Listener Mail: Beans and Babel

Published Jul 18, 2022, 10:01 AM

Once more, it's time for a weekly dose of Stuff to Blow Your Mind and Weirdhouse Cinema listener mail...

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind listener mail. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And today it is Monday, the day of the week. We readback some messages you've sent into the show account. Which we often say at the end of the show, but we should say it up front. It is contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com if you ever want to get in touch. Let's see. So I'm going to start off with this message from Josh, which has to do with your interview on story Machines and UH and our episodes own document duplication. All right, Well, just a reminder when we get into these stories, if you want to create one yourself, you can go to story hyphen Machines dot net UH and you can try it out for yourself. Josh says, Hey, Robert and Joe. Oh, I've been having so much fun playing around the story generating AI you guys recently talked about. I used this as an opportunity to throw back to one of my favorite episodes that you guys have done, discussing the Library of Babel, the mind bending thought provoking nature of the whole concept of stuck with me. Since I heard the episode years ago. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to know what would happen if one could actually find the book, the one that holds the key to the mysteries of the library. I give you title the book, and then if I'm reading the punctuation here right, I think Josh begins with the with the the feed incidents. After wandering for countless years in the library of Babel, I had finally stumbled upon the book. From here, the Machine rights a tone of unimaginable knowledge and power. It contained the secrets to all things. I could control the elements, some in spirits, and even travel through time. With this book, I could become the most powerful being in the Uni Verse. But the book had a price. In order to read it, I had to sacrifice my own soul. I hesitated for a moment, but then decided that it was worth it. I opened the Tone and began to read. But as I did, something began to change within me. The power of the book was intoxicating, and I began to feel like I was in control. The longer I read, the more I became consumed by the magic of the tone. I didn't notice when the other library patrons began to disappear or when the police arrived to take the book away. All I could focus on was the knowledge contained within the pages. And then suddenly the book was gone. I was alone, naked and exposed to the elements. The price of the book had been my soul. Josh says he left the story as it was generated on the first attempt, but was very attempted to change the word police into the word inquisitors to fit more with the original story. But he says it, but oh well, I'm still satisfied. Thanks and keep up the good work. Josh. PS. If you want to throw in another thought of mine, as this is my first time writing in I briefly wanted to touch on the document bloat that you guys mentioned in your fact similar episodes. I work in healthcare and the documentation slash note writing burden is definitely one of the largest contributors to healthcare worker burnout. This is made worse by the fact that certain notes are required to have certain content for insurance and billing purposes, even if not exactly useful to the readers. Slash other healthcare providers. To be efficient in reviewing a patient's chart, one has to become very good at skimming and inordinate volume of text in order to identify and use some small piece of actually useful information. With the ease of electronic charts, digital copying, etcetera, it has certainly paved the way for medical documentation to explode in terms of the amount to write and a few. While there are definitely benefits to electronic charting, the note bloat that has overtaken the system is certainly a barrier and burden for much of day to day practice. That's all for now, Josh, Well, thanks for writing in, Josh. Uh. I enjoyed the note bloat note here, but as as I've been enjoying, I really enjoyed this UH, this bit of AI assisted text here. I think the the impulse to go back and change just a few things to perfect it, I think that that probably speaks volumes regarding where we're going to be going with AI human creative endeavors in the future. Well, yeah, Robert, I don't know exactly how this UH meshes with your thinking, but it seems to me unlikely that at any point and even the middle distant future that AI is going to be able to write stories that are truly compelling from beginning to end in a way that you know, would be like the stories humans could tell. But I can certainly see how they could be a tool for human writers. There's sort of a way of generating interesting ideas that can fuel the real creativity that takes place in the human brain. Yeah, yeah, it's it'll probably what's the name of the little paper clip that used to pop up on computers clippy clippy like clip, you will pop up and instead of saying, oh, I see your writing a letter, and be like, oh, I see your writing a sci fi thriller involving robots and pets. I have a few few ideas for how we might devolve the plot. Yeah, I see that your story has an infinite book. Would you like to have your protagonists lose their soul? Absolutely? All right? Well, you know next we're gonna we're gonna get into some leftovers, and you know what's better when it comes to leftovers than beans uh. This is a response to our Vault episode on beans uh. This is a fun exploration in which we we got to really get into some of like the supernatural