Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. Listener mail. This is Robert Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. And it's Monday, the day of each week that we read back messages from the Stuff to Blow your Mind mail bag. If you are a listener to the show and you've never gotten in touch before, why not give it a try. You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Any kind of message is fair game. Of course, feedback on recent episodes is always appreciated. If you have something interesting to add, if you have thoughts about us something we've talked about recently, or if you have corrections or updates or anything like that, all fair game. Send it to contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. But also if you just want to share something random that you thought we'd be interested in, or just send a friendly message, it's all welcome. Rob. I think we should start off with some responses to our series on bathing and beliefs about the supposed healing powers of immersion in water and various warm mineral springs and things like that. Rob, do you do you want to start us off reading this message from Fun Sure Fun Rides High Folks really enjoyed the episode on the cultures around bathing, and I'm looking forward to the rest of the series. I thought it would be interesting that fatigue was mentioned as something the ancient Romans believe could be helped by bathing, as I deal with chronic fatigue and always find starting my day with a hot shower boosts my energy. I think this is by virtue of relaxing my muscles and putting me in a good mood and ties in with the idea of the full body experience being an important aspect of this episode's topic. Well, yeah, on that note, I don't I don't have to contend with chronic fatigue, but I do find that a nice hot shower is definitely a boost, regardless of what part of the day I happen to take the shower in, Like, sometimes I'll take it first thing in the morning, sometimes later, sometimes you know, I'll take two, Sometimes I'll take one of the gym, one of the house. That sort of thing always like realigns the neurons in my experience. I was going to say exactly the same thing even without chronic fatigue. I find it is a hot shower is kind of a crucial part of my wake up routine. If I have to skip it, in a way, I kind of feel like I haven't woken up yet long end of the day. Yeah, they continue here relating to cold water. My strongest experience would be taking part in the Christmas Swim, going into the sea on Christmas morning with a few hundred others. There is always an intensely joyful social atmosphere and much talk of kickstarting the immune system. I suspect that therapeutic aspect here is the carthosis of collectively doing something that is a bit absurd, and of course getting cozy afterwards is very satisfying. Yeah. As we discussed in the episodes, While it seems there are some isolated cases like chronic lead poisoning where bathing probably does have a direct mechanism for healing, in most cases perceived health benefits from bathing are more likely psychological, based in either the placebo effect or in just you know, relaxation and positive effects on mood. Though that's not to discount these effects, because psychological benefits can be surprisingly powerful even to how you feel in the body. Yeah, the cold tub. The cold dip is of course a part of different different sauna and spa cultures. I know there's a There's Grean sauna that I have gone to in the past here in the Atlanta area, and they have they have a cold tub amid their hot tubs, and I see I would see people do the full immersion in the cold tub, and it's it's just too cold for me. I think I got down up to my neck in at once for maybe half a second, but that's the most I could do, too shocking from my system. And of course you see various like training videos of athletes doing the not only cold bath, but like an ice bath as part of their I guess like post workout regime. But yeah, I haven't researched that at all to to know like if that's something it's helpful with like sore muscles and so forth. But if nothing else, it definitely looks like they're getting a shock to the system. Okay, more from the message. This episode also got me thinking about scenes of bathing in Irish folklore stories I've read recently, namely Lady Gregory's translations from the early nineteen hundreds. There are regular occurrences of heroes being healed miraculously in baths with healing herbs. Could this be considered tea and often by bathing and broth? Bath and broth. I assume that means like a meat broth. Yeah, I'm imagining the feeling now. It's a little bit of gelatin clinging to your skin all over your body. Well, I mean it's off. And I've often seen it recommended that if you have itchy skin, you might put some oats in the bath with you. So there's a there's a thin line between culinary preparation and just a good bath, I guess anyway, the message continues. Immediate access to fresh bathing water also seemed important in these stories for greeting guests, and a great moment is when Kohland arrives somewhere in his godly fury the warp spasm. To avoid Kholand's wrath, his host put out three baths of cold water to literally quench his anger. When he gets into the first bath, all the water is immediately evaporated, the second boils over, and finally in the third bath he can cool down and relax. Oh man, I don't I don't remember encountering this in our past look at coholand but I love this. This is almost like a Loony Tunes level trying to cool down the hot anger of Koholand. Oh, it's also like a warp spasm version of the Three Bears. Like the first two beds aren't comfortable enough, the last one final works all right, and finally they turned a weird house on. Weird House sent him a note. Over the last few days, I had a bunch of older episodes on for some background listening, and during one film about giant fighting robots, a character used some kind of medical spray. I think it was in Robot Shocks, but it may have been a different giant robot picture. Anyway, you were wondering where you had seen this medical spray before, thinking perhaps it was in a video game. I was pretty sure it was in a Metal Gear Solid game, and indeed, after checking the wiki, the healing spray item appeared in MGSV but also quote resembles the first date spray from the Resident Evil series. Now at the end of this email, all I can think of is magical healing bath in a can. Thanks again for the great episodes, all the best. Well, thank you for jan I was definitely thinking of the healing spray from Resident Evil when I put this together. I think I specifically