Stuff To Blow Your MindOnce more, it's time for a weekly dose of Stuff to Blow Your Mind and Weirdhouse Cinema listener mail...
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind Listener Mail. My name is Robert.
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and hey folks. As you probably heard on the past few weeks on the show, we are trying something a little bit different with our listener mail offerings. For the past few years, we've been doing listener mail every week on Mondays. Right now we're trying out a schedule where we wait a few weeks and let the mail bag accumulate a bit in between listener mail episodes, which we'll run in a Tuesday or Thursday episode slot instead of Mondays. This is how we used to do listener mail back in the day before we went to daily publication on Stuff to Blow Your Mind. And for the time being, while we're trying this out, we're going to be running Weird House Cinema Rewinds on Mondays. But hey, I think one thing we see sort of half promised at some point was that our beloved mail bot Carne would he would have to return again if we were going back to the old school way of doing listener mail. We never intended to neglect Carne. He just sort of, I don't know. Over time, in the busyness and hectic schedule of every week, we sort of forgot about him, and he became less of a thing and more of an idea. And so I think it is only fitting that upon returning Listener Mail to a Tuesday Thursday slot, that Carne the mail bot should become incarnate once again. So arise, Carne, Arise from your crypt of incorporeality and become a being. Become flesh, become circuits.
Beautiful, beautiful. We have unpuffed the magic dragoned him. Now he is here once more to guide us through Listener Mail.
Glistening look at that. Oh, another thing to address here at the top of this listener Mail episode. We have gotten a number of emails asking us about the reason for the change, like, oh, do you not have enough messages to read? Etc. So I'm going to address all of those questions right here at the top. No, we usually do have more email than we can get to in a week, though it varies from week to week, so like every now and then we have a week where we come up a bit short, which makes things a little bit difficult. I would say The main reason is we're just trying to have a bit more time to devote to our core offerings. Our weekly production schedule has been a lot to handle, and we just wanted to see if backing off on weekly mail episodes would give us a bit more breathing room and allow us to focus more time on core episodes.
That's all, yeah, because I don't know if we drive this home a lot or enough. But when it comes to the actual just production of the show, it's a three person team. It's Joe, it's me, it's jj We're the only three people working on the production of the show. That's not counting anybody that's involved in ads and you know, the larger corporate structures around us. But in terms of making stuff to blow your mind, it's just the.
Three of us. Yeah, that's right. I mean sometimes we get messages from people who seem to assume we've got some kind of like command center worrying in the background, where we have a large like army of workers who are going out and selecting topics and doing research and stuff. So nope, it's it's just the three of us on the content side.
And now Carne. If we consider Carne a person, then I guess that's right. I'd say it's four. But he's very specialized. He does only one thing, and that is fetched listener mail for us, but.
He does it so well, and so Carney, we're glad to have you back in the flesh. Oh and of course, if you out there listening would like to get in touch with us, you can always do so by writing our email address, which is contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Of course, if you have thoughts about listener mail itself, and you know how you what your ideal schedule would be, you know, if you like it the old way, you like it the new way, whatever, you can write to us at contact at stuff to blow Yourmind dot com. But you can also write with any kind of message about the show. If you have feedback to a recent episode, if you have a correction, if you have just something interesting to add to a topic we've talked about. All of that's fair game. Contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Yeah, if you want to join the Discord server, that's also that's also how you can you can join it. Just email us and ask for the link and we'll send it to you.
All right, I thought maybe we should kick things off today with a message that's less about an episode and more on a personal note, Rob, you recently took a family vacation to Japan, and our frequent correspondent Renata got in touch about that.
Oh yeah, this is a fun one, r'naa Wrights, and it says, Hi, Robin Joe, what a coincidence. Ben and I are just returning from Japan as well. Not sure if our trip overlap with yours. Rob. We got there on June eighteenth, and we are returning today.
Not sure what day this email came in. I did not make a note of that, but Renata does attach a picture that looks like it was taken in the airport. We'll get to that in a minute.
