Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio. Hey you welcome to listener mail from Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is Robert Land and this is Joe McCormick. And it's Monday, the day of each week that we reback some messages from the mail bag. If you are a listener to Stuff to Blow your Mind and you've never gotten in touch with us before, why not ride in. You can contact us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. All kinds of messages are fair game. Of course, feedback on the episodes we've put out in the past, if you have things to add, corrections, you know, general appreciation, any of that is fine. But you can also just share anything you find interesting. Let's see, Rob, do you mind if I kick things off today with this message from Michael about our series on horror Vakawee. Go for it, okay. Horror Vakawee was the idea of Fear of the Void, and Michael says, Hey, Robin, Joe, I'm a bit behind. I think you've done a few listener mail episodes since these were aired, but I did want to share a thought I had while listening to the Horror Vakawe series. I think it was somewhere during episode one that you mentioned the difference between nothing and a vacuum as something people have struggled to understand throughout history. It made me think of the Nothing from The never Ending Story. The ultimate villain in that movie was purely the lack of existence and quite literally represents the fear of emptiness. I know it's a bit of a stretch from the discussions you had in this series, but I'm curious if this came to either of your minds while thinking about Horror of Aakawee Rob. I would be shocked if it did not come to your mind, as I know you are a huge fan of The never Ending Story in its multiple forms. Yeah, I think it did cross my mind, but I didn't ended up not incorporating it into the note to the discussion. But but yeah, ever Ending Story. Both the film and Michael Enda's original novel are both both very dear to me. So it's at some point I would like to perhaps do an ever ending story for Weird Helps. I think that there's a lot of fun stuff to talk about there as a refresher. This is picking up on what we talked about in that series about like ancient philosophers, at least in some cases, not seeming to be able to grasp the concept of empty space, like that they couldn't envision such a thing as they're being three dimensions of space and it being an existing space that had nothing in it. I think that for some of them, for example, like Aristotle, they just thought, well, if there's nothing in it, then it can't exist, because there's got to be something somewhere for something to exist. Of Course, now we know that, you know, space is in a way not nothing because space has property, is like, there are characteristics of space, So it's not the same thing as non existence. Though, then you start getting into questions about like, well, what would it mean for non existence to this? Could that? Is that even a coherent concept? Um? But yeah, so so I don't know where the nothing from the Never Ending Story falls in there? Is it? Is it like is it like sort of a destructive force or just a negation force? How would you characterize it? Rob? Well, Um, I'd need to revisit the novel to really get in, I mean to really get in deep there, because the novel definitely goes deeper on a lot of these concepts and and is very contemplative on various paradoxes, because the first half of the novel is essentially the movie, but then there's an entire second half of the adventure that's kind of like I would I would compare it easily to Doon Messiah. You know. It's like the first one is the rise of the of a tray you and the Rise of Bastion, and in the second half of the novel is kind of I wouldn't say it's necessarily about his fall, but it's about sort of what what happens after one achieves power, or what happens after one achieves their dreams, et cetera. There's a lot of a lot of fun, weird stuff that happens in the second part as well. Uh, some of which is reflected in the never Ending Story too the movie, but but not really. That's that one's kind of a mass but it has some many monsters in it. But anyway, the nothing um, I guess the short version is that the nothing is um it's it's it's a vacancy. Yeah, it's it's. It's it's it's that it is erasure as well, but it's also not a conscious entity. It is um it's kind of a result, and there are agents behind the nothing that are pushing it. And in in the book they really some of the characters really get into doupth describing or sort of teasing what those powers beyond the nothing are. All right, there's a second half of Michael's message here. Michael goes on to say, for a different concept on the same topic. Part of my job involves writing legal documents, and one of the things many people have probably seen but never really put much thought into, is when a page ends before the document ends, and instead of leaving a true blank space, you will see a box in the document that reads this space intentionally left blank. It's always something I have to stop to think about. Is this blank space too big and therefore needs filler? Or can I leave a few lines empty at the end of the page without upsetting the expectation of the document's fullness. Thanks for everything you do, Michael. I actually went to read about like the history of you know these this page intentionally left blank markings and stuff to see if there was anything really interesting about it. Not really, I mean, I think it's mostly just like to avoid the avoid confusion about whether you're looking at a printing error or something like it. You know, was this space supposed to be here? Or did something get left out that line? Just as sure as you nothing was left out. I don't remember if this actually happened. I remember I had a creative writing teacher once who said that they knew an author who tried to get their publishers behind the idea of including a large chunk of blank pages in the at the end of the novel that he was having published, because you wanted the ending to feel more sudden and more of a surprise. So you would be reading through it and you'd be like, oh, it's over now, Oh my goodness. Which I don't think the publishers end up going for that, but you do. You still get that experience occasion. I had that experience pretty recently with a book where I didn't realize, like reading on a kindle, I didn't realize that there was a glossary and some sort of extra bit on the end of the novel, and so when it ended, I was like, oh, wow, we're already there, and I was a little surprised. That's