Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, 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 some messages from the mail bag. If you are a listener to Stuff to Blow your Mind 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. All sorts of messages are welcome. If you've got feedback on a previous episode, if you want to add something to our comments, or you know, share a thought you had if you of course, if you have corrections, you can send them on in. But also just if you want to share something you think we'd be interested in, send it our way. And also just saying hi is fine too. Yeah, and if you want to connect with us otherwise, I should point out that we do have a discord server discord page whatever you want, I guess is a server. So if you would like to appear on that and to interact with other listeners there, we'll just email us. We'll send you the link for that. We're also on the Facebook group the Stuff to Blow your Mind discussion module, and you can if you're on Facebook, you can easily obtain access to that. And then just for Weird House Cinema, we're on letterbox dot com. It's ltt r boxd dot com and that's mostly we just use an account there Weird House to log all of the movies we've watched. For Weird House Cinema, not a lot of commenting going on there for us, but if you comment there, I'll probably see it. Oh hey, one more administrative note, because why not. Not too long ago, we were told by our people here at the company that some of you out there, some listeners, may have been subscribed to Stuff to Blow your Mind and had auto downloads enabled, so you thought you were supposed to get new episodes, but for various reasons, one of them maybe being if you hadn't listened to one of the newest episodes in the feed for a while, maybe the five most recent episodes the platform you listen through may have turned off your automatic downloads, in which case you're no longer getting our new shows, even though we are still publishing. If you think that may have happened to you, go in and check just to make sure that you do have auto downloads enabled, of course, if that is what you want. And one way to try to avoid that happening in the future is too if you can be relatively current on listening, to try to listen to at least one of the five most recent episodes at any given time. But then again, I mean, you know, we're not trying to constrict how you listen to the show. If you listen at all, we're grateful and we really do appreciate it, so do it the way you want it. But to try to avoid weird technical glitches, that is apparently one thing you can do. And before we get into the listener mail, I'm also going to note that we're recording this on March fourteenth, so a lot of times we end up recording far closer to the publication date, So just bear that in mind. If you've sent in an email March fourteenth, or even just late in the day on March fourteenth, we probably haven't seen it yet, and that's one of many reasons we may not be reading it in this episode. The other reason could be all the cursing, so you know, try and keep the language clean, Okay, I think that does it for preliminary business. I'm going to kick things off with a message from Jeremy which is a follow up to a message featured on last week's episode. So on last Monday's Listener Mail, Jeremy got in touch to share with us that just as he was listening to our episodes on Finn McCool, during a passage in which we were describing the Giants Causeway, he drove past an art installation that appeared to be modeled on the Giants Causeway, raising questions, of course, about whether we were sort of a lay of heavening Jeremy's environment through the Internet. Anyway, we tried to figure out from Jeremy's photo, which he attached in the email, where the sculpture was and who made it, but no luck, so Jeremy wrote back in to fill us in. Turns out the photo was from the Babraham Research Campus, which is a laboratory campus south of Cambridge in England, and Jeremy writes as follows, Hello, Robert and Joe, thank you for reading out my emails since you appeared fascinated. I investigated further and found the following about the columns the referring to the sculpture. Apparently, the artwork is called Hive and is designed to represent honeycomb rather than the basalt columns, and is linked to the bioscience nature of the research going on at the campus. Best regards Jeremy Ps, no gray whales were cited, unfortunately, so I looked into this a little more. The sculpture, it's called Hive. It is made to resemble honeycomb or beehive, but it also apparently is modeled on the Giants Causeway, so it's both at the same time. It's by an artist named Tanya Covots, and I was reading from the website for the installation, which says quote from her studio in Devon. Covots cast more than two hundred and fifty concrete hexagons that resemble the basalt formations of the Giant's Causeway, as well as the shapes crafted in bee hives. The work is completed by a wildflower meadow and ribbon orchard of fruit trees, all of which work together to attract solitary bees with places to rest and feed throughout the growing calendar. So anyway, very nice sculpture. I like that it's trying to be a little bit geological and biological at the same time. Yeah. Absolutely, it's neat to know the I guess. I mean, even in my experience, sometimes you drive past some sort of cool roadside art and you never really know the details on what's going on there. You don't know what the artist's intent is. So here we seem to have finally received the full story. I mean, I guess it wouldn't be advisable to start trying to like google art installation details while you're driving past. Oh no, no, no, All right, here's one that comes to us from Kim. Tim writes in and says, dear Joe and Robert. First of all, thank you very much for everything you do. I've been listening for years and it's always a delight. I'm writing to you today because of your episode on the Gray Way. You mentioned a book by Mark Carwodeen quite a lot, and I just wanted to inform you that he is best known for his work with the incomparable Douglas Adams. Together they traveled the world trying to find some of the rarest still living animals. I remember the Kiwi and the bay Gee. This is would be the bay Gee. This is the yang Ze River Dolphin. The resulting book is Last Chance to See and I highly recommend it. They even made a TV show where Carboden visited some of the animals a couple of years ago in the company of Stephen Fry. Very watchable obviously. Thanks for all you do, Please keep it up. Greetings from Germany. Tim. Now, if I understand correctly, I think the original book by Carwardine and Douglas Adams was from maybe like the late eighties or something. But then there was this follow up television show from the more recently, certainly twenty first century, and the main thing I remember, though I haven't seen it in full, there was at least one viral moment from the show with Stephen Fry because one person involved with the show it might have been Mark Carwardine himself, they found a rare tropical bird that was trying to mate with his head. Oh yes, I do remember this going viral. Yeah yeah. Mark Carwardine is as a British zoologist and if you want to learn more about his work, he has a website Mark Carwardine dot com that's cr W A R D, I N E and H. Yeah. It has some links to the book to some of the books, including the Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises books, a book that I was referencing. It looks like there's a relatively new edition of Last Chance to See out with a forward by Stephen Frye. So yeah, he's been involved in a number of great projects, a lot of great wildlife to talk or Fean Moore. I just looked it up and I think the rare parrot that was trying to mate with his head was the caca po oh. Okay, yes, a very spirited animal also known as the owl parrot. Yeah, this bird came up fairly recently on the