Podcasts about Moxie

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. 

Brian and Aislinn return for the conclusion of the 2021 Teen Movie Review! "Black as Night", "A Week Away", "12 Mighty Orphans", "To All the Boys: Always and Forever", "Come True", "Kid 90", "Moxie", "North Hollywood", "Seance", "Hero Mode", and "The Kissing Booth 3" are all discussed on this episode. 

HIO Ep. 110 - Growing Amidst The Pandemic & Practical Social Equity for the Cannabis Industry with Jordan Lams of Moxie In this episode, we'll be speaking with Jordan Lams of Moxie about starting a cannabis company at the forefront of a nascent stage of the cannabis industry, and what it's like now to operate a cannabis company in the height of a global pandemic. We'll also discuss the ever-changing state of cannabis regulations in the U.S., what the practical components to social equity look like in the cannabis industry, the state of environ-mentality in the cannabis industry, and more. Sin más preámbulos, let's Hash It Out. ----- enjoymoxie.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordan-lams-3b3987122 https://www.facebook.com/moxie710/ https://twitter.com/moxie710 instagram.com/enjoymoxie ----- Hash it Out features conversations about trending cannabis topics. We also bring in industry insiders and influencers to discuss their point of view. To reach the show: hashitout@trichomes.com

Second Week of 2022 ------

Jack Butcher, Bilal Zaidi & Trung Phan discuss what they're finding on the edges of the internet + the latest in business, technology and memes.Watch + Subscribe on YouTube:https://youtu.be/upj5-JiOy80Join our group chat on Telegram:https://t.me/notinvestmentadviceLet us know what you think on Twitter:@bzaidi@trungtphan@jackbutcher@niapodcastTimestamps:0:00:00 – Meme of the Week + What We'll Cover0:04:00 – Moxie Marlinspike (Signal Founder) on Web 30:10:07 – Centralization + Protocols0:13:13 – Vitalik's Response0:21:10 – Financial + Technical Speculation0:25:07 – Moxie's NFT + OpenSea Example0:34:40 – Intent + Fair Criticism0:44:22 – Psychology Of Markets + Citadel Investment0:51:42 – LooksRare Launches OpenSea Competitor + Nas NFT Drop1:00:23 – Staking $LOOKS + Cobra EffectLinks mentioned:Moxie summary: https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1479567493215637506?s=21Vitalik response: https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/1479815125955715072?s=21LooksRare: https://looksrare.org/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Modern Moxie is a kaleidoscope of musical genres and generational styles, taking dance-happy cues from The Cars and David Bowie and bringing them to a contemporary pop-rock stage. On the heels of their 2019 debut full-length “Claw Your Way Out” and their recognition as “Charlotte's Best Band” by Queen City Nerve, Modern Moxie bandmates Madison Lucas and Harry Kollm share how the Charlotte band's success can be traced all the way back to a small dorm room closet in South Carolina.

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…

Un pueblo holandés frente al mega-centro de datos de Facebook / Kosovo frente a los criptomomineros / Más antivirus con minado oculto / Trasplante de corazón de cerdo exitoso en un humano / Interconexión entre 5G e Internet satelital

Our 100th episode is not  a recap of 2021. It is more than that. It is a reflection of our 3 year journey of being Moxie and the plans we have for you as we soldier on with 2022.   Our hope was, and still is, for you to find a home here. We want you, friends, to build a community; a community that challenges truth and embraces vulnerable conversations. We will be holding transformative talks on life, struggles, faith, what failing forward is, wins, building friendships that are transparent, and so much more topic-oriented conversations.   We have so much more news and updates on the direction the Moxie podcast is taking for 2022. Listen in and get all the gist!   We love you friends and are so expectant to see these conversations ignite impact in us and our communities.

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.

“Get uncomfortable. Don't feel like you can't keep creating new value in an environment of curiosity.” Suzy Deering is Ford's global Chief Marketing Officer - leading Ford's North America marketing and driving strategy across the company's global business units – to constantly enhance and release the huge customer and company value across Ford's iconic brands. Suzy was previously global CMO of eBay, where she helped revive the company's brand and drive sharply higher revenue. She also served as CEO of Moxie, a technology-led marketing agency, and spent many years in senior media and brand roles at Verizon and Home Depot. And she actually got her start at the Walt Disney Company, and studied Advertising at the University of Georgia. Suzy's been recognized as an AdAge “40 Under 40” and as one of Business Insider's “Top 50 Most Innovative CMOs.” While Suzy may not be a P&G Alumni - she is a purpose driven leader. Suzy also happens to be a longtime friend of fellow P&G Alumni leader (and past podcast guest) Kirk Perry, now CEO of IRI Worldwide, who joins for the first of many “deep dives” - where past guests invite non-Alumni leaders to for a candid conversation on their leadership journeys. Which purpose driven leaders do YOU know and want to hear? Let us know at pgalumpod@gmail.com, and who knows, maybe you'll hear them on our podcast soon!

Six Angry Girls by Adrienne Kisner read-alikes Leah on the Offbeat Dumplin by Julie Murphy The (un)popular vote by Jasper Sanchez Any of the Lumberjanes graphic novels Moxie by Jennifer Mathieu Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

Let's meet Shay Ramsee of Moxie and Luxe Wedding Planning Service. She is not just a regular wedding planner. She plans “Non Traditional + Luxury Weddings For Courageous Engaged Couples”. Contact information: Website: https://www.moxieandluxe.com/ IG: @moxieandluxe_ FB: @moxieandluxe

Merry Christmas, the podcast is back this time we are covering two movies of the same name Jack Frost, released 1 year apart. Both of these movies have their good and bad and you will hear them all from Wheeler and Moxie. follow the podcast at @wheelerpodcast --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wheelerpodcast/support

Woah, what a year it's been! There's been so much great and fun ska that's come out in last few years! Oh yes, it's been an embarrassment of riches and never been a better time than to be a ska fan! And blah, blah, blah, it's late, I'm tired, I don't think anyone reads these, so I'm gonna be direct... I think these songs are all both and worth your ear's time, so listen up you slackers! 00:00 - Dani Radic with the Slackers - Let Me Be (Dani Radic with the Slackers '21)02:51 - Western Standard Time Ska Orchestra - Nostalgic Ska (Tombstone '21)05:26 - Half Past Two - Holiday (Holidays '21)08:14 - Paul the Kid - FUCK YOUR NEW TONE (FUCK YOUR NEW TONE '21)11:30 - THE JAMÓNS - Jennifer Lawrence of Arabia (Jennifer Lawrence of Arabia '20)14:04 - the Inevitables - When the Fever Breaks (When the Fever Breaks '21)16:48 - Flying Raccoon Suit - 3 Raceways & Wario Stadium (Skario Kart: A Ska Tribute to Mario Kart 64 comp '21)19:53 - Eskapart - gruba dupa (Wasted Brains '21) If you'd like to submit your band for a future show email: submissions@23ska.com(Please no Youtube or Spotify links)Any other questions or comments, please email: podcast@23ska.comAlso check out our sister podcast On the Upbeat!linktr.ee/ontheupbeatskaSession : Twenty One // Episode : 482 // Airdate : December 23rd, 2021

(0:00) Zolak & Bertrand start the fourth hour by circling back to their conversation about Christmas Vacation, before a call comes in on Boston's new proof of vaccination mandate. (16:37) We discuss what Mac Jones showed in the second half against the Colts and what that means heading into this Sunday's matchup against the Bills. (23:55) The guys take some more calls on Chase Winovich not calling in and why comedies always die out towards the end. (38:02) Today's Takeaways

(0:00) Zolak & Bertrand start the fourth hour by circling back to their conversation about Christmas Vacation, before a call comes in on Boston's new proof of vaccination mandate. (16:37) We discuss what Mac Jones showed in the second half against the Colts and what that means heading into this Sunday's matchup against the Bills. (23:55) The guys take some more calls on Chase Winovich not calling in and why comedies always die out towards the end. (38:02) Today's Takeaways

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

Embodied Inc. is the company behind Moxie, the social robot who's sole objective is to help kids develop socio-emotional skills and traits. We're joined by CTO, Stefan Scherer to discuss the design and engineeringconsiderations for creating a robot that uses natural language processing for its primary user interface, but thatalso has a face. This is the future of multi-modal conversation design.Learn more about MoxiePresented by DeepgramDeepgram is a Speech Company whose goal is to have every voice heard and understood. We have revolutionized speech-to-text (STT) with an End-to-End Deep Learning platform. This AI architectural advantage means you don't have to compromise on speed, accuracy, scalability, or cost to build the next big idea in voice. Our easy-to-use SDKs and APIs allow developers to quickly test and embed our STT solution into their voice products. For more information, visit:Deepgram websiteDeepgram on LinkedInDeepgram on Twitter See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Moxie can't decide whether to kill the vampires or stop an elder God from waking so Jeremy just decides for them, fun ensues and donuts are destroyed.

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

www.DogCastRadio.comExpert behaviourist Carolyn Menteith discusses research by Tails.com into the perceptions of changes in the dog world in the last two years. Jess Stone talks about how she and her GSD Moxie are biking around the world to raise money for Girl Up. A feel good podcast.

Happy holiday shopping season! Have no fear that with the many ways you can be bamboozled in shopping this year, ScamWow is here to guide you down the right path. Author and comedian Carrie McCrossen is here to discuss book scams! Covering everything from publishing to promotion, Caitlin and Carrie go over the hottest romance novel scams to ever hit your tablets and the drama behind #CockGate. Why are romance novel readers so angry about a court case involving cocky doctors and cocky firefighters? Find out this and why you should be reviewing books on Barns&Noble over Amazon.  Today's guest Carrie McCrossen and her husband Ian McWethy, co-wrote the young adult novel, Margot Mertz Takes It Down, which is quickly becoming a fan favorite!  Here is a little blurb from Penguin Random House:  Veronica Mars meets Moxie in this hilarious and biting YA contemporary novel following Margot Mertz, a girl who runs an internet cleanup business and embarks on a quest to take down a revenge-porn site targeting the girls in her school. For the right price, high school junior Margot Mertz will go to the ends of the internet to remove your nip-slip, dick pic, or embarrassing DM. At least that's what it says on her business card. Margot founded a now notorious company that helps students, teachers, even a local weatherman, discreetly clean up their digital shame. And since her parents lost her college fund, Margot is happy to work for anyone… if they can pay, she can clean.   But when a fellow student hires her to take down some leaked nudes, Margot discovers a secret revenge porn site featuring Roosevelt High girls. And hell hath no fury like Margot when she sees girls' butts shared without their consent. With the help of an unwitting ally, the popular and uncomfortably handsome Avery Green, Margot will gain access to the far flung cliques of Roosevelt High. Anything to find the mastermind (read: asshole) behind the site. But the more she digs, the deeper and darker the case becomes until Margot realizes that some jobs are so dirty, no one can come away clean. Even her. Gross.” Teen & Young Adult Fiction, Teen & Young Adult Social Issues, Teen & Young Adult Romance RESOURCES: https://www.instagram.com/misscarrielynne/?hl=en  https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/647585/margot-mertz-takes-it-down-by-carrie-mccrossen/ https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/16/17566276/cockygate-amazon-kindle-unlimited-algorithm-self-published-romance-novel-cabal https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/27/16208294/handbook-for-mortals-nyt-bestseller-list-accusations https://www.vulture.com/2017/09/handbook-for-mortals-lani-sarem-23-hour-new-york-times-bestseller.html https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamrowe1/2018/04/07/amazon-has-filed-suit-to-stop-the-six-figure-book-stuffing-kindle-scam/?sh=7f5fa7a97344 @caitybrodnick  @scamwowpodcast Scamwowpodcast.com DISCLAIMER: We are comedians and this is satire. C'mon Send us your scams! scamwowpodcast@gmail.com Or call: 347-509-9414 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

Photo:   MOXIE highlighted on the Mars 2020 Rover The Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment is a technology demonstration on the NASA Mars 2020 rover Perseverance investigating the production of oxygen on Mars. On April 20, 2021, MOXIE produced oxygen from carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere by using solid oxide electrolysis. @Batchelorshow #ClassicHotelMars:   MOXIE on Mars.  Michael Hecht @MIT @NASA David Livingston, SpaceShow.com #FriendsofHistoryDebatingSociety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Oxygen_ISRU_Experiment

In this episode, I talk about a recent setback with my health journey and how it impacted me. Am I a bad person?  Why is it so hard to move on? Is this what GRIT is really about? Take a listen and then ask yourself how you handle life's failures and setbacks. Do you let it derail you or do you put your adult panties on and move forward?

