Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Listener mail This is Robert Lamb and this is Joe McCormick, a candidates. Monday, the day of the week, we read back some messages from the mail bag that you have sent into our show account. If you've never tried it before, you can get in touch with us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Whatever you want to send. This fair game. If you just want to share something interesting, if you want to have feedback on another episode, or you just want to say hi, tell us your thoughts about the show anytime, right in? All right, Rob, I'm going to kick us off today with this message about our series on whistling from Renata. All right, go for it, Renata says hi, Rob, Seth and Joe. Sorry for the late response to the whistling episodes. Have you ever wondered how many Ripperton and Mariah Carey hit those glass shattering high notes. They do it by going into the whistle register, which is physiologically distinct from other sounds made with the vocal cords. As far as I can tell, it's called the whistle register. Only because it sounds similar to a whistle, but is also physiologically distinct from a whistle. According to miscellaneous YouTube videos, the whistle register is achieved by clamping shut a large portion of your vocal cords and only allowing air through a tiny hole. Apparently, babies and small children make this noise effortlessly when they scream and cry. But something about learning language causes us to find producing this sound less natural as we age. Have I tried doing it? Yes? Did it sound molefluous? No? It also hurt a little afterwards. This makes me all the more impressed with singers who have the practice and controlled use this range on a regular basis and make it sound effortless. Thanks for making me think deeply about seemingly mundane topics. Best renata renata, Yeah, this is interesting. I don't know that much about Mariah Carey, though I think I can hear in her song is kind of going into a pitch above normal soprano. But yeah, many reportson is great. You can hear her using the whistle register on that single. Everybody probably knows Loving You, that's the one with line you Loving you is easy because you're beautiful? Uh? Robbi I attached a link if you're not familiar with this song. But yeah, there is a moment where you can hear her go from kind of regular soprano voice to to the whistle register. That's kind of hard to describe, except that it is higher than even the normal high singing voice of a soprano singer, and many repretend famous for having an extremely wide range of octaves that different notes she could hit. One thing I didn't realize until I was looking her up just before this. Uh, Mini Repurton was the mother of the comedian Maya Rudolph, and that's why apparently at the end of the song loving You you hear her sing Maya, Maya Maya. That's about her daughter, Maya Rudolph. Oh, I didn't realize that. I mean, this is a great song. I'm familiar with it, and of course and I like Maya Rudolph's work as well. But interesting. Huh So anyway, thanks for Nata. All right, here's uh we will see some We'll see some listener mail from from folks in uh response to our episode on fun and So we heard from Jim in New Jersey. Jim in New Jersey writes it and says Robert, Joe and Seth. At the end of your third installment on Fun, you mentioned how to make exercise more fun. This reminded me of a Freakonomics episode entitled When will Power Isn't Enough. It featured Katherine Milkman, associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania. From the podcast. This is a direct quote from Milkman in the in the podcast quote, So I struggle at the end of a long day to get myself to the gym, even though I know I should go. And at the end of a long day, I also struggle with the desire to watch my favorite TV shows instead of getting work done. And so I actually realized that those two temptations, those two struggles I faced, could be combined to solve both problems. Jim continues. She calls the technique temptation bundling. Milkman continues, quote, what I realized is that if I only allowed myself to watch my favorite TV shows while exercising at the gym, then I'd stop wasting time at home on useless television, and I'd start craving trips to the gym at the end of the long day because I'd want to find out what happens next in my show, and not only that, I'd actually enjoy my workout and my show more combined, I wouldn't feel guilty watching TV, and time would fly while I was at the gym. So when I talk about temptation bundling, I mean combining a temptation something like a TV show, a guilty pleasure, something that will pull you into engaging in a behavior with something you know you should do but might struggle to do. Jim in New Jersey, Oh yeah, thanks, Jim. Uh, this is interesting, and I know we have heard from listener is describing this exact same thing, maybe not with the terminology of tem temptation bundling, but telling us that they listen to our show when they, for example, do dishes as a motivation to make themselves do the dishes. I think this is a common thing people do with their podcasts, right, like you set it aside for like when you need