show. I think we were talking back he remember as a listener mail or if it came up in the context of another episode, but highly intelligent parrot species sometimes Rex cars. Yes, it was a listener mail someone had written in about one of these animals tormenting their parents. I think, Okay, this next message is from Mike. This one's long, so I don't know, we might want to break this up part way through or something, but this is a fantastic message about firsthand experience with whales, so I wanted to feature as much of it as we could. Mike says Hello, Robert and Joe. Apologize for the length here. After listening to your whale episodes, I wanted to write in about my whale experience. I live in Santa Cruz, californ, Ornya. We are located right on the northern edge of the Monterey Bay. Our waters host many marine mammals, including various pinnipeds, sea otters, and of course whales were a major hub for gray whales, and I've seen them as well as a blue whale, humpback whales in orcas nice. I am an avid surfer and that puts me in close proximity to many of these creatures. On a daily basis. It's not uncommon for me to find myself next to otters, sea lions, possibly even an elephant seal in the water. As for whales, the blues and orcas don't really come in that close to shore, but the humpbacks and grays can get very close to the surf zone At the right time of the year. It's quite common to see them feeding or just engaged in whale leisure just offshore. On one occasion, I was outsurfing when significant whale feeding was taking place. These were clearly humpbacks engaged in what's known as lunge feeding, unlike the way that gray's scoop food out of the bottom, and that's referring to the feeding behavior we talked about in our gray whale series where they'll like slam their head down into the ocean floor and scoop up sediment to filter organisms out of it. Back to Mike's message, the humpbacks engage in more active pursuit of free swimming food. Lunge feeding involves the whales cooperating with each other to herd small fish like sardines into a tight bait ball. Then they take turns swimming up through the bait ball from below with their mouths agape. It's a real spectacle as the feeding whale will breach the surface, often to great heights with their mouth agape. You really get a good look at these massive creatures as they slam their mouths shut, simultaneously ejecting vast quantities of water and crashing back down. As the feeding whale breaches, they tend to push a lot of the bait fish to the surface. This draws in seabirds by the hundreds, as the fish are easy pickings for them. On this particular day, multiple whales were breach over and over from where I was sitting in the water. I had a good view, but still felt quite a safe distance from the activity. For the most part, all this activity takes place in deeper water outside of the surfing area. At one point, however, I noticed that the birds had all taken up a position directly overhead. I am well aware that the birds know exactly where the whales are at all times. The birds above surely meant the whales were below me. I definitely did not want to be there. I moved to paddling closer to shore, but it was too late. I felt a strange disturbance in the water, unlike anything I had felt before. The water started swelling up, as though the ocean was filling up from below. The birds rained down from the sky all around me. Sardines began to explode from the water by the hundreds. I was in the worst possible position. I imagine that whale charging up from the depths with its huge mouth gaping. I didn't think it would eat me, as I've heard that humpback's throat is actually only wide enough to smallow a few small fish at a time. I was very worried that it could violently thrash me around, should I accidentally end up in its mouth, or that it could breach near me and come crashing down on me. Miraculously, the chaos stopped, The water calmed down, the sardine stopped emerging, the birds relaxed. No whale lunged out of the water. Okay, intermission, rob Do you want to take over at this point? Yes, hands on attack rope, here we go. Okay, all right. Instead, three whale surface not far from me. One aimed directly at me. It advanced and, with seeming intent, pushed me aside with its snout or bow. I don't know what the proper term for the front of a whale is. It's not the nose, that's right. A humpback whale swam out to me and gave me a shove. It was similar to having a good sized boat passing too close. There was enough wake from the whale to kind of drag me along in the same direction. As the whale brushed past, it rolled a bit so that it could align its eye with my face. There I was sitting in the water face to eye with this whale. Now I may be bringing my own preconceptions to the situation, but it feels like there's something deeply powerful in that gaze behind those eyes burned and intellect that seems curious and analytical. It seemed more knowing than say, a sea lion that might be looking at me. No disrespect to sea lions, as they are amazing in their own right. I felt like I was being sized up, and it felt like the whale was intentionally looking me in the face, as if to make sure that I noticed it. I really got the distinct impression that it was, on some level trying to reason with me. Its reasoning was do you mind we're working here? Or something similar. It was simultaneously the most magical and terrifying thing I've ever experienced. It's hard to really understand how huge and powerful these animals are until you were in the water with them and totally at their mercy. As Robert noted recounting his experiences in Mexico, they are surprisingly fast and agile, and you really have to see them in person to fully appreciate the power. Likewise, it's hard to really understand that that weird connection that one feels when they look into the eyes of another intelligent species until you were there. Note I don't recommend that people try to get in the water with the whales and replicate this experience. I was there accidentally. I now moved back towards the shore a lot sooner when I see this feeding happening. Clearly, my presence disrupted the feeding of this whale. I don't know if it got another turn or the other whales were like, sorry, back to the end of the line. It's my turn to lunch the bait ball. For all I know, I might have ruined this whale's day. However, as much as I try to stay out of their way, I still seem to cross pass with them pretty regularly. Since that experience, whales have unexpectedly surfaced right next to me many times. It's quite possible that some of the whales I've seen were the very same whales. Robert Sell in Mexico, thanks for reading and putting out such a great show. Mike. Oh and then Mike has a ps here ps. The Monterey Bay, as seen from Santa Cruz, is home to one of the most incredib and persistent displays of Fata morgana around, especially in the summer when we have warm, still air and cold water. The distant shores often consist of these phantom shapes that rise and chains throughout the day. It's quite common to see distant structures on the far shore repeated and inverted. Just one more bit of stuff to blow your mind. Magic that's here. Wow, what a fantastic message. Thank you, Mike. Yeah, that was wonderful. Yeah I agree with I did not obviously I did not have the exact same experience here, but yeah, to the extent that our experiences line up, I totally agree with everything that Mike shared about looking into the whale's eye, being in close proximity to one of these magnificent organisms. It's amazing. Okay. This next message is in response to our episodes on Horror Vakay and some previous listener mail. This is from Gary and it's about well we got We got a message from a listener a couple of mondays ago about pages in documents and books that are labeled this page intentionally left blank. So Gary says, Hi, Robert and Joe, just listening to your listener