a great idea to have surprise for the ending, but yeah, I feel like you couldn't do it with blank pages because you just noticed that too easily. I mean, even if you're not reading ahead, you just kind of notice that the end of the book didn't have anything on it. I feel like you'd have to fill it up with Laura ipsum or something thing. Yeah, And I do think it's more gracefully achieved by having some sort of extra material at the end. Or sometimes if it's like a you know, an author with other books, or sometimes not even the same author, you'll sometimes have like a preview of another book at the end of a book, and that can kind of accomplish the same goal, unless you're really checking your watch on a book, which I've certainly had that situation as well, But you're like, how how long does this go on? Yeah? Maybe there's some sort of a glosser at the end. Crap, there's not. Yeah, Well, anyway, let's see Rob. Do you want to do this? Next message from John? Yeah. This one is in a response to a couple of episodes that Seth and I did on hidden tracks while you were out on paternity leave. John Right, Sollo, Rob, Joe and Seth hiding a track either as a track after the last listed track or after a long silent break in that track is all too common. As you say, I remember learning of a different form of hidden track back in the early days of compact discs, back in the mid nineteen eighties, specifically the hidden zero track. It didn't always work, I suppose it varied by how the manufacturers programmed their players. But if you put a CD in, press play in, then rewound the track track back before the first song started, there was another song hidden there. I remember I had. They might be giants and rim discs with tracks like this, but I haven't heard them in years because I only have a computer CD DVD drive these days and it doesn't work with this zero track hack. This type of hidden track is popular enough there is a Wikipedia page listing many of them, not nearly as many there as on the more standard version hidden track page. This link is the main page linking to an alphabetical list of performers who have hidden tracks on their albums, and John includes a couple of links here. Thanks for another great episode, John, I was really combing through the list of album containing hidden tracks to try to find one where it's like, oh yeah, I remember this one. Um, I know I had an album with a hidden zero track, but I can't remember what it was, And all the ones I could find on here that I recall were like, yeah, ones where it just plays after the last track on the CD, after a big gap, like remember there's a there's a Queens of the Stone Age album that had a track like that. But anyway, looking through this list, the funniest example I found was that there are allegedly two Jimmy Buffett albums with hidden tracks, and trying to imagine Jimmy Buffett fans kind of mashing the buttons on their CD players was it was a strongly amusing image. One of the albums that as a hidden track is allegedly called Banana wind h Well, you know, don't The profit can be very cryptic in his messages. Yeah, I'm looking at this list as well, and uh, I think I'm familiar with some of these albums, Like there's an Autecher album on here, there's some DJ Food and DK. But I think most of the artists on here that I'm into I got into after I was done with CD players, so I don't really have any experience with the track zero on their their work. It is amusing that some of these artists did it more than once, where they're like, that was great, Let's do that again. Oh, I Monster is also in here. That's another band that I really I really liked this album from two thousand and three, never odd or even M But again I got that album digitally at some point, and I have no experience with the CD. Okay. This next message is in response to our series on t This is from Jake. Let's see and there there are a couple of subtopics here. Jake begins by responding to our discussion on bertrand russell teapot, analogy that was a tangent we did in one of our episodes, and Jake compares Russell's teapot to the now very well known satirical deity called the flying Spaghetti Monster, which is an omnipotent wad of pasta containing several meatballs. Jake writes quote referring to the spaghetti Monster quote. This started as a similar type of thought experiment to the teapot and Carl Sagan's Invisible Dragon, but more explicitly designed to look like Christianity. In the years since the original website went up, people have adopted the trappings of it as a religion, entering it as their faith on census forms, winning court cases, to be allowed to wear a colander on their heads for official id as it is religious headgear, and even churches with dedicated priests and regular services. And yeah, Jake, this is interesting because we covered some aspects of this in an episode we did many years ago now, and I haven't heard it in a long time, so I don't know how our discussion holds up. But we were talking about a framework called hyper real religions, which was basically a sociology of religion concept to describing postmodern religions that are consciously based on explicitly fictional ideas, often from pop culture. So there were a bunch of examples, but one of them was Jediism, a religion based on the Jedi Order from the Star Wars universe. And the Flying Spaghetti Monster religion was another one. Though it began as a parody, it sort of evolved to have more, I don't know, things, kind of like a real religion would have. And I think what's interesting is that a lot of these religions by now seem to have at least some members who claim to practice them sincerely, not just as a joke or a parody or a way of making a point, though obviously a lot of them kind of started that way. And this phenomenon's interesting to me because it suggests a religion can arise without a starting point of literalist enchantment with the myths. Like no one starts out by having a literal belief in the existence of Jedi knights in the Force. Everybody understands Star Wars is fiction. But nevertheless, you can kind of work up to a feeling of sincere belief about a religion, I guess through actions or contemplation, maybe through ritual repetition or just ongoing discourse, you know, repeatedly talking about the central ideas. And even if it starts just as a joke or something that you did just for fun, it can kind of become serious to you. And this in turn makes me wonder about the origins of traditional religions. Like I've said this on the show before, but I mean this really, Like, are we so sure that the authors