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and it's been downhill for New World peoples ever since.  Today we look at residential schools, the occupation of Alcatraz by Indians of All Tribes, the Oka crisis (aka the Mohawk resistance), and Sacheen Littlefeather's Oscar speech. YBOF Book; Audiobook (basically everywhere but Audible); Merch! Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs  .Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram. Support the show Music by Kevin MacLeod, Steve Oxen, David Fesliyan.   Links to all the research resources are on our website. Late summer, 1990.  The protest had been going on for two months; tensions were escalating.  Soldiers had been dispatched to enforce the government's will, but the Kahnawake Mohawk weren't going to give up another inch of their land.  14 year old Waneek and her 4 year old sister Kaniehtiio were there with their activist mother when the violence started.  Waneek tried to get little Tio to safety when she saw a soldier who had taken her school books from her weeks prior...and he stabbed her in the chest.  My name's...   One of my goals with this podcast is to tell the stories that don't get told, the stories of people of color and women.  It's not always easy.  Pick a topic to research and it's white men all the way down.  But, even when I haven't been struggling with my chronic idiopathic pulmonary conditions, as I've been for the past three acute months, I've dropped the ball.  Mea culpa.  So let me try to catch up a little bit here as we close out November and Native American Heritage month.  And since the lungs are still playing up a bit, I'm tagging past Moxie in to help, though I've done with I can to polish her audio, even though I lost more than 100 episodes worth of work files when I changed computers and deleted the hard drive on my right rather than the hard drive on my left.     Today's episode isn't going to be a knee-slapping snark fest, but the severity of the stories is the precise reason we need to tell them, especially the ones that happened relatively recently but are treated like a vague paragraph in an elementary school textbook.  Come with me now, to the 1960's and the edge of California, to a rocky island in San Francisco bay.  Yes, that one, Alcatraz, the Rock.     After the American Indian Center in San Francisco was destroyed in a fire in October 1969, an activist group called “Indians of All Tribes” turned its attention to Alcatraz island and the prison which had closed six years earlier.  I'm going to abbreviate Indians of All Tribes to IAT, rather than shorten it to Indians, just so you know.  A small party, led by Mohawk college student Richard Oakes, went out to the island on Nov 9, but were only there one night before the authorities removed them.  That didn't disappoint Oakes, who told the SF Chronicle, “If a one day occupation by white men on Indian land years ago established squatter's rights, then the one day occupation of Alcatraz should establish Indian rights to the island.”   11 days later, a much larger group of Indians of All Tribes members, a veritable occupation force of 89 men, women and children, sailed to the island in the dead of night and claimed Alcatraz for all North America natives.  Despite warnings from authorities, the IAT set up house in the old guards' quarters and began liberally, vibrantly redecorating, spray-painting the forboding gray walls with flowers and slogans like “Red Power” and “Custer Had It Coming.”  The water tower read “Peace and Freedom. Welcome. Home of the Free Indian Land.”  And of course I put pictures of that in the Vodacast app.  Have you checked it out?  I'm still getting the hang of it...  The IAT not only had a plan, they had a manifesto, addressed to “The Great White Father and All His People,” in which they declared their intentions to use the island for a school, cultural center and museum.  Alcatraz was theirs, they claimed, “by right of discovery,” though the manifesto did offer to buy the island for “$24 in glass beads and red cloth”—the price supposedly paid for the island of Manhattan.     Rather than risk a PR fall-out, the Nixon administration opted to leave the occupiers alone as long as things remained peaceful and just kinda wait the situation out.  The island didn't even have potable water; how long could the IAT stay there?  Jokes on you, politicians of 50 years ago, because many of the occupiers lived in conditions as bad on reservations.  They'd unknowingly been training for this their entire lives.  Native American college students and activists veritably swarmed the island and the population ballooned to more than 600 people, twice the official capacity of the prison.  They formed a governing body and set up school for the kids, a communal kitchen, clinic, and a security detail called “Bureau of Caucasian Affairs.”  Other activists helped move people and supplies to the island and supportive well-wishers send money, clothes and canned food.    Government officials would travel to the island repeatedly to try, and fail, to negotiate.  The IAT would settle for nothing less than the deed to Alcatraz Island, and the government maintained such a property transfer would be impossible.  The occupation was going better than anyone expected, at least for the first few months.  Then, many of the initial wave of residents had to go back to college and their places were taken by people more interested in no rent and free food than in any cause.  Drugs and alcohol, which were banned, were soon prevalent.  Oakes and his wife left Alcatraz after his stepdaughter died in a fall, and things began to unravel even more quickly.  By May, the sixth month of the occupation, the government dispensed with diplomatic efforts and cut all remaining power to Alcatraz.  Only a few weeks later, a fire tore across the island and destroyed several of Alcatraz's historic buildings.  Federal marshals removed the last occupiers in June of the second year, an impressive 19 months after they first arrived, six men, five women and four children.  This time, when laws were passed after an act of rebellion, they were *for the rebels, which many states enacting laws for tribal self rule.  When Alcatraz opened as a national park in 1973, not only had the graffiti from the occupation not been removed, it was preserved as part of the island's history.   People gather at Alcatraz every November for an “Un-Thanksgiving Day” celebrating Native culture and activism. RESIDENTIAL SCHOOL   The American government took tens of thousands of children from Native families and placed them in boarding schools with strict assimilation practices.  Their philosophy - kill the Indian to save the man.  That was the mindset under which the U.S. government Native children to attend boarding schools, beginning in the late 19th century, when the government was still fighting “Indian wars.”   There had been day and boarding schools on reservations prior to 1870, when U.S. cavalry captain, Richard Henry Pratt established the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.  This school was not on a reservation, so as to further remove indigenous influences.  The Carlisle school and other boarding schools were part of a long history of U.S. attempts to either kill, remove, or assimilate Native Americans.  “As white population grew in the United States and people settled further west towards the Mississippi in the late 1800s, there was increasing pressure on the recently removed groups to give up some of their new land,” according to the Minnesota Historical Society. Since there was no more Western territory to push them towards, the U.S. decided to remove Native Americans by assimilating them. In 1885, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Hiram Price explained the logic: “it is cheaper to give them education than to fight them.”   Off-reservation schools began their assault on Native cultural identity as soon as students arrived, by first doing away with all outward signs of tribal life that the children brought with them.  The long braids worn by boys were cut off.  Native clothes were replaced with uniforms.  The children were given new Anglicized names, including new surnames.  Traditional Native foods were abandoned, as were things like sharing from communal dishes,  forcing students to use the table manners of white society, complete with silverware, napkins and tablecloths.  The strictest prohibition arguably fell on their native languages.  Students were forbidden to speak their tribal language, even to each other.  Some school rewarded children who spoke only English, but most schools chose the stick over the carrot and relied on punishment to achieve this aim.  This is especially cruel when you consider that many of the words the children were being forced to learn and use had no equivalent in their mother tongue.   The Indian boarding schools taught history with a definite white bias.  Columbus Day was heralded as a banner day in history and a beneficial event for Native people, as it was only after discovery did Native Americans become part of history.  Thanksgiving was a holiday to celebrate “good” Indians having aided the brave Pilgrim Fathers.  On Memorial Day, some students at off-reservation schools were made to decorate the graves of soldiers sent to kill their fathers.   Half of each school day was spent on industrial training. Girls learned to cook, clean, sew, care for poultry and do laundry for the entire institution.  Boys learned industrial skills such as blacksmithing, shoemaking or performed manual labor such as farming.  Not receiving much funding from the government, the schools were required to be as self-sufficient as possible, so students did the majority of the work.  By 1900, school curriculums tilted even further toward industrial training while academics were neglected.   The Carlisle school developed a “placing out system,” which put Native students in the mainstream community for summer or a year at a time, with the official goal of exposing them to more job skills.  A number of these programs were out-right exploitive.  At the Phoenix Indian School, girls became the major source of domestic labor for white families in the area, while boys were placed in seasonal harvest or other jobs that no one else wanted.   Conversion to Christianity was also deemed essential to the cause.  Curriculums included heavy emphasis of religious instruction, such as the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes and Psalms.  Sunday school meant lectures on sin and guilt.  Christianity governed gender relations at the schools and most schools invested their energy in keeping the sexes apart, in some cases endangering the lives of the students by locking girls in their dormitories at night.     Discipline within the Indian boarding schools was severe and generally consisted of confinement, corporal punishment, or restriction of food.  In addition to coping with the severe discipline, students were ravaged by disease exacerbated by crowded conditions at the boarding schools. Tuberculosis, influenza, and trachoma (“sore eyes”) were the greatest threats.  In December of 1899, measles broke out at the Phoenix Indian School, reaching epidemic proportions by January.  In its wake, 325 cases of measles, 60 cases of pneumonia, and 9 deaths were recorded in a 10-day period.  During Carlisle's operation, from 1879 and 1918, nearly 200 children died and were buried near the school.   Naturally, Indian people resisted the schools in various ways. Sometimes entire villages refused to enroll their children in white schools.  Native parents also banded together to withdraw their children en masse, encouraging runaways, and undermining the schools' influence during summer break.  In some cases, police were sent onto the reservations to seize children from their parents.  The police would continue to take children until the school was filled, so sometimes orphans were offered up or families would negotiate a family quota. Navajo police officers would take children assumed to be less intelligent, those not well cared for, or those physically impaired.  This was their attempt to protect the long-term survival of their tribe by keeping healthy, intelligent children at home.     It was not until 1978, within the lifetime of many of my gentle listeners. that the passing of the Indian Child Welfare Act that Native American parents gained the legal right to deny their children's placement in off-reservation schools.   Though the schools left a devastating legacy, they failed to eradicate Native American cultures as they'd hoped. Later, the Navajo Code Talkers who helped the U.S. win World War II would reflect on the strange irony this forced assimilation had played in their lives.  “As adults, [the Code Talkers] found it puzzling that the same government that had tried to take away their languages in schools later gave them a critical role speaking their languages in military service,” recounts the National Museum of the American Indian.   In addition to documentaries, I'd like to recommend the movie The Education of Little Tree, starring James Cromwell, Tantu Cardinal and Graham Green, about a part-Charokee boy who goes to live with his grandparents in the Tennessee mountains, but is then sent to an Indian school.   There are a number of off-reservation boarding schools in operation today.  Life in the schools is still quite strict, but now includes teaching Native culture and language rather than erasing it.  Though they cannot be separated from their legacy of oppression and cultural violence, for many modern children, they're a step to a better life.  Poverty is endemic to many reservations, which also see much higher than average rates of alcoholism, drug use, and suicide.    For the students, these schools are a chance to escape.   OKA   Some words are visceral reminders of collective historic trauma. “Selma” or “Kent State” recall the civil rights movement and the use of military force against U.S. citizens. “Bloody Sunday” evokes “the Troubles” of Northern Ireland. Within Indigenous communities in North America, the word is “Oka.”  That word reminds us of the overwhelming Canadian response to a small demonstration in a dispute over Mohawk land in Quebec, Canada, in 1990. Over the course of three months, the Canadian government sent 2,000 police and 4,500 soldiers (an entire brigade), backed by armored vehicles, helicopters, jet fighters and even the Navy, to subdue several small Mohawk communities.  What was at stake?  What was worth all this to the government?  A golf course and some condos.   The Kanesetake had been fighting for their land for centuries, trying to do it in accordance with the white man's laws, as far back as appeals to the British government in 1761. In 1851, the governor general of Canada refused to recognize their right to their land.  8 years later, the land was given to the Sulpicians, a Catholic diocese.  In 1868, the government of the nascent Dominion of Canada denied that the Mohawk's original land grant had even reserved land for them, so it wasn't covered under the Indian Act. In the 1910's, the he Mohawks of Kanesatake's appealed all the way to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, Canada's highest appeals court at the time, who ruled that official title to the land was held by the Sulpicians.  By the end of the Second World War, the Sulpicians had sold all of their remaining land and had left the area. Surely the Mohawk could have their land back now!  Nope.  The Mohawk of Kanesatake were now confined to about 2.3mi sq/6 km sq, known as The Pines, less than 1/10th of the land they once held.  The Mohawk people of Kahnawake, Kanesetake and Akwesasne asserted Aboriginal title to their ancestral lands in 1975, but their claim was rejected on the most BS possible reason -- that they had not held the land continuously from time immemorial.  And on and on.   So you can understand why they'd be a little miffed when plans were announced to expand a golf course that had been built in 1961, expanding onto land that was used for sacred and ceremonial purposes and included a graveyard.  Again, the Mohawk tried to use the proper legal channels and again they got royally fucked over.  That March, their protests and petitions were ignored by the City Council in Oka.  They had to do something the city couldn't ignore.  They began a blockade of a small dirt road in The Pines and they maintained it for a few months.  The township of Oka tried to get a court injunction to order its removal.  On July 11, 1990, the Quebec provincial police sent in a large heavily armed force of tactical officers armed with m16s and tear gas and such-like to dismantle this blockade.  The Mohawks met this show of force with a show of their own.  Behind the peaceful protestors, warriors stood armed and ready.     Let me try to give this story some of the air time it deserves.  April 1, 1989, 300 Kanesatake Mohawks marched through Oka to protest against Mayor Jean Ouellette's plan to expand the town's golf course.  On March 10, 1990, --hey, that's my birthday!  the day, not the year-- After Oka's municipal council voted to proceed with the golf course expansion project, a small group of Mohawks barricades the access road.  With a building.  They drug a fishing shack into the Pines and topped it with a banner that read “Are you aware that this is Mohawk territory?” and the same again in French, because Quebec.  There's a picture on the Vodacast app, naturally, as well as a photo called Face to Face is a photograph of Canadian Pte. Patrick Cloutier and Anishinaabe warrior Brad Larocque staring each other down during the Oka Crisis. It was taken on September 1, 1990 by Shaney Komulainen, and has become one of Canada's most famous images.  It really should be more famous outside of Canada, like the lone protestor blocking tanks in Tiananmen Square or 1968 Summer Olympics, Tommie Smith and John Carlos staged a protest and displayed a symbol of Black power during their medal ceremony.  Check it out on Vodacast and let me know if you agree, soc. med.   during the summer of 1990 the Mohawk warrior society engaged in the 78 day armed standoff with the s.q Provincial Police and the Canadian Armed Forces in order to protect an area of their territory from development known as the pines near the town of oka.   This area was used as a tribal cemetery along with other tribal activities important to the Mohawks.  The oka crisis or also known as the Mohawk resistance was a defensive action that gained international attention,  taken by Mohawks of the Kanna Satake reserve along with other Mohawks from the nearby communities of Kanna waka as well as the Aquosasne on a reservation on the American side of the u.s. Canadian colonial border.  It was one of the most recent examples of Native armed resistance that was successful in stopping construction and development on to tribal lands.  So what was being developed that led to this armed confrontation leading to the death of an sq SWAT officer during that hot summer?  Golf.  The town of oka and investors wanted to expand a nine-hole golf course at the Open Golf Club into an 18-hole course as well as build around 60 condominiums into Mohawk territory.  Since 1989 the Mohawks had been protesting these plans for development by the town of oka and investors of the Golf Course expansion.  Seeing that the local courts were not of any help in recognizing Mohawk claims of the land under development, Mohawk protesters and community members held marches rallies and signed petitions.   Eventually the Mohawks set up a barricade blocking access to the development site on a gravel road.  Later on it was occupied mainly by Mohawk women and children OCA's mayor jean wallet one of the nine hole golf course expanded and filed the injunction against the Mohawks. He went into hiding during the oka crisis. [sfx clip] I will occupy this land for what it takes he has to prove it to me that it's his and I will prove it to him that's mine.  Oak is mayor had stated the land in question actually belonged to the town of oka and did not back down from the issue, but instead filed an injunction one of many that had been issued prior to remove the Mohawks from the area and take down the barricades by force if necessary.  if I have to die for Mohawk territory I will but I ain't going alone are you armed no the Creator will provide in anticipation of the raid by the sq mohawks of knesset Aki sent out a distress call to surrounding communiti.  In the Mohawk warrior society from the Aquos austenite reservation and the American side of the Mohawk reserve as well as kana waka have begun filtering into the barricade area with camping gear communications equipment food and weapons.  It's difficult to pin down just who makes up the Warriors society. the leaders an organization you each depending on the circumstances.  the member roles are  treated like a military secret, which is fitting since many or most of the Warriors were veterans, with a particular persistance of Vietnam Marines.   why the Warriors exist is easier to answer   mohawk have closed off the Mercier bridge sparking a traffic nightmare.  Provincial police arrived at dawn secure position in case of Mohawk until 8:00 to clear out.  The natives stood their ground the battle for the barricade started just before nine o'clock on one side heavily armed provincial police bob tear gas and stun grenade power [sfx reporter] a 20-minute gun battle ensued dozens of rounds of ammunition were shot off and then the inevitable someone was hit a police officer took a bullet in the face which proved fatal that seems to turn the tide the police has been advancing until then turned tail and fled leaving six of their vehicles behind.  The Mohawk celebrated when the police left celebrated what they called a victory over the qpm.  Most of the Mohawks each shot that the raid had taken place they said they were angry - angry that a dispute over a small piece of land had ended in violence.  [sfx this clip but earlier] I mean the non-indians that initiated this project of a golf course and then and then trying to take the land away because it's Mohawk clan it's our land there's a little bit left they're sucking the marrow out of our bones.  [sfx this clip, little earlier] we've kept talking in and saying you know what kind of people are you there's children here and you're shooting tear gas at us we're not we're on armed and you're aiming your weapons at us what kind of people are you.     The police retreated, abandoning squad cars and a front-end loader, basically a bulldozer.  They use the loader to crash the vehicles and they push them down the road, creating two new barricades, blocking highway 344.  The Mohawk braced for a counterattack and vowed to fire back with three bullets for every bullet fired at them.  due to the inability of the SQ to deal with the heavily armed Mohawks   The Canadian government called in the Royal Canadian Armed Forces to deal with the Mohawks. As the army pushed further into the Mohawk stronghold there was a lot of tension with Mohawk warriors staring down soldiers getting in their faces taunting them challenging them to put down their weapons and engage in hand-to-hand combat.   this is how the remainder of the siege would play out between the Warriors and Army as there were thankfully no more gun battles. [Music] as the seige wore on and came to an end most of the remaining Warriors as well as some women and children took refuge in a residential treatment center.   instead of an orderly surrender as the army anticipated warriors simply walked out of the area where they were assaulted by waiting soldiers and the police.  50 people taken away from the warrior camp including 23 warriors, but that means right over half the people taken into custody were non-combatants.   by 9:30 that night the army began to pull out, at the end of their two and a half months seige  a number of warriors were later charged by the sq.  5 warriors were convicted of crimes included assault and theft although only one served jail time.  during the standoff the Canadian federal government purchased the pines in order to prevent further development, officially canceling the expansion of the golf course and condominiums.  Although the government bought additional parcels of land for connoisseur taka there has been no organized transfer of the land to the Mohawk people. investigations were held after the crisis was over and revealed problems with the way in which the SQ handled the situation which involved command failures and racism among sq members.   Ronald (Lasagna) Cross and another high-profile warrior, Gordon (Noriega) Lazore of Akwesasne, are arraigned in Saint-Jérôme the day after the last Mohawks ended their standoff. In all, about 150 Mohawks and 15 non-Mohawks were charged with various crimes. Most were granted bail, and most were acquitted. Cross and Lazore were held for nearly six months before being released on $50,000 bail. They were later convicted of assault and other charges. After a community meeting, it was the women who decided that they would walk out peacefully, ending the siege. With military helicopters flying low, spotlights glaring down and soldiers pointing guns at them, Horn-Miller carried her young sister alongside other women and children as they walked to what they thought was the safety of the media barricades.  They didn't make it far before violence broke out. People started running, soldiers tackled warriors, fights broke out and everyone scrambled to get to safety. Up until that point Horn-Miller said she was able to keep her older sister calm by singing a traditional song to her.   LITTLEFEATHER on the night of 27 March 1973. This was when she took the stage at the 45th Academy Awards to speak on behalf of Marlon Brando, who had been awarded best actor for his performance in The Godfather. It is still a striking scene to watch.  Amid the gaudy 70s evening wear, 26-year-old Littlefeather's tasselled buckskin dress, moccasins, long, straight black hair and handsome face set in an expression of almost sorrowful composure, make a jarring contrast.  Such a contrast, that is beggered belief.   Liv Ullman read the name of the winner and Roger Moore made to hand Littlefeather Brando's Oscar, but she held out a politely forbidding hand.  She explained that Brando would not accept the award because of “the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry.”  Some people in the audience applauded; a lot of them booed her, but she kept her calm.  Here, you can listen for yourself.  [sfx clip]  At the time, Wounded Knee, in South Dakota, was the site of a month-long standoff between Native American activists and US authorities, sparked by the murder of a Lakota man.  We're used to this sort of thing now, but on the night, nobody knew what to make of a heartfelt plea in the middle of a night of movie industry mutual masturbation.  Was it art, a prank?  People said Littlefeather was a hired actress, that she was Mexican rather than Apache, or, because people suck on several levels at once, that she was a stripper.  How did this remarkable moment come to pass?   Littlefeather's life was no cake-walk.  Her father was Native American and her mother was white, but both struggled with mental health.  Littlefeather had to be removed from their care at age three, suffering from tuberculosis of the lungs that required her to be kept in an oxygen tent at the hospital.  She was raised by her maternal grandparents, but saw her parents regularly.  That may sound like a positive, but it exposed her to domestic violence.  She once tried to defend her mother from a beating by hitting her father with a broom.  He chased her out of the house and tried to run her down with his truck.  The young girl escaped into a grove of trees and spent the night up in the branches, crying herself to sleep. r   She did not fit in at the white, Catholic school her grandparents sent her to.  At age 12, she and her grandfather visited the historic Roman Catholic church Carmel Mission, where she was horrified to see the bones of a Native American person on display in the museum. “I said: ‘This is wrong. This is not an object; this is a human being.' So I went to the priest and I told him God would never approve of this, and he called me heretic. I had no idea what that was.”  An adolescence of depression and a struggle for identity followed.   Fortunately, in the late 1960s and early 70s Native Americans were beginning to reclaim their identities and reassert their rights.  After her father died, when she was 17, Littlefeather began visiting reservations and even visited Alcatraz during the Indians of all Tribes occupation.  She travelled around the country, learning traditions and dances, and meeting other what she called “urban Indian people” also reconnecting with your heritage.  “The old people who came from different reservations taught us young people how to be Indian again. It was wonderful.”  By her early 20s Littlefeather was head of the local affirmative action committee for Native Americans, studying representation in film, television and sports.  They successfully campaigned for Stanford University to remove their offensive “Indian” mascot, 50 years before pro sports teams like the Cleveland Indians got wise.  At the same time, white celebrities like Burt Lancaster began taking a public interest in Native American affairs.  Littlefeather lived near director Francis Ford Coppola, but she only knew him to say hello.  Nonetheless, after hearing Marlon Brando speaking about Native American rights, as she walked past Coppola's house to find him sitting on his porch, drinking ice tea.  She yelled up the walk, “Hey! You directed Marlon Brando in The Godfather” and she asked him for Brando's address so she could write him a letter.  It took some convincing, but Coppola gave up the address.   Then, nothing.  But months later, the phone rang at the radio station where Littlefeather worked.  He said: ‘I bet you don't know who this is.'  She said, “Sure I do.  It sure as hell took you long enough to call.”  They talked for about an hour, then called each other regularly.  Before long he was inviting her for the first of several visits and they became friends.  That was how Brando came to appoint her to carry his message to the Oscars, but it was hastily planned.  Half an hour before her speech, she had been at Brando's house on Mulholland Drive, waiting for him to finish typing an eight-page speech.  She arrived at the ceremony with Brando's assistant, just minutes before best actor was announced.  The producer of the awards show immediately informed her that she would be removed from the stage after 60 seconds.  “And then it all happened so fast when it was announced that he had won.  I had promised Marlon that I would not touch that statue if he won. And I had promised [the producer] that I would not go over 60 seconds. So there were two promises I had to keep.”  As a result, she had to improvise.   I don't have a lot of good things to say about Marlon Brando --he really could have had a place in the Mixed Bags of History chapter of the YBOF book; audiobook available most places now-- but he had Hollywood dead to rights on its Native Americans stereotypes and treatment, as savages and nameless canon fodder, often played by white people in red face.  This was a message not everyone was willing to hear.  John Wayne, who killed uncountable fictional Natives in his movies, was standing in the wings at that fateful moment, and had to be bodily restrained by security to stop him from charing Littlefeather.  For more on Wayne's views of people of color, google his 1971 Playboy interview.  Clint Eastwood, who presented the best picture Oscar, which also went to The Godfather, “I don't know if I should present this award on behalf of all the cowboys shot in all the John Ford westerns over the years.” In case you thought fussing out an empty chair was the worst we got from him.  When Littlefeather got backstage, people made stereotypical war cries and tomahawk motions at her.  After talking to the press --and I can't say I'm not surprised that event organizers didn't spirit her away immediately -- she went straight back to Brando's house where they sat together and watched the reactions to the event on television, the ‘compulsively refreshing your social media feed' of the 70's.   But Littlefeather is proud of the trail she blazed. She was the first woman of colour, and the first indigenous woman, to use the Academy Awards platform to make a political statement. “I didn't use my fist. I didn't use swear words. I didn't raise my voice. But I prayed that my ancestors would help me. I went up there like a warrior woman. I went up there with the grace and the beauty and the courage and the humility of my people. I spoke from my heart.”  Her speech drew international attention to Wounded Knee, where the US authorities had essentially imposed a media blackout.  Sachee Littlefeather went on to get a degree in holistic health and nutrition, became a health consultant to Native American communities across the country, worked with Mother Teresa caring for Aids patients in hospices, and led the San Francisco Kateri Circle, a Catholic group named after Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American saint, canonized in 2012.  Now she is one of the elders transmitting knowledge down generations, though sadly probably not for much longer.  She has breast cancer that metastasized to her lung.  “When I go to the spirit world, I'm going to take all these stories with me. But hopefully I can share some of these things while I'm here.  I'm going to the world of my ancestors. I'm saying goodbye to you … I've earned the right to be my true self.”   And that's...Rather than being taken to the hospital for the stab wound a centimeter from her heart, Waneek and the other protesters were taken into custody.  Thankfully, she would heal just fine and even went on to become an Olympic athlete and continued her activism.  And little Tio?  She grew up to be an award-winning actress, best known in our house for playing Tanis on Letterkenny.  Season 10 premier watch party at my house.  Remember….Thanks...       Sources: https://www.history.com/news/how-boarding-schools-tried-to-kill-the-indian-through-assimilation http://www.nativepartnership.org/site/PageServer?pagename=airc_hist_boardingschools https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17645287 https://hairstylecamp.com/native-american-beard/ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/03/i-promised-brando-i-would-not-touch-his-oscar-secret-life-sacheen-littlefeather https://www.cbc.ca/radio/unreserved/reflections-of-oka-stories-of-the-mohawk-standoff-25-years-later-1.3232368/sisters-recall-the-brutal-last-day-of-oka-crisis-1.3234550 https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/oka-crisis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOIdwcj2w8 https://www.history.com/news/native-american-activists-occupy-alcatraz-island-45-years-ago  

