comedy.  That means we're going to try to cram hundreds of years, thousands of performers, and a dozen mediums into a half-hour show.  But don't panic.  My name's Moxie and this is your brain on facts.    British comedy history is measured in centuries, from chase scenes and beatings into Shakespeare's comedies to the misadventures of Mr. Bean.  Even as times, tastes, and technologies changes, some themes are eternal.  Innuendo, for example, has been a staple in the literature as far back as Beowulf and Chaucer, and is prevalent in many British folk songs.  King Charles II was such a fan of innuendo that he encouraged it to the point that Restoration comedy became not only its own genre, but an explicit one at that.  The repressive Victorian period gave us burlesque, though not in the same form as the shows you can see today - more vaudeville than striptease.  Absurdism and the surreal had always been an undercurrent, which firmly took root in the 1950's, leading Red Dwarf, The Mighty Boosh, and Count Duckula.  Though the British Empire successfully conquered ¼ of the globe, but its individual people struggled and suffered.  Plagues, wars, poverty, class oppression, and filthy cities gave rise to, and a need for, black humor, in which topics and events that are usually treated seriously are treated in a humorous or satirical manner.  The class system, especially class tensions between characters, with pompous or dim-witted members of the upper/middle classes or embarrassingly blatant social climbers, has always provided ample material, which we can see in modern shows like Absolutely Fabulous, Keeping Up Appearances, and Blackadder.  The British also value finding humor in everyday life, which we see in shows like Father Ted, The IT Crowd, and Spaced, which also incorporates a fair amount of absurdity.   But there's nothing the Brits do better than satire and nobody does it better than the Brits.  “The British, being cynical and sarcastic by nature do have a natural flair for satire,” says BBCAmerica.com writer Fraser McAlpine.  “There's a history of holding up a mirror to society and accentuating its least attractive qualities that goes back hundreds of years...Sometimes the satire is biting and cold, sometimes it's warm and encouraging, but if you want someone who can say a thing that isn't true, but also somehow IS true in a really profound way. You need look no further.”  There are three principal forms of satire.  Menippean satire uses fantasy realms that reflect back on modern society.  Everything from Alice in Wonderland to the works of Terry Pratchett fit here, as would Dr. Who.  Horatian satire skewers cultural moments of silliness using parodic humor.  These are the kind of thing you tend to see most of in comedy TV shows, like The Office.  We're laughing at people being inept and harassed, but not evil.  Juvenalian satire skewers everything with abrasive, often bleak, wit.  If there's an element of horror at the topic being discussed, that's a clue that it's Juvenalian.  John Oliver is a fair hand with Juvenalian satire.  Most political cartoon and black humor fall under this heading.   Though comedy is as old as laughter, we're going to begin today's time travel with the music hall.  (FYI, the narrative today is going to overall linear, but there will be a fair amount of bouncing around.)  Music halls sprang up as an answer to proper theater, which was at the time heavily monitored and censored by the government.  It took place in humble venues like the backs of pubs and coffee houses.  By the 1830s taverns had rooms devoted to musical clubs. They presented Saturday evening Sing-songs and “Free and Easies”. These became so popular that entertainment was put on two or three times a week.  Music in the form of humorous songs was a key element because dialogue was forbidden.  Dialogue was for the theater and if you had speaking parts, you'd be subject to censorship.  The Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737 empowered the Lord Chamberlain's Office to censor plays; this act would be in force until 1968. So, no speaking parts, less, though still some censorship.  Music halls also allowed drinking and smoking, which legitimate theaters didn't.  As the shows became more popular, they moved from the pubs into venues of their own.  Tavern owners, therefore, often annexed buildings adjoining their premises as music halls.  The usual show consisted of six to eight acts, possibly including a comedy skit (low comedy to appeal to the working class), a juggling act, a magic act, a mime, acrobats, a dancing act, a singing act, and perhaps a one-act play.  In the states, this format was essentially vaudeville.  The music hall era was a heyday for female performers, with headliners like Gracie Fields, Lillie Langtry, and Vesta Tilley.  The advent of the talking motion picture in the late 1920s caused music halls to convert into cinemas to stay in business.  To keep comedians employed, a mixture of films and songs called cine-variety was introduced.     The other critically important tradition of that era was panto or pantomime, but not the Marcel Marceau type of pantomime you might be picturing, but a type of theatrical musical comedy designed for family entertainment.  Modern pantomime includes songs, gags, slapstick comedy, dancing, and gender-crossing actors.  