would have been thinking about Resident Evil for I don't know, like a zombie. I say, chunk out of your neck, and the way you get better is you take an aerosol can and spray yourself. There's some goodness. There's some other game that I played or replayed recently that in retrospect also had this. Maybe it was maybe it was X Calm. I have this vague memory of some sort of floating robot coming over and like hosing down a character with some sort of a spray to heal them up. I feel like it would make more sense if what you were being sprayed with was like nanobots like the ones from Jason X that going in repair all your tissue. I don't know exactly how just the regular spray works. It's a disinfectant, I suppose. Yeah. All right, onto the next message about the washing of the waters. This is from Sean, and this one calls back to something we addressed in one of the episodes where at one of the warm springs in Ireland where there was allegedly a healing property, there was a source rob you were talking about that said people would like gather up a worm that lived in the spring, and the worm would be like in a cloth, and then they would rub that cloth on their eyes. And then the source also said people didn't leave the cloth hanging on a shrub nearby because there wasn't a saint associated with the spring. And we were mighty confused by this. We were like, wait, is this saying that they didn't leave a cloth because like a saint wasn't there to make them be altruistic or something. But Sean helps clear this up. High in relation to washing of the water's Part two, specifically folklore remedies from Ireland, it is tradition to leave items, typically cloth, hanging from the local bushes or trees at holy wells with the belief that it will be blessed by the saint of those waters and imbued with some property. The same can be seen of trinkets left on top of the site. This can be seen to this day amongst the countless wells across our landscape. Many also have some ritual in how they are approached or utilized. How much of these traditions stem from pagan versus strictly Christian practice. I cannot say. I suspect it is a syncretism, meaning a blending of different religious traditions, as there are pagan myths involving wells as sources of healing. This syncretism of older cultural practices can be seen amongst our art and stories in insular Christianity. A wider example can be seen of this on Saint Bridget's Day, where folks leave cloth outside the house to be blessed by her. I guess, meaning Saint Bridget. She is one of our three national saints, alongside comb Seal. I think that might also be known as Columba and Patrick, and typically is associated with protection and healing. I'm not so sure what the whole idea is regarding application of a worm in a soaked cloth onto the eye. A weak argument can be made general health improvements could be made from cleaning wounds with fresh water sources filtered by the rocks under the ground, or potentially the composition of the water having some effect, but I'd tend towards placebos. One example in which I cannot speak to the veracity of the claim involves I'll try to say this to buyer nanialt i e. The well at Glenn nanialt It's curative properties are said to stop madness again. It appears once or twice in general myths and local folklore. The unfaified claim relates to low levels of lithium having been identified in the water source, which could induce antidepressive or antipsychosis effects over time. We'll rob this connects to a note from our last episode on the beliefs about healing waters, specifically about so called lithium springs or lithium or lithia waters. I think you may confirm this. Our conclusions were that actual pharmacological effects from lithium springs would be really held back by dosage regulation issues. So it seemed fairly doubtful to us that people were really getting direct lithium treatment benefits from these supposed waters because often, like the lithium level was so low that it was like not anywhere close to what you would take as an actual medical dose, but even if it were higher, it would be unregulated in a way that might be dangerous. Yeah, exactly, Like during the time period that lithium water was initially really hot, Like that was the that was the problem, as people would then looked at the water to analyze the water and they said, whoa, there's actually little to no lithium in this water, so you're nowhere near at therapeutic dose. And I also want to again thanks to Sean, because this email came in before we did that episode, and so this email helped inform our treatment of the Lithia Waters segment of those episodes. Ah oh. And then finally Sean includes a Gaelic greeting saying regards and a happy Saint Patrick's Day to you. Sean. Well, thank you very much for the message. All right, we also heard from the Nation of Gems. I'm not sure which gym this says, if this is a past gem or a new gym, but this is not a gym from New Jersey, right right. This jem says, Hey, guys, I'm enjoying the Washing of the Water series. Rob is a fellow swimmer. Do you find the quiet and peacefulness of the water muffling the outside world to allow your mind to enter a contemplative contemplative state? I enjoy swimming for the physical exercise, but part of me enjoys the time I have to reflect and muse on what is going on in my day to day life. Thanks Jim. Well, that's a that's a great question. I may have touch based on this a little bit in the past, but I know when I'm swimming, I'm generally doing one of two things. Either I'm structuring my thoughts so as to keep track of what lane I'm on, Like on this lane, I'm only going to think about alien and then the second lap, I'm only going to think about aliens and then Alien three, etc. That seems to work. Or I'll do like a top five of something just to do things in chunks of five. But other times I will really sort of think structurally about about something I'm I'm putting together, like for the podcast or whatever, or some kind of like personal project or something, and I find that really rewarding. But yeah, so, yeah, there is something about the water muffling and so forth. There's still a lot to distract one if you let it distract you, in my experience, in like a YMCA pool, because you can still you can still let these you know, negative outside thoughts in you can let yourself get discouraged or frustrated with people and situations around you, even in the immediate vicinity so it's I don't know. I think about the experience of being like a lap swimmer a lot, like it's it's a bunch of people literally in their own lane, doing their own thing, and uh, and sometimes I