Lex buys a woman Moxie soda while getting Hydrox cookies - leading him to sell his Seattle Supersonics outfit - but ends up having to do all the photoshop himself.

When USAID worker Jess Stone fell in love with her fellow international aid worker now-husband Greg, she knew she would spend a lifetime on two wheels. Greg was an inveterate, unrepentantly passionate motorcycle enthusiast, and Jess was a city girl who didn't even drive stick. But they loved each other, so they bought motorcycles in Liberia so Greg could teach her to ride. He turned out to be a less-than-patient teacher – but a great road partner. Back in the states, they rode all over the continent and down to South America, stopping in Guatemala along the way and falling in love with the highlands, the people, and the culture. Years later, Greg got a job with a Guatemalan nonprofit that provides microfinances for indigenous women. Once settled in Panajachel on a lake surrounded by three volcanoes, Jess finally realized her lifelong dream and got a dog. Visiting a litter of German Shepherd pups, Jess took Greg's sage advice to “pick the dog who picks you,” and Moxie joined their family. Moxie's high energy told Jess she would be up for their epic motorcycle adventures … but her weight eliminated any of the current options for riding with them. To keep her bike and their rides lightweight and supple, Jess and Greg created a new type of motorcycle dog carrier: a frame that is custom-made to fit the bike and dog in question, is lightweight, and totally secure. It's called the K9 Moto Cockpit. Creating the cockpit led to creating a company to make them for other moto folks, and pretty soon, GoRuffly.com was born. The company makes everything locally, including the cockpit, but also high quality, finely crafted adventuring dog gear. Jess and Greg built their company to make sure employees are well paid and safe. Most work from home, so they can also care for their families. Meanwhile Jess, Greg, and Moxie continue to come up with new ideas and new ways to make a difference. What's next? Raising funds for Girl Up, a nonprofit that helps girls all around the world become leaders in their local community. The goal: raise $100,000 with a motorcycle trip around the world that will be chronicled on their YouTube channel. Along the way they will visit Girl Up clubs and 10% of all gear purchases from GoRuffly will go to their fundraiser. About Jess Stone Jess Stone has spent years helping people in the developing world, whether by working overseas with USAID, starting an ethically made outdoor dog gear company, or riding around the world to raise funds and awareness for Girl Up, a nonprofit that develops leadership skills in girls in all 50 states and 130 countries. Along with her husband and fellow aid worker, Greg, Stone is creator of the K9 Moto Cockpit, a unique way to carry your dog on your motorcycle. https://goruffly.com/world-adventure https://www.goruffly.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/Ruffly https://www.instagram.com/goruffly/ https://www.facebook.com/goruffly https://girlup.org/ About The Long Leash  Thank you for joining us. If you have enjoyed listening, please SUBSCRIBE so you'll never miss out!   Check out Dog Podcast Network for other dog-adjacent shows.  Follow us in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. 

A microphone is a good enough platform for getting back at people, but an entire recording studio is even better.  Popular music is littered with songs getting back at an ex lover, from Waylon Jennings to Taylor Swift, but a fair number of the tracks you know by heart are actually clap-backs to the people in the mixing booth or the record label offices. YBOF Book; Audiobook (basically everywhere but Audible); Merch! Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs  .Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram. Support the show Music by Kevin MacLeod, Steve Oxen, David Fesliyan.   Links to all the research resources are on our website.   I love this podcast and am so happy Moxie is so prolific! A very compelling mix of the obscure to the commonplace, and a riveting listen no matter what.