of the Book of Genesis meant, for, say, the six day Creation story to be taken as a literal, factual account of where everything came from? Or is it possible they might have said, we don't know where everything came from, We don't know how it came to be, but here is an interesting story that we tell, and this story maybe has some things to say about our culture. And another thing this connects to is something I just believe is true about people. If we spend enough time being interested in something, even in a totally ironic way, over time our interest will start to become more earnest. I think that's just a feature of human psychology. If you consistently spend your time thinking and talking about something as a joke, you will end up thinking and talking about it with a kind of with a more sincere appreciation, finding serious meaning in it. And you could chalk this up to a number of different things. You could say it's a kind of like sunk cost fallacy about your own time and efforts thinking and talking about that thing. Or you could say that it's just that, you know, the more you think about anything, the more it just you notice things about it that resonate in more profound ways. But anyway, uh, yeah, yeah, so I think that that raises a lot of interesting questions. Yeah, yeah, this was this was a fun topic yeah, when we approached it back in the day. Again, I haven't listened to this and forever, so I don't know how it holds up either. But um, yeah, there were other things like Dudaism. I think it was a big one based on the dude from The Big Lebowski and uh, yeah, I don't know. It's it's it's interesting to think about. Um. You know, with Star Wars, for example, I would not say that I believe in Jediism or anything. But if you have a story like like Star Wars, and you like see you grow up with it, uh, if you find yourself returning to it, uh in difficult times, if you uh if if you have like a child who gets into it. You know, these have the last two have been my experience, or I guess all three have been my experience. Like you can find yourself um more attached to the material than you were previously. Uh. And and you know, not to the point again where I think Jediism is a thing or that the force is real or anything like that, but it kind of gets to the point where I like where there was a time where I would you know, I would maybe make fun of of elements and say the prequels. But nowadays it's like there's a there's a joke that's maybe like a little too hard on the Fall of Anakin Skywalker. I'm kind of like, you shouldn't joke about that. That's a serious story. A lot of people take that very seriously. I don't know, and I don't know why exactly, you know, but I think part of it is just, yeah, sort of like clinging to it a little bit during um, you know, in recent years, having a child grow up with it and see it through through his eyes and his experiences, you know, it kind of changes the way you approach some of it. If I can psychoanalyze you a little bit, Robert I, it seems to me, just based on things you've said to me, that a lot of this might be based in like showing the prequels to your son and appreciating them together. It's like when you see them again through the eyes of a child, that really makes you you experienced them in a whole new way. They come to me and something different to you. Yeah, which film that we've covered for Weird House should a religion be based upon? Though, if you had to had to push for your own hyper real religion. Well, you know, there are a couple of different ways to answer that question, because there are some that naturally invite occult interpretations. So you know, you get you got your done which horror, and you got your oh what's it called the Devil rides out? You know, like Christopher Lee in that movie is almost asking to be your your your priest and your shaman um. But on the other hand, i'd say, you know, transfers too, that that's got some real mythological gusto. Yeah, yeah, that's that's a pretty good pick, you know. And of course some of the films we've talked about do have actual mythologies at the heart of them, or they have they're based on fictional franchises that people have invested so much in that they they either achieve or nearly achieving hyper real status. For instance, The Keeper, which was the Russian adaptation of The Fellowship of the Rings. So I guess it'd be kind of like Russian Orthodox tokenism there. Oh yes, oh wait, I just thought to woor the Great, I mean to bore the Great is a god, so there you go. Oh but anyway, sorry, I gotta return to Jake's message. So concluding the section about the parody religion, Jake says, all this stuff maybe an indication that the flying Spaghetti Monster religion quote has transitioned from the realms of healing driftwood into the more mainstream territory of healing crystals. That's referring to another thing we said in the episode about how the ideas, even if there's no evidence for them, take on a feeling of plausibility just if they're more familiar than if unfamiliar. Okay, second half of Jake's message, he says, in more directly tea related talk, you ask for stories about listeners tea habits. Growing up, my parents always left the tea bag in the mug when drinking tea, so when I started drinking it, naturally this is what I did. I never really internalized that it was unusual until I was quite a lot older, although I learned fairly quickly that when making tea for guests, I should check if they wanted their tea bags removed. I've grown out of the habit since moving out, mainly because I have a small dog who loves to grab tea bags out of any mug left within his reach and cause a mess, throwing them around. Wow, But I do still occasionally indulge. I'd like it because the tea gets progressively stronger as you drink, so no two mouthfuls taste the same. Ghost without saying that, I don't have a problem with over steeped tea. Thanks again for the podcast. Keep up the great work. Regards Jake, This is great. Yeah, I mean it varies so much depending on what tea you're using. I guess like in my household, we drink a lot Againmacha tea. That's the one with the toasted rice, and it is amazing tea and one that I have found to be very forgiving of over steeping, especially on subsequent steeps. But even the first steep you can kind of let it go a little bit and it doesn't it too sharp or too strong. Other teas I have you have to It's like that first steep. You got to give it like thirty seconds otherwise you're dimmed. But I sometimes I do the Jake approach if I am drinking tea in the studio, because sometimes I don't