mail episode where you talked about blank pages, I was instantly reminded of the novel Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Stern, published in seventeen fifty nine, which famously has a blank page in it where Stern invites the reader to use it to describe a character. Big fan of the show, many thanks for making such a fun and interesting podcast. Best wishes, Gary. This is a great find. Gary, Yeah, a good literary reference. And by the way, I know when people talk about this book, they always shorten the title to just the name Tristram Shandy. But for humor's sake, I do like the full title, which is the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. Gentleman, You've got to know the opinions. But anyway, I'm going to read the paragraph that leads straight into this blank page. I think what's going on here in the book is the narrator here is describing a character, a character that somebody is falling in love with, so they are smitten. And it says chapter thirty eight to conceive this right, call for pen and ink. Here's paper ready to your hand. Sit down, sir, paint her to your own mind, as like your mistress as you can, as unlike your wife as your conscience will let you. Tis all one to me, please put your own fancy in it. And then there's just a blank page, this page one forty seven of this volume. I wonder to what extent this is adapted in the film. Maybe it is, Well, they just show a blank page, just like picture as unlike your wife, as your conscience will allow. Yeah, you kind of have like a little intermission there, like, I don't know they might have. It seems like a clever sort of movie. Maybe they did. It's interesting that this is a very experimental kind of thing to occur in a book from the middle of the eighteenth century. But I know that though I've never read it in full, trust from Shandy does have that reputation. In general, it's sort of consider to be a kind of ahead of its time book in terms of weird experimental forms and literary conventions. And I think it has like a lot of stream of consciousness stuff in it, which was obviously not common of the novels or romances of the time. It's sort of, I think thought of as a proto modernist novel. But I also like how this looks ahead to to the way characters are realized in many video games of today, where you can like build your own characters. You just you know, Yeah, they don't come pre written for you. You draw him for yourself. Yeah. Yeah, And I mean, and of course you still see games go both ways, but yeah, there's there's a certain power and being able to decide exactly what a what a character looks like. You know, And I think I've probably mentioned this before, but obviously I think we often do this ourselves. And I know I did this more when I was a younger reader, where I would sort of decide for myself what a character looked like and then go with it. But then I would get irritated, you know, halfway through the book the author just casually mentioned, oh, this character has a mustache, or this character had you know, any description like that. Well, now you've completely thrown me off. I already had a certain I had to already had this part cast and now you're giving me additional information. Yeah, you rebel against the author. This is not your character anymore. It's mine. Now I get to decide what they look like. I'm curious. I hadn't thought about this in a while, but yeah, I used to when I was a young reader, like reading like full length novels for the first time, I would kind of go through it. I would actually cast the characters, often like with particular actors, and I would decide ahead of time who was playing what part. And I don't really do that anymore. Occasionally I'll catch myself kind of casting and character or sort of course correcting, and maybe even at times if there's some confusing characters going on, I'll do a little bit of that to try and keep things straight in my head, but not not like I did when I was younger. And of course, if you're reading a book that there's already a movie version, and they're kind of doing that for you, and maybe that's where that activity came from. All right, Well, it's Pinball Wizard time because we have a great bit of weird house cinema. Listener mail, this is gonna be the last one to read in this episode, but it's a it's a weighty one. So here we go from Zach Dear Joe and Robert. I've been meaning to get in touch for a while. I'm a massive fan of weird house cinema, and I just love the verbal imagery you can cock for old and weird movies. I must admit I haven't seen half of the films you talk about, but your elegant descriptions make me feel like I have. I was inspired to experience the Super Inframan with my family because of the revered tones expressed in your podcast. I can't thank you enough for the recommendation. Not only did I personally delight in the colors and textures of that masterpiece, but my family all gains something special from the experience. My two little ladies still talk about seeing the zippers on those amazing rubber suits, a nuance that is lost with the day's seamless computer wizardry. Well, that fills my heart with gladness. You know, not many of the movies we talked about weird on Weird House or not for everyone, but in for Man, I think that that's the exception. That's just a movie that I think everybody should see and nearly everyone would love. Yeah, yeah, and it is great to see. I see this night in my own son. I've I've talked about this several times, I'm sure, but you know where they're they're seeing through effects, but sometimes they're able to experience effects that are not absolutely pristine despite being exposed to some really amazing modern effects. So it's it's great when they can appreciate the older stuff. Yeah. Anyway, continuing the email, your recent review of Clash of the Titans, one of my all time favorite stop motion animation slash Ray Harryhouse Inflix spurred me on to reach out. I'm not sure whether you're aware, but there is an interesting correlation between b movies and all time classic pinball machines. Because pinball was massive in the sixties through the nineties, anything at everything could become a theme for a pinball machine, so original themes were common. Licensing is more popular today than it was back then, and so some unusual choices were made for games because of the sheer number of games pumped out. Not all pinball machines were particularly great. Some, however, are regarded as timeless, primarily after hearing of your particular fondness for the film Sinbad in the Eye of the Tiger. I believe Joe owned it on VHS. I think I had a slightly pirated version on VHS. Ah, you'll hopefully be delighted to know that the accompanying pinball machine is revered as an all time classic. The pinball company Gottlieb made hundreds of games back in its heyday, but this nineteen seventy eight beauty is something special. It has the unique feature of two sets of double or inline flippers. Is a fast and brutal game and is one that I own and love well. Rob I had to dig up some pictures and paste them in the outline here for you to look at. So I love the artwork on the whatever it's called the backboard where it shows the scores. We have here some illustrations that only marginally resemble the characters in the movie. But we've got the evil sorceress, Queens and Nobia. We've got the bronze automaton of minotaur shape called the Minoton. He's a robot bullhead. We've got Sinbad here with his sword raised standing in front of Valency. The princess I think her name is Farrah or Farrah or something, and that's the Jane Seymour in the movie, I believe. And then smoke rising in the background so it's beautifully painted. And then when you look at the actual I don't know what you call it, the play space or something. Sure, okay, yeah, yeah, But the thing I didn't realize exactly what Zach was talking about here with the idea of double flippers or