to do chores or something else. Yeah, yeah, that's that's interesting. It reminds me a little bit of, you know, something like flying, where I'm not a huge fan of flying, but sometimes I can get sort of I'll sort of say, well, okay, flying is the time where there's nothing else to do but to like, I have free license to just to you know, to watch something, to play a game on my phone, to read whatever. Whatever I'm gonna do, I have license to do it during the flight because it will make the flight easier. It's not quite the same as temptation bundling. I guess, um, My main exercises are swimming in yoga, and it's really it's either not wise or improper to try and temptation bundle any of those things. Uh. I get, you can get you can get specialized underwater earbuds and so forth to listen to music while while swimming. But I don't think I could really follow a podcast or something or an audiobook while swimming. But that's just me. If you fill a swimming pool with sugary soda that you want to drink but you know you shouldn't, and then you can take a few gulps while you're doing your laps, I guess. So yeah, it's I guess it tends to work better with like stationary exercise equipment, often with that built in screen. Like you were saying, yeah, I think you were talking about watching television Preachers or evangelists. Yeah on the screen there that's my vice. But temptation, Bunny, that's it's worth worth thinking about. Like, I like this concept. Okay. This next message is also in response to Fun and this is from Lex, like says Joe Robin Seth. Loved your episodes on Fun and always enjoy listening to the show. I would consider myself a fun Efficiana know, and your discussion of fund in the workplace reminded me of a previous employer. At this workplace, there was an anonymous person who is designated as the Minister of Fun. While I love the concept, it was not always effective. For example, when there were busy stretches, the Minister of Fun or m o F might go silent and thereby add to the collective existential dread of the humdrum of work. Additionally, the activities may not appeal to all members of the team, fostering more division than connectivity. Uh and and as you said, the activity maybe time or labor intensive, adding to the stress of work. Yeah, it's difficult when you're you're you're under under a deadline and then also somebody's trying to make you play a game. Lex goes on However, in a less stressful work environment like the one I'm in now, I think that the value of an anonymous fund master is high. It also removes some of the infantilizing connotations of having the boss force feed fund I cannot help but think about Michael Scott's strong, arming employees and having fun. Of course that's on the office, like making everyone go to the Dundee Awards banquet despite very little genuine interest thanks for the hours of fantastic content. Lex I could see this idea. So it's not that the boss is planning games and stuff. It's a an anonymous, maybe randomly chosen one of the employees whose duty it is to to make some fun that that day. It is interesting that this it's mentioned that this is an anonymous person. Um Like, it sounds like it's possibly official. But also you could imagine an anonymous minister fund could almost be like vigilante fun person and then in the office and yeah, and of course that could be seen as dangerous by the powers that be, uh like, because this is like pure organic fun. Who is the anonymous fun meister who is devising what is fun in the office? And is that fun? Like too critical of the mission statement, and so forth. Or it could be like which one which one of us is secretly ratting to the boss that I'm not having fun? All right? This next one comes to us from Adam. This was in response to both Are Fun Episode episodes and the Paragraphs episodes. Adam writes, Hi, Robert and Joe, I love your show because I'm consistently excited that you were covering a topic that I myself would want to cover if I had my own podcast. So thank you for letting me outsource my curiosity to you. It's an excellent hands. I'm reaching out because I am able to share a book recommendation based on one of your conversations. In the paragraph part two, Robert mentioned the short story collection The Voice Imitator by the brilliant Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhardt, who is known for extended paragraphs. I particularly love his novels Gargoyles two four pages, Wittgenstein's Nephew You hundred and six pages, and The Loser a hundred and ninety pages. If I'm not mistaken, all consists of singular, unbroken paragraphs. Joe said that he dreaded the idea of reading never ending chunks of prose. But Bernhardt turns this horror into a form of art that is truly transcended. If you have the patience and commitment to taking the work on its own terms, that's fascinating. I really this is a book that had been on my shelf for a while, and I had not picked it up in a while, and I hadn't really looked into the author um beyond the voice imitator. So this is this is interesting to learn a bit, a little bit more about this this author. It's not just a choice for that work. It's like a consistent style for this