give myself enough time to steep it before I go in, so I got to bring it in here with the tea bag still in, but with a little like ramikin or something to put the tea bag in when it's time to take it out. And that allows me to sort of like keep sipping and sort of fine tune it, like, am I there, yad, it's time to take it out. Maybe I can push it a little further and then like, okay, now it's the time. I used to assume that the reason that tea cups were served on a little saucer plate was so that you could take the tea bag out and put it on the plate. But then I thought the way that the saucer plates pre date the use of tea bags for steeping. I'm sure like that goes back to a time when you just have the loose leaves in the in the pot and you pour it out of the spout. Right, I assume I've never really looked into that. I had an aunt who would reportedly she was a great aunt, who would reportedly with coffee or tea, I forget which would pour the tea or coffee into the saucer so that it could cool, which I that's not the right way to use it, right, This has to be a novel use of the cup and saucer. I get you know what I imagine. I bet it's to rest your teaspoon on. If you're stirring like milk indoor sugar into your tea, you got a little teaspoon that goes on the saucer. I bet that's why the saucer was invented. Yeah, spillage maybe as well. I don't know. Yeah, see, we should goose should do a whole invention on just spitball. Yeah, okay, let's see. Oh, Rob, do you want to do this short one from Jeremy about Finn McCool. Oh yeah, yeah, we've been rearing the Finn McCool episodes from last year. As we approached Saint Patty's Day again, Jeremy rights, Hello, Robert and Joe. While listening to the recent Select's episode about Finn McCool, had just reached the point of describing the Giants Causeway when I rode past a sculpture representing the same formation. So to be clear, Jeremy's not driving past the actual Giants Causeway, but just something that looks like it and seems to be intentionally crafted to look like it, And they included a picture for us appears to be made out of concrete pieces. How would you describe this concrete hexagons, little columns. I guess it's to resemble the columnar basalt. But I've never seen anything like this before, and I tried to google it to figure out what. Jeremy does not say where this is. So I was googling giants causeway sculpture came up with zips, So I don't know. Yeah, you'd have to do like a deep search based on the There's some sort of a big house in the background, kind of a manor house, but I know who knows what that is really creepy with this, Yeah, Jeremy continues, since it appears your podcasting powers have now reached the point of auto generation. I was momentarily concerned the giants would be next, but fortunately neither of them appeared. Should I be concerned about listening to future episodes? Winky face best regards Jeremy. Well, Jeremy, I think you may soon be driving and find a gray whale encrusted with barnacles laying across the road, so be careful going around the tight corners. But thanks for writing him. This is amusing. I gotta kick out of this, and it does make me wonder about it. This has the there's an intentionality to this work. This appears to be an actual work of art here. This is not just we encounter a lot of stuff. I guess this encountered this everywhere, but particularly in the American South, you find a lot of sort of like junkyard art that is kind This seems to be kind of you know, there's an intentional, outsider art approach to it, but there's also just sort of like the effect of stuff piling up. And I don't get that feel from what we're looking at here. Oh no, no, this is a sculpture, definitely. Yeah. You kind of want to climb on it like it looks. I'm surprised there's no children on it here. I always want to climb on everything. All right, I think we should call today's episode there. We've got a few messages about Weird House, but we will We'll save those for next week. All right. Just remindered everybody that Listener Mail publishes here on Mondays and the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed. Yeah, if you want to keep up with what we're doing on the show, really subscribe to a feed somewhere. That's the best way to do it because we don't really we don't really do much in the way of letting folks know on social when there's a new episode or any of that right now, So subscribing is the best way to do it, and it helps off the show. But let's see what else we got going on. We got Tuesday, Rob, Can I add something though? Yes, yeah, as our bosses have told us many times, at least some podcast platforms out there, I think Apple Apple Podcasts has been singled out there. There may be some weirdness going on with people who are subscribed to our podcast, but the platform stops auto downloading even though you didn't tell it to do that. So if you're a fan of the show and you want to make sure you're always getting our new stuff, go in. Make sure that you are, Make sure that you're subscribed if you meant to be. Make sure that auto downloads are turned on. Even if you had them turned on before. Somehow they might have gotten turned off on their own. I don't know why they do that, but that's what we've heard happens, so just check on that. And we've also been told that on some platforms, again specifically Apple Podcasts, it may stop downloading episodes even if you have it set to download episodes if you haven't listened to the last x number maybe five episodes or something. So if you're one of those people out there who likes to let them, you know, save them up and then binge them, I mean, you know that that's your right. You do that if that's what you want, but just be aware that may stop episodes from downloading. So if you want to make sure you're always getting new episodes downloaded and you want to help us out, a good idea might be to just try to stay as current as you can, or listen to at least one fresh episode per week, even if you are saving them up to benj them on the weekends or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, that way they'll digitally manifest on your device so that they can physically manifest in the world as you drive around. So again, he has stuff to blow your mind. Podcast feed Core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, listenermail on Mondays. On Wednesdays, a short form artifact or monster fact, and then on Friday's Weirdhouse Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a strange film huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Pauseway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio. Hey