inline flippers. But they're flippers that when they are not activated, they form a straight line. It's the line that makes a kind of V at the bottom of the pinball space where the ball will roll down into the to the hole at the bottom. But when you activate them, I'm doing a terrible job of explaining this, but instead of just having one pair of flippers down at the bottom of that V, the whole V is made of flippers. So there's four flippers and when you flip them, both of them flip up on each side. Yeah. Yeah, now that I see it, I'll see a picture of it here on our notes. I totally get it. But yeah, this is a beautiful machine. I was I never really got timball machines. I was never a huge arcade kid anyway, but I was always interested in the arcade machines and today I can still I can look at these and I can understand why people go crazy for them, for the nostalgia of them, for the like the physical playable artifacts that they are very cool. Okay, Rob, I'm currently looking at an big internet list of licensed pinball games, and there are so many. There are so many that you really would not have expected. I'm gonna name three, and you tell me which of these is not a real, licensed pinball cabinet. Okay, all right, Okay, Apollo thirteen, Aerosmith Baywatch, I'm gonna say Apolo thirteen is not a pinball machine. No it is. They're all real. Oh like wow? All right, Well, you know, I thought this this quiz was gonna go in a different direction. And you're gonna ask me to name one film that I wish was a pinball machine. Okay, and I didn't even have to think about it. It's gonna be Chuck. Please tell me, Chudd, there's a pinball machine. John Heard's face scrawled up on the background. Yeah, in like subway tunnels. You can imagine, like it seems like they could have done something really cool with that, and maybe they did. Did they get the pinball factory on the phone? I think you've got a white hot idea there that it can't lose, all right, but it doesn't exist that we know of. All right, Well, we have to have some more stuff he wants to share about pinballs, and so I'm going to read through them here real quickly. We also have meteor another late seventies classic, made by Stern Electronics. Stern Electronics was renowned for making beautiful, fast, and cheaply made games that have recently become darlings of the US tournament scene. I'm just so many things to floor me in this. I did not know there was like you still had like Pinball Wizard competitions. In appearance, it doesn't seem to be related to have licensed property. The art is great, but a bit generic, but it is actually a direct tie in to the nineteen seventy nine Sean Connery film I've never even heard of this movie, Meteor? Are they trolling us? Is this real? Natalie Wood, Henry Fonda, Martin Landau, Carl Malden, Huh yeah, in nineteen seventy nine. You know, I guess the thing with some of these big budget to films, especially some of these big disaster films, they weren't good. They haven't really stood the test of time, so nobody thinks about them today. Like, I really am not up on Meteor, but I feel like I've run across multiple films like this from more or less this time period and researching stuff for Weird House, and I'm like, oh, well, that's that I did not know that existed, and I have no interest in seeing it. This is an American International Pictures. Okay, I think this may need to go on the list for Weird House. It might be at least be something we should check out and see if it's worth doing. Yeah, I'm happy to look into it. Okay, here's another one. We also have the Shadow licensed from that fair to middling Alec Baldwin film. This is a highly collectible and fired game that's on my wish list. It commands a high price and as an excellent representation of all the greatest elements of nineties pinball design. Now, this is a film I'm very familiar with because I believe this was a Russell McKay film. I remember being very excited for it when it came out and I was a kid. And then I remember finding it somewhat disappointing, But not for reasons I can necessarily articulate. I just I have seen it forever. I just remember it did not win me over the way I wanted it to, despite a great cast. Speaking of underwhelming and great cast, you'll never guess the next movie that they made a pinball machine out of yes, I continues, Finally, I know you're both fond of the film Crawl. I saw it in the cinema back in the day and loved it. The pinball machine associated with this license has the legend of being a game that only made it to the prototype. It has the crazy feature of a second full sized playfield located underneath the main play field that is viewed via a distorting mirror from above. The mad creativity behind the design has sadly not been repeated since rob I dug up another high def picture of this and put it in the outline for you. Okay, so I can tell what's going on on the backboard. That we've got our main characters from KRUL, or at least one of them, I don't remember. I don't know who this lady with the big hair and the wizard staff is is. Oh no, that's that's our our lady, the lady. Yeah, okay, remember remember the beast um has her like dolled up for I guess their wedding, you know, Oh okay, but she ends up looking like this. There's the Widow of the web, the big spider. I see that, and they see some people on horses. I guess people ride horses in the movie. Uh. And then yeah, in the middle of the playfield there is I can't even tell what I'm looking at, but it's like a big It looks like just a big glass pane. So this is like a window into a lower level of play. Wow, it does seem ambitious, maybe two ambitious, like one wonder glancing? This is this something that was as fun to use? Was it innovation over fun? Or is a situation where it was fun and innovative but more difficult to manufacture? I don't know, you know, they really missed an opportunity here to have in the middle of the playfield a five sided star of flippers that you could all flip simultaneous. Again, be the Glave of flippers. Yeah, yeah, they should let me design pinball cabinets. How do you get into this line of work. It's got to be a very specialized field at this point, right, but man it yeah it looks it looks very cool anyway, apologies for the essay. Right, So, I actually host a podcast called the Pinball Tapes on the Pinball Network, which is a historical based podcast that focuses on individual games. I'm deep into the hobby as both a restore and player, and so I tend to get a bet verbose. I'll admit my podcast is in its infancy, but I'm really enjoying the right. Thank you for your time, gents. I really love what you do, and I'm very grateful for you introducing me to the to a world of weird and wonderful aw tours that I didn't know existed. Cheers, Zach. Well, thank you so much for the email, Zach, and best of luck with your podcast. It sounds like you really know your stuff. Yeah, it's this is a seems like it's a very interesting world to explore for sure. All right, well, I think we're gonna have to close it up right there. I mean we have to. We have to. We all have to go off and like look and see if they made like the Chronicles of Riddick pinball machine now and so forth. Uh, there's like there's in some so many films that seemed like they would be just perfect for this kind of treatment. I mean, Chronicles of Riddick is basically a pinball machine, so the adaptation writes itself. In the meantime, certainly reach out to us. So I think we told you some ways to do that at the beginning. We'll share the email here in a second. Just a reminder listener Maile episodes published on Monday's Core, episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind on Tuesday and Thursday, short form Artifact or Monster on Wednesday, and on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on a weirdhouse cinema. Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Pauseway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio. Hey you welcome to 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 some messages from the mail bag. If you are a listener to Stuff to Blow your Mind 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. All sorts of messages are welcome. If you've got feedback on a previous episode, if you want to add something to our comments, or you know, share a thought you had if you of course, if you have corrections, you can send them on in. But also just if you want to share something you think we'd be interested in, send it our way. And also just saying hi is fine too. Yeah, and if you want to connect with us otherwise, I should point out that we do have a discord server discord page whatever you want, I guess is a server. So if you would like to appear on that and to interact with other listeners there, we'll just email us. We'll send you the link for that. We're also on the Facebook group the Stuff to Blow your Mind discussion module, and you can if you're on Facebook, you can easily obtain access to that. And then just for Weird House Cinema, we're on letterbox dot com. It's ltt r boxd dot com and that's mostly we just use an account there Weird House to log all of the movies we've watched. For Weird House Cinema, not a lot of commenting going on there for us, but if you comment there, I'll probably see it. Oh hey, one more administrative note, because why not. Not too long ago, we were told by our people here at the company that some of you out there, some listeners, may have been subscribed to Stuff to Blow your Mind and had auto downloads enabled, so you thought you were supposed to get new episodes, but for various reasons, one of them maybe being if you hadn't listened to one of the newest episodes in the feed for a while, maybe the five most recent episodes the platform you listen through may have turned off your automatic downloads, in which case you're no longer getting our new shows, even though we are still publishing. If you think that may have happened to you, go in and check just to make sure that you do have auto downloads enabled, of course, if that is what you want. And one way to try to avoid that happening in the future is too if you can be relatively current on listening, to try to listen to at least one of the five most recent episodes at any given time. But then again, I mean, you know, we're not trying to constrict how you listen to the show. If you listen at all, we're grateful and we really do appreciate it, so do it the way you want it. But to try to avoid weird technical glitches, that is apparently one thing you can do. And before we get into the listener mail, I'm also going to note that we're recording this on March fourteenth, so a lot of times we end up recording far closer to the publication date, So just bear that in mind. If you've sent in an email March fourteenth, or even just late in the day on March fourteenth, we probably haven't seen it yet, and that's one of many reasons we may not be reading it in this episode. The other reason could be all the cursing, so you know, try and keep the language clean, Okay, I think that does it for preliminary business. I'm going to kick things off with a message from Jeremy which is a follow up to a message featured on last week's episode. So on last Monday's Listener Mail, Jeremy got in touch to share with us that just as he was listening to our episodes on Finn McCool, during a passage in which we were describing the Giants Causeway, he drove past an art installation that appeared to be modeled on the Giants Causeway, raising questions, of course, about whether we were sort of a lay of heavening Jeremy's environment through the Internet. Anyway, we tried to figure out from Jeremy's photo, which he attached in the email, where the sculpture was and who made it, but no luck, so Jeremy wrote back in to fill us in. Turns out the photo was from the Babraham Research Campus, which is a laboratory campus south of Cambridge in England, and Jeremy writes as follows, Hello, Robert and Joe, thank you for reading out my emails since you appeared fascinated. I investigated further and found the following about the columns the referring to the sculpture. Apparently, the artwork is called Hive and is designed to represent honeycomb rather than the basalt columns, and is linked to the bioscience nature of the research going on at the campus. Best regards Jeremy Ps, no gray whales were cited, unfortunately, so I looked into this a little more. The sculpture, it's called Hive. It is made to resemble honeycomb or beehive, but it also apparently is modeled on the Giants Causeway, so it's both at the same time. It's by an artist named Tanya Covots, and I was reading from the website for the installation, which says quote from her studio in Devon. Covots cast more than two hundred and fifty concrete hexagons that resemble the basalt formations of the Giant's Causeway, as well as the shapes crafted in bee hives. The work is completed by a wildflower meadow and ribbon orchard of fruit trees, all of which work together to attract solitary bees with places to rest and feed throughout the growing calendar. So anyway, very nice sculpture. I like that it's trying to be a little bit geological and biological at the same time. Yeah. Absolutely, it's neat to know the I guess. I mean, even in my experience, sometimes you drive past some sort of cool roadside art and you never really know the details on what's going on there. You don't know what the artist's intent is. So here we seem to have finally received the full story. I mean, I guess it wouldn't be advisable to start trying to like google art installation details while you're driving past. Oh no, no, no, All right, here's one that comes to us from Kim. Tim writes in and says, dear Joe and Robert. First of all, thank you very much for everything you do. I've been listening for years and it's always a delight. I'm writing to you today because of your episode on the Gray Way. You mentioned a book by Mark Carwodeen quite a lot, and I just wanted to inform you that he is best known for his work with the incomparable Douglas Adams. Together they traveled the world trying to find some of the rarest still living animals. I remember the Kiwi and the bay Gee. This is would be the bay Gee. This is the yang Ze River Dolphin. The resulting book is Last Chance to See and I highly recommend it. They even made a TV show where Carboden visited some of the animals a couple of years ago in the company of Stephen Fry. Very watchable obviously. Thanks for all you do, Please keep it up. Greetings from Germany. Tim. Now, if I understand correctly, I think the original book by Carwardine and Douglas Adams was from maybe like the late eighties or something. But then there was this follow up television show from the more recently, certainly twenty first century, and the main thing I remember, though I haven't seen it in full, there was at least one viral moment from the show with Stephen Fry because one person involved with the show it might have been Mark Carwardine himself, they found a rare tropical bird that was trying to mate with his head. Oh yes, I do remember this going viral. Yeah yeah. Mark Carwardine is as a British zoologist and if you want to learn more about his work, he has a website Mark Carwardine dot com that's cr W A R D, I N E and H. Yeah. It has some links to the book to some of the books, including the Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises books, a book that I was referencing. It looks like there's a relatively new edition of Last Chance to See out with a forward by Stephen Frye. So yeah, he's been involved in a number of great projects, a lot of great wildlife to talk or Fean Moore. I just looked it up and I think the rare parrot that was trying to mate with his head was the caca po oh. Okay, yes, a very spirited animal also known as the owl parrot. Yeah, this bird came up fairly recently on the show. I think we