worry that it's not, you know, it's not social enough, Like it's not there should be some sort of like built in way that we're communicating with each other instead of just doing our own things and and maybe eyeing each other less communally, you know. But yeah, I guess the water muffling is part of it. Like you're you know, you're literally submerging yourself into this, uh, this altered state of sensory perception. I think this is why people have a lot of thoughts in the shower. Also, it is not just that they are for the moment away from all their other tasks and devices and media sources and stuff, so they're alone with their own thoughts, but it's also the I think the noise of the shower, like the shower water coming down creates a white noise environment that helps you sort of like let your thoughts wander. I find that snorkeling can be even more relaxing. Snortling can also be like for me anyway, it can be kind of like high engagement, especially if I'm snorkeling in a place that I haven't been to before. The water is really cold. But if I'm like comfortable in a snortling environment and there's some interesting stuff to look at, that's really nice in my experience because you get that like part of it is not only the muffling of the water, but also the rhythmic breathing. Your own sound of your own breath through the snorkel is really calming in a way that you know, rhythmic breathing for lap swimming isn't okay. So I think we need to move on to some messages in response to our series on whales and Rob, You've got to read this first one from Evan because I think you are the Star Wars Extended Universe guy between us, and this one definitely concerns the outskirts of the cannon. Okay, all right, Evan Wright. Then it says, Hi, Rob and Joe love the show. Me and my wife have been listening for a long time. Keep up the amazing work related to the idea of whale barnacle armor. I was wondering if anyone else mentioned that Darth Bain, who lived about a thousand years before the films, at one point chose to allow himself to be covered with orbelisks, an insect or crustacean like creature. Joe, are you familiar with Darth Bain? Not at all? I assumed you would be. Well, it's not a story the Jedi would tell you anyway, Heaven continues. Their tough shells provided him with lightsaber and blaster proof armor, allowing him to take a purely offensive fighting style, as well as pain and a chemical that boosted his connection to the dark side, and they mentioned his terrifying appearance. It was not without downsides. They shortened his life and nearly killed him. While he needed the insects remove, he also needed to wear special armor to keep them from spreading and covering his face, hands, etc. Looking like a monster also limited his ability to appear in public and maintain his budding empire. The details can be found in the Great Bain Trilogy books by Drew Carpettien, which are wonderfully read with exceptional voice acting and sound effects in the official audio books as well. Me and my wife listen to it on Libby We are a Libby household as well. Great way to get your digital and audio library books. You could ask about it at your local library, as your card number will be needed. I attached a few images for fun. Okay, one's an illustration and one is a costume at a con or something. The illustration we got like a major evil looking bald boy who has got some kind of pyramid floating in his hand and a red lightsaber. And yes he does appear to be encrusted with some kind of gunk, almost almost barnacle like in fact. Yeah, this is an interesting approach to buio armor, which of course brings to mind something from Children of Doone. I don't want to spoil anything for anyone out there who hasn't gone that far in the Dune series. But as for Darth Baine himself, I haven't. I haven't read any of these books, but I have run across people saying they're good before, so yeah, at some point I might need to check them out. I haven't really explored that much from this time period of Star Wars lore. Well, thank you, Evan. Okay, we got a message from colmb Colms says, hey guys, just a quick one liner. Check out this story below good timing with the gray whale episodes, and so I put together some notes here from Colm's length. This is an article in The Guardian by Phoebe weston headline extraordinary sighting of Orca with baby pilot whale Astound's scientists. Now, yeah, a lot of what we discussed in that series was about orca's being the main natural pred ors of gray whales, and so there would be this migratory journey where the gray whale mothers and their calves would be going back up north along the western coast of North America, with the newborn calves having to be escorted by the mothers because the new worn calves are vulnerable to predation by orcas. But in this case it's orca parenting behavior. So an adult orca appeared to be sort of guiding and protecting this little whale from a different species, a pilot whale. And this happened near Snifflesness, a peninsula on the western side of Iceland, where I have actually been, and that's a really cool place, awesome landscape. I don't know if it's normally like this, but when I was there, the wind quite literally almost knocked me off my feet. It was the windiest place I've ever been. But anyway, so I found that the citation of the scientific paper documenting this observation in the orcas, This was by Marie Teresa Marucha at All published in the Canadian Journal of Zoology, called first account of apparent aloparental care of a long finned pilot whale calf by a female killer whale, and this was just this year twenty twenty three. To read from Phoebe Weston's article in The Guardian, quote, the ship's crew initially thought it was a very small killer whale calf swimming alongside the orca, but photos later confirmed what Muchoks suspected that the female, called Sidis, appeared to be looking after a newborn long finned pilot whale and then a different quote from the article, Although this is the first time this behavior called interspecific alo parenting, has been observed in orcas, it has been seen in other cetacean species. Short beaked common dolphins, common bottle noses, Indian Ocean humpbacks and Indo Pacific humpbacks have all been observed looking after the young of other species. Well, that is very interesting also definitely a different side to see after thinking about the predatory capacity of the Orcas almost exclusively for several episodes there. It's very interesting and not to anthropomorphize too much, but I will say heartwarming. Yeah, I think if nothing else, it does just remind us that orcas are complex creatures, intelligent