It combines topical humour with well-known stories like fables and folk tales.  It is a participatory form of theatre, in which the audience is expected to sing along with certain parts of the music and shout out phrases to the performers.  It's traditionally quite popular around Christmas and New Years.  In early 19th century England, pantomime acquired its present form and featured the first mainstream clown Joseph Grimaldi, while comedy routines also featured heavily in British music halls.  British comedians who honed their skills at pantomime and music hall sketches include Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel.  The influential English music hall comedian and theatre impresario Fred Karno developed a form of sketch comedy without dialogue in the 1890s, and Chaplin and Laurel were among the young comedians who worked for him as part of "Fred Karno's Army". VODACAST   Hopping back to famous ladies of music hall, one such was Lily Harley, though her greatest claim to fame is having given birth to Charles Spencer Chaplin.  When Lily inexplicably lost her voice in the middle of a show, the production manager pushed the five-year-old Charlie, whom he'd heard sing, onto the stage to replace her.  Charlie lit up the audience, wowing them with his natural comedic presence.   Sadly, Lily's voice never recovered, and she was unable to support her two sons, who were sent to a workhouse.  For those of us who don't know workhouses outside of one reference in A Christmas Carol, think an orphanage or jail with indentured servitude.  Young Charlie took whatever jobs he could find to survive as he fought his way back to the stage.  His acting debut was as a pageboy in a production of Sherlock Holmes.  From there he toured with a vaudeville outfit named Casey's Court Circus and in 1908 teamed up with the Fred Karno pantomime troupe, where Chaplin became one of its stars as the Drunk in the comedic sketch A Night in an English Music Hall.  With the Karno troupe, Chaplin got his first taste of the United States, where he caught the eye of a film producer who signed Chaplin to a contract for a $150 a week, equivalent to over three-grand today.   During his first year with the company, Chaplin made 14 films, including The Tramp, which established Chaplin's trademark character and his role as the unexpected hero.  By the age of 26, Chaplin, just three years removed from his vaudeville days, was a superstar.  He'd moved over to the Mutual Company, which paid him a whopping $670,000 a year to make now-classics like Easy Street.   Chaplin came to be known as a grueling perfectionist.  His love for experimentation often meant countless takes, and it was not uncommon for him to order the rebuilding of an entire set or begin filming with one leading actor, realize he'd made a mistake in his casting and start again with someone new.  But you can't argue with results.  During the 1920s Chaplin's career blossomed even more, with landmark films, like The Kid, and The Gold Rush, a movie Chaplin would later say he wanted to be remembered by.  We'll leave Chaplin's story while he's on top because his private life from here on out gets, in a word, sordid.   Though Chapin was English, his film were American.  British cinema arguably lagged decades behind, but they began to close the gap in the 1940's.  Films by Ealing Studios, particularly their comedies like Hue & Cry, Whisky Galore! and The Ladykillers began to push the boundaries of what could be done in cinema, dealing with previously taboo topics like crime in comedic ways.  Kitchen sink dramas followed soon after, portraying social realism, with the struggles of working class Britons on full display, living in cramped rented accommodation and spending their off-hours drinking in grimy pubs, to explore controversial social and political issues ranging from abortion to homelessness.  These contrasted sharply with the idea of cinema as escapism.  This was the era of such notable stars as actor/comedian/singer-songwriter Norman Wisdom.  Beginning with 1953's Trouble in the Store, for which he won a BAFTA (the British equivalent to an Oscar), his films were among Britain's biggest box-office successes of their day.  Wisdom gained celebrity status in lands as far apart as South America, Iran and many Eastern Bloc countries, particularly in Albania where his films were the only ones by Western actors permitted by dictator Enver Hoxha to be shown.  He also played one of the best characters in one of my favorite and most hard to find films, “The Night They Raided Minsky's.”   There are few institutions in British history that have had such a massive role in shaping the daily lives of British citizens as the British Broadcasting Corporation, which for decades meant the wireless radio.  “For many it is an ever-present companion: from breakfast-time to bedtime, from childhood through to old age, there it is telling us about ourselves and the wider world, amusing and entertaining us,” says Robin Aitkin, a former BBC reporter and journalist.  The BBC solidified its place in the public consciousness from its beginnings in 1922 to the end of the Second World War in 1945 is of special interest because these pivotal years helped redefine what it means to be British in modern society.  This was especially true during the high unemployment of the 1920's, when other forms of entertainment were unaffordable.  