you welcome to listener mail from Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is Robert Land and this is Joe McCormick. And it's Monday, the day of each week that we reback some messages from the mail bag. If you are a listener to Stuff to Blow your Mind and you've never gotten in touch with us before, why not ride in. You can contact us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. All kinds of messages are fair game. Of course, feedback on the episodes we've put out in the past, if you have things to add, corrections, you know, general appreciation, any of that is fine. But you can also just share anything you find interesting. Let's see, Rob, do you mind if I kick things off today with this message from Michael about our series on horror Vakawee. Go for it, okay. Horror Vakawee was the idea of Fear of the Void, and Michael says, Hey, Robin, Joe, I'm a bit behind. I think you've done a few listener mail episodes since these were aired, but I did want to share a thought I had while listening to the Horror Vakawe series. I think it was somewhere during episode one that you mentioned the difference between nothing and a vacuum as something people have struggled to understand throughout history. It made me think of the Nothing from The never Ending Story. The ultimate villain in that movie was purely the lack of existence and quite literally represents the fear of emptiness. I know it's a bit of a stretch from the discussions you had in this series, but I'm curious if this came to either of your minds while thinking about Horror of Aakawee Rob. I would be shocked if it did not come to your mind, as I know you are a huge fan of The never Ending Story in its multiple forms. Yeah, I think it did cross my mind, but I didn't ended up not incorporating it into the note to the discussion. But but yeah, ever Ending Story. Both the film and Michael Enda's original novel are both both very dear to me. So it's at some point I would like to perhaps do an ever ending story for Weird Helps. I think that there's a lot of fun stuff to talk about there as a refresher. This is picking up on what we talked about in that series about like ancient philosophers, at least in some cases, not seeming to be able to grasp the concept of empty space, like that they couldn't envision such a thing as they're being three dimensions of space and it being an existing space that had nothing in it. I think that for some of them, for example, like Aristotle, they just thought, well, if there's nothing in it, then it can't exist, because there's got to be something somewhere for something to exist. Of Course, now we know that, you know, space is in a way not nothing because space has property, is like, there are characteristics of space, So it's not the same thing as non existence. Though, then you start getting into questions about like, well, what would it mean for non existence to this? Could that? Is that even a coherent concept? Um? But yeah, so so I don't know where the nothing from the Never Ending Story falls in there? Is it? Is it like is it like sort of a destructive force or just a negation force? How would you characterize it? Rob? Well, Um, I'd need to revisit the novel to really get in, I mean to really get in deep there, because the novel definitely goes deeper on a lot of these concepts and and is very contemplative on various paradoxes, because the first half of the novel is essentially the movie, but then there's an entire second half of the adventure that's kind of like I would I would compare it easily to Doon Messiah. You know. It's like the first one is the rise of the of a tray you and the Rise of Bastion, and in the second half of the novel is kind of I wouldn't say it's necessarily about his fall, but it's about sort of what what happens after one achieves power, or what happens after one achieves their dreams, et cetera. There's a lot of a lot of fun, weird stuff that happens in the second part as well. Uh, some of which is reflected in the never Ending Story too the movie, but but not really. That's that one's kind of a mass but it has some many monsters in it. But anyway, the nothing um, I guess the short version is that the nothing is um it's it's it's a vacancy. Yeah, it's it's. It's it's it's that it is erasure as well, but it's also not a conscious entity. It is um it's kind of a result, and there are agents behind the nothing that are pushing it. And in in the book they really some of the characters really get into doupth describing or sort of teasing what those powers beyond the nothing are. All right, there's a second half of Michael's message here. Michael goes on to say, for a different concept on the same topic. Part of my job involves writing legal documents, and one of the things many people have probably seen but never really put much thought into, is when a page ends before the document ends, and instead of leaving a true blank space, you will see a box in the document that reads this space intentionally left blank. It's always something I have to stop to think about. Is this blank space too big and therefore needs filler? Or can I leave a few lines empty at the end of the page without upsetting the expectation of the document's fullness. Thanks for everything you do, Michael. I actually went to read about like the history of you know these this page intentionally left blank markings and stuff to see if there was anything really interesting about it. Not really, I mean, I think it's mostly just like to avoid the avoid confusion about whether you're looking at a printing error or something like it. You know, was this space supposed to be here? Or did something get left out that line? Just as sure as you nothing was left out. I don't remember if this actually happened. I remember I had a creative writing teacher once who said that they knew an author who tried to get their publishers behind the idea of including a large chunk of blank pages in the at the end of the novel that he was having published, because you wanted the ending to feel more sudden and more of a surprise. So you would be reading through it and you'd be like, oh, it's over now, Oh my goodness. Which I don't think the publishers end up going for that, but you do. You still get that experience occasion. I had that experience pretty recently with a book where I didn't realize, like reading on a kindle, I didn't realize that there was a glossary and some sort of extra bit on the end of the novel, and so when it ended, I was like, oh, wow, we're already there, and I was a little surprised. That's a great idea to