guy. Yeah, I gotta respect that, all right. Um Adam continues here on another note, I was thinking about what makes creative work fun when I was listening to your episode on the topic in your The Nature of Fun episodes, and for me, Monty Python immediately comes to mind. In particular, I frequently recalled particular scenes that bring a smile to my heart, such as the Bridge of Death scene in The Holy Grail. You're comment about humor deriving often from the resolution of incongruities in the Psyche resonated with me and help me understand why I keep going back to it in my mind. They take a trope answering riddles to avoid supernatural death and bridge trolls of fairy tale lore and turned it on its head. The central incongruity concerns the difficulty of the questions. Comically, Sir Galahad can't answer the simple third question about his favorite color. Later author's third question about the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow seems impossible, but then the role is reversed uh when he knows more about sparrows than the Riddler, who then is hoisted by his own petard, paying the price for his own hypocritical ignorance. There's so much going on here, but twelve year old me only got about forty of it. On a conscious level. All I knew was it was a ton of fun that I could keep returning to as my friends and I called back to it in our in jokes repeatedly for years. Get back to your thoughts about incongruity. This joke is a masterpiece, and that it has multiple twists and turns. They create a spring loading effect that pays off fantastically well. When the incongruities are resolved by the bridgekeeper's death, which follows the deaths of Robin and Sir Galahad, But one incongruity remains unresolved. What is the air speed velocity of an unladen African swallow and how does it compare to that of the European variety? We may never know. Thanks for the amazing work you guys do weekend and week out, Adam. I think you're right about all that, Adam. That seems a classic for a reason is almost a perfectly structured piece of comedy. All right, we got another message about our episodes on the paragraph. This is from somebody who wants to defend the honor of the pill crow as a as a useful symbol. Uh. And it's from a listener who wanted to remain anonymous. She asked simply to be called a woman in stem I think because she ends up potentially implicating her boss in the message. So uh, listener says, I love the show. I've been listening for nearly a decade. Now you are the only original show I'm still auto downloading, So I hope you know how special that makes you. Sorry, this is lagging so far behind the topic, but here goes on paragraphs in the workplace in a business environment. My three favorite paragraphs each consist of one word yes, no, and okay. And then in this next paragraph, I think this is referring to the conversation we had about how a lot of good writing doesn't just explain what the author thinks, but shows you how the author thinks. So it kind of takes you along a path of the author getting to a thought within their own brain. But this listener here says bad writing also sadly displays the author's thinking. However, rambling, disordered and oblivious to the interest, need, or expertise level of the reader, and a complete lack of respect for the reader's time. I suffer a barrage of daily emails from one or more coworkers guilty of all the above sins, combined with a refusal to edit, and egos sufficient to believe anyone cares what they think based on the list of c C is generally attached. Unfortunately, I report to one of the offenders, so I cannot just ignore them completely. Yeah, they're I think there are a lot of jobs where the the email is copious and uh and and not as well edited as it could be, but the message goes on. I wanted to close with a defense of the humble pill crow symbol in word. Remember this is the symbol that denotes a paragraph break. If you have accidentally turned it on and desperately tried to turn it off, you are not it's intended audience, But as someone who makes their living converting random text documents into data, it is invaluable. Definitely, it identifies where the line breaks are with paragraph marks, but it does much more. Turning the pill crow symbol on has helped me identify hidden white space, weird extra characters, and all sorts of surprise nonsense that is sometimes lurking unseen in documents that can be treated as text. These extra symbols inhibit your ability to treat portions of text as data fields. This is very important for any business process that turns out the same file format over and over that has then written to individual files. Only a computer has time to read all the files and find all the matching data fields, store them in a database, and produce a nice, usable summary report for the end users. And then if you read this on air, please call me a woman in stem since I called out my boss and don't know who else at the office might be listening. Looking forward to listening for another decade or more. Uh a woman in stem Uh. So, yeah, thanks for the message. I can absolutely see how Yeah, I think the story was that I remember that time when I was a kid and I