creatures with a lot going on, and that we shouldn't be too quick to dismiss them as one thing or another. Oh but hey, one more quick response to the series we did on whales. We got a message from Mike. Mike's message was featured in a previous Listener Maile episode. This was the one about Mike had had an experience where he was out surfing and he found himself directly in the path of it was a baleen whale. I think it was a humpback I'm sorry if I remember that. Yes, yeah, a humpback whale trying to feed, doing like lunge feeding on schools of something maybe small fish near the surface, and Mike ended up having a profoundly stirring encounter with one of the whale's eyes as it sort of gently pushed him out of the way. So Mike got in contact to say thanks for reading his whale story, and then he added something else just to summarize. He said his work involves some connection to generative AI, so he made some images. He attached, first of all, an image based on a description of his encounter with the Humpbacks, and of that image, Mike says, it fails to capture the burning intellect of the whale, but accurately captures the chaos and surreal surreality of the experience. And it shows a kind of strange, sort of glyph faced human underneath a whale that's breaching the surface, as there are fish all throughout the sky, sort of exploding from the water's surface. There. Yeah, these were neat to scroll through. But then the second thing is so that was his encounter. He also had He also generated a bunch of images for movie posters for a film concept that is not a real movie. It's one mic dreamed up and that concept is scanner whales. That's that's very good. M M. Yeah, there might be something too that The scanner whale poster is of a very seventies look. I really like them. And one of them shows what appears to be like a whale with a sort of X ray image where you're looking at I guess it's skeleton, but it's not a whale skeleton. It looks like sort of a combination of a whale skeleton with like a deflated basketball, or maybe like a card that's been in a in an accident and it's all crunched up. It's it's very interesting. M Yeah, I could imagine this sort of thing fitting into that. That that that sort of weird period of dolphin and whale based cinema, you know, which also kind of has its carkins back to the successive Jaws. Are we talking Day of the Dolphin or are we talking talking about free Willie? Not so much free Willie, thinking more about Day of the Dolphin. Also certainly thinking about the nineteen seventy seven film Orca, which which we were talking about a little bit when we were recording these episodes. Not a movie I recommend anyone watch, but I'm a movie that I remember watching part of I Think on A and E as a kid, and it has some very disturbing scenes in it, started of course Richard Harris. Anyway, Mike says, thanks absolutely, love stuff to blow your mind. In weird House, looking forward to more, all right, speaking a weird House let's go ahead and do one last listener mail. This will be a weird house related directly from Levi Levi Ride. Hello guys. A recent backpacking trip to the Red River Gorge had me binging all my podcasts, but I was gleefully surprised to listen to your latest Weird House Cinema episode, which is quickly becoming my favorite podcast. Growing up, my dad was our media curator, and as a result, we watched all the great classic sci fi movies, campy westerns, The Twilight Zone, etc. Somewhere in the mix was this story that absolutely enthralled me as a child, about a man who starts shrinking and goes on incredible adventures in his inning. In his inbiginning home, I had vivid memories of a tiny man fighting off a basement creature with a needle spear, but I always assumed this was an episode of The Twilight Zone. Over the years, whenever I thought about it, I would pull out my box set of the show and try to find that lost episode, to no avail. Just last week, a video from the YouTube channel Corridor Crew pulled a scene from a movie to react to, and lo and behold, it was the incredible shrinking man. I was instantly nostalgic and so relieved to find the source of those black and white memories. So you can likely imagine the sheer delight when I discovered that you Fellas had given this movie the weird House deep dive treatment only days after. I was reminded of how much inspired me as a boy. Also to Joe's comment about wanting to see water portrayed as dangerous at miniature scale, another bit of childhood sci fi nostalgia finds me recalling a book in the Danny Dunn series, Danny Dunn and the Smollifying Machine, in which there is a lot of talk about being careful not to lean against water droplets for fear of breaking the surface tension, falling in and becoming trapped. Wonderful job is always wonderful movie. Thanks so much for all your hard work, guys. Leavin Oh, thanks Leavitt. That's exactly what I was talking about. How I feel like I got to go back and read this book. I've never even heard of it. Yeah, just look at what a series of young reader books from I'm just judging by the title the cover page, I'm thinking seventies or eighties looks like it. There's a bunch of I mean, there's a picture of a kid's face. He looks a little like alfredy Newman. I don't think he's supposed to. And then there is there's like a giant grasshopper, and I don't know kids playing all around it. Well, I've looked it up. Now. There are fifteen books in the Danny Dunn series, and Danny Dunn and the Smollifying Machine is actually from nineteen sixty nine, though that cover I was looking at, of course, certainly could be from subsequent decades. But yeah, this is the whole series. I don't know anything about amazing. All right, Well, we're gonna go and close things out here, but we'd love to hear from everyone out there if you have thoughts on oh, baths, swimming whales, smollifying machines, and shrinking movies. If you have comments or feedback on past episodes, current episodes, future episodes of stuff to blow your mind of the artifact, the Monster fact or of course, episodes of Weird House Cinema right in, we would love to hear from you. Well, I'm sure we mentioned this in our two most recent Weird House episodes, but definitely right in about your favorite shrink movies. What shrink movies are we missing out on? Yeah, I mean there are plenty of great ones. It just depends on how small do you want to go. I don't know if they're all over top the Simpsons, Treeouse, Horror with Lisa and the Tooth, but there's a lot of room to explore. Okay, so oh huge, Thanks as always to our audio producer J J. 