The House of Representatives has passed the largest expansion of the social safety net in decades, a $1.75 trillion bill that funds universal pre-K, Medicare expansion, renewable energy credits, affordable housing, a year of expanded Child Tax Credits and major Obamacare subsidies. Now President Biden's Build Back Better Act heads to the Senate. CNBC's Ylan Mui reports on the Congressional Budget Office estimate that the legislation would add $367 billion to budget deficits over a decade. Veteran CEO Richard Parsons, senior advisor at Providence Equity Partners and former CEO of Time Warner, tells Joe Kernen, Becky Quick and Andrew Ross Sorkin that the President hasn't been showing enough “leadership moxie.” Scott Cohn reports on the end of the 11-week trial against Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. Plus, Sweetgreen has a sweet debut and the kids - they love TikTok.In this episode:Ylan Mui, @ylanmuiScott Cohn, @ScottCohnTVAndrew Ross Sorkin, @andrewrsorkinJoe Kernen, @JoeSquawkBecky Quick, @BeckyQuickKatie Kramer, @Kramer_Katie

When we get older, it will be really hard to learn things. When we age, it's harder and harder (damn near impossible) to lose weight. The older we get, the lonelier we get. I'm too old to start new adventures, I should have done that when I was young.These are just a few of the myths about aging that I grew up with. I'll bet you have some too.Do you know what I think of these? Bullsh*t. You don't get weaker with age...you develop more GRIT.  That's why I did S2E12 of the Café Grit Podcast about The GRIT of Aging. It's time to crush those myths! So many of you who have made AMAZING things happen in your life after the age of 35...45...55...70! Let's celebrate this!

After being turned down at least 100 times Alicia Tulsee has developed a business that is rapidly growing into one of the leading apparels brands for the medical community today. Alicia knew she had something worth fighting for so mustered all the moxie she had herself to develop the first direct to consumer apparel brand for nurses, Moxie Scrubs. Listen in on how she never stopped fighting for those that fight for us when we are at our worst. 

Quick, switch over to Vodacast to see the pictures I talk about in the episode! From using a train in a car race to marathon doping with deadly poison, there's far more excitement in racing than simply declaring a winner. YBOF Book; Audiobook (basically everywhere but Audible); Merch! Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs  .Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram. Support the show Music by Kevin MacLeod, Steve Oxen, David Fesliyan.   Links to all the research resources are on our website.     Born in New York in 1901, Frank Hayes dreamed of being a race horse jockey.  Though he was short in stature, he was too heavy for the job, so he found himself working as a groom and stablehand instead.  Sadly, Hayes wouldn't live to see himself ride a horse to victory, but he *would win a race.  My name's...   LeMans, Grand Prix, Bathurst, the Indy 500, car races are big business around the world, but there was a time when people believed these new horseless carriages were a novelty item, too flimsy for such an activity.  In 1908, a race was organized to prove otherwise, in which six teams of drivers tried to be the first to get from New York to Paris.  Considering the state of the automobile technology and the lack of road infrastructure at the time, that was no mean feat.  Only three of the six competitors would even complete the course.  The race was a 169-day ordeal, still the longest motorsport event ever held. The starting line was set up in Times Square, on a gray morning, the 12th of February.  The six driving teams competed under four flags, Germany, France, Italy and the United States. The French set off with the highest number of cars, as three distinct automobile manufacturers participated.  The event brought almost 250,000 people on the streets of New York City to witness the start of the contest, considerably more crowd than the very first ball drop in New York at the New Year's Eve celebration, welcoming 1908.  The starter's gun fired at 11:15 AM, 15 minutes late.  Mayor George McClellan was supposed to fire the pistol, but he wasn't there on time and apparently, an impatient bystander did the job and the racers took off.  This was the first of many unexpected challenges.The planned route would take the racers across the United States, north through Canada into Alaska, over the frozen Bering Strait to Siberia, across Russia to Europe and finally to Paris.  The decision to have the race rolling in the midst of winter-time added to the challenges of the racers.  Drivers needed to stop often to repair their cars. They even used locomotive lines when it was impossible to find the road.  Not the rails, though.  The American car straddled the rails, bumping along on the ties for hundreds of miles.  The Italian team complained that this was cheating.  The car that would win had a 4 cylinder, 60 hp engine and a top speed of 60 mph.  Cars of the day offered little in rider comfort or amenities, like a roof.  They drove around the world, fifteen hours a day, in winter, in open-top cars without windshields.  Antifreeze hadn't been invented yet, so the radiators had to be drained each night.    While most teams were made of a driver and a mechanic, some teams included journalists, and even a poet, instead.  The first car, a French Sizaire-Naudin, dropped out after only 96 miles, with a broken differential they could not repair.  Another French team lost a man after they became stuck in the snow and the teammates began to fight.  They were about to duel with pistols, when the mechanic fired his assistant, an Artic travel expert he would be sorely lacking later on.  Not even in Iowa yet, the Italian car had mechanical troubles and the driver tried to cheat by loading the car onto a freight train.  He abandoned the plan when a photographer caught him in the act.  The car's owner then sent him a telegram, received a cable from the owners of his car: “Quit race, sell car and come home.”  The American team, driving a Thomas Flyer, took the lead when crossing the United States. The team managed to arrive in San Francisco in 41 days, 8 hours, and 15 minutes, 9,000 miles ahead of the car in second place.  This was actually the very first crossing of the US by an automobile in winter.  The route then took the drivers to Valdez, Alaska, by ship.  The American driver, George Schuster wasted no time investigating the Valdez-Fairbanks Trail in a single-horse sleigh, and concluded that the only way to cross Alaska in a car would be to dismantle it and ship the parts by dogsled.  The Parisian race committee abandoned the idea of Alaska and the Bering Strait and ordered the Americans to return to Seattle. The new plan was for the cars to sail to Vladivostok and drive to Paris from there.  While the Americans were still at sailing back to Seattle, their competitors arrived there and set sail for Russia. Then the Americans lost time getting their Russian visas in order.  The Flyer had been the first to arrive on the Pacific coast but was now the last to leave, a weeks behind the competition.  The race committee also decided that  the American team was given an allowance of 15 days, meaning the remaining teams could beat them to Paris by two weeks and still lose, *and penalized the team that tried to use a train.    The driving resumed from Vladivostok, but by this point, there were only three competitors left: The German Protos, the Italian Züst, and the Flyer from America.  Not an American Flyer; a little red wagon wouldn't fair well in these conditions.  What do all these cars look like anyway?  I'm glad you asked!  I put pictures in the Vodacast app, partner for this episode.  Vodacast is a brand new podcast player that makes it easy to see all the bonus content the creator wants to show you all in one place.  It even syncs to the audio, so you can see what I'm talking about right then and there!  It's still early-days, but it's going to be a real boon for both listeners and creators.   So the drivers, who you can see on Vodacast, agreed to start again evenly matched.  They had extreme difficulty finding petrol in Siberia, leading the French driver to try to bribe the other teams to let him ride on one of their cars, so he could still at least be *on a winning car.  This prompted his sponsor to pull him from the race.  The two two teams faced another set of major challenges as passing through the tundra realms of Siberia and Manchuria.  The spring thaw turned the Asian plains into a seemingly endless swamp.  Progress measured in *feet per hour, rather than miles.  The driver had to push their cars as much as drive them and even resorted to hitch up teams of horses to pull them along.  They also got lost, a lot.  The racers couldn't ask locals for directions as no one spoke Russian and a wrong turn could cost you 15 hours.  Once they neared Europe, roads improved and the race sped up. The Germans arrived in Paris on July 26, while the Americans were still in Berlin, but the 15 day allowance for the Americans and the 15 day penalty for the Germans meant that the Flyer had a month to drive to the next country.  The American team arrived in Paris on July 30th, 1908, to win the race, having covered approx 16,700 km/10377.  Even though the victor had been declared, the Italians trove on and made it to Paris in September 1908. The victory meant huge recognition for Shuster, who in 2010 was also inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame.  If you're ever in Reno, NV, you can see the Flyer in the National Automobile Museum.   ADS - Podcorn and Healthy Postnatal   America's first Olympics, held in 1904 in St. Louis as part of that year's World's Fair, stand unchallenged for the title of most bizarre.  The Olympics' signal event, the marathon, was conceived to honor the classical heritage of Greece and underscore the connection between the ancient and modern.  The outcome was so scandalous that the event was nearly abolished for good.  A few of the runners were recognized marathoners, rest could be described as “assorted.”  There was a man who did all his training at night because he had a day job as a bricklayer, ten Greeks who had never run a marathon, two men of the Tsuana tribe of South Africa who were in St. Louis as part of the South African World's Fair exhibit and who arrived at the starting line barefoot, and a Cuban mailman named Félix Carbajal, attired in a white, long-sleeved shirt, long, dark pants, a beret and a pair of street shoes, who raised money to come to the States by demonstrating his running prowess by running the length of the island.  Upon his arrival in New Orleans, he lost all his money on a dice game and had to walk and hitchhike to St. Louis.   The race was run on August 30, starting at 3:03 p.m.  If you know anything about daytime temperatures, that's what we call hot time.  Heat and humidity soared into the 90s.  The 24.85-mile course involved roads inches deep in dust, seven hills, varying from 100-to-300 feet high, some with brutally long ascents, cracked stone strewn across the roadway, the roadway that was still open to traffic, trains, trolley cars and people walking their dogs.  There were only *two places where athletes could secure fresh water, from a water tower at six miles and a roadside well at 12 miles.  Cars carrying coaches and physicians drove alongside the runners, kicking the dust up and launching coughing spells.   William Garcia of California nearly became the first fatality of an Olympic marathon we he collapsed on the side of the road and was hospitalized with hemorrhaging; the dust had coated his esophagus and ripped his stomach lining.  Len Tau, one of the South African participants, was chased a mile off course by wild dogs.  Félix Carvajal trotted along in his cumbersome shoes and billowing shirt, making good time even though he paused to chat with spectators in broken English.  A bit further along the course, he stopped at an orchard and snacked on some apples, which turned out to be rotten. Suffering from stomach cramps, he lay down and took a nap.  At the nine-mile mark cramps plagued Fred Lorz, who decided to hitch a ride in one of the accompanying automobiles, waving at spectators and fellow runners as he passed.   Thomas Hicks, the bricklayer, one of the early American favorites, begged his two-man support crew for a drink at the 10-mile mark. They refused, instead sponging out his mouth with warm distilled water.  (Purposeful dehydration was considered a positive 115 years ago.)  Seven miles from the finish, his handlers fed him a concoction of strychnine and egg whites—the first recorded instance of drug use in the modern Olympics.  Strychnine, in small doses, was commonly used a stimulant.  Hicks' team also carried a flask of French brandy but decided to withhold it until they could gauge his condition.   Meanwhile, Lorz, recovered from his cramps, emerged from his 11-mile ride in the automobile. One of Hicks' handlers saw him and ordered him off the course, but Lorz kept running and finished with a time of just under three hours. The crowd roared and began chanting, “An American won!”  Alice Roosevelt, the 20-year-old daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, placed a wreath upon Lorz's head and was just about to lower the gold medal around his neck when, one witness reported, “someone called an indignant halt to the proceedings with the charge that Lorz was an impostor.” The cheers turned to boos. Lorz smiled and claimed that he had never intended to accept the honor; he finished only for the sake of a “joke.”  You know, it was just a prank, bro.   Hicks, pumping with strychnine, had grown ashen and limp.  When he heard that Lorz had been disqualified he perked up and forced his legs to keep going.  His trainers gave him another dose of strychnine and egg whites, this time with some brandy to wash it down. They fetched warm water and soaked his body and head.  He began hallucinating, believing that the finish line was still 20 miles away.  In the last mile he begged for something to eat, then he begged to lie down. He was given more brandy and two more egg whites. Swinging into the stadium, he tried to run but was reduced to a graceless shuffle. His trainers carried him over the line, holding him aloft while his feet moved back and forth, and he was declared the winner.   It took four doctors and one hour for Hicks to feel well enough just to leave the grounds. He had lost eight pounds during the course of the race, and declared, “Never in my life have I run such a touch course. The terrific hills simply tear a man to pieces.” Hicks and Lorz would meet again at the Boston Marathon the following year, which Lorz won fair and square.  Bonus fact: The 1904 Olympics also saw gymnast George Eyser earned six medals, including three gold, despite his wooden leg.   MIDROLL  Patreon, names and increase Review and CTA While it's usually easy for humans on a race course to navigate, how then do homing pigeons figure out where they are?  A researcher at the US Geological Survey, Jonathan Hagstrum, has come up with a novel suggestion. It involves, of all things, pigeon races.  In Europe, and to a lesser extent in the US, pigeon racing has become a passionately-followed sport for which birds are carefully bred and trained.  Birds from many lofts are taken to a common distant location, released together, and their return speeds timed.  90% of the birds usually return within a few days, and eventually almost all do.   On Sunday, June 29, 1997, a great race was held to celebrate the centenary of the Royal Pigeon Racing Association.  More than 60,000 homing pigeons were released at 6:30 AM from a field in Nantes in southern France, flying to lofts all over southern England, 400-500mi/640-800km away.  By 11:00 AM, the majority of the racing birds had made it out of France and were over the English Channel.  The fastest birds should have arrived at their lofts by early afternoon. But they didn't.   A few thousand of the birds straggled in over the next few days.  Most were never seen again. The loss of so many birds was a disaster of previously unheard proportions in the pigeon racing world.  One bird could get lost, maybe a hundred, but tens of thousands?   A theory would later emerge.  At the very same time the racing pigeons were crossing the Channel, 11:00 AM, the Concorde supersonic airliner was flying along the Channel on its morning flight from Paris to New York.  In flight, the Concorde generated a shock wave that pounded down toward the earth, a carpet of sound almost a hundred miles wide. The racing pigeons flying below the Concorde could not have escaped the intense wave of sound. The birds that did eventually arrive at their lofts were actually lucky to be more tortoise than hare.  They were still south of the Channel when the SST passed over, ahead of them.  Perhaps racing pigeons locate where they are using atmospheric infrasounds that the Concorde obliterated.  Low frequency sounds can travel thousands of miles from their sources. That's why you can hear distant thunder.  Pigeons can hear these infrasounds very well as they use them for navigation.   What sort of infrasounds do pigeons use for guidance?  All over the world, there is one infrasound, the very low frequency acoustic shock waves generated by ocean waves banging against one another!  Like an acoustic beacon, a constant stream of these tiny seismic waves would always say where the ocean is.  This same infrasound mapping sense may play an important part in the long distance navigation of other creatures. It could explain how Monarch butterflies in the US are able to find one small locality in Mexico, or how Brazilian sea turtles are able to find their way to their homes on tiny Ascension Island a thousand miles out in the Atlantic.  Even more valuable to a racing pigeon looking for home, infrasounds reflect from cliffs, mountains, and other steep-sided features of the earth's surface. Ocean wave infrasounds reflecting off of local terrain could provide a pigeon with a detailed sound picture of its surroundings, near and far.  The enormous wave of infrasound generated by the Concorde's sonic boom would have blotted out all of the normal oceanic infrasound information. Any bird flying in its path would lose its orientation.  The incident is referred to as the Great Pigeon Race Disaster.  The Concorde stopped flying six years later, for reason unrelated to the pigeons. Not every race goes to the swiftest, one was meant to go to the friskiest.  Charles Vance Millar practiced law in Ontario for 45 years until his death in 1926.  He was also a shrewd investor, which meant there was a nice fat bank account before his fatal heart attack.  A lifelong bachelor with no close relatives, Millar wrote up a will that was as mischievous as he had been. For example, Millar would amuse himself by dropping dollar bills on the sidewalk and then watching the expressions of the people who bent to furtively pocket the cash.  In death, Millar outdid himself in roguishness. He wrote “This Will is necessarily uncommon and capricious because I have no dependents or near relations and no duty rests upon me to leave any property at my death and what I do leave is proof of my folly in gathering and retaining more than I required in my lifetime.”  He left the shared tenancy of a Jamaican vacation spot to three men who could not stand the sight of each other.  He tested the resolve of teetotallers by leaving them shares in companies involved in the alcohol business.  The Ontario Jockey Club is an august body whose membership is drawn from society's upper crust, so Millar left shares in the club to an unsavoury character who existing members would find repellent and to two opponents of racetrack gambling.   He parcelled out much of his estate to test his theory that every person had a price; the only mystery being at what level would greed trump principle.  But, it was Clause 9 of the will that caused the most fuss; it was the legacy that triggered a race to conceive.  Simply put, he directed the residue of his estate be given to the Toronto mother who gave birth to the most children in the ten years immediately following his death.  The money involved wasn't chump change. By the time the race came to an end, the total prize was worth $750,000; that would be a bit more than $12 million today.  What came to be called the Stork Derby was on, especially at the three year mark, when the Stock Market Crash of 1929 ushered in the Great Depression.  You might have heard of it. With so many people experiencing unemployment and poverty, the pot of gold offered by Charles Millar was enticing, even if the attempt meant creating a *lot for mouths to feed.   Newspapers followed the fortunes and fecundity of the contestants closely.  It was a welcome distraction from grim reality.  Five women leading the pack, mostly lower income and already with a slew of children, became household names.  Those five of most fruitful loins had delivered 56 kids between them, 32 of which had born by 1933.  From Time Magazine from Christmas Eve 1934: “Last week in Toronto each of the two leading contenders for the prize money bore a child. Mrs. Frances Lillian Kenny, 31, gave birth to a girl, her eleventh child since the race began. Mrs. Grace Bagnato, 41, gave birth to a boy, her ninth ...”  While citizens followed the race keenly, the Ontario provincial government was not amused. It called the maternal marathon “the most revolting and disgusting exhibition ever put on in a civilized country.”   VODACAST   Midnight on Halloween 1936 was the deadline for baby-birthing.  On October 19, The Daily Journal-World of Lawrence, Kansas carried a story that started, “A hesitant stork circled uncertainly today over 1097 West Dundas Street with what looked like a $750,000 baby in his well-worn bill.”  However, the productive resident of that address Grace Bagnato was soon disqualified from the derby; her husband turned out to be an illegal Italian immigrant and that didn't sit well with the authorities. Everything old is new again, eh?  Lillian Kenny, who had ten births to her credit, was also tossed out of the event because she had the misfortune to deliver two stillbirths and that was declared not to count.  Pauline Clarke also gave birth ten times during the competition period but several of her babies were conceived out of wedlock; an activity deeply frowned upon at the time, so they were out.   As the final whistle blew, four women were tied at nine babies each.  Annie Smith, Alice Timleck, Kathleen Nagle, and Isobel MacLean each received $125,000,or about $2mil today.  Lillian Kenny and Pauline Clarke were handed consolation prizes of $12,500 apiece, or $20K.  Mrs. Bagnato, got nothing.   When Millar's law partner found the will he thought it was a joke rather than a legal document. Others thought its purpose was to tie the legal system into knots.  According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, “The question of whether Millar intended his will to take effect or merely to amuse his lawyer friends remains in doubt.”  The Ontario government, which had earlier huffed and puffed about the unseemly nature of the Stork Derby, tried several times to have Charles Millar's will declared null and void. The premier, Mitchell Hepburn, had said it was “the duty of the government to stop this fiasco.”   A few of Millar's *distant relatives popped up to challenge the will; hoping to score the jackpot. But, the will, and its Stork Derby clause, held up and, eventually, the Supreme Court of Canada said it was valid.   It's pleasing to report that the winners handled their legacies sensibly and were able to buy homes and provide an education for their children. The winners, that is.  Nobody knows how many women started the Stork Derby and then dropped out. However, by the end, at least two dozen mothers had produced at least eight babies. This placed an enormous burden on the families who were suffering through the Great Depression with 25% of Toronto families receiving government support in 1935.   The prize money was a direct result of Millar's capricious nature.  He once missed the ferry between Windsor, Canada and Detroit.  This angered him so he bought the property that would eventually be used to construct the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, which put the ferries out of business.  It was money from this investment that largely funded the Stork Derby.   And that's….When Frank Hayes was given the chance to fill in for another jockey, he had to lose a lot of weight fast, like 10 lbs/4kilos in 24 hours, which he probably did by not eating or drinking and possibly sweating or purging.  Doctors then and now think that's why he died suddenly of a heart attack in the second half of the race.  He didn't fall out of the saddle though, even after his horse crossed the finish line first.  He was declared the victor, and remains the only jockey to have ever won while dead.  The horse, Sweet Kiss, was immediately retired, because no one wanted to ride a horse nicknamed Sweet Kiss of Death.  Remember...Thanks    Some races go off the rails, but there are plenty that were made to be weird.  Every year, young women line the streets of Moscow to run for a higher purpose – shopping.  Glamour magazine hosts an annual stiletto race. Young women strap on their tallest heels (3.5”/9cm minimum), and run a 164ft/50 meter course in hopes of winning a $3,000 gift card. Most of the women taped their shoes to their feet, but that did not stop all the trips, slips, and falls.  Thanks for spending part of your day with me.   Sources: https://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/01/01/the-historic-new-york-to-paris-race-in-1908/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-1904-olympic-marathon-may-have-been-the-strangest-ever-14910747/ http://biologywriter.com/on-science/articles/pigeons/ https://owlcation.com/humanities/The-Toronto-Stork-Derby https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/paris-or-bust-the-great-new-york-to-paris-auto-race-of-1908-116784616/  