accidentally turned on the paragraph markers on on Microsoft Word and then I was like, ah, what what are all these symbols? But yeah, if you if you're trying to avoid confusion and make sure you're just getting the relevant text and not extra stuff, that's that's very helpful. All right. This next one comes to us from Keith when it has and it has the title Crabs. Uh. You know, we we frequently come back to crabs on the show. We love a good crab story, we love crab movies and and so forth. So Keith writes in and says, first time a long time. I've been saving up some Pokemon comments for when I had a nice cash to send you, but I just got knocked off my feet by House of the Dragon, so I'll drop one right now. When I listened to your Crab series, the hairy crabs excited me because they must have been an inspiration for the Pokemon Crabominable. Uh. And then there's a picture attached to here and you can pull this up. You can also look up crabominable in various Pokemon databases, and it is indeed a beautiful beast. I don't think I've asked my son about this one, but uh yeah, beautiful, beautiful creature here. Wooly crab Pokemon is the species. But does this crab not have claws that where the clothes would be. I see like almost what looks like flowers with the kind of ball in the middle. Well, and so many of these creatures they are hybrids. Uh you know, they are monsters. They are pocket monsters at the end of the day, and therefore there there are a lot of chimeras in the mix. I would have concerns about putting this creature in my pocket. Anyway, they continue. I do wish that the in game explanations were as interesting as the real crabs, but I suppose it is a game designed to keep kids engage, not adult nerds. House of the Dragon, on the other hand, is very much not for kids and spoiler light. Episode two begins with a horrifying shot of humans being eaten alive by crabs as the surf licks their legs. It's gnarly stuff, so view at your own risk, but I was curious about your take on the prospect these crabs even seem to nestle in the flesh of their victims. I have been a fan since the days when Christian was a co host, and I love how you keep the show fresh and exciting all these years. In Thanks for all the content and movie recommendations, Keith. Thanks Keith. Always welcome more crab content. People out there. You've got interesting stuff about crabs, send it on in Well. I am current on the House of the Dragon. I've been watching it and yes there this is not really a spoiler at all, but there is a character that's introduced that is like a pirate lord that's threatening the realm and is he's called the crab Feeder, and he's this horrific looking individual with like copious sunburns and also this weird mask, uh mysterious. You don't know much about him, but after they defeat a particular enemy, they stake everybody to the shore like basically like crucifying them in some cases, and they let the crabs crawl on them, sometimes dumple a few crabs on them just to be sure. And the crabs start eating them. So the question did occur to me because we've talked about crabs eating people before. That's the kind of show we we are, and so I was wondering, It's like, well, would crabs really be up for this or they be turned off? Would they Would they be far more inclined to eat these people after they had died. Uh? I tend to think that's the case. Yeah. I would tend to think crabs in the real world tend to be more scavengers than than hunters of large prey. I mean, when they are hunters, I think they're they're grabbing it stuff smaller than them. I don't know for sure, but it seems very unlikely to me that that crabs would be trying to eat like a human sized animal that was capable of moving. Yeah, So unless there's a specialized species or ray of species in West roast Um, I would tend to say that this is just some some grotesque of fantastic dreaming here. But I love that they included it. It was still it's it's at the end of the day, it's crabs eating people, So it's it's kind of fun um and it's a good year for that sort of thing, because the season three of Love Death Robots has a wonderful episode, horrific episode titled Bad Traveling that that is centered around a monstrous crab that takes over a ship. So if you like your crab monsters, especially you're talking crab monsters, that's definitely an episode to check out. That one, uh I believe was Yeah, it's a bit based on a short story by Neil Asher, and uh it was adapted. The screenplay was adapted by Andrew Kevin Walker, So that's pretty cool, all right. On that crab note, we will go ahead and close out this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind listener Mail, but we'd love to hear from you out there. Do you have crab related thoughts to past episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, crab related thoughts to Weird House cinema, uh, crab related thoughts to any of our episodes right in, We'd love to hear from you, and we'll read your your email on a future episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Uh crab based listener mail, which 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 is a 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.