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, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. Listener mail. This is Robert Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. And it's Monday, the day of each week that we read back messages from the Stuff to Blow your Mind mail bag. If you are a listener to the show and you've never gotten in touch before, why not give it a try. You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Any kind of message is fair game. Of course, feedback on recent episodes is always appreciated. If you have something interesting to add, if you have thoughts about us something we've talked about recently, or if you have corrections or updates or anything like that, all fair game. Send it to contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. But also if you just want to share something random that you thought we'd be interested in, or just send a friendly message, it's all welcome. Rob. I think we should start off with some responses to our series on bathing and beliefs about the supposed healing powers of immersion in water and various warm mineral springs and things like that. Rob, do you do you want to start us off reading this message from Fun Sure Fun Rides High Folks really enjoyed the episode on the cultures around bathing, and I'm looking forward to the rest of the series. I thought it would be interesting that fatigue was mentioned as something the ancient Romans believe could be helped by bathing, as I deal with chronic fatigue and always find starting my day with a hot shower boosts my energy. I think this is by virtue of relaxing my muscles and putting me in a good mood and ties in with the idea of the full body experience being an important aspect of this episode's topic. Well, yeah, on that note, I don't I don't have to contend with chronic fatigue, but I do find that a nice hot shower is definitely a boost, regardless of what part of the day I happen to take the shower in, Like, sometimes I'll take it first thing in the morning, sometimes later, sometimes you know, I'll take two, Sometimes I'll take one of the gym, one of the house. That sort of thing always like realigns the neurons in my experience. I was going to say exactly the same thing even without chronic fatigue. I find it is a hot shower is kind of a crucial part of my wake up routine. If I have to skip it, in a way, I kind of feel like I haven't woken up yet long end of the day. Yeah, they continue here relating to cold water. My strongest experience would be taking part in the Christmas Swim, going into the sea on Christmas morning with a few hundred others. There is always an intensely joyful social atmosphere and much talk of kickstarting the immune system. I suspect that therapeutic aspect here is the carthosis of collectively doing something that is a bit absurd, and of course getting cozy afterwards is very satisfying. Yeah. As we discussed in the episodes, While it seems there are some isolated cases like chronic lead poisoning where bathing probably does have a direct mechanism for healing, in most cases perceived health benefits from bathing are more likely psychological, based in either the placebo effect or in just you know, relaxation and positive effects on mood. Though that's not to discount these effects, because psychological benefits can be surprisingly powerful even to how you feel in the body. Yeah, the cold tub. The cold dip is of course a part of different different sauna and spa cultures. I know there's a There's Grean sauna that I have gone to in the past here in the Atlanta area, and they have they have a cold tub amid their hot tubs, and I see I would see people do the full immersion in the cold tub, and it's it's just too cold for me. I think I got down up to my neck in at once for maybe half a second, but that's the most I could do, too shocking from my system. And of course you see various like training videos of athletes doing the not only cold bath, but like an ice bath as part of their I guess like post workout regime. But yeah, I haven't researched that at all to to know like if that's something it's helpful with like sore muscles and so forth. But if nothing else, it definitely looks like they're getting a shock to the system. Okay, more from the message. This episode also got me thinking about scenes of bathing in Irish folklore stories I've read recently, namely Lady Gregory's translations from the early nineteen hundreds. There are regular occurrences of heroes being healed miraculously in baths with healing herbs. Could this be considered tea and often by bathing and broth? Bath and broth. I assume that means like a meat broth. Yeah, I'm imagining the feeling now. It's a little bit of gelatin clinging to your skin all over your body. Well, I mean it's off. And I've often seen it recommended that if you have itchy skin, you might put some oats in the bath with you. So there's a there's a thin line between culinary preparation and just a good bath, I guess anyway, the message continues. Immediate access to fresh bathing water also seemed important in these stories for greeting guests, and a great moment is when Kohland arrives somewhere in his godly fury the warp spasm. To avoid Kholand's wrath, his host put out three baths of cold water to literally quench his anger. When he gets into the first bath, all the water is immediately evaporated, the second boils over, and finally in the third bath he can cool down and relax. Oh man, I don't I don't remember encountering this in our past look at coholand but I love this. This is almost like a Loony Tunes level trying to cool down the hot anger of Koholand. Oh, it's also like a warp spasm version of the Three Bears. Like the first two beds aren't comfortable enough, the last one final works all right, and finally they turned a weird house on. Weird House sent him a note. Over the last few days, I had a bunch of older episodes on for some background listening, and during one film about giant fighting robots, a character used some kind of medical spray. I think it was in Robot Shocks, but it may have been a different giant robot picture. Anyway, you were wondering where you had seen this medical spray before, thinking perhaps it was in a video game. I was pretty sure it was in a Metal Gear Solid game, and indeed, after checking the wiki, the healing spray item appeared in MGSV but also quote resembles the first date spray from the Resident Evil series. Now at the end of this email, all I can think of is magical healing bath in a can. Thanks again for the great episodes, all the best. Well, thank you for jan I was definitely thinking of the healing spray from Resident Evil when I put this together. I think I specifically