This YA detective takes on revenge porn in this debut that's being billed as Veronica Mars meets Moxie! Carrie McCrossen and Ian McWethy introduce readers to Margot Mertz in their debut YA book, Margot Mertz Takes It Down. Margot is known for hunting down and erasing embarrassing digital content that others don't want online. When Margot discovers a secret revenge porn site, she makes it her mission to "take it down." The authors join us in this episode to dish out how they brought Margot to life. Purchase Margot Mertz Takes It Down! This episode is sponsored by Libro.fm. Buy audiobooks while supporting your local bookstore. Libro.fm has a special offer for Bookstacked readers. Get TWO audiobooks for the price of one with your first month of membership when using the code Bookstacked. Click here to get started. Get in touch … Let your voice be heard! There are several ways you can get in touch with us and interact with the show. Your messages might be included in the next episode! Record and send us a voice message! Follow and talk to us through Twitter! Send us an old-fashioned email! Follow the guest and host … Margot Mertz: @MargotMertz (Twitter), @margotmertztakesitdown (Instagram) Carrie McCrossen: @CarrieMcCrossen (Twitter), @misscarrielynne (Instagram) Ian McWethy: @IanMcWethy (Twitter) Chelsea Regan: @pluckybookmark (Instagram), @chelsearegan17 (Twitter)