have surprise for the ending, but yeah, I feel like you couldn't do it with blank pages because you just noticed that too easily. I mean, even if you're not reading ahead, you just kind of notice that the end of the book didn't have anything on it. I feel like you'd have to fill it up with Laura ipsum or something thing. Yeah, And I do think it's more gracefully achieved by having some sort of extra material at the end. Or sometimes if it's like a you know, an author with other books, or sometimes not even the same author, you'll sometimes have like a preview of another book at the end of a book, and that can kind of accomplish the same goal, unless you're really checking your watch on a book, which I've certainly had that situation as well, But you're like, how how long does this go on? Yeah? Maybe there's some sort of a glosser at the end. Crap, there's not. Yeah, Well, anyway, let's see Rob. Do you want to do this? Next message from John? Yeah. This one is in a response to a couple of episodes that Seth and I did on hidden tracks while you were out on paternity leave. John Right, Sollo, Rob, Joe and Seth hiding a track either as a track after the last listed track or after a long silent break in that track is all too common. As you say, I remember learning of a different form of hidden track back in the early days of compact discs, back in the mid nineteen eighties, specifically the hidden zero track. It didn't always work, I suppose it varied by how the manufacturers programmed their players. But if you put a CD in, press play in, then rewound the track track back before the first song started, there was another song hidden there. I remember I had. They might be giants and rim discs with tracks like this, but I haven't heard them in years because I only have a computer CD DVD drive these days and it doesn't work with this zero track hack. This type of hidden track is popular enough there is a Wikipedia page listing many of them, not nearly as many there as on the more standard version hidden track page. This link is the main page linking to an alphabetical list of performers who have hidden tracks on their albums, and John includes a couple of links here. Thanks for another great episode, John, I was really combing through the list of album containing hidden tracks to try to find one where it's like, oh yeah, I remember this one. Um, I know I had an album with a hidden zero track, but I can't remember what it was, And all the ones I could find on here that I recall were like, yeah, ones where it just plays after the last track on the CD, after a big gap, like remember there's a there's a Queens of the Stone Age album that had a track like that. But anyway, looking through this list, the funniest example I found was that there are allegedly two Jimmy Buffett albums with hidden tracks, and trying to imagine Jimmy Buffett fans kind of mashing the buttons on their CD players was it was a strongly amusing image. One of the albums that as a hidden track is allegedly called Banana wind h Well, you know, don't The profit can be very cryptic in his messages. Yeah, I'm looking at this list as well, and uh, I think I'm familiar with some of these albums, Like there's an Autecher album on here, there's some DJ Food and DK. But I think most of the artists on here that I'm into I got into after I was done with CD players, so I don't really have any experience with the track zero on their their work. It is amusing that some of these artists did it more than once, where they're like, that was great, Let's do that again. Oh, I Monster is also in here. That's another band that I really I really liked this album from two thousand and three, never odd or even M But again I got that album digitally at some point, and I have no experience with the CD. Okay. This next message is in response to our series on t This is from Jake. Let's see and there there are a couple of subtopics here. Jake begins by responding to our discussion on bertrand russell teapot, analogy that was a tangent we did in one of our episodes, and Jake compares Russell's teapot to the now very well known satirical deity called the flying Spaghetti Monster, which is an omnipotent wad of pasta containing several meatballs. Jake writes quote referring to the spaghetti Monster quote. This started as a similar type of thought experiment to the teapot and Carl Sagan's Invisible Dragon, but more explicitly designed to look like Christianity. In the years since the original website went up, people have adopted the trappings of it as a religion, entering it as their faith on census forms, winning court cases, to be allowed to wear a colander on their heads for official id as it is religious headgear, and even churches with dedicated priests and regular services. And yeah, Jake, this is interesting because we covered some aspects of this in an episode we did many years ago now, and I haven't heard it in a long time, so I don't know how our discussion holds up. But we were talking about a framework called hyper real religions, which was basically a sociology of religion concept to describing postmodern religions that are consciously based on explicitly fictional ideas, often from pop culture. So there were a bunch of examples, but one of them was Jediism, a religion based on the Jedi Order from the Star Wars universe. And the Flying Spaghetti Monster religion was another one. Though it began as a parody, it sort of evolved to have more, I don't know, things, kind of like a real religion would have. And I think what's interesting is that a lot of these religions by now seem to have at least some members who claim to practice them sincerely, not just as a joke or a parody or a way of making a point, though obviously a lot of them kind of started that way. And this phenomenon's interesting to me because it suggests a religion can arise without a starting point of literalist enchantment with the myths. Like no one starts out by having a literal belief in the existence of Jedi knights in the Force. Everybody understands Star Wars is fiction. But nevertheless, you can kind of work up to a feeling of sincere belief about a religion, I guess through actions or contemplation, maybe through ritual repetition or just ongoing discourse, you know, repeatedly talking about the central ideas. And even if it starts just as a joke or something that you did just for fun, it can kind of become serious to you. And this in turn makes me wonder about the origins of traditional religions. Like I've said this on the show before, but I mean this really, Like, are we so sure that the authors of the Book of Genesis