would have been thinking about Resident Evil for I don't know, like a zombie. I say, chunk out of your neck, and the way you get better is you take an aerosol can and spray yourself. There's some goodness. There's some other game that I played or replayed recently that in retrospect also had this. Maybe it was maybe it was X Calm. I have this vague memory of some sort of floating robot coming over and like hosing down a character with some sort of a spray to heal them up. I feel like it would make more sense if what you were being sprayed with was like nanobots like the ones from Jason X that going in repair all your tissue. I don't know exactly how just the regular spray works. It's a disinfectant, I suppose. Yeah. All right, onto the next message about the washing of the waters. This is from Sean, and this one calls back to something we addressed in one of the episodes where at one of the warm springs in Ireland where there was allegedly a healing property, there was a source rob you were talking about that said people would like gather up a worm that lived in the spring, and the worm would be like in a cloth, and then they would rub that cloth on their eyes. And then the source also said people didn't leave the cloth hanging on a shrub nearby because there wasn't a saint associated with the spring. And we were mighty confused by this. We were like, wait, is this saying that they didn't leave a cloth because like a saint wasn't there to make them be altruistic or something. But Sean helps clear this up. High in relation to washing of the water's Part two, specifically folklore remedies from Ireland, it is tradition to leave items, typically cloth, hanging from the local bushes or trees at holy wells with the belief that it will be blessed by the saint of those waters and imbued with some property. The same can be seen of trinkets left on top of the site. This can be seen to this day amongst the countless wells across our landscape. Many also have some ritual in how they are approached or utilized. How much of these traditions stem from pagan versus strictly Christian practice. I cannot say. I suspect it is a syncretism, meaning a blending of different religious traditions, as there are pagan myths involving wells as sources of healing. This syncretism of older cultural practices can be seen amongst our art and stories in insular Christianity. A wider example can be seen of this on Saint Bridget's Day, where folks leave cloth outside the house to be blessed by her. I guess, meaning Saint Bridget. She is one of our three national saints, alongside comb Seal. I think that might also be known as Columba and Patrick, and typically is associated with protection and healing. I'm not so sure what the whole idea is regarding application of a worm in a soaked cloth onto the eye. A weak argument can be made general health improvements could be made from cleaning wounds with fresh water sources filtered by the rocks under the ground, or potentially the composition of the water having some effect, but I'd tend towards placebos. One example in which I cannot speak to the veracity of the claim involves I'll try to say this to buyer nanialt i e. The well at Glenn nanialt It's curative properties are said to stop madness again. It appears once or twice in general myths and local folklore. The unfaified claim relates to low levels of lithium having been identified in the water source, which could induce antidepressive or antipsychosis effects over time. We'll rob this connects to a note from our last episode on the beliefs about healing waters, specifically about so called lithium springs or lithium or lithia waters. I think you may confirm this. Our conclusions were that actual pharmacological effects from lithium springs would be really held back by dosage regulation issues. So it seemed fairly doubtful to us that people were really getting direct lithium treatment benefits from these supposed waters because often, like the lithium level was so low that it was like not anywhere close to what you would take as an actual medical dose, but even if it were higher, it would be unregulated in a way that might be dangerous. Yeah, exactly, Like during the time period that lithium water was initially really hot, Like that was the that was the problem, as people would then looked at the water to analyze the water and they said, whoa, there's actually little to no lithium in this water, so you're nowhere near at therapeutic dose. And I also want to again thanks to Sean, because this email came in before we did that episode, and so this email helped inform our treatment of the Lithia Waters segment of those episodes. Ah oh. And then finally Sean includes a Gaelic greeting saying regards and a happy Saint Patrick's Day to you. Sean. Well, thank you very much for the message. All right, we also heard from the Nation of Gems. I'm not sure which gym this says, if this is a past gem or a new gym, but this is not a gym from New Jersey, right right. This jem says, Hey, guys, I'm enjoying the Washing of the Water series. Rob is a fellow swimmer. Do you find the quiet and peacefulness of the water muffling the outside world to allow your mind to enter a contemplative contemplative state? I enjoy swimming for the physical exercise, but part of me enjoys the time I have to reflect and muse on what is going on in my day to day life. Thanks Jim. Well, that's a that's a great question. I may have touch based on this a little bit in the past, but I know when I'm swimming, I'm generally doing one of two things. Either I'm structuring my thoughts so as to keep track of what lane I'm on, Like on this lane, I'm only going to think about alien and then the second lap, I'm only going to think about aliens and then Alien three, etc. That seems to work. Or I'll do like a top five of something just to do things in chunks of five. But other times I will really sort of think structurally about about something I'm I'm putting together, like for the podcast or whatever, or some kind of like personal project or something, and I find that really rewarding. But yeah, so, yeah, there is something about the water muffling and so forth. There's still a lot to distract one if you let it distract you, in my experience, in like a YMCA pool, because you can still you can still let these you know, negative outside thoughts in you can let yourself get discouraged or frustrated with people and situations around you, even in the immediate vicinity so it's I don't know. I think about the experience of being like a lap swimmer a lot, like it's it's a bunch of people literally in their own lane, doing their own thing, and uh, and sometimes I