were talking back he remember as a listener mail or if it came up in the context of another episode, but highly intelligent parrot species sometimes Rex cars. Yes, it was a listener mail someone had written in about one of these animals tormenting their parents. I think, Okay, this next message is from Mike. This one's long, so I don't know, we might want to break this up part way through or something, but this is a fantastic message about firsthand experience with whales, so I wanted to feature as much of it as we could. Mike says Hello, Robert and Joe. Apologize for the length here. After listening to your whale episodes, I wanted to write in about my whale experience. I live in Santa Cruz, californ, Ornya. We are located right on the northern edge of the Monterey Bay. Our waters host many marine mammals, including various pinnipeds, sea otters, and of course whales were a major hub for gray whales, and I've seen them as well as a blue whale, humpback whales in orcas nice. I am an avid surfer and that puts me in close proximity to many of these creatures. On a daily basis. It's not uncommon for me to find myself next to otters, sea lions, possibly even an elephant seal in the water. As for whales, the blues and orcas don't really come in that close to shore, but the humpbacks and grays can get very close to the surf zone At the right time of the year. It's quite common to see them feeding or just engaged in whale leisure just offshore. On one occasion, I was outsurfing when significant whale feeding was taking place. These were clearly humpbacks engaged in what's known as lunge feeding, unlike the way that gray's scoop food out of the bottom, and that's referring to the feeding behavior we talked about in our gray whale series where they'll like slam their head down into the ocean floor and scoop up sediment to filter organisms out of it. Back to Mike's message, the humpbacks engage in more active pursuit of free swimming food. Lunge feeding involves the whales cooperating with each other to herd small fish like sardines into a tight bait ball. Then they take turns swimming up through the bait ball from below with their mouths agape. It's a real spectacle as the feeding whale will breach the surface, often to great heights with their mouth agape. You really get a good look at these massive creatures as they slam their mouths shut, simultaneously ejecting vast quantities of water and crashing back down. As the feeding whale breaches, they tend to push a lot of the bait fish to the surface. This draws in seabirds by the hundreds, as the fish are easy pickings for them. On this particular day, multiple whales were breach over and over from where I was sitting in the water. I had a good view, but still felt quite a safe distance from the activity. For the most part, all this activity takes place in deeper water outside of the surfing area. At one point, however, I noticed that the birds had all taken up a position directly overhead. I am well aware that the birds know exactly where the whales are at all times. The birds above surely meant the whales were below me. I definitely did not want to be there. I moved to paddling closer to shore, but it was too late. I felt a strange disturbance in the water, unlike anything I had felt before. The water started swelling up, as though the ocean was filling up from below. The birds rained down from the sky all around me. Sardines began to explode from the water by the hundreds. I was in the worst possible position. I imagine that whale charging up from the depths with its huge mouth gaping. I didn't think it would eat me, as I've heard that humpback's throat is actually only wide enough to smallow a few small fish at a time. I was very worried that it could violently thrash me around, should I accidentally end up in its mouth, or that it could breach near me and come crashing down on me. Miraculously, the chaos stopped, The water calmed down, the sardine stopped emerging, the birds relaxed. No whale lunged out of the water. Okay, intermission, rob Do you want to take over at this point? Yes, hands on attack rope, here we go. Okay, all right. Instead, three whale surface not far from me. One aimed directly at me. It advanced and, with seeming intent, pushed me aside with its snout or bow. I don't know what the proper term for the front of a whale is. It's not the nose, that's right. A humpback whale swam out to me and gave me a shove. It was similar to having a good sized boat passing too close. There was enough wake from the whale to kind of drag me along in the same direction. As the whale brushed past, it rolled a bit so that it could align its eye with my face. There I was sitting in the water face to eye with this whale. Now I may be bringing my own preconceptions to the situation, but it feels like there's something deeply powerful in that gaze behind those eyes burned and intellect that seems curious and analytical. It seemed more knowing than say, a sea lion that might be looking at me. No disrespect to sea lions, as they are amazing in their own right. I felt like I was being sized up, and it felt like the whale was intentionally looking me in the face, as if to make sure that I noticed it. I really got the distinct impression that it was, on some level trying to reason with me. Its reasoning was do you mind we're working here? Or something similar. It was simultaneously the most magical and terrifying thing I've ever experienced. It's hard to really understand how huge and powerful these animals are until you were in the water with them and totally at their mercy. As Robert noted recounting his experiences in Mexico, they are surprisingly fast and agile, and you really have to see them in person to fully appreciate the power. Likewise, it's hard to really understand that that weird connection that one feels when they look into the eyes of another intelligent species until you were there. Note I don't recommend that people try to get in the water with the whales and replicate this experience. I was there accidentally. I now moved back towards the shore a lot sooner when I see this feeding happening. Clearly, my presence disrupted the feeding of this whale. I don't know if it got another turn or the other whales were like, sorry, back to the end of the line. It's my turn to lunch the bait ball. For all I know, I might have ruined this whale's day. However, as much as I try to stay out of their way, I still seem to cross pass with them pretty regularly. Since that experience, whales have unexpectedly surfaced right next to me many times. It's quite possible that some of the whales I've seen were the very same whales. Robert Sell in Mexico, thanks for reading and putting out such a great show. Mike. Oh and then Mike has a ps here ps. The Monterey Bay, as seen from Santa Cruz, is home to one of the most incredib and persistent displays of Fata morgana around, especially in the summer when we have warm, still air and cold water. The distant shores often consist of these phantom shapes that rise and chains throughout the day. It's quite common to see distant structures on the far shore repeated and inverted. Just one more bit of stuff to blow your mind. Magic that's here. Wow, what a fantastic message. Thank you, Mike. Yeah, that was wonderful. Yeah I agree with I did not obviously I did not have the exact same experience here, but yeah, to the extent that our experiences line up, I totally agree with everything that Mike shared about looking into the whale's eye, being in close proximity to one of these magnificent organisms. It's amazing. Okay. This next message is in response to our episodes on Horror Vakay and some previous listener mail. This is from Gary and it's about well we got We got a message from a listener a couple of mondays ago about pages in documents and books that are labeled this page intentionally left blank. So Gary says, Hi, Robert and Joe, just listening to your listener mail episode