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Listener mail This is Robert Lamb and this is Joe McCormick, a candidates. Monday, the day of the week, we read back some messages from the mail bag that you have sent into our show account. If you've never tried it before, you can get in touch with us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Whatever you want to send. This fair game. If you just want to share something interesting, if you want to have feedback on another episode, or you just want to say hi, tell us your thoughts about the show anytime, right in? All right, Rob, I'm going to kick us off today with this message about our series on whistling from Renata. All right, go for it, Renata says hi, Rob, Seth and Joe. Sorry for the late response to the whistling episodes. Have you ever wondered how many Ripperton and Mariah Carey hit those glass shattering high notes. They do it by going into the whistle register, which is physiologically distinct from other sounds made with the vocal cords. As far as I can tell, it's called the whistle register. Only because it sounds similar to a whistle, but is also physiologically distinct from a whistle. According to miscellaneous YouTube videos, the whistle register is achieved by clamping shut a large portion of your vocal cords and only allowing air through a tiny hole. Apparently, babies and small children make this noise effortlessly when they scream and cry. But something about learning language causes us to find producing this sound less natural as we age. Have I tried doing it? Yes? Did it sound molefluous? No? It also hurt a little afterwards. This makes me all the more impressed with singers who have the practice and controlled use this range on a regular basis and make it sound effortless. Thanks for making me think deeply about seemingly mundane topics. Best renata renata, Yeah, this is interesting. I don't know that much about Mariah Carey, though I think I can hear in her song is kind of going into a pitch above normal soprano. But yeah, many reportson is great. You can hear her using the whistle register on that single. Everybody probably knows Loving You, that's the one with line you Loving you is easy because you're beautiful? Uh? Robbi I attached a link if you're not familiar with this song. But yeah, there is a moment where you can hear her go from kind of regular soprano voice to to the whistle register. That's kind of hard to describe, except that it is higher than even the normal high singing voice of a soprano singer, and many repretend famous for having an extremely wide range of octaves that different notes she could hit. One thing I didn't realize until I was looking her up just before this. Uh, Mini Repurton was the mother of the comedian Maya Rudolph, and that's why apparently at the end of the song loving You you hear her sing Maya, Maya Maya. That's about her daughter, Maya Rudolph. Oh, I didn't realize that. I mean, this is a great song. I'm familiar with it, and of course and I like Maya Rudolph's work as well. But interesting. Huh So anyway, thanks for Nata. All right, here's uh we will see some We'll see some listener mail from from folks in uh response to our episode on fun and So we heard from Jim in New Jersey. Jim in New Jersey writes it and says Robert, Joe and Seth. At the end of your third installment on Fun, you mentioned how to make exercise more fun. This reminded me of a Freakonomics episode entitled When will Power Isn't Enough. It featured Katherine Milkman, associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania. From the podcast. This is a direct quote from Milkman in the in the podcast quote, So I struggle at the end of a long day to get myself to the gym, even though I know I should go. And at the end of a long day, I also struggle with the desire to watch my favorite TV shows instead of getting work done. And so I actually realized that those two temptations, those two struggles I faced, could be combined to solve both problems. Jim continues. She calls the technique temptation bundling. Milkman continues, quote, what I realized is that if I only allowed myself to watch my favorite TV shows while exercising at the gym, then I'd stop wasting time at home on useless television, and I'd start craving trips to the gym at the end of the long day because I'd want to find out what happens next in my show, and not only that, I'd actually enjoy my workout and my show more combined, I wouldn't feel guilty watching TV, and time would fly while I was at the gym. So when I talk about temptation bundling, I mean combining a temptation something like a TV show, a guilty pleasure, something that will pull you into engaging in a behavior with something you know you should do but might struggle to do. Jim in New Jersey, Oh yeah, thanks, Jim. Uh, this is interesting, and I know we have heard from listener is describing this exact same thing, maybe not with the terminology of tem temptation bundling, but telling us that they listen to our show when they, for example, do dishes as a motivation to make themselves do the dishes. I think this is a common thing people do with their podcasts, right, like you set it aside for like when you need