worry that it's not, you know, it's not social enough, Like it's not there should be some sort of like built in way that we're communicating with each other instead of just doing our own things and and maybe eyeing each other less communally, you know. But yeah, I guess the water muffling is part of it. Like you're you know, you're literally submerging yourself into this, uh, this altered state of sensory perception. I think this is why people have a lot of thoughts in the shower. Also, it is not just that they are for the moment away from all their other tasks and devices and media sources and stuff, so they're alone with their own thoughts, but it's also the I think the noise of the shower, like the shower water coming down creates a white noise environment that helps you sort of like let your thoughts wander. I find that snorkeling can be even more relaxing. Snortling can also be like for me anyway, it can be kind of like high engagement, especially if I'm snorkeling in a place that I haven't been to before. The water is really cold. But if I'm like comfortable in a snortling environment and there's some interesting stuff to look at, that's really nice in my experience because you get that like part of it is not only the muffling of the water, but also the rhythmic breathing. Your own sound of your own breath through the snorkel is really calming in a way that you know, rhythmic breathing for lap swimming isn't okay. So I think we need to move on to some messages in response to our series on whales and Rob, You've got to read this first one from Evan because I think you are the Star Wars Extended Universe guy between us, and this one definitely concerns the outskirts of the cannon. Okay, all right, Evan Wright. Then it says, Hi, Rob and Joe love the show. Me and my wife have been listening for a long time. Keep up the amazing work related to the idea of whale barnacle armor. I was wondering if anyone else mentioned that Darth Bain, who lived about a thousand years before the films, at one point chose to allow himself to be covered with orbelisks, an insect or crustacean like creature. Joe, are you familiar with Darth Bain? Not at all? I assumed you would be. Well, it's not a story the Jedi would tell you anyway, Heaven continues. Their tough shells provided him with lightsaber and blaster proof armor, allowing him to take a purely offensive fighting style, as well as pain and a chemical that boosted his connection to the dark side, and they mentioned his terrifying appearance. It was not without downsides. They shortened his life and nearly killed him. While he needed the insects remove, he also needed to wear special armor to keep them from spreading and covering his face, hands, etc. Looking like a monster also limited his ability to appear in public and maintain his budding empire. The details can be found in the Great Bain Trilogy books by Drew Carpettien, which are wonderfully read with exceptional voice acting and sound effects in the official audio books as well. Me and my wife listen to it on Libby We are a Libby household as well. Great way to get your digital and audio library books. You could ask about it at your local library, as your card number will be needed. I attached a few images for fun. Okay, one's an illustration and one is a costume at a con or something. The illustration we got like a major evil looking bald boy who has got some kind of pyramid floating in his hand and a red lightsaber. And yes he does appear to be encrusted with some kind of gunk, almost almost barnacle like in fact. Yeah, this is an interesting approach to buio armor, which of course brings to mind something from Children of Doone. I don't want to spoil anything for anyone out there who hasn't gone that far in the Dune series. But as for Darth Baine himself, I haven't. I haven't read any of these books, but I have run across people saying they're good before, so yeah, at some point I might need to check them out. I haven't really explored that much from this time period of Star Wars lore. Well, thank you, Evan. Okay, we got a message from colmb Colms says, hey guys, just a quick one liner. Check out this story below good timing with the gray whale episodes, and so I put together some notes here from Colm's length. This is an article in The Guardian by Phoebe weston headline extraordinary sighting of Orca with baby pilot whale Astound's scientists. Now, yeah, a lot of what we discussed in that series was about orca's being the main natural pred ors of gray whales, and so there would be this migratory journey where the gray whale mothers and their calves would be going back up north along the western coast of North America, with the newborn calves having to be escorted by the mothers because the new worn calves are vulnerable to predation by orcas. But in this case it's orca parenting behavior. So an adult orca appeared to be sort of guiding and protecting this little whale from a different species, a pilot whale. And this happened near Snifflesness, a peninsula on the western side of Iceland, where I have actually been, and that's a really cool place, awesome landscape. I don't know if it's normally like this, but when I was there, the wind quite literally almost knocked me off my feet. It was the windiest place I've ever been. But anyway, so I found that the citation of the scientific paper documenting this observation in the orcas, This was by Marie Teresa Marucha at All published in the Canadian Journal of Zoology, called first account of apparent aloparental care of a long finned pilot whale calf by a female killer whale, and this was just this year twenty twenty three. To read from Phoebe Weston's article in The Guardian, quote, the ship's crew initially thought it was a very small killer whale calf swimming alongside the orca, but photos later confirmed what Muchoks suspected that the female, called Sidis, appeared to be looking after a newborn long finned pilot whale and then a different quote from the article, Although this is the first time this behavior called interspecific alo parenting, has been observed in orcas, it has been seen in other cetacean species. Short beaked common dolphins, common bottle noses, Indian Ocean humpbacks and Indo Pacific humpbacks have all been observed looking after the young of other species. Well, that is very interesting also definitely a different side to see after thinking about the predatory capacity of the Orcas almost exclusively for several episodes there. It's very interesting and not to anthropomorphize too much, but I will say heartwarming. Yeah, I think if nothing else, it does just remind us that orcas are complex creatures, intelligent