where you talked about blank pages, I was instantly reminded of the novel Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Stern, published in seventeen fifty nine, which famously has a blank page in it where Stern invites the reader to use it to describe a character. Big fan of the show, many thanks for making such a fun and interesting podcast. Best wishes, Gary. This is a great find. Gary, Yeah, a good literary reference. And by the way, I know when people talk about this book, they always shorten the title to just the name Tristram Shandy. But for humor's sake, I do like the full title, which is the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. Gentleman, You've got to know the opinions. But anyway, I'm going to read the paragraph that leads straight into this blank page. I think what's going on here in the book is the narrator here is describing a character, a character that somebody is falling in love with, so they are smitten. And it says chapter thirty eight to conceive this right, call for pen and ink. Here's paper ready to your hand. Sit down, sir, paint her to your own mind, as like your mistress as you can, as unlike your wife as your conscience will let you. Tis all one to me, please put your own fancy in it. And then there's just a blank page, this page one forty seven of this volume. I wonder to what extent this is adapted in the film. Maybe it is, Well, they just show a blank page, just like picture as unlike your wife, as your conscience will allow. Yeah, you kind of have like a little intermission there, like, I don't know they might have. It seems like a clever sort of movie. Maybe they did. It's interesting that this is a very experimental kind of thing to occur in a book from the middle of the eighteenth century. But I know that though I've never read it in full, trust from Shandy does have that reputation. In general, it's sort of consider to be a kind of ahead of its time book in terms of weird experimental forms and literary conventions. And I think it has like a lot of stream of consciousness stuff in it, which was obviously not common of the novels or romances of the time. It's sort of, I think thought of as a proto modernist novel. But I also like how this looks ahead to to the way characters are realized in many video games of today, where you can like build your own characters. You just you know, Yeah, they don't come pre written for you. You draw him for yourself. Yeah. Yeah, And I mean, and of course you still see games go both ways, but yeah, there's there's a certain power and being able to decide exactly what a what a character looks like. You know, And I think I've probably mentioned this before, but obviously I think we often do this ourselves. And I know I did this more when I was a younger reader, where I would sort of decide for myself what a character looked like and then go with it. But then I would get irritated, you know, halfway through the book the author just casually mentioned, oh, this character has a mustache, or this character had you know, any description like that. Well, now you've completely thrown me off. I already had a certain I had to already had this part cast and now you're giving me additional information. Yeah, you rebel against the author. This is not your character anymore. It's mine. Now I get to decide what they look like. I'm curious. I hadn't thought about this in a while, but yeah, I used to when I was a young reader, like reading like full length novels for the first time, I would kind of go through it. I would actually cast the characters, often like with particular actors, and I would decide ahead of time who was playing what part. And I don't really do that anymore. Occasionally I'll catch myself kind of casting and character or sort of course correcting, and maybe even at times if there's some confusing characters going on, I'll do a little bit of that to try and keep things straight in my head, but not not like I did when I was younger. And of course, if you're reading a book that there's already a movie version, and they're kind of doing that for you, and maybe that's where that activity came from. All right, Well, it's Pinball Wizard time because we have a great bit of weird house cinema. Listener mail, this is gonna be the last one to read in this episode, but it's a it's a weighty one. So here we go from Zach Dear Joe and Robert. I've been meaning to get in touch for a while. I'm a massive fan of weird house cinema, and I just love the verbal imagery you can cock for old and weird movies. I must admit I haven't seen half of the films you talk about, but your elegant descriptions make me feel like I have. I was inspired to experience the Super Inframan with my family because of the revered tones expressed in your podcast. I can't thank you enough for the recommendation. Not only did I personally delight in the colors and textures of that masterpiece, but my family all gains something special from the experience. My two little ladies still talk about seeing the zippers on those amazing rubber suits, a nuance that is lost with the day's seamless computer wizardry. Well, that fills my heart with gladness. You know, not many of the movies we talked about weird on Weird House or not for everyone, but in for Man, I think that that's the exception. That's just a movie that I think everybody should see and nearly everyone would love. Yeah, yeah, and it is great to see. I see this night in my own son. I've I've talked about this several times, I'm sure, but you know where they're they're seeing through effects, but sometimes they're able to experience effects that are not absolutely pristine despite being exposed to some really amazing modern effects. So it's it's great when they can appreciate the older stuff. Yeah. Anyway, continuing the email, your recent review of Clash of the Titans, one of my all time favorite stop motion animation slash Ray Harryhouse Inflix spurred me on to reach out. I'm not sure whether you're aware, but there is an interesting correlation between b movies and all time classic pinball machines. Because pinball was massive in the sixties through the nineties, anything at everything could become a theme for a pinball machine, so original themes were common. Licensing is more popular today than it was back then, and so some unusual choices were made for games because of the sheer number of games pumped out. Not all pinball machines were particularly great. Some, however, are regarded as timeless, primarily after hearing of your particular fondness for the film Sinbad in the Eye of the Tiger. I believe Joe owned it on VHS. I think I had a slightly pirated version on VHS. Ah, you'll hopefully be delighted to know that the accompanying pinball machine is revered as an all time classic. The pinball company Gottlieb made hundreds of games back in its heyday, but this nineteen seventy eight beauty is something special. It has the unique feature of two sets of double or inline flippers. Is a fast and brutal game and is one that I own and love well. Rob I had to dig up some pictures and paste them in the outline here for you to look at. So I love the artwork on the whatever it's called the backboard where it shows the scores. We have here some illustrations that only marginally resemble the characters in the movie. But we've got the evil sorceress, Queens and Nobia. We've got the bronze automaton of minotaur shape called the Minoton. He's a robot bullhead. We've got Sinbad here with his sword raised standing in front of Valency. The princess I think her name is Farrah or Farrah or something, and that's the Jane Seymour in the movie, I believe. And then smoke rising in the background so it's beautifully painted. And then when you look at the actual I don't know what you call it, the play space or something. Sure, okay, yeah, yeah, But the thing I didn't realize exactly what Zach was talking about here with the idea of double flippers or inline flippers. But