The BBC was formed from the merger of several major radio manufacturers in 1922, receiving a royal charter in 1927, and governmental protection from foreign competition made it essentially a monopoly.  Broadcasting was seen as a public service; a job at the BBC carried similar gravitas to a government job.  Classical music and educational programs were its bedrock, with radio plays added to bring theater to the wireless.  The BBC strove to be varied but balanced in its offerings, neutral but universal; some people found it elitist nonetheless.  Expansion in offerings came slowly, if at all, in the early years.     Trying to bring only the best of culture to the people meant that bawdy music hall acts had little to no place on the radio.  Obscenity was judged by laws passed as early as 1727.  British libel and slander laws are more strict than in the US, so making fun of public figures was taboo even in forms that would have been legal.  And blasphemy?  Lord, no.  In 1949, the BBC issued to comedy writers and producers the Variety Programmes Policy Guide For Writers and Producers, commonly known as "the Green Book."  Among things absolutely banned were jokes about lavatories, effeminacy in men, immorality of any kind, suggestive references to honeymoon couples, chambermaids, fig leaves, ladies' underwear, prostitution, and the vulgar use of words such as "basket".  (Not an actual basket, the Polari word “basket,” meaning the bulge in a gentleman's trousers.  More on that later.)  The guidelines also stipulated that "..such words as God, Good God, My God, Blast, Hell, Damn, Bloody, Gorblimey, Ruddy, etc etc should be deleted from scripts and innocuous expressions substituted."  Where the independently tun music halls gave people what they wanted, BBC radio gave people what it felt they needed.  But comedy writers are nothing if not clever and there is always a way to slip past the censors if you try.   In the very beginning of radio, comedies lampooned the poor, because only those with money had radios.  As radio ownership grew, the topics of shows broadened.  First half-hour comedy program in 1938, Band Wagon, included musical interludes, was effectively a sitcom and set the stage for much of what came after.  By then, nearly every household had a radio.   WWII had an enormous impact on British comedy and entertainment in general.  Unlike WWI, which was fought on the continent, WWII was right on top of them, with the Blitz, blackouts, rationing, et al.  All places of amusement, which by their nature meant lots of people would gather and could be a target for bombings, were closed.  But the government soon realized comedy had an important role to play in helping its people to keep calm and carry on.  Bonus fact: The iconic 'Keep Calm and Carry On' poster was designed months before WWII began, but was never officially sanctioned for display.  It only achieved its prominent position in the public imagination after its rediscovery in 2001.  All the parody t-shirts still annoy me though.   Theater was allowed to continue, but television service was suspended.  This brought radio back to the forefront for communication and diversion.  The most popular show was It's That Man Again, which ran on BBC radio from ‘39-'49.  It's humor was a great unifier during the war, helping people to laugh at the things they were scared of.  People would often listen huddled around their radio during a blackout.  In its character archetypes, it offered a more comprehensive range of social representation than what had come before it, with characters ranging from east end charwomen to the upper class.  It was so universally popular that supposedly its catch-phrases, which is regarded as the first to really succeed with, were used to test suspected German spies.  If you didn't know who said what, they'd be shot.      During the war, Britain fought back against the Nazi propagandists' ferocious scaremongering with things like a song about the fact that Hitler may or may not have only one testicle, the other of which we were storing in a London theatre for safe keeping.  This attitude, combined with having had enough authority to last them a while, would extend to their own government at the start of the 1960's when Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, and Jonathan Miller made fun of the prime minister in their stage show Beyond The Fringe, with the PM in the audience.  This would open the door for satirical news programs like 1962's That Was The Week That Was, grandfather to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.  There was also The Frost Report, whose staff of writers included five names many of know well and you know we're going to get into more detail on - Chapman, Jones, Idle, Palin, and Cleese.   The war would remain subject to comedy, either as the primary setting or a recurring plot point for decades to come in shows like Dad's Army, Allo Allo, and even Are You Being Served?, one of my personal favorites.   If you've ever seen me at my customer service day jobs, I pattern my behavior on Mrs. Slocombe, though I don't reference my pussy as often. [clip]  Experiences in the war led to the prominence of absurdism/surrealism, because nothing could match what they men had been through.  One of the most famous example was The Goon Show, with Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, and Peter Sellers.  