creatures with a lot going on, and that we shouldn't be too quick to dismiss them as one thing or another. Oh but hey, one more quick response to the series we did on whales. We got a message from Mike. Mike's message was featured in a previous Listener Maile episode. This was the one about Mike had had an experience where he was out surfing and he found himself directly in the path of it was a baleen whale. I think it was a humpback I'm sorry if I remember that. Yes, yeah, a humpback whale trying to feed, doing like lunge feeding on schools of something maybe small fish near the surface, and Mike ended up having a profoundly stirring encounter with one of the whale's eyes as it sort of gently pushed him out of the way. So Mike got in contact to say thanks for reading his whale story, and then he added something else just to summarize. He said his work involves some connection to generative AI, so he made some images. He attached, first of all, an image based on a description of his encounter with the Humpbacks, and of that image, Mike says, it fails to capture the burning intellect of the whale, but accurately captures the chaos and surreal surreality of the experience. And it shows a kind of strange, sort of glyph faced human underneath a whale that's breaching the surface, as there are fish all throughout the sky, sort of exploding from the water's surface. There. Yeah, these were neat to scroll through. But then the second thing is so that was his encounter. He also had He also generated a bunch of images for movie posters for a film concept that is not a real movie. It's one mic dreamed up and that concept is scanner whales. That's that's very good. M M. Yeah, there might be something too that The scanner whale poster is of a very seventies look. I really like them. And one of them shows what appears to be like a whale with a sort of X ray image where you're looking at I guess it's skeleton, but it's not a whale skeleton. It looks like sort of a combination of a whale skeleton with like a deflated basketball, or maybe like a card that's been in a in an accident and it's all crunched up. It's it's very interesting. M Yeah, I could imagine this sort of thing fitting into that. That that that sort of weird period of dolphin and whale based cinema, you know, which also kind of has its carkins back to the successive Jaws. Are we talking Day of the Dolphin or are we talking talking about free Willie? Not so much free Willie, thinking more about Day of the Dolphin. Also certainly thinking about the nineteen seventy seven film Orca, which which we were talking about a little bit when we were recording these episodes. Not a movie I recommend anyone watch, but I'm a movie that I remember watching part of I Think on A and E as a kid, and it has some very disturbing scenes in it, started of course Richard Harris. Anyway, Mike says, thanks absolutely, love stuff to blow your mind. In weird House, looking forward to more, all right, speaking a weird House let's go ahead and do one last listener mail. This will be a weird house related directly from Levi Levi Ride. Hello guys. A recent backpacking trip to the Red River Gorge had me binging all my podcasts, but I was gleefully surprised to listen to your latest Weird House Cinema episode, which is quickly becoming my favorite podcast. Growing up, my dad was our media curator, and as a result, we watched all the great classic sci fi movies, campy westerns, The Twilight Zone, etc. Somewhere in the mix was this story that absolutely enthralled me as a child, about a man who starts shrinking and goes on incredible adventures in his inning. In his inbiginning home, I had vivid memories of a tiny man fighting off a basement creature with a needle spear, but I always assumed this was an episode of The Twilight Zone. Over the years, whenever I thought about it, I would pull out my box set of the show and try to find that lost episode, to no avail. Just last week, a video from the YouTube channel Corridor Crew pulled a scene from a movie to react to, and lo and behold, it was the incredible shrinking man. I was instantly nostalgic and so relieved to find the source of those black and white memories. So you can likely imagine the sheer delight when I discovered that you Fellas had given this movie the weird House deep dive treatment only days after. I was reminded of how much inspired me as a boy. Also to Joe's comment about wanting to see water portrayed as dangerous at miniature scale, another bit of childhood sci fi nostalgia finds me recalling a book in the Danny Dunn series, Danny Dunn and the Smollifying Machine, in which there is a lot of talk about being careful not to lean against water droplets for fear of breaking the surface tension, falling in and becoming trapped. Wonderful job is always wonderful movie. Thanks so much for all your hard work, guys. Leavin Oh, thanks Leavitt. That's exactly what I was talking about. How I feel like I got to go back and read this book. I've never even heard of it. Yeah, just look at what a series of young reader books from I'm just judging by the title the cover page, I'm thinking seventies or eighties looks like it. There's a bunch of I mean, there's a picture of a kid's face. He looks a little like alfredy Newman. I don't think he's supposed to. And then there is there's like a giant grasshopper, and I don't know kids playing all around it. Well, I've looked it up. Now. There are fifteen books in the Danny Dunn series, and Danny Dunn and the Smollifying Machine is actually from nineteen sixty nine, though that cover I was looking at, of course, certainly could be from subsequent decades. But yeah, this is the whole series. I don't know anything about amazing. All right, Well, we're gonna go and close things out here, but we'd love to hear from everyone out there if you have thoughts on oh, baths, swimming whales, smollifying machines, and shrinking movies. If you have comments or feedback on past episodes, current episodes, future episodes of stuff to blow your mind of the artifact, the Monster fact or of course, episodes of Weird House Cinema right in, we would love to hear from you. Well, I'm sure we mentioned this in our two most recent Weird House episodes, but definitely right in about your favorite shrink movies. What shrink movies are we missing out on? Yeah, I mean there are plenty of great ones. It just depends on how small do you want to go. I don't know if they're all over top the Simpsons, Treeouse, Horror with Lisa and the Tooth, but there's a lot of room to explore. Okay, so oh huge, Thanks as always to our audio producer J J. 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.