Quick, switch over to Vodacast to see the pictures I talk about in the episode! We all lose things -- keys, wallets, patience -- but how do you lose an entire city?  Hear the stories of three American towns built in a hurry but kept off the map, secure Soviet enclaves known by their post codes, ancient cities found by modern technology, and the ingenious engineering of underground dwellings. YBOF Book; Audiobook (basically everywhere but Audible); Merch Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram. Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs. Support the show Music by Kevin MacLeod, .   Links to all the research resources are on our website.    In the opal-mining region of South Australia, lies the town of Coober Peedy.  You're welcome to visit, but don't expect to see much.  There aren't many buildings, though the landscape is dotted with ventilation shafts.  There's almost no movement at all.  So if the town is here, where are its 3500 residents?  Look down.  My name's Moxie and this is your brain on facts.   In 1943, three ordinary-looking US cities were constructed at record speed, but left off all maps.  Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Richland, Washington; and Los Alamos, New Mexico held laboratories and sprawling industrial plants, as well as residential neighborhoods, schools, churches, and stores.  The three cities had a combined population of more than 125,000 and one extraordinary purpose: to create nuclear weapons as part of the Manhattan project, the U.S. military's initiative to develop nuclear weapons.     Their design was driven by unique considerations, such as including buffer zones for radiation leaks or explosions. In each case, there were natural features, topographical features, that were considered to be favorable. In all three cases, they were somewhat remote—in the case of Richland and Los Alamos, very remote—which offered a more secure environment, of course. But also, in the event of a disaster, an explosion or a radiation leak, that would also minimize the potential exposure of people outside the project to any sort of radiation danger.  The sites were  selected far from one another in case German or Japanese bombers somehow managed to penetrate that far into the United States, it would be harder for them in a single bombing run to take out more than one facility.  K-25 plant at Oak Ridge, which was where they enriched uranium using the gaseous diffusion method, was the largest building in the world under a single roof, spanning more than 40 acres.    Before you being any building project, you have to clear the site of things like trees, high spots, people. In 1942, the government approached the families that lived near the Clinch river in Tennessee, some of whom had farmed there for generations, and kicked them out, telling them the land was needed for a “demolition range,” so as to scare off hold-outs with the threat of adjacent explosions.  The town scaled up fast.   Oak Ridge was initially conceived as a town for 13,000 people but grew to 75,000 by the end of the war, the biggest of the secret cities. The laboratories took up most of the space, but rather than constructing basic dormitories for employees, the architects and designers settled on a suburban vision.  To pull this off quickly and secretly, the architects relied on prefabricated housing, in some cases, a house might come in two halves on the back of a truck to be assembled on-site. These were called “alphabet houses;” A houses were the most modest (read: tiny), while D houses included dining rooms.  Housing was assigned based on seniority, though allowances were sometimes made for large families.     And race.  This was the early 40's, after all.  The secret suburbs for factories manufacturing megadeaths were segregated by design.  Their houses were called “hutments,” little more than plywood frames without indoor plumbing, insulation or glass in the windows.  Though two of the first public schools in the south to be desegregated were in Oak Ridge. They even threatened to secede from Tennessee in order to desegregate, so at least there's that.  There were white families in the hutments as well and all of the residents of that lower-class neighborhood were under more surveillance and stricter rules than the families in better housing.  Married couples may be forbidden to live together.  By the end of the war, most of the white families had been moved out of the hutments and but many of the African American families continued to live in the basic dwellings until the early 1950s.    These towns didn't appear on any official maps, and visitors were screened by guards posted at the entrances.  Anyone over 12 had to have official ID.  Firearms, cameras, and even binoculars were prohibited.  Billboards were installed all over town to remind workers to keep their mouths shut about their work, even though most workers knew very little about the project's true scope.  For example, you job may be to watch a gauge for eight hours and flip a switch if it goes to high.  You don't know what you're measuring or what the machine is doing.  All you've been told is to flip the switch when the needle hits a certain number.  In Los Alamos and Richland, the entire neighborhood may have the same mailing address.  At Oak Ridge, street addresses were designed to be confusing to outsiders. Bus routes might be called X-10 or K-25 while dorms had simple names such as M1.  There were no signs on buildings. The town was full of such ciphers, and even employees didn't know how to decode them all.  The use of words such as “atomic” or “uranium” was taboo lest it tip off the enemy.   When the US dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945, the city's secret was out. Many residents celebrated at this turning point in the war, but not all.  Mary Lowe Michel, a typist in Oak Ridge, is quoted in an exhibit on display now at the National Building Museum in DC: “The night that the news broke that the bombs had been dropped, there was joyous occasions in the streets, hugging and kissing and dancing and live music and singing that went on for hours and hours. But it bothered me to know that I, in my very small way, had participated in such a thing, and I sat in my dorm room and cried.”  All three cities remained part of the military industrial complex, continuing to work on nuclear weapons during the cold war as well as broader scientific research.  Today Oak Ridge is heavily involved in renewable energy, minus the barbed wire fence.   For most of the twentieth century, if the US was doing it, so was the USSR.  We had closed cities to build nuclear weapons, and so did the Soviet Union.  We had three, they had….lots. Like, a lot a lot.  Like, multiple screens on the Wikipedia list.  Where the US began to open its closed cities after the war, the USSR was building more and more, and not just for nuclear weapons.  These closed cities were nicknamed “post boxes,” because they would be named for the nearest non-secret city and the end of their post code; or simply “boxes” for their closed nature. During the two decades following World War II, dozens of closed cities were built around the country. Some were naukogradi (“science cities”) or akademgorodoki (“academic cities”), while others developed military technology and later spacecraft.  The official name was closed administrative-territorial formations or zakrytye administrativno-territorial'nye obrazovaniya, or ZATOs.    The cities were largely built by slave labor from the Gulag prison camps, which at the time accounted for 23% of the non-agricultural labor force in the Soviet Union.  They were guarded like gulags, too - surrounded by barbed wire and guards, with no one was allowed to enter or leave without official authorization.  Many residents did not leave the city once between their arrival and their death.  That being said, the captive residents enjoyed access to housing, food, and health care better than Soviet citizens elsewhere.  While most towns in the Soviet Union were run by local communist party committees, military officials oversaw the secret cities that would eventually be home to over 100,000 people.  Even during construction, officials were ordered to use trusted prisoners only, meaning no Germans, POWs, hard criminals, political prisoners.  Nevertheless, even living alongside Gulag prisoners, residents believed they were making a valuable contribution to their country. Nikolai Rabotnov, a resident of Chelyabinsk-65, remembered, “I was sure that within our barbed labyrinth, I inhaled the air of freedom!”   Arzamas-16, today known by its original name Sarov, was one of the most important sites in the early development of the first Soviet atomic bomb and hydrogen and was roughly the Soviet equivalent of Los Alamos.  Scientists, workers, and their families enjoyed privileged living conditions and were sheltered from difficulties like military service and economic crisis.  Leading researchers were paid a very large salary for those times.  Chelyabinsk-65 or Ozersk was home to a plutonium production plant similar to the American facilities built at Richland.  Located near a collective farm in the southern Ural Mountains, Chelyabinsk-65 was more or less built from nothing, where Arzamas-16 was an existing town that was taken over.  After the basics of the city were completed, early years were very difficult for the residents. The cities lacked basic infrastructure and suffered from high rates of alcoholism and poor living conditions. The Mayak Plutonium Plant dumped nuclear waste in the nearby Techa River, causing a health crisis not only for the residents of Chelyabinsk-65 but for all the villages which ran along it.   Conditions at Chelyabinsk-65/Ozersk would not improve until after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953.  You remember that story, it was in our episode For Want of a Nail.  Owing to the plutonium plant, Chelyabinsk-65 is still one of the most polluted places in the world. Some residents refer to it as the “graveyard of the Earth.”  Somehow, though, it's considered a prestigious place to live where.  When the government polled residents after the Cold War had thawed over whether to open the city, they voted to keep it closed.  In fact, half of the nuclear scientists said they would refuse to stay if it was opened.  As one resident explained, “We take pride in the fact that the state trusts us enough to live and work in Ozersk.”   In 1991, the Soviet Union officially disbanded and its fifteen republics became independent, four of which had nuclear weapons deployed on their territories. This was of great concern to the West, as these newly formed nations did not have the financial or technological means to properly store and safeguard these weapons.  With budgets a fraction of what they were in the decades before, the standard of living in the ZATOs quickly declined.  Security went with it, as the soldiers who guarded the ZATOs also saw their wages slashed.   With little prospect of employment and limited security, scientists suddenly had the freedom not only to leave their cities but to leave the country.  Fear quickly spread in the United States that they could help develop nuclear programs in other countries, such as Iran.  In 1991, the Nunn-Lugar Act financed the transportation and dismantlement of the scattered nukes to not only reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world but to provide the scientists with proper employment.  One result of this effort was the International Science and Technology Center in Moscow, which employed many former atomic scientists on non-weapons programs and still exists today.      If you need to hide a city from your enemies, you'd do well to move it underground.  Built in the late 50s in Wiltshire, England, the massive complex, codename Burlington was designed to safely house up to 4,000 central government personnel in the event of a nuclear strike.  In a former Bath stone quarry the city was to be the site of the main Emergency Government War Headquarters, the country's alternative seat of power if the worst happened.  Over 2/3mi/1km in length, and boasting over 60mi/97km  of roads, the underground site was designed to accommodate the Prime Minister, the Cabinet Office, civil servants and an army of domestic support staff.   Blast proof and completely self-sufficient the secret underground site could accommodate up to 4,000 people  in complete isolation from the outside world  for up to three months.  Though it was fortunately never used, the grid of roads and avenues ran between underground hospitals, canteens, kitchens, warehouses of supplies, dormitories, and offices.  The city was also equipped with the second largest telephone exchange in Britain, a BBC studio from which the PM could address the nation and a pneumatic tube system that could relay messages, using compressed air, throughout the complex.  An underground lake and treatment plant could provide all the drinking water needed.  A dozen huge tanks could store the fuel required to keep the generators in the underground power station running for up to three months.  The air within the complex could also be kept at a constant humidity and heated to around 68F/20C degrees.   The complex was kept on standby in case of future nuclear threats to the UK, until 2005, when the underground reservoir was drained, the supplies removed, the fuel tanks were emptied and the skeleton staff of four were dismissed. Some cities were not secret in their heyday, but were lost to time until recently.  In what's being hailed as a “major breakthrough” for Maya archaeology in February 2018, researchers have identified the ruins of more than 60,000 buildings hidden for centuries under the jungles of Guatemala.  Using LiDAR, or Light Detection And Ranging, scholars digitally removed the tree canopy from aerial images of the area, revealing the ruins of a sprawling pre-Columbian civilization that was far more complex and interconnected than most Maya specialists had supposed.   Mounted on a helicopter, the laser continually aims pulses toward the ground below, so many that a large number streak through the spaces between the leaves and branches, and are reflected back to the aircraft and registered by a GPS unit. By calculating the precise distances between the airborne laser and myriad points on the earth's surface, computer software can generate a three-dimensional digital image of what lies below.  To put the density of this jungle into perspective, archaeologists have been searching the area on foot for years, but did not find a single man-made feature.   “LiDAR is revolutionizing archaeology the way the Hubble Space Telescope revolutionized astronomy,” said Francisco Estrada-Belli, a Tulane University archaeologist and National Geographic Explorer. “We'll need 100 years to go through all [the data] and really understand what we're seeing.”  The project mapped more than 800 sq mi/2,100 sq km of the Maya Biosphere Reserve in the Petén region of northern Guatemala, producing the largest LiDAR data set ever obtained for archaeological research.  The old school of that held that Mayan civilization existed as scattered city-states, but these findings suggest that Central America supported an advanced civilization that was, with as many as 14 million people at its peak around 1,200 years ago, comparable to sophisticated cultures like ancient Greece or China.  The LiDAR even revealed raised highways connecting urban centers and complex irrigation and agricultural terracing systems.  And that was without the use of the wheel or beasts of burden   Despite standing for millennia, these sites are in danger from looting and environmental degradation.  Guatemala is losing more than 10 percent of its forests annually, and habitat loss has accelerated along its border with Mexico as trespassers burn and clear land for agriculture and human settlement.  “By identifying these sites and helping to understand who these ancient people were, we hope to raise awareness of the value of protecting these places,” Marianne Hernandez, president of the Foundation for Maya Cultural and Natural Heritage.   Lidar has also helped scientists to redraw a settlement located on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa, and it tells the beginnings of a fascinating story.  Scientists from the University of Witwatersrand believe the newly discovered city was occupied in the 15th century by Tswana-speaking people who lived in the northern parts of South Africa.  Many similar Tswana city-states fell during regional wars and forced migration in the 1820s, and there was little oral or physical evidence to prove their existence.  Though archaeologists excavated some ancient ruins in the area in the 1960s, they couldn't comprehend the full extent of the settlement. By using LiDAR technology, the team was able to virtually remove vegetation and recreate images of the surrounding landscape, allowing them to produce aerial views of the monuments and buildings in a way that could not have been imagined a generation ago.    Using these new aerial photographs, they can now estimate that as many as 850 homesteads had once existed in and around the city they've given the temporary designation of SKBR.  It's likely that most homesteads housed several family members, meaning this was a city with a large population.  There are also stone towers outside some homesteads, as high as 8ft2.5m high with bases 16ft/5m wide.  The academics believe these may have been bases for grain bins or even burial markers for important people.  Though the team estimates they are still another decade or two away from fully understanding the city's inhabitants and how the city came to be, and ceased to exist.   Modern technology has also helped us find an ancient city in Cambodia.  Constructed around 1150, the palaces and temples of Angkor Wat were, and still are, the biggest religious complex on Earth, covering an area four times larger than Vatican City.   In the 15th Century, the Khmer kings abandoned their city and moved to the coast.  They built a new city, Phnom Penh, the present-day capital of Cambodia.  Life in Angkor slowly ebbed away.  Everything made of wood rotted away; everything made of stone was reclaimed by the jungle.   An international team, led by the University of Sydney's Dr Damian Evans, was able to map out /370 sq km around Angkor in unprecedented detail in less than two weeks - no mean feat given the density of the jungle.  Rampant illegal logging of valuable hardwoods had stripped away much of the primary forest, allowing dense new undergrowth to fill in the gaps. It was unclear whether the lasers could locate enough holes in the canopy to penetrate to the forest floor.  The prevalence of landmines from Cambodia's civil war are another area where shooting Lidar from a helicopter really shines. The findings were staggering.  The archaeologists found undocumented cityscapes etched on to the forest floor, with remnants of boulevards, reservoirs, ponds, dams, dikes, irrigation canals, agricultural plots, low-density settlement complexes and orderly rows of temples. They were all clustered around what the archaeologists realized must be a royal palace, a vast structure surrounded by a network of earthen dikes—the ninth-century fortress of King Jayavarman II. “To suspect that a city is there, somewhere underneath the forest, and then to see the entire structure revealed with such clarity and precision was extraordinary,” Evans told me. “It was amazing.”     These new discoveries have profoundly transformed our understanding of Angkor, the greatest medieval city on Earth.  Most striking of all was evidence of large-scale hydraulic engineering, the defining signature of the Khmer empire, used to store and distribute seasonal monsoon water using a complex network of huge canals and reservoirs.  Harnessing the monsoon provided food security - and made the ruling elite fantastically rich. For the next three centuries they channelled their wealth into the greatest concentration of temples on Earth.  Angkor was a bustling metropolis at its peak, covering /1,000 sq km; It would be another 700 years before London reached a similar size.     Bonus fact: and not to be a pedant, but “monsoon” refers no to the heavy rains in the rainy season from May to September, but to the strong, sustained winds that bring them.   And that's where we run out of ideas, at least for today.  Some cities are hidden, not for reasons of subterfuge or dereliction, but by necessity.  80% of the world's opal comes from the area of Coober Peedy, but that wealth is nothing to the sun it's going to continue with the Mad Max motif.  It may be 115 degrees F/47C outside, but it's only 74F/23C underground.  When heavy mining equipment was introduced a century ago, people took advantage of it to dug themselves homes, a church, hotels and B&Bs, a museum, casino, a gift shop, and, of course, a pub.  Remember...thanks... Source: http://www.nationalgeographic.com.au/history/laser-scans-reveal-maya-megalopolis-below-guatemalan-jungle.aspx https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/lost-city-cambodia-180958508/ https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29245289 https://www.citylab.com/design/2018/05/inside-the-secret-cities-that-created-the-atomic-bomb/559601/ https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-to-build-secret-nuclear-city https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/may/03/off-the-map-the-secret-cities-behind-the-atom-bomb-manhattan-project https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/soviet-closed-cities https://metro.co.uk/2015/05/28/theres-a-whole-town-in-australia-that-lives-underground-5219091/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/proof/2016/09/coober-pedy-opal-mining/ https://www.outback-australia-travel-secrets.com/coober-pedy-underground-homes.html http://www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/content/articles/2005/12/14/burlington_nuclear_bunker_feature.shtml https://theculturetrip.com/africa/south-africa/articles/a-lost-african-city-has-just-been-discovered-by-scientists/ https://www.historicmysteries.com/derinkuyu-underground-city-cappadocia/

Sam, like the plotts he runs, is warm and energetic, gritty and tough. Despite being in his mid seventies and having a 50 year career to look back on, Sam is still tangibly enthusiastic about the lifestyle he lives, and his enthusiasm is infectious.  As I pick Sam's brain about dog training, breeding, and what learn what is required of him to turn a pup turn into a top performer.  We are joined towards the end by Sam's daughter, Samantha, who is the editing and filming wiz behind the scenes of Sam's YouTube channel: Hound Hunting Bear and Bobcat with Sam Natole. Grab a cold glass of Moxie, and join us as a couple of Mainer's get a-talkin'. 

Last year was weird and terrifying, wasn't it?In this episode of the mini-series Songs I Shouldn't Explain, Ray and Ben talk to Madison Lucas from the Charlotte-based rock band Modern Moxie about their new song Big Wave. They explore the peculiar ways that lockdown influenced our creative endeavors. They also discuss  the political and cultural turbulence of the past few years and the lessons learned along the way. And a quick content warning -- this episode contains various references to touchy topics like right wing nationalism, the pandemic and other elements of recent national politics . If that makes you uncomfortable, this may not be the episode for you and that's okay. We'll see you soon on another episode. Make sure to rate, like, and subscribe to the podcast on your platform of choice... and follow us on Instagram and TikTok -- @decodingthecreative on both platforms!

On the first episode of season 2 we connect with SF Native Nico Hiraga.  Nico skates pro for brands like Lakai, FTC, and more.  Recently he has become a full time actor with roles in Moxie, Skate Kitchen, and North Hollywood.