Renata continues, I'm curious if you made it to the Miyoshi manonok Yokai Museum. We visited it and it was delightful. The whole town of Meyoshi had a wistful, quiet, small town vibe. At the end of the museum, you can color yokai drawing, then scan it, and your yokai joins with all the others on a display on the wall, and you can touch the yokai and make them dance. My drawing was a kappa. My favorite yokai, however, is Kasa Obaki, the umbrella Yokai. I just think he's the goofiest and Japan is so full of umbrellas that it's fun to imagine all the umbrellas turning into yokai at night and having a party. We bought a huge yokai book among numerous other souvenirs at the museum, currently still in the plastic, and I guess this is a picture they included of the beautiful cover to this book.
I don't know what creature this is, but it looks like an elephant made out of dirty laundry with these huge, bloodshot, bulbous eyes.
Well, it might be the Baku. Remember we talked about the paku a little bit. This is more purely pachadermical, I guess than some of the depictions I've seen of the baku. But uh that's my my my initial guess. Anyway, it could be something else.
I can't read the text on the cover, but the illustration absolutely makes me want to open this book and see what see what's inside?
And now it continues, Can we expect you know some Yokai related episodes coming up. I haven't listened to your latest Japan episode yet, so maybe you already got into it all the best for not well, Yeah, I have to say that that museum sounds awesome. My family and I we packed as much into our trip as possible, but sadly we didn't make it to Hiroshima, and we we looked into another Yokai museum that proved to be just too far out of the way at least this trip it was even like even further south. But I hope to return to Japan in the future and check out more of the southern sides for sure, maybe some of the northern sides as well, I don't know, And of course just more Tokyo, because there's so much of it one cannot cannot get quite enough of it now. As for more Yokai episodes, I think one way or another. Certainly we've discussed doing one of the many Yokai movies for Weird House, and I can easily see there being more Yokai Monster Fact episodes and core episodes are even a major possibility. They're also just going to probably continue to sort of pop up in unexpected ways. Just because ultimately the Japanese Yokai, they cover a lot of ground that they you know, they touch on occasionally things that we could discuss from a scientific perspective. They certainly touch on things we can we can discuss from historical and cultural perspective. So I'm sure the okai will be back. Oh and then we're not responded to a reply that that I sent sent their way with My favorite Yokai movie for what it's worth is Yokai Monsters one hundred Monsters. But probably because Kasa Obaki is a central.
Character, that's the umbrella Yokai.
Yeah, this is one that is on our list of potential episodes. We actually considered doing it for our one hundredth episode, but we did. What do we do instead?
I can't? I mean of Weird House Cinema.
Of Weird House Cinema, Yes, yeah, yeah, one hundredth episode of Subsible of Your Mind that ships long, long sale. I'm not sure when that would have been, but yeah, on the on the number of films that we've covered on Weird House. Let's see what are we up to now? I can easily check by going to letterbox dot com and going to our profile weird House. I can see how many films we've covered, and the count is up too, one sixty nine. It's going to be one seventy tomorrow. Entry number one hundred was Jason X.
That's perfect. Yes, well, maybe we'll do Yochai Monsters one hundred monsters for our thousandth episode.
Oh there you go.
Yeah, okay. Should we do some responses to our series on the Ninja? Yes, this one is from Mike. Of course. We talked about many things in this series, about history, about alleged technology and gadgets, a bit of ninja physics and science, but also just about the pop culture ninja, the international ninja, and the ninja craze of the eighties and nineties. So Mike writes in on that subject and says, Robin Joe, I really enjoyed the first part on the Ninja when you were talking about some of the odd American family friendly ninja movies of the eighties and nineties, like Three Ninjas. I was reminded of a movie I hadn't thought about in years, Surf Ninjas. This was an odd little snapshot of society at the time. Nineteen ninety three, you had a thirty year old Rob Schneider playing a teenager, Leslie Nil Wilson as a cyborg warlord who couldn't get wet. I assume that would negatively affect his cyborginess, a game gear with the power to show the future, and Tone Loake as a wise cracking detective. I was thirteen at the time and truly loved this movie. Can't imagine it holds up all that well thirty years later. Love the show. Thanks for resurfacing this movie in my memory, Mike. I don't think I ever saw this one, but it's the kind of movie I saw lots of.