they're flippers that when they are not activated, they form a straight line. It's the line that makes a kind of V at the bottom of the pinball space where the ball will roll down into the to the hole at the bottom. But when you activate them, I'm doing a terrible job of explaining this, but instead of just having one pair of flippers down at the bottom of that V, the whole V is made of flippers. So there's four flippers and when you flip them, both of them flip up on each side. Yeah. Yeah, now that I see it, I'll see a picture of it here on our notes. I totally get it. But yeah, this is a beautiful machine. I was I never really got timball machines. I was never a huge arcade kid anyway, but I was always interested in the arcade machines and today I can still I can look at these and I can understand why people go crazy for them, for the nostalgia of them, for the like the physical playable artifacts that they are very cool. Okay, Rob, I'm currently looking at an big internet list of licensed pinball games, and there are so many. There are so many that you really would not have expected. I'm gonna name three, and you tell me which of these is not a real, licensed pinball cabinet. Okay, all right, Okay, Apollo thirteen, Aerosmith Baywatch, I'm gonna say Apolo thirteen is not a pinball machine. No it is. They're all real. Oh like wow? All right, Well, you know, I thought this this quiz was gonna go in a different direction. And you're gonna ask me to name one film that I wish was a pinball machine. Okay, and I didn't even have to think about it. It's gonna be Chuck. Please tell me, Chudd, there's a pinball machine. John Heard's face scrawled up on the background. Yeah, in like subway tunnels. You can imagine, like it seems like they could have done something really cool with that, and maybe they did. Did they get the pinball factory on the phone? I think you've got a white hot idea there that it can't lose, all right, but it doesn't exist that we know of. All right, Well, we have to have some more stuff he wants to share about pinballs, and so I'm going to read through them here real quickly. We also have meteor another late seventies classic, made by Stern Electronics. Stern Electronics was renowned for making beautiful, fast, and cheaply made games that have recently become darlings of the US tournament scene. I'm just so many things to floor me in this. I did not know there was like you still had like Pinball Wizard competitions. In appearance, it doesn't seem to be related to have licensed property. The art is great, but a bit generic, but it is actually a direct tie in to the nineteen seventy nine Sean Connery film I've never even heard of this movie, Meteor? Are they trolling us? Is this real? Natalie Wood, Henry Fonda, Martin Landau, Carl Malden, Huh yeah, in nineteen seventy nine. You know, I guess the thing with some of these big budget to films, especially some of these big disaster films, they weren't good. They haven't really stood the test of time, so nobody thinks about them today. Like, I really am not up on Meteor, but I feel like I've run across multiple films like this from more or less this time period and researching stuff for Weird House, and I'm like, oh, well, that's that I did not know that existed, and I have no interest in seeing it. This is an American International Pictures. Okay, I think this may need to go on the list for Weird House. It might be at least be something we should check out and see if it's worth doing. Yeah, I'm happy to look into it. Okay, here's another one. We also have the Shadow licensed from that fair to middling Alec Baldwin film. This is a highly collectible and fired game that's on my wish list. It commands a high price and as an excellent representation of all the greatest elements of nineties pinball design. Now, this is a film I'm very familiar with because I believe this was a Russell McKay film. I remember being very excited for it when it came out and I was a kid. And then I remember finding it somewhat disappointing, But not for reasons I can necessarily articulate. I just I have seen it forever. I just remember it did not win me over the way I wanted it to, despite a great cast. Speaking of underwhelming and great cast, you'll never guess the next movie that they made a pinball machine out of yes, I continues, Finally, I know you're both fond of the film Crawl. I saw it in the cinema back in the day and loved it. The pinball machine associated with this license has the legend of being a game that only made it to the prototype. It has the crazy feature of a second full sized playfield located underneath the main play field that is viewed via a distorting mirror from above. The mad creativity behind the design has sadly not been repeated since rob I dug up another high def picture of this and put it in the outline for you. Okay, so I can tell what's going on on the backboard. That we've got our main characters from KRUL, or at least one of them, I don't remember. I don't know who this lady with the big hair and the wizard staff is is. Oh no, that's that's our our lady, the lady. Yeah, okay, remember remember the beast um has her like dolled up for I guess their wedding, you know, Oh okay, but she ends up looking like this. There's the Widow of the web, the big spider. I see that, and they see some people on horses. I guess people ride horses in the movie. Uh. And then yeah, in the middle of the playfield there is I can't even tell what I'm looking at, but it's like a big It looks like just a big glass pane. So this is like a window into a lower level of play. Wow, it does seem ambitious, maybe two ambitious, like one wonder glancing? This is this something that was as fun to use? Was it innovation over fun? Or is a situation where it was fun and innovative but more difficult to manufacture? I don't know, you know, they really missed an opportunity here to have in the middle of the playfield a five sided star of flippers that you could all flip simultaneous. Again, be the Glave of flippers. Yeah, yeah, they should let me design pinball cabinets. How do you get into this line of work. It's got to be a very specialized field at this point, right, but man it yeah it looks it looks very cool anyway, apologies for the essay. Right, So, I actually host a podcast called the Pinball Tapes on the Pinball Network, which is a historical based podcast that focuses on individual games. I'm deep into the hobby as both a restore and player, and so I tend to get a bet verbose. I'll admit my podcast is in its infancy, but I'm really enjoying the right. Thank you for your time, gents. I really love what you do, and I'm very grateful for you introducing me to the to a world of weird and wonderful aw tours that I didn't know existed. Cheers, Zach. Well, thank you so much for the email, Zach, and best of luck with your podcast. It sounds like you really know your stuff. Yeah, it's this is a seems like it's a very interesting world to explore for sure. All right, well, I think we're gonna have to close it up right there. I mean we have to. We have to. We all have to go off and like look and see if they made like the Chronicles of Riddick pinball machine now and so forth. Uh, there's like there's in some so many films that seemed like they would be just perfect for this kind of treatment. I mean, Chronicles of Riddick is basically a pinball machine, so the adaptation writes itself. In the meantime, certainly reach out to us. So I think we told you some ways to do that at the beginning. We'll share the email here in a second. Just a reminder listener Maile episodes published on Monday's Core, episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind on Tuesday and Thursday, short form Artifact or Monster on Wednesday, and on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on a weirdhouse cinema. Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Pauseway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.