Ean Price Murphy is the founder and CEO of Moxie Bookkeeping and Consulting, where she helps small businesses and creatives manage their finances - all without any complicated software, spreadsheets, or jargon! Moxie is focused on profit first money management because they believe it's the best possible way for businesses to handle finances. Now, she's letting One Big Tip listeners in on this secret. What if rather than subtracting your expenses from your income to calculate your profit, you made sure you always took out your profit first and left the rest for expenses? That's exactly what the profit first system is all about, and Ean is here to break it all down for us.Ean says the most important thing about profit first is that you're giving every dollar a job and a home, and this can make a world of difference in your finances. In this episode, she explains not only how this system works, but also how it's beneficial for every single business owner - that includes you, so listen up! In this episode:[1:59] Ean shares her journey to the world of bookkeeping and coaching - believe it or not, it started with bankruptcy![5:42] Ean says profit-first money management was the gamechanger for her. She explains exactly what that is here. [9:39] What's the net result of taking the profit-first route? Ean says it's highly profitable. Overall, it gives peace of mind. [12:10] Ean discusses how profit first management translates to her team's workload. She says it doesn't cost them much time at all! [14:58] Wondering if profit first is right for you? Ean says there's not a single person it won't work for. Support the show (https://jeffmendelson.com/onebigtip)

Welcome back to another episode of Life After Corporate! Today, we're sitting down with one of my good friends, Deb Beroset. Deb spent several years working in the corporate world as an internal think tank creator, an editorial director of public relations, and leader for companies like Hallmark or Landmark, and finally decided to heed the call of her own soul and started her own business called Moxie Soul Spa. She is also the founder of Club Moxie, which is an online membership community which you will hear all about in this episode today. In this episode, Deb will be unpacking the concept of a cosmic job description, nailing down our purpose, and gathering the intel from different aspects in our lives to discover it. All of that in this juicy episode today!   [00:01 - 09:27] Opening Segment I welcome our guest: Deb Beroset Deb shares about her transition from corporate to entrepreneurship  How she came up with the idea of Moxie  Started investing in herself  Fell in love with the use of the neuroscience principles    [09:28 - 27:24] Nailing Down Your Person Finding your purpose the Moxie Way Multiple ways to have your purpose expressed Purpose as the core of your existence  Tendency to compartmentalize ourselves  Gathering intel and being mindful of the clues Deb's cosmic experience The importance of being authentic     [27:25- 36:12] Closing Segment  Giving yourself space to look at your life  What people say what you're good at  What people say you're passionate at Observe what you post on your social media  Check out the themes in your careers, hobbyist, etc Ask when you are in your happiest, when you are in flow  Connect with Deb through the links below  Follow us on social media and leave a review Final words   Tweetable Quotes: “Once you distinguish your purpose, or as I like to call it, your cosmic job description, there are so many, many, many different ways that your purpose can be expressed. So I like to think of your cosmic job description is, it's like your essence, it's that core thing that captures what you stand for, and why you exist.” - Deb Beroset “One of the things that I highly recommend is when you know what your purpose, your cosmic job description is, you want to get it woven throughout your business.” -Deb Beroset   Connect with Deb through her website at www.moxiesoulspa.com and join Club Moxie!  You can also follow her on Instagram and Facebook.    SUBSCRIBE & LEAVE A FIVE-STAR REVIEW and share this podcast to other growing entrepreneurs!  Get weekly tips on how to create more money and meaning doing work you love and be one of the many growing entrepreneurs in our community. CLICK HERE to join our private Facebook Group!  Connect with me on Instagram, LinkedIn, or checkout our website at www.lifeaftercorporatepodcast.com

Mars rover, mars rover, send your Boston science over! Join me in another exciting BOS Science Sound Byte episode as I explore the amazing planet Mars and how Boston scientists have left their mark all over the red planet.   In today's episode, you'll learn; Why we call mars the red planet; How an optical illusion inspired the belief of life on mars; What it takes to keep Matt Damon alive on Mars; Where is the best place to look for life on mars; How to make a sexy scientific mission name; Who is using data from Martian satellites to understand climate change; Why scientists are working in lava tubes to prepare for mars missions; And who's the best dancer: robot dogs or K-pop singers?   SHOW NOTES: MIT's oxygen producing MOXIE device aboard the Perseverance Rover (1), (2) BU researchers studying Martian climate change using the MAVEN satellite (1), (2) Boston Dynamic 'SPOT' robot dog practices Martian cave exploration in Earth's lava tubes (1), (2) Only click this if you listened to the whole episode!! PATRONS: Today's episode is brought to you in part thanks to the support of BOS Science's patrons; Mark Ingalls, Chris Micheli, Catherine Ingalls, and Brittany Pack!   Follow @BOSScience on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, to see photos from the episode, get info on upcoming guests and episode releases. To support the show, please consider donating to the new BOS Science Patreon, or writing a review on Apple Podcasts! To suggest guests for the show, a Sound Byte topic I should cover, or to just say hi, you can email BOSSciencePodcast@gmail.com   Some sound effects were used from Zatsplat.com

♪♫This is Halloween!  This is Halloween!♫♪  Supporters on our Patreon and fans in our FB group chose the topics for today's episode (plus now there's a sub-reddit):  01:35 sorting Dracula fact from fiction 07:49 how horror stars got their stars 20:01 when did clowns become scary 23:29 the history behind zombies 28:38 movie monster fast facts!  Mentioned in the show: Overly Sarcastic's Frankenstein run-down Cutting Class podcast on Christopher Lee Oh No! Lit Class on The Phantom   Who needs a costume when you could wear this?!   Read the full script. Reach out and touch Moxie on FB, Twit, the 'Gram or email. Music by Kevin MacLeod  Sponsor: City of Ghosts Brandi B. asked that we sort fact from fiction on Vlad Dracula.  Personally, I can remember a time when I didn't know that Vlad the Impaler was thought to be the inspiration from Bram Stoker's genre-launching vampire Dracula.  Hop in your magic school bus, police box, or phone booth with aerial antenna, and let's go back to 15th's century Wallachia, a region of modern day Romania that was then the southern neighbor of the province of Transylvania.  Our Vlad was Vlad III.  Vlad II, his father, was given the nickname Dracul by his fellow Crusade knights in the Order of the Dragon, who were tasked with defeating the Ottoman Empire.  Wallachia was sandwiched between the Ottomans and Christian Europe and so became the site of constant bloody conflict.  Without looking it up, I'm going to guess that they failed, since the Ottoman Empire stood until 1923.  Dracul translated to “dragon” in old Romanian, but the modern meaning is more like devil.  Add an A to the end to denote son-of and you've got yourself a Vlad Dracula.   At age 11, Vlad and his 7-year-old brother Radu went with their father on a diplomatic mission into the Ottoman Empire.  How's it go?  No too good.  The three were taken hostage.  Their captors told Vlad II that he could be released – on condition that the two sons remain.  Since it was his only option, their father agreed.  The boys would be held prisoner for 5 years.  One account holds that they were tutoried in the art of war, science and philosophy.  Other accounts says they were also subjected to torture and abuse.  When Vlad II returned home, he was overthrown in a coup and he and his eldest son were horribly murdered.   Shortly thereafter, Vlad III was released, with a taste for violence and a vendetta against the Ottomans.  To regain his family's power and make a name for himself, he threw a banquet for hundreds of members of his rival families.  On the menu was wine, meat, sweetbreads, and gruesome, vicious murder.  The guests were stabbed not quite to death, then impaled on large spikes.  This would become his signature move, leading to his moniker Vlad the Impaler, but wasn't the only arrow in his quiver.  Facing an army three times the size of his, he ordered his men to infiltrate their territory, poison wells and burn crops.  He also paid diseased men to go in and infect the enemy.  Defeated combatants were often treated to disemboweling, flaying alive, boiling, and of course impalement.  Basically, you turn your enemy into a kabob and let them die slowly and, just as important, conspicuously.  Vlad's reputation spread, leading to stories we have trouble sorting from legend, like that he once took dinner in a veritable forest of spikes.  We do know that in June of 1462, he ordered 20,000 defeated Ottomans to be impaled.  It's a scale that's hard to even imagine.   When the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II came upon the carnage, he and his men fled in fear back to Constantinople.  You'd think Vlad was on the road to victory, but shortly after, he was forced into exile and imprisoned in Hungary. [[how?]]  He took a stab, no pun intended, on regaining Wallachia 15 years later, but he and his troops were ambushed and killed.  According to a contemporary source, the Ottomans cut his corpse into pieces and marched it back to Sultan Medmed II, who ordered them displayed over the city's gates.  History does not record where the pieces ended up.   Vlad the Impaler was an undeniably brutal ruler, but he's still considered one of the most important rulers in Wallachian history for protecting it against the Ottomans and a national hero of Romania.  He was even praised by Pope Pius II for his military feats and for defending Christendom.  So how did get get from Vlad Dracula, the Impaler, a warrior king with a taste for torture, to, 400 years later, Dracula the undead creature of the night who must feed on the blood of living, can morph into bats or mist, and must sleep in his native earth?  Historians have speculated that Irish author Bram Stoker met with historian Hermann Bamburger, who told him about Vlad III, which ignited some spark of inspiration, but there's not actually any evidence to back this up.  Stoker was actually the first writer that we know of to have a vampire drink blood.  Vampires are actually a common folklore baddie around the world, from the obayifo in Africa which can take over people's bodies and emit phosphorus light from their armpits and anus to the manananggal of the Philippines who can detach her torso from her legs so she can fly around with her organs trailing behind her and use her snakelike tongue to steal babies from the womb.  In Western culture, though, Vlad the Impaler became the basis for everything from Bela Lugosi's Dracula to Count Chocula.  That means he's also the source of the Twilight saga, truly one of history's greatest monsters.   Ronnie asked for “how some legends got their stars.”  I wasn't sure what that meant, so I asked for clarification.  No, I didn't, I launched off immediately and at a full gallop with the first interpretation that came to mind, as I do in all aspects of my life.  So let's talk horror actors and the Hollywood walk of fame.   Even if he weren't a recognizable face, Vincent Price is probably the most recognizable voice in horror history.  For folks my age, you probably heard him for the first time on Michael Jackson's Thriller.  Folks in their 30's might have heard him first as Prof. Ratigan in The Great Mouse Detective.  Price wasn't always a horror icon.  He'd done theater, radio, including Orson Wells Mercury Theater of the Air, and other genres of films, but 1953's House of Wax, which was also the first 3D movie to crack the top 10 box office gross for its year, solidified his place in horror history.  It's almost odd that Price went into acting at all.  His father was the president of the National Candy Company and his grandfather had set the family up with independent means thanks to his brand of cream of tartar.  Price and his wife Mary wrote a number of cookbooks, one of which my mother had when I was young.  You cannot fathom my confused disappointment that it was just a regular cookbook full of regular, boring, non-scary recipes.  And now, for no other reason than it makes me smile, is another amazing voice, Stephen Fry, talking about Price on QI.:  Romanian-born Bela Lugosi was a classical actor in Hungary before making the move to movies.  In fact, he was already playing Dracula on stage when the movie was being assembled.  Lugosi wanted the role so badly he agreed to do it for $500 per week, about $9K today, only one quarter that of actor David Manners who played Jonathan Harker.  It was a good investment, I'd say, since everyone knows Lugosi and this was the first time I'd ever seen David Manners' name.  Though Lugosi turned down the role of the monster in Frankenstein, he was quickly locked into horror.  He appeared in minor roles in a few good movies, like “Ninotchka” with Greta Garbo, but mostly bounced like a plinko chip from mediocre to bad movies, with ever decreasing budgets.  His drug addiction probably had a cyclical relationship with his work prospects.  He died two days into filming the absolutely dreadful “Plan 9 From Outer Space” and was replaced by a much younger and taller actor and his ex-wife's chiropractor because he fit the costume.   Peter Lorre is a name you might not recognize, but you would absolutely recognize his overall aesthetic.  It's still being referenced and parodied to this day.  See the bad guy?  Is he short, with round eyes, and a distinctive way of speaking?  What you got there is Peter Lorre.  Hungarian-born Lorre struck out at 17 to become a star.  For 10 years he played bit parts in amateur productions, but in 1931 he got his big break in the German film “M,” and Hollywood took notice.  His first English-speaking role was in the Hitchcock thriller “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”  The character spoke English, but Lorre didn't.  Just like Bela Legosi during his first turn as Dracula, Lorre had to memorize his lines phonetically.  Imagine how difficult it must be to put the right pacing and inflection into a sentence when you don't know which word means what.  He continued portraying psychopaths until John Huston cast him in a quasi-comic role in “The Maltese Falcon” with Humphrey Bogart and Sidney Greenstreet, which led to lighter roles like the one he played in Arsenic and Old Lace.  If you never seen it, make it you next choice.  It's a comedy, but you can definitely watch it with your horror movies, since it's about a pair of serial killers hiding bodies in their cellar.   Arsenic and Old Lace also features a bad guy getting plastic surgery to avoid the police, which accidentally leaves him looking like Boris Karloff and he's really touchy about it.  I don't know why.  Even though he played many monsters and villains in his career, Karloff was said to actually be a kind, soft-spoken man who was happiest with a good book or in his garden.  We hear him narrate How the Grinch Stole Christmas every year.  He doesn't sing the song, though.  That's Thurl Ravenscroft, who was also the original voice of Tony the Tiger.  The title role in Frankenstein took Karloff from bit player to household name.  Karloff said of the monster, “He was inarticulate, helpless and tragic.  I owe everything to him. He's my best friend.”  By the way, if you're one of those people who delights in going “Um, actually, Frankenstein was the name of the doctor,” can you not?  We all know that.  And since it's the last name of the man who gave him life, aka his father, it's a perfectly passable patronym to use.  Oh and by the way Mr or Ms Superior Nerd, Frankenstein wasn't a doctor, he was a college dropout.  I refer you to my much-beloved Red at Overly Sarcastic Productions on YouTube for a thorough explanation of the actual story.  Penny Dreadful did get pretty close in their interpretation.   Here's a name more people should know, John Carradine.  Wait, you say, the guy from Kill Bill?  No, that's his son David.  Oh, you mean the FBI guy the sister was dating on Dexter.  No, that's his other son Keith.  Revenge of the Nerds?  No, that's Robert.  The patriarch John Carradine was in over 500 movies, big names like Grapes of Wrath and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, but he also did a lot of horror, though it could be a mixed bag — everything from Dracula in House of Dracula down to Billy the Kid vs Dracula.  Not always for the love of it, either.  Sometimes a gig's just a gig.  He told one of his sons, “Just make sure that if you've got to do a role you don't like, it makes you a lot of money.”  Good advice for many areas of life.  If you've got Prime Video or Shudder, look for The Monster Club.  It's an darling, schlocky little anthology movie, which they just don't seem to make anymore, starring Carradine and Vincent Price.     Jaime Lee Curtis could have been on this list since she was in 5 of the Halloween films, but I just don't think people think “horror” when they hear her name.   There were a few names surprisingly not set in the stones.  While ‘man of a thousand faces' Lon Chaney, who played the original Phantom of the Opera and Hunchback of Notre Dame, has a star, his son, Lon Chaney Jr, who played the Wolfman, the Mummy and numerous other roles in dozens of horror movies, does.  Somehow, Christopher Lee doesn't either.  In addition to the 282 roles on his imdb page, he deserves a star just for playing Dracula 10 times and still having a career after that.  Also, he was metal as fuck, recording metal albums into his 80's and there was the time he corrected director Peter Jackson on what it's like when you stab someone, because he *knew.  My buddies over at Cutting Class diverged from their usual format to tell us all about his amazing life.   Over in the Brainiac Breakroom, (plug sub reddit, thank Zach), Alyssa asked for the history behind clowns being evil.  One day, a man dressed up as a clown and it was terrifying.  Thank you for coming to my TED talk.   No?  Okay.  Fine!  It's not like I have to research them and keep seeing pictures of clowns.  Clowns weren't really regarded as frightening, or at least a fear of clowns wasn't widely known, from the creation of what we'd recognize as a clown by Joseph Grimaldi in the 1820's until fairly recently.  David Carlyon, author, playwright and a former clown with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in the 1970s, argues that coulrophobia, the fear of clowns, was born from the counter-culture 1960s and picked up steam in the 1980s.  “There is no ancient fear of clowns,” he said. “It wasn't like there was this panic rippling through Madison Square Garden as I walked up through the seats. Not at all.”  For centuries, clowns were a funny thing for kids — there was Bozo, Ronald McDonald, Red Skelton's Clem Kaddidlehopper and Emmet Kelly's sad clown– then bam!  Stephen King's hit novel “It,” the doll in “Poltergeist,” and every incarnation of The Joker.  It could be seen as a pendulum swing.  Clowns had been so far to the good side that it must have been inevitable they would swing *way the hell over to evil.   Not so fast, argues Benjamin Radford, author of the book “Bad Clowns,” who argues that evil clowns have always been among us.  “It's a mistake to ask when clowns turned bad because historically they were never really good.  Sometimes they're making you laugh. Other times, they're laughing at your expense.”  Radford traces bad clowns all the way to ancient Greece and connects them to court jesters and the Harlequin figure.  He points particularly to Punch of the Punch & Judy puppet shows that date back to the 1500s.  Punch was not only not sweet and loveable, he was violent, abusive, and even homicidal.   Maybe when isn't as important as why.  Why are some of us afraid of clowns?  Personally, I think it's their complete disregard for personal space.  Kindly keep your grease-painted face at least arm's length away.  The grease paint may be part of it.  It exaggerates the features.  The face is basically human in composition, but it's not.  It dangles us over the edge of the uncanny valley, where something makes us uncomfortable because it is *almost human.  The makeup obscures the wearer's identity, so we don't really know who we're dealing with.  Clowns also act in aberrant ways, contrary to societal norms and expectations, and that might subconsciously get our back up.  As for coulrophilia, sexual attraction to clowns…. I got nothing.  You do you.   Charlie asked for the real history behind popular horror icons, like werewolves, vampires, and zombies.  Even though the zombie craze held on longer than the 2017 obsession with bacon, most people don't know about them pre-George Romero's Night of the Living Dead.   The word “zombie” first appeared in English around 1810 in the book “History of Brazil,” this was “Zombi,” a West African deity.  The word later came to suggest a husk of a body without vital life energy, human in form but lacking the self-awareness, intelligence, and a soul.  The Atlantic slave trade caused the idea to move across the ocean, where West African religions began to mix with force Christianity.  Pop culture continually intermixes many African Diasporic traditions and portrays them exclusively as Voodoo. However, most of what is portrayed in books, movies, and television is actually hoodoo. Voodoo is a religion that has two markedly different branches: Haitian Vodou and Louisiana Vodoun. Hoodoo is neither a religion, nor a denomination of a religion—it is a form of folk magic that originated in West Africa and is mainly practiced today in the Southern United States.   Haitian zombies were said to be people brought back from the dead (and sometimes controlled) through magical means by voodoo priests called bokors or houngan. Sometimes the zombification was done as punishment (striking fear in those who believed that they could be abused even after death), but often the zombies were said to have been used as slave labor on farms and sugarcane plantations. In 1980, one mentally ill man even claimed to have been held captive as a zombie worker for two decades, though he could not lead investigators to where he had worked, and his story was never verified.   To many people, both in Haiti and elsewhere, zombies are very real and as such very frightening.  Think about it.  These people were enslaved, someone else claimed dominion over their body, but they still had their mind and their spirit.  What could be more frightening to an enslaved person than an existence where even that is taken from you?   In the 1980s when a scientist named Wade Davis claimed to have found a powder that could create zombies, thus providing a scientific basis for zombie stories, a powerful neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin, which can be found in several animals including pufferfish.  He claimed to have infiltrated secret societies of bokors and obtained several samples of the zombie-making powder, which were later chemically analyzed.  Davis wrote a book on the topic, “The Serpent and the Rainbow,” which was later made into a really underappreciated movie.  Davis was held up as the man who had scientifically proven the existence of zombies, but skeptic pointed out that the samples of the zombie powder were inconsistent and that the amounts of neurotoxin they contained were not high enough to create zombies.  It's not the kind of thing you can play fast & loose with.  Tetrodotoxin has a very narrow band between paralytic and fatal.  Others pointed out nobody had ever found any of the alleged Haitian plantations filled with zombie laborers.  While Davis acknowledged problems with his theories, and had to lay to rest some sensational claims being attributed to him, he insisted that the Haitian belief in zombies *could be based on the rare happenstance of someone being poisoned by tetrodotoxin and later coming to in their coffin.   Bonus fact: Ever wonder where we get brain-eating zombies from?  Correlation doesn't equal causation, but the first zombie to eat brains was the zombie known as Tarman in 1984's Return of the Living Dead.  This wasn't a George Romero movie, though.  It's based on a novel called  Return of the Living Dead by John Russo, one of the writers of Night of the Living Dead.  After Russo and Romero parted company, Russo retained the rights to any titles featuring the phrase “Living Dead.”    Cindra asked for movie monster facts.  The moon is getting full, so let's hit these facts muy rapido.   1922's Nosferatu was an illegal and unauthorized adaption of Bram Stoker's Dracula.  Stoker's heirs sued over the film and a court ruling ordered that all copies be destroyed.  However, Nosferatu subsequently surfaced in other countries and came to be regarded as an influential masterpiece of cinema.   Not a single photograph of Lon Chaney as the Phantom in The Phantom of the Opera (1925) was published in a newspaper or magazine, or seen anywhere before the film opened in theaters.  It was a complete surprise to the audience and to Chaney's costar Mary Philbin, whos shriek of fear and disgust was genuine.   In the original Dracula, Lugosi never once blinks his eyes on camera, to give his character an otherworldy vibe.  Francis Ford Coppolla did something similar by having Dracula's shadow move slightly independently, like the rules of our world don't apply to him.   Even though he starred in the film, Boris Karloff was considered such a no-name nobody that Universal didn't invite him to the premiere of 1931's Frankenstein.   Karloff's classic Mummy the next year did not speak because the actor had so many layers of cotton glued to his face that he couldn't move his mouth.   The Creature from the Black Lagoon's look was based on old seventeenth-century woodcuts of two bizarre creatures called the Sea Monk and the Sea Bishop.   To make a man invisible for 1933's The Invisible Man, director James Whale had Claude Rains dressed completely in black velvet and filmed him in front of a black velvet background.   The movie poster for The Mummy (1932) holds the record for the most money paid for a movie poster at an auction: nearly half a million dollars.   Boris Karloff's costume and makeup for 1935's Bride of Frankenstein were so heavy and hot that he lost 20 pounds during filming, mostly through sweat.  His shoes weighed 13 lb/6 kg/1 stone apiece.   The large grosses for the film House on Haunted Hill (1960) were noticed by Sir Alfred Hitchcock was inspired to make a horror movie after the seeing the box office gross for William Castle's House on Haunted Hill.   Filming the shower scene for Psycho was pretty mundane, but actress Janet Leigh was so terrified by seeing the finished product –thanks to the editing by Alma Reveill-Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann score– that she did not shower, only bathed, from the premier in 1960 to her death in 2004.  You can read more about Alma Revill in the YBOF book.   According to our friends Megan and RJ at Oh No! Lit Class podcast, the first use of Toccata Fuge in G Minor in a film was the 1962 Phantom of the Opera.  It's hard to imagine classic horror without it.   In Night of the Living Dead, the body parts the zombies ate were ham covered in chocolate sauce.  George Romero joked that they shouldn't bother putting the zombie makeup on the actors because the choco-pork made them look pale and sick with nausea anyway.   A lot of people know that Michael Myers' mask in the original Halloween was actually a William Shatner mask painted white.  They bought it because it was on clearance and the film had a small budget.  Most people don't know that Shatner later repaid the favor by dressing up as Michael Myers for Halloween.   Freddy Kruger's look was based on a scary drunk man Wes Craven saw outside his home as a child.  His glove made of leather and steak knives was actually inspired by Craven's cat.  Looks down at scratches on both arms.  Yeah, that checks out.  The idea of being killed in your sleep comes from real deaths of people who survived the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, only to die mysteriously later.   1987's The Monster Squad. With a werewolf, a mummy, Dracula, and Frankenstein's monster in the mix, the group looked suspiciously like the line-up of the 1930s and '40s Universal horror movies. To avoid confusion (i.e. lawsuits), filmmaker Fred Dekker made some subtle changes to his monsters, like removing Dracula's widow's peak, and moving Frankenstein's neck bolts up to his forehead. See? Totally different!   Yes, those were real bees in Candyman, even the ones in Candyman's mouth.  Tony Todd had a clause in his contract that he would get $1k for every bee sting he got during filming.  Even though juvenile bees with underdeveloped stingers were used, he still got $23k worth of stings.   You might think 1991's Silence of the Lambs was the first horror movie to win an Oscar, but Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde beat them to it by 60 years with Fredric March's Oscar for Best Actor.