to do chores or something else. Yeah, yeah, that's that's interesting. It reminds me a little bit of, you know, something like flying, where I'm not a huge fan of flying, but sometimes I can get sort of I'll sort of say, well, okay, flying is the time where there's nothing else to do but to like, I have free license to just to you know, to watch something, to play a game on my phone, to read whatever. Whatever I'm gonna do, I have license to do it during the flight because it will make the flight easier. It's not quite the same as temptation bundling. I guess, um, My main exercises are swimming in yoga, and it's really it's either not wise or improper to try and temptation bundle any of those things. Uh. I get, you can get you can get specialized underwater earbuds and so forth to listen to music while while swimming. But I don't think I could really follow a podcast or something or an audiobook while swimming. But that's just me. If you fill a swimming pool with sugary soda that you want to drink but you know you shouldn't, and then you can take a few gulps while you're doing your laps, I guess. So yeah, it's I guess it tends to work better with like stationary exercise equipment, often with that built in screen. Like you were saying, yeah, I think you were talking about watching television Preachers or evangelists. Yeah on the screen there that's my vice. But temptation, Bunny, that's it's worth worth thinking about. Like, I like this concept. Okay. This next message is also in response to Fun and this is from Lex, like says Joe Robin Seth. Loved your episodes on Fun and always enjoy listening to the show. I would consider myself a fun Efficiana know, and your discussion of fund in the workplace reminded me of a previous employer. At this workplace, there was an anonymous person who is designated as the Minister of Fun. While I love the concept, it was not always effective. For example, when there were busy stretches, the Minister of Fun or m o F might go silent and thereby add to the collective existential dread of the humdrum of work. Additionally, the activities may not appeal to all members of the team, fostering more division than connectivity. Uh and and as you said, the activity maybe time or labor intensive, adding to the stress of work. Yeah, it's difficult when you're you're you're under under a deadline and then also somebody's trying to make you play a game. Lex goes on However, in a less stressful work environment like the one I'm in now, I think that the value of an anonymous fund master is high. It also removes some of the infantilizing connotations of having the boss force feed fund I cannot help but think about Michael Scott's strong, arming employees and having fun. Of course that's on the office, like making everyone go to the Dundee Awards banquet despite very little genuine interest thanks for the hours of fantastic content. Lex I could see this idea. So it's not that the boss is planning games and stuff. It's a an anonymous, maybe randomly chosen one of the employees whose duty it is to to make some fun that that day. It is interesting that this it's mentioned that this is an anonymous person. Um Like, it sounds like it's possibly official. But also you could imagine an anonymous minister fund could almost be like vigilante fun person and then in the office and yeah, and of course that could be seen as dangerous by the powers that be, uh like, because this is like pure organic fun. Who is the anonymous fun meister who is devising what is fun in the office? And is that fun? Like too critical of the mission statement, and so forth. Or it could be like which one which one of us is secretly ratting to the boss that I'm not having fun? All right? This next one comes to us from Adam. This was in response to both Are Fun Episode episodes and the Paragraphs episodes. Adam writes, Hi, Robert and Joe, I love your show because I'm consistently excited that you were covering a topic that I myself would want to cover if I had my own podcast. So thank you for letting me outsource my curiosity to you. It's an excellent hands. I'm reaching out because I am able to share a book recommendation based on one of your conversations. In the paragraph part two, Robert mentioned the short story collection The Voice Imitator by the brilliant Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhardt, who is known for extended paragraphs. I particularly love his novels Gargoyles two four pages, Wittgenstein's Nephew You hundred and six pages, and The Loser a hundred and ninety pages. If I'm not mistaken, all consists of singular, unbroken paragraphs. Joe said that he dreaded the idea of reading never ending chunks of prose. But Bernhardt turns this horror into a form of art that is truly transcended. If you have the patience and commitment to taking the work on its own terms, that's fascinating. I really this is a book that had been on my shelf for a while, and I had not picked it up in a while, and I hadn't really looked into the author um beyond the voice imitator. So this is this is interesting to learn a bit, a little bit more about this this author. It's not just a choice for that work. It's like a consistent style for this