meant, for, say, the six day Creation story to be taken as a literal, factual account of where everything came from? Or is it possible they might have said, we don't know where everything came from, We don't know how it came to be, but here is an interesting story that we tell, and this story maybe has some things to say about our culture. And another thing this connects to is something I just believe is true about people. If we spend enough time being interested in something, even in a totally ironic way, over time our interest will start to become more earnest. I think that's just a feature of human psychology. If you consistently spend your time thinking and talking about something as a joke, you will end up thinking and talking about it with a kind of with a more sincere appreciation, finding serious meaning in it. And you could chalk this up to a number of different things. You could say it's a kind of like sunk cost fallacy about your own time and efforts thinking and talking about that thing. Or you could say that it's just that, you know, the more you think about anything, the more it just you notice things about it that resonate in more profound ways. But anyway, uh, yeah, yeah, so I think that that raises a lot of interesting questions. Yeah, yeah, this was this was a fun topic yeah, when we approached it back in the day. Again, I haven't listened to this and forever, so I don't know how it holds up either. But um, yeah, there were other things like Dudaism. I think it was a big one based on the dude from The Big Lebowski and uh, yeah, I don't know. It's it's it's interesting to think about. Um. You know, with Star Wars, for example, I would not say that I believe in Jediism or anything. But if you have a story like like Star Wars, and you like see you grow up with it, uh, if you find yourself returning to it, uh in difficult times, if you uh if if you have like a child who gets into it. You know, these have the last two have been my experience, or I guess all three have been my experience. Like you can find yourself um more attached to the material than you were previously. Uh. And and you know, not to the point again where I think Jediism is a thing or that the force is real or anything like that, but it kind of gets to the point where I like where there was a time where I would you know, I would maybe make fun of of elements and say the prequels. But nowadays it's like there's a there's a joke that's maybe like a little too hard on the Fall of Anakin Skywalker. I'm kind of like, you shouldn't joke about that. That's a serious story. A lot of people take that very seriously. I don't know, and I don't know why exactly, you know, but I think part of it is just, yeah, sort of like clinging to it a little bit during um, you know, in recent years, having a child grow up with it and see it through through his eyes and his experiences, you know, it kind of changes the way you approach some of it. If I can psychoanalyze you a little bit, Robert I, it seems to me, just based on things you've said to me, that a lot of this might be based in like showing the prequels to your son and appreciating them together. It's like when you see them again through the eyes of a child, that really makes you you experienced them in a whole new way. They come to me and something different to you. Yeah, which film that we've covered for Weird House should a religion be based upon? Though, if you had to had to push for your own hyper real religion. Well, you know, there are a couple of different ways to answer that question, because there are some that naturally invite occult interpretations. So you know, you get you got your done which horror, and you got your oh what's it called the Devil rides out? You know, like Christopher Lee in that movie is almost asking to be your your your priest and your shaman um. But on the other hand, i'd say, you know, transfers too, that that's got some real mythological gusto. Yeah, yeah, that's that's a pretty good pick, you know. And of course some of the films we've talked about do have actual mythologies at the heart of them, or they have they're based on fictional franchises that people have invested so much in that they they either achieve or nearly achieving hyper real status. For instance, The Keeper, which was the Russian adaptation of The Fellowship of the Rings. So I guess it'd be kind of like Russian Orthodox tokenism there. Oh yes, oh wait, I just thought to woor the Great, I mean to bore the Great is a god, so there you go. Oh but anyway, sorry, I gotta return to Jake's message. So concluding the section about the parody religion, Jake says, all this stuff maybe an indication that the flying Spaghetti Monster religion quote has transitioned from the realms of healing driftwood into the more mainstream territory of healing crystals. That's referring to another thing we said in the episode about how the ideas, even if there's no evidence for them, take on a feeling of plausibility just if they're more familiar than if unfamiliar. Okay, second half of Jake's message, he says, in more directly tea related talk, you ask for stories about listeners tea habits. Growing up, my parents always left the tea bag in the mug when drinking tea, so when I started drinking it, naturally this is what I did. I never really internalized that it was unusual until I was quite a lot older, although I learned fairly quickly that when making tea for guests, I should check if they wanted their tea bags removed. I've grown out of the habit since moving out, mainly because I have a small dog who loves to grab tea bags out of any mug left within his reach and cause a mess, throwing them around. Wow, But I do still occasionally indulge. I'd like it because the tea gets progressively stronger as you drink, so no two mouthfuls taste the same. Ghost without saying that, I don't have a problem with over steeped tea. Thanks again for the podcast. Keep up the great work. Regards Jake, This is great. Yeah, I mean it varies so much depending on what tea you're using. I guess like in my household, we drink a lot Againmacha tea. That's the one with the toasted rice, and it is amazing tea and one that I have found to be very forgiving of over steeping, especially on subsequent steeps. But even the first steep you can kind of let it go a little bit and it doesn't it too sharp or too strong. Other teas I have you have to It's like that first steep. You got to give it like thirty seconds otherwise you're dimmed. But I sometimes I do the Jake approach if I am drinking tea in the studio, because sometimes I don't give myself enough time to