Microsoft upsets the FOSS community, Moxie trolls NFT clowns, Trump's people don't seem to understand licences, a 1337 haxx0r tool, KDE Korner, and more.   News Apple joins Blender Development Fund L0phtCrack is now open source Signal's founder is trolling with an NFT that'll turn to shit if you buy it Trump's Social Media Platform... Read More

Maple Syrup Princess in, "Princesses vs. Boss Rat: The Fight for PrincessFest!" THE EXCELLENTS: https://www.9thlevel.com/excellents THE LULLABY LOUNGE NOVELTY HOUR: https://www.katenyx.com/lounge MOXIE BUTTERCUP: https://twitter.com/itsmemoxieb KATE NYX: https://www.katenyx.com/ Want to support the show? Support these causes! https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/# ALL MY FANTASY CHILDREN: http://www.allmyfantasychildren.com/ PARTY OF ONE DISCORD: https://discordapp.com/invite/SxpQKmK SUPPORT JEFF ON PATREON: www.patreon.com/jeffstormer THEME SONG: Mega Ran feat. D&D Sluggers, “Infinite Lives,” RandomBeats LLC, www.megaran.com 5Calls.org: https://5calls.org/ – Stance: http://takeastance.us/ – ResistBot: https://resistbot.io/ – Swing Left: https://swingleft.org/

Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment Principal Investigator Mike Hecht discusses the MOXIE technology demonstration that's generating oxygen on the Red Planet.

Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment Principal Investigator Mike Hecht discusses the MOXIE technology demonstration that's generating oxygen on the Red Planet.

To lots of folks, “foreplay” is shorthand for...hand stuff. But foreplay - or outercourse, as I call it - is actually way more about emotional intelligence, than anything having to do with your fingers. On today's show, I dive into the psychology of foreplay and intimacy, a fascinating study on the difference between a good' and ‘bad' sex life, and how to get aroused with specific (and quite sexy) pre-game tips.Click Here to Subscribe.We also talk about what to do if foreplay and overall sex with your partner has gotten a bit stale, how to tease and arouse yourself, what to do if your partner isn't so keen on exploring new things, and how to handle a partner who won't reciprocate foreplay...after you give them all sorts of pre-game love. Plus, I answer your questions! I share what to do if you find yourself fantasizing about a past crush (while in a committed relationship), and give tips for how to have an orgasm… for the first time.For more information about or to purchase the products mentioned in this podcast, click below:Foria: Premium CBD ProductsMagic Wand: The World's Best Selling Massage WandWe-Vibe BondShow Notes:Episode: The Gottmans on Compatibility, Conflict & ConversationEpisode: Talk Dirty To Me w/ Joanna AngelArticle: Ask Emily: How Do I Get Better at Dirty Talk?Download my Yes No Maybe ListSystem Jo LubricantsArticle: 6 Tips For Being A Better KisserForia Sex Oil We-Vibe Bond and Moxie b-Vibe See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

After an eight month trip around South America, Jess and Greg Stone fell in love with Guatemala. They moved there in 2016 and adopted a German Shepherd that has since been a regular passenger on the back of Jess's bike on a custom made carrier. They're now planning a new adventure, a ride around the world with their dog, Moxie. We talked to Jess and Greg about their upcoming trip and what it's like to travel and ride with a dog on the back of the bike. More motorcycle travel episodes available on Adventure Rider Radio at adventureriderradio.com.  Want to help out? Subscribe, rate and review us on iTunes or on your favourite podcast app, tell your family, friends, riding buddies or club about ARR. Adventure Rider Radio is a listener supported show and we'd love to get your help. Please check us out on Patreon. Have a comment? Go to the episode show notes on our website and have your say at the bottom of the page.

Who do you think of when you hear the word moxie? Who do you know that is courageous and determined? A close friend? Your mom? A mentor? On this episode of God Hears Her, Eryn and Elisa talk with Julie Richardson, a woman who learned courage and determination from her mom and from facing unforeseen personal struggles.   About Our Guest: Julie Richardson has experienced God's faithfulness through many life challenges including divorce, infertility, and the loss of loved ones. She has led women's ministries in a variety of churches and parachurch ministries over the last 25 years, and one of her greatest joys is to mentor women, helping them discover the vibrant life that Christ offers. Julie has been a part of Our Daily Bread Ministries for the last 20 years working in a variety of capacities and most recently as a visual media producer who tells stories of how God works in the lives of His people. She is passionate about prayer and leads the growing prayer ministry at Our Daily Bread Ministries.   Notes and Quotes: “I was seeking the world's happiness, and as I was doing those things I started to not hear God's voice as much; His voice got softer and softer.” “I really got everything I was hoping for with the happiness factor. And I wasn't happy. I didn't feel fulfilled.” “God placed a couple people in my path. And they were ‘Jesus' to me.” “You can look at your life as if it's a home, and have you given God every room of your life?” (Anne Graham Lotz) “You have 100% of the Holy Spirit in your life, but does the Holy Spirit have 100% of you?” Moxie means determination and courage. “Your grief and joy can coexist at the same time.” “Following God, surrendering, doesn't always mean we get what we want.”   Links/Books/Resources Mentioned in Show:  God Hears Her website: https://www.godhearsher.org/ Subscribe on iTunes!  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/god-hears-her-podcast/id1511046507?utm_source=applemusic&utm_medium=godhearsher&utm_campaign=podcast Order God Sees Her: 365 Devotions for Women by Women on Amazon.  https://amzn.to/32lYSgh Elisa's Instagram: elisamorganauthor Eryn's Instagram: eryneddy