guy. Yeah, I gotta respect that, all right. Um Adam continues here on another note, I was thinking about what makes creative work fun when I was listening to your episode on the topic in your The Nature of Fun episodes, and for me, Monty Python immediately comes to mind. In particular, I frequently recalled particular scenes that bring a smile to my heart, such as the Bridge of Death scene in The Holy Grail. You're comment about humor deriving often from the resolution of incongruities in the Psyche resonated with me and help me understand why I keep going back to it in my mind. They take a trope answering riddles to avoid supernatural death and bridge trolls of fairy tale lore and turned it on its head. The central incongruity concerns the difficulty of the questions. Comically, Sir Galahad can't answer the simple third question about his favorite color. Later author's third question about the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow seems impossible, but then the role is reversed uh when he knows more about sparrows than the Riddler, who then is hoisted by his own petard, paying the price for his own hypocritical ignorance. There's so much going on here, but twelve year old me only got about forty of it. On a conscious level. All I knew was it was a ton of fun that I could keep returning to as my friends and I called back to it in our in jokes repeatedly for years. Get back to your thoughts about incongruity. This joke is a masterpiece, and that it has multiple twists and turns. They create a spring loading effect that pays off fantastically well. When the incongruities are resolved by the bridgekeeper's death, which follows the deaths of Robin and Sir Galahad, But one incongruity remains unresolved. What is the air speed velocity of an unladen African swallow and how does it compare to that of the European variety? We may never know. Thanks for the amazing work you guys do weekend and week out, Adam. I think you're right about all that, Adam. That seems a classic for a reason is almost a perfectly structured piece of comedy. All right, we got another message about our episodes on the paragraph. This is from somebody who wants to defend the honor of the pill crow as a as a useful symbol. Uh. And it's from a listener who wanted to remain anonymous. She asked simply to be called a woman in stem I think because she ends up potentially implicating her boss in the message. So uh, listener says, I love the show. I've been listening for nearly a decade. Now you are the only original show I'm still auto downloading, So I hope you know how special that makes you. Sorry, this is lagging so far behind the topic, but here goes on paragraphs in the workplace in a business environment. My three favorite paragraphs each consist of one word yes, no, and okay. And then in this next paragraph, I think this is referring to the conversation we had about how a lot of good writing doesn't just explain what the author thinks, but shows you how the author thinks. So it kind of takes you along a path of the author getting to a thought within their own brain. But this listener here says bad writing also sadly displays the author's thinking. However, rambling, disordered and oblivious to the interest, need, or expertise level of the reader, and a complete lack of respect for the reader's time. I suffer a barrage of daily emails from one or more coworkers guilty of all the above sins, combined with a refusal to edit, and egos sufficient to believe anyone cares what they think based on the list of c C is generally attached. Unfortunately, I report to one of the offenders, so I cannot just ignore them completely. Yeah, they're I think there are a lot of jobs where the the email is copious and uh and and not as well edited as it could be, but the message goes on. I wanted to close with a defense of the humble pill crow symbol in word. Remember this is the symbol that denotes a paragraph break. If you have accidentally turned it on and desperately tried to turn it off, you are not it's intended audience, But as someone who makes their living converting random text documents into data, it is invaluable. Definitely, it identifies where the line breaks are with paragraph marks, but it does much more. Turning the pill crow symbol on has helped me identify hidden white space, weird extra characters, and all sorts of surprise nonsense that is sometimes lurking unseen in documents that can be treated as text. These extra symbols inhibit your ability to treat portions of text as data fields. This is very important for any business process that turns out the same file format over and over that has then written to individual files. Only a computer has time to read all the files and find all the matching data fields, store them in a database, and produce a nice, usable summary report for the end users. And then if you read this on air, please call me a woman in stem since I called out my boss and don't know who else at the office might be listening. Looking forward to listening for another decade or more. Uh a woman in stem Uh. So, yeah, thanks for the message. I can absolutely see how Yeah, I think the story was that I remember that time when I was a kid and I