steep it before I go in, so I got to bring it in here with the tea bag still in, but with a little like ramikin or something to put the tea bag in when it's time to take it out. And that allows me to sort of like keep sipping and sort of fine tune it, like, am I there, yad, it's time to take it out. Maybe I can push it a little further and then like, okay, now it's the time. I used to assume that the reason that tea cups were served on a little saucer plate was so that you could take the tea bag out and put it on the plate. But then I thought the way that the saucer plates pre date the use of tea bags for steeping. I'm sure like that goes back to a time when you just have the loose leaves in the in the pot and you pour it out of the spout. Right, I assume I've never really looked into that. I had an aunt who would reportedly she was a great aunt, who would reportedly with coffee or tea, I forget which would pour the tea or coffee into the saucer so that it could cool, which I that's not the right way to use it, right, This has to be a novel use of the cup and saucer. I get you know what I imagine. I bet it's to rest your teaspoon on. If you're stirring like milk indoor sugar into your tea, you got a little teaspoon that goes on the saucer. I bet that's why the saucer was invented. Yeah, spillage maybe as well. I don't know. Yeah, see, we should goose should do a whole invention on just spitball. Yeah, okay, let's see. Oh, Rob, do you want to do this short one from Jeremy about Finn McCool. Oh yeah, yeah, we've been rearing the Finn McCool episodes from last year. As we approached Saint Patty's Day again, Jeremy rights, Hello, Robert and Joe. While listening to the recent Select's episode about Finn McCool, had just reached the point of describing the Giants Causeway when I rode past a sculpture representing the same formation. So to be clear, Jeremy's not driving past the actual Giants Causeway, but just something that looks like it and seems to be intentionally crafted to look like it, And they included a picture for us appears to be made out of concrete pieces. How would you describe this concrete hexagons, little columns. I guess it's to resemble the columnar basalt. But I've never seen anything like this before, and I tried to google it to figure out what. Jeremy does not say where this is. So I was googling giants causeway sculpture came up with zips, So I don't know. Yeah, you'd have to do like a deep search based on the There's some sort of a big house in the background, kind of a manor house, but I know who knows what that is really creepy with this, Yeah, Jeremy continues, since it appears your podcasting powers have now reached the point of auto generation. I was momentarily concerned the giants would be next, but fortunately neither of them appeared. Should I be concerned about listening to future episodes? Winky face best regards Jeremy. Well, Jeremy, I think you may soon be driving and find a gray whale encrusted with barnacles laying across the road, so be careful going around the tight corners. But thanks for writing him. This is amusing. I gotta kick out of this, and it does make me wonder about it. This has the there's an intentionality to this work. This appears to be an actual work of art here. This is not just we encounter a lot of stuff. I guess this encountered this everywhere, but particularly in the American South, you find a lot of sort of like junkyard art that is kind This seems to be kind of you know, there's an intentional, outsider art approach to it, but there's also just sort of like the effect of stuff piling up. And I don't get that feel from what we're looking at here. Oh no, no, this is a sculpture, definitely. Yeah. You kind of want to climb on it like it looks. I'm surprised there's no children on it here. I always want to climb on everything. All right, I think we should call today's episode there. We've got a few messages about Weird House, but we will We'll save those for next week. All right. Just remindered everybody that Listener Mail publishes here on Mondays and the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed. Yeah, if you want to keep up with what we're doing on the show, really subscribe to a feed somewhere. That's the best way to do it because we don't really we don't really do much in the way of letting folks know on social when there's a new episode or any of that right now, So subscribing is the best way to do it, and it helps off the show. But let's see what else we got going on. We got Tuesday, Rob, Can I add something though? Yes, yeah, as our bosses have told us many times, at least some podcast platforms out there, I think Apple Apple Podcasts has been singled out there. There may be some weirdness going on with people who are subscribed to our podcast, but the platform stops auto downloading even though you didn't tell it to do that. So if you're a fan of the show and you want to make sure you're always getting our new stuff, go in. Make sure that you are, Make sure that you're subscribed if you meant to be. Make sure that auto downloads are turned on. Even if you had them turned on before. Somehow they might have gotten turned off on their own. I don't know why they do that, but that's what we've heard happens, so just check on that. And we've also been told that on some platforms, again specifically Apple Podcasts, it may stop downloading episodes even if you have it set to download episodes if you haven't listened to the last x number maybe five episodes or something. So if you're one of those people out there who likes to let them, you know, save them up and then binge them, I mean, you know that that's your right. You do that if that's what you want, but just be aware that may stop episodes from downloading. So if you want to make sure you're always getting new episodes downloaded and you want to help us out, a good idea might be to just try to stay as current as you can, or listen to at least one fresh episode per week, even if you are saving them up to benj them on the weekends or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, that way they'll digitally manifest on your device so that they can physically manifest in the world as you drive around. So again, he has stuff to blow your mind. Podcast feed Core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, listenermail on Mondays. On Wednesdays, a short form artifact or monster fact, and then on Friday's Weirdhouse Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a strange film huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Pauseway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.