ideas around beans uh continues to fascinate me. But this is what ghost Rock had to say. Hello Robert and Joe. Longtime listener, first time emailer. Thank you to you and your whole team for the excellent podcast. I love thinking about the topics you've talked about in ways I had never considered, as well as just the sheer fun of your lighthearted approach. On listening to the rebroadcast or re podcast of reconsider the Being Part two, a funny memory resurfaced in my brain. Many years ago. David Letterman had a daytime talk show predating the late night TV show. Wow that Yeah, that would have been many years ago for sure. For some reason, yeah, yeah, for some reason. The only memory I have of it was an ad for the show featuring a fake cooking segment, and it went something like this, Today I'm cooking with David Letterman. I'll show you how to make three bean salad with only one kind of being and magic markers. Thanks again for all you do and keep up the good work. Ghost Rock. I've never seen this show, but that sounds funny because who doesn't want to taste a magic marker? You know your kids all have that experience. You're sitting there, You're looking at the colors. You're like, these markers have different colors, just like skittles have different colors, and the different colors on the skittles are flavors, So the markers must have flavors too, right, It's it's logic. Well, this implies to there's really no taste difference in the beans that say business like Rancho Gordo is just one guy with a magic mark with a few different magic markers and one type of bean, and and he's just coloring them with different markers and sending them out as different varieties. This actually got me thinking about something, the three beans salad joke. I was talking to Rachel about this before we recorded. Uh. I must admit that as much as I respect beans and I love beans, I enjoy eating them, I find the phrase three beans salad immensely unappealing. And perhaps this is related to the fact that I also love pasta, but generally experienced revulsion that the idea of pasta salad and just personal preference. If you like these things, that's great, but for me, like there are some things that work great tossed in a vitigrette, and served cold. And those things do not include feusily noodles and kidney beans. Well, I have to agree to disagree. I do love a good bean salad. I love a good pasta salad. I guess three beans salad. It also kind of implies there just three beans in there, which which is also not accurate. I think it's often like, I don't know, it's like green beans. That's a little misleading, even though it is the same species. That's still your old fazziolist. That's just you know, without being shocked from the contato. Yeah, so fresh green beans. And then I think usually kidney beans and one other thing I don't know, candellini beans or something, but I don't know. Again, I love beans, but I think when they're cold that they have a kind of more um merely kind of crystallized starch texture that I do not enjoy as much as I enjoy the creamy texture of a hot bean. That's my take. All right, Well, let's move along. Looks like we have a little bit of weird house cinema correspondents to get into here. Yeah, let's see. Oh well, so before we get the weird house cinema, there's one that's about previous listener mail, but then sort of trending in the weird house direction. So this concerns the previous listener mail about local horror hosts. Remember the talk was about, you know, they used to show like old horror movies on TV and it wouldn't be just the movie. You'd have Al Lewis or Al Elvira or somebody there like introducing the parts of the movie, making jokes about it, doing the commercial breaks and so forth. And and we were talking about the you know, distinct pleasures of watching a movie that way, especially wanting to find out about all the local media market horror hosts that were less familiar with uh So here we heard from Pat. Pat says enjoyed the listener mail today. I got the impression you were unaware of the quote shock package sold to local television stations by screen Jim's in the late fifties. The horror hosts you mentioned were in many cities. Mine was Zacherle, So I looked up Zacharly. I was not previously familiar. I think this is somebody named John Zacherley who did work as a horror host but also had like a horror comedy novelty rock and roll songs from the fifties, including one called a Dinner with Drack in ninety eight. Rob, I think we should listen to that for a moment and then comment on it or dessert there was batwing confetti and the veins of a mommy named Betty. I first frowned upon it, but catch up on it. It tasted very much like spaghetti. I just want to point out that Dinner with Drack does predate the Monster Ash, so if one is a rip off of the other, it's it's Monster Mash that came later. Yeah. It definitely lands in the expected zone for what novelty hard track should be. But it's pretty fun too. It has like a little bit of um what a screening Jay Hawkins kind of vibe to it without being that outlandish and bad in your face. Yeah, it's got a real ripping saxophone lead. Uh, and the lyrics are like we I was dining with Drack at his house by the sea, and but I choked on my wine when I discovered the main course was me classic, classic, good, good, but not quite as good as lay Law as monster rapping. Is that the first time we've mentioned Monster rapping on the show Monster Rapping. Uh, No, we definitely talked we've I think we've talked about it a little bit, um Monsters wrapping, the crypt Keeper rap and so forth group Keeper jam. Was it? No? No, no, the song Monster Rapping? Remember