accidentally turned on the paragraph markers on on Microsoft Word and then I was like, ah, what what are all these symbols? But yeah, if you if you're trying to avoid confusion and make sure you're just getting the relevant text and not extra stuff, that's that's very helpful. All right. This next one comes to us from Keith when it has and it has the title Crabs. Uh. You know, we we frequently come back to crabs on the show. We love a good crab story, we love crab movies and and so forth. So Keith writes in and says, first time a long time. I've been saving up some Pokemon comments for when I had a nice cash to send you, but I just got knocked off my feet by House of the Dragon, so I'll drop one right now. When I listened to your Crab series, the hairy crabs excited me because they must have been an inspiration for the Pokemon Crabominable. Uh. And then there's a picture attached to here and you can pull this up. You can also look up crabominable in various Pokemon databases, and it is indeed a beautiful beast. I don't think I've asked my son about this one, but uh yeah, beautiful, beautiful creature here. Wooly crab Pokemon is the species. But does this crab not have claws that where the clothes would be. I see like almost what looks like flowers with the kind of ball in the middle. Well, and so many of these creatures they are hybrids. Uh you know, they are monsters. They are pocket monsters at the end of the day, and therefore there there are a lot of chimeras in the mix. I would have concerns about putting this creature in my pocket. Anyway, they continue. I do wish that the in game explanations were as interesting as the real crabs, but I suppose it is a game designed to keep kids engage, not adult nerds. House of the Dragon, on the other hand, is very much not for kids and spoiler light. Episode two begins with a horrifying shot of humans being eaten alive by crabs as the surf licks their legs. It's gnarly stuff, so view at your own risk, but I was curious about your take on the prospect these crabs even seem to nestle in the flesh of their victims. I have been a fan since the days when Christian was a co host, and I love how you keep the show fresh and exciting all these years. In Thanks for all the content and movie recommendations, Keith. Thanks Keith. Always welcome more crab content. People out there. You've got interesting stuff about crabs, send it on in Well. I am current on the House of the Dragon. I've been watching it and yes there this is not really a spoiler at all, but there is a character that's introduced that is like a pirate lord that's threatening the realm and is he's called the crab Feeder, and he's this horrific looking individual with like copious sunburns and also this weird mask, uh mysterious. You don't know much about him, but after they defeat a particular enemy, they stake everybody to the shore like basically like crucifying them in some cases, and they let the crabs crawl on them, sometimes dumple a few crabs on them just to be sure. And the crabs start eating them. So the question did occur to me because we've talked about crabs eating people before. That's the kind of show we we are, and so I was wondering, It's like, well, would crabs really be up for this or they be turned off? Would they Would they be far more inclined to eat these people after they had died. Uh? I tend to think that's the case. Yeah. I would tend to think crabs in the real world tend to be more scavengers than than hunters of large prey. I mean, when they are hunters, I think they're they're grabbing it stuff smaller than them. I don't know for sure, but it seems very unlikely to me that that crabs would be trying to eat like a human sized animal that was capable of moving. Yeah, So unless there's a specialized species or ray of species in West roast Um, I would tend to say that this is just some some grotesque of fantastic dreaming here. But I love that they included it. It was still it's it's at the end of the day, it's crabs eating people, So it's it's kind of fun um and it's a good year for that sort of thing, because the season three of Love Death Robots has a wonderful episode, horrific episode titled Bad Traveling that that is centered around a monstrous crab that takes over a ship. So if you like your crab monsters, especially you're talking crab monsters, that's definitely an episode to check out. That one, uh I believe was Yeah, it's a bit based on a short story by Neil Asher, and uh it was adapted. The screenplay was adapted by Andrew Kevin Walker, So that's pretty cool, all right. On that crab note, we will go ahead and close out this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind listener Mail, but we'd love to hear from you out there. Do you have crab related thoughts to past episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, crab related thoughts to Weird House cinema, uh, crab related thoughts to any of our episodes right in, We'd love to hear from you, and we'll read your your email on a future episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Uh crab based listener mail, which 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 is a 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.