The scripts mixed ludicrous plots with surreal humour, puns, catchphrases and an array of bizarre sound effects. Some of the later episodes feature electronic effects devised by the fledgling BBC Radiophonic Workshop, who also created the theme to Dr Who.  The Goon Show and other such programs were popular with those who were students at the time, seeding their sense of humor into the next generation.  Spike Milligan in particular had wide-reaching cultural influence.  The Goon Show was cited as a major influence by The Beatles, the American comedy team The Firesign Theatre, as well as, among many others, Monty Python.   PATREON   Do you remember how I said in episode #39, Short-Lived, Long Remembered that Jackie Gleason's Honeymooner's was the first TV sitcom?  I was mistaken and I don't mind issuing a correction.  Pinwright's Progress, which ran for ten episodes starting in 1946, was the first half-hour television sitcom, telling the tale of a beleaguered shop-owner, his hated rival and his unhelpful staff.  By 1955, ⅓ of British households had a TV.  That year saw the launch of ITV, I for independent, because it was *not run by BBC with its war vets with good-school educations, but by showmen and entertainers.  Where the BBC did comedies for and about the middle-class, ITV brought full-blooded variety to TV.  The BBC was forced to loosen its tie a bit to keep up.  ITV also had commercials, which BBC shows never did -a concept that is quite foreign to the American brain- so writers had to learn to pace their shows differently to allow for the break.  One stand-out was Hancock's Half-hour, which began on radio and moved to TV.  Fom 54-61, it pushed sitcoms with a focus on character development, rather than silly set-ups, musical interludes, and funny voices of radio plays.  Two writers on the show, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, would leave to create Comedy Playhouse in 1961, ten half-hour plays.  One of these grew into the TV show Steptoe and Son (1962–74), about two rag and bone men, father and son, who live together in a squalid house in West London.  This was the basis for the American series Sanford and Son, as well as version in Sweden, Netherlands and Portugal.  For those not in the know, a rag and bone man collected salvageable rubbish from the streets, making it a bizarre name choice for a clothing company but oh well.    The tone and offerings changed considerably with the cultural revolution of the 1960's.  Rock music, the birth control pill, civil rights, everything was changing.  Round The Horne, which aired on BBC radio on Sunday afternoons was chock full of brazen innuendos and double-entendres.  Some of them were risque to the point of being ironically safe -- people who would have objected to them were not of the sensibility to catch the joke it the first place.  Their most remarkable characters were Julian and Sandy, two very obviously gay characters in a time when it was still illegal to be gay in Britain.  Julian and Sandy got away with the bawdiest of their jokes because they spoke Polari, a pidgin language made up a words from Romani, French, Italian, theater and circus slang and even words spelled backwards.  They might refer to someone's dirty dishes and the squares would have no idea that “dish” meant derriere.  Bonus fact: You probably use Polari words without even realizing it, if you describe a masculine person as “butch” or something kitchy as “camp,” even “drag” meaning clothes, particularly women's.    The Carry On Films, a franchise that put out nearly a movie a year for three decades and spun off a TV series, held up a cartoonish mirror to the depressed and repressed Britain of the 1950s and 1960s.  They blended the rapid-fire pace of music hall sketches with topicality and a liberating sense of directness.  Carry On also filled the gap left as music halls as an institution collapsed.   Monty Python's Flying Circus aired from 69-74 and enjoyed a unique watershed success not just for British comedy but also for television comedy around the world. Monty Python was unlike anything that had appeared on television, and in many ways it was both a symbol and a product of the social upheaval and youth-oriented counterculture of the late 1960s.  The show's humour could be simultaneously sarcastic, scatological, and intellectual.  The series was a creative collaboration between Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and Terry Gilliam, the sole American in a group of Oxford and Cambridge graduates.  The five Brits played most of the roles, with Gilliam primarily contributing eccentric animations.  Although sketch comedy shows were nothing new, television had never broadcast anything as untraditional and surreal, and its importance to television is difficult to overstate.  Their free-form sketches seldom adhered to any particular theme and disregarded the conventions of comedy that writers, performers and audiences had been accustomed to for generations.  Even the opening title sequence didn't follow the rules; it might run in the middle of the show or be omitted entirely.  Over the run of the series, a *few characters recurred, but most were written solely for one sketch.  The show spun-off a number of feature films, like Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Life of Brian (1979), and the Meaning of Life (1983) and even a Tony Award-winning musical comedy Spamalot, first produced in 2005, as well as books and albums like Instant Record Collection.  