the law a Monster rapping? Oh, the one that is a very early dr dre worked on. Yeah. I don't think we've talked about it on the show, have we? But Oh, that's a that's an obscure but wonderful track that everyone should, well not everyone, some people should look up if you want, you know, everyone should. It's awesome lay law l A y l a W Monster Wrapping. It's beautiful, it is, it's it's one of the best novelty Halloween tracks you could possibly find. Oh anyway, But to finish Pat's message about the shock package sold by screen Gems in the late fifties, um Pat says the package included many of the Universal Studios classic monsters. My family made a Saturday night for many years with these movies. Hey, that's good family time. Often the print was very bad, poor sound, crazy edits scratches. When these films were remastered, many seemed like a new film. Thanks again, Pat. Yeah, yeah, thanks for pointing this out. Yeah, the Shock Theater or Shock package a bunch of what pre nineteen horror films and you can pull up a list of these online. There's a wicky about them. Uh yeah, some great stuff on that list. I don't know the whole story that. It makes me wonder, like, did they send out a like a a daytime horror host kit. Uh, They're like, you're gonna have to develop your own host. We can't supply that. Here are some useful props to consider. Here is some Google makeup to put on. Somebody. Find someone in your organization that can do this. All right, here's another one that someone comes to us from Jason. Jason says, Hi, guys love the podcast, particularly the Weird House Cinema episodes. I thought your review of Robot Jocks was great and wanted to let you know I saw this film in the theater at least half a dozen times in my early teens. Yes, I was a total nerd, and I don't regret it for a minute. I was surprised, though, that you didn't mention Gary Graham appearing in Star Trek Enterprise alongside one of the greatest ever wait for it, the one and only Jeffrey Combs playing an and Dorian commander with one broken antenna, which was never explained. Of course, Mr Combs is absolutely one of the most underrated actors ever, and if you were a fan, you should buy all means check out the Justice League Unlimited animated series where he does the voice of the question a hardcore conspiracy theorist who holds nothing back. Hearing him explain that the plastic tips of shoelaces are called aglets and that they serve quote a far more sinister purpose is pure gold. Thanks again for all the great content you put out there, and keep up the good work, Jason ps. Including this pick that I thought Robert would enjoy, and it is uh a trio of images. We have the Enterprise here, the U. S. S Enterprise, and it's as faster than light travel in fiction. Uh, Star Trek we use warp engines, and then we see a star Destroyer to the Star Wars we use hyper drives, and then we see a ship from Warhammer forty thousand and it says, uh, we traveled through Hell, which is true. That's that's how they got to get around. Basically that I think that's come up on the show before because we commented that must have been the inspiration for Event Horizon. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of people have have connected those two, and again Event Horizon was not shy about taking, uh, borrowing ideas from other properties and sort of stitching together into into into the movie. Um, so yeah, they might have. They might very well have been inspired by by Warhammer to create their what turned out to be a hell Drive in that movie. So I've never heard of this DC character the question before this is the one that was voiced by Jeffrey Combs in the cartoon. But that sounds like a great idea. I've always thought we should have a superhero version of Dale Gribble. Yeah. I wasn't failiar with this guy either, but I even I mean, DC has been around for so long. Yeah, they a rich rogues gallery. Uh and then they're always getting retooled and rediscovered and recreated to uh to to to to re debut in comics and in comic book related properties. But I agree Jeffrey Combs, there's nothing like a Jeffrey Combs performance. I guess um he was in The Giver. Remember he shows at the very end as the scientist who's doing some kind of unethical experiment. Then he suddenly turns into one of the big jiggling monsters, and then I think it's uh disemboweled because the mcguffin gets thrown down his mouth. Yeah, we haven't watched a pure Jeffrey Combs movie yet, like something in which he stars, So I don't know. I don't know if there there's one out there that would be the right fit. Well, I don't think it's a good movie at all, but I just do want to remind you that the third Reanimator movie is the one with that techno that euro disco song in it where the chorus is reanimate your feet. Oh yes, yes, all right, Well, on that note, we're gonna go ahead and close out. But if we'd love to hear from everyone out there, if you have responses to any of the listener mails in this episode, right in, if you have responses to oh, current, past, future episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, a Weird how cinema, right in, we'd love to hear from you. In the meantime, you'll find core episodes of the show on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed on Wednesday's We Do Short Form artifact or monster Fact on Monday's We Do Listener mail, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film. Huge thanks, as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. 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. It's production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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