Decades after the show's initial run, the mere mention of some dead parrots, silly ways, Spam or the Spanish Inquisition is enough to prompt laughter from even casual fans.  All the members who continue on to successful careers, but let's follow John Cleese to his next best-known project.  I put my favorite sketch in Vodacast; see if you can guess it before you look.  And tell me yours, soc med.   Fawlty Towers has been described as the sitcom by which other sitcoms must be measured, voted number one in the BFI's 100 Greatest British Television Programmes in 2000. Its main character, Basil Fawlty, was inspired by a seethingly rude hotel proprietor John Cleese encountered while filming abroad with the Monty Python team.  Cleese actually tested the character on another show in 1971, Doctor At Large, a comedy about newly-graduated doctors, based on the books of Richard Gordon.  The setting for Fawlty Towers was a painfully ordinary hotel that Basil constantly struggling to inject a touch of class into.  His escapades included trying to hide a rat from a hygiene inspector, keeping a dead customer hidden, and pretending that his wife Sybil was ill during their anniversary party, when in fact she's walked out on him).  Basil was the perfect vehicle for Cleese's comic talents: mixing the biting verbal tirades against his wife and guests with the physical dexterity utilised to charge about between self-induced disasters.  Part of the success of the show is arguably the fact that it ran for a mere twelve episodes, so never ran out of steam.  It's been remade in other countries, but those version never really capture the success of the original.  That's one of the key differences between British and American TV series.  A British show might have 2 writers for a season of 6-10 episodes, whereas an American show will have a team of writers for a season of 13-25 episodes.  Quality over quantity, I suppose.  In part, this is a reflection of the difference between the size of the TV audience in the two countries, and the economics of television production; for decades sitcoms on US television that delivered the highest ratings, whereas; in Britain the highest ratings figures were normally for soap operas.   The tone shifted again as the 60's gave way to the 70's.  The anger of 60's revolution gave way to a more comfortable feeling in the 70's.  One of the stand-outs of the decade, which continued into the 80's, was The Two Ronnies.  A sketch show starring Ronnies Barker and Corbett, it moved away from the long-standing comic and straight-man format.  It was the BBC's flagship of light entertainment, the longest running show of its genre.  If we're talking modern comedy duos, we need to talk about Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders.  Even in alternative comedy scenes, women had trouble gaining the same notoriety as their male peers.  A step in the right direction was 1987's French and Saunders, a sketch show that displayed the wilful amateurishness of much alternative comedy, but shunned both the violence and scatology or the strident politics that were staples of the big-name performers.  The duo's humour was distinctively female, but not feminist, and most of their jokes were at the expense of themselves or each other.  As audiences and budgets grew, the pair increasingly favoured elaborate spoofs of pop stars and blockbuster movies.  After the show French starred in The Vicar of Dibley and Saunders to the role she's probably best known for, Edina in Absolutely Fabulous.   And that's where we run out of ideas, at least for today.  Don't be surprised if this topic spawns a sequel.  I left out Punch and Judy, skipped right over literature, had to forgo luminaries like Morecambe and Wise, didn't get to the panel show format, and said nothing of Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, which may actually be a crime, I'm not sure.  Well, it's like they say in the biz, always leave them wanting more.  Thanks for spending part of your day with em.     Sources: https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/truth-behind-keep-calm-and-carry-on https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/feb/17/the-five-stages-of-british-gags-silliness-repression-anger-innuendo-fear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goon_Show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Wisdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hancock%27s_Half_Hour https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/apr/17/gender.filmnews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round_the_Horne http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1011109/index.html https://www.britannica.com/topic/Monty-Pythons-Flying-Circus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galton_and_Simpson http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/fawltytowers/ http://www.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia/2014/06/history-brits-better-satire https://www.britannica.com/art/music-hall-and-variety https://www.biography.com/people/charlie-chaplin-9244327 https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1107&context=ghj https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U77CXPANrCc&list=PL9e1sByp65ixpMQlW9hpMMdomwSwGK9-Y