Yeah, I didn't see this one either, and I have to admit I think I get it kind of mixed up in my head with the nineteen eighty seven film Surf Nazis Must Die. It's like Surf Nazis Surf Ninja's. I haven't seen neither film, so they neatly combine into one unseen film for me, though, imagine they're rather different because Surf Nazis Must Die as a trauma.
Picture, probably not as family friendly. Yeah, now, just looking at the plot summary, one thing that stands out to me is that it appears that the game that can predict the future or control some kind of has some divination power. Is like an actual branded game gear. It's not a case where you have some spray painted piece of technology masquerading as something else. You know, like in all these scenes where there's a there's like a robot that's actually just like a component from a Beta max player or something like that.
Or the power glove and into no power glove as part of a cyborg's interface system.
Yeah right, No, this seems more like it's that movie where the power glove is a power glove and it has powers. This this looks like it's a game gear that is a game gear and can control time.
Wow, so this movie was game gear's big moment, right It was really sink or swim for them?
Funny you should say that because what's right here on the poster it looks like a cyborged up Leslie Nielsen sinking into the waves failing to swim anyway, Thank you, Mike.
All right, now, this next one comes to us from Nathan, and I believe this one came in after we recorded and published part one, but before we published subsequent episodes that got into more detailed discussions of Ninja swords and alleged ninja swords.
Right, I think there was a question of talking about movies in which you see a ninja carrying a katana or something.
Yes, anyway, Nathan writes hello again the late eighties, pre teen pedant in me is compelled to point out that samurai carried katana with a curve blade and round handguard, while ninja wielded ninjado with a shorter, straight blade and square handguard. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was perhaps the most egregious example of confusing the two, as Leonardo's signature weapons were always called katanas, despite at least in the original black and white mirage comics, being depicted as the more angular ninjada. However, as I only learned relatively recently, and this is where we're getting into something that we would talk about on the show and the subsequent episodes, much like the mythical modern ninja, ninjado seems to be a twentieth century invention. The wiki best sums up the controversy here. By the way, I think pluralizing any of the above words with an S is totally fine, as they've been anglicized and as such only a dorc would pronounce ninja as ninja, though for the record, I only ever knew one kid like that. I enjoyed the short Netflix series from a few years ago called Age of Samurai, but even more enjoyed commentary about the finished product from several featured consultants found in two parts here, and they included a couple of episodes, and they had I'm pretty sure your guy Turnbull is among them.
Turnbull is one of the authors we cited in the Ninja series, having written a serious historical investigation of the ninja in the historical basis of the and the development in the mythology.
Yeah, and he's also highly cited in other ninja books, like he was cited in the book that I was referencing a lot for those episodes. Anyway, they continue great topic and great coverage. As always, gentlemen, I think the only film franchise worth adding to those mentioned would be American Ninja.
I know nothing about that.
I had to look it up. This is one that I don't think I've seen, but I'm familiar with the title. It stars Michael Dudakov and co stars Steve James. This was nineteen eighty five. I mainly remember the VHS box art because it is quite stellar. A picture of you will an American flag, a black clad ninja, and then a camo clad GI locking samurai swords or Cadanna or I don't know, the swords against the backdrop of the American flag, and then there's your title, American Ninja.
It's a little known fact that Benjamin Franklin was a ninja. Yeah.
I don't think I've seen this one, but maybe it bears a closer analysis. I'm not sure. Anyway, they continue. The arcade version of Ninja Gaiden in my memory was awesome, but I thought maybe I had imagined it until recently finding a playthrough a series of games called tin Chu Stealth Assassin is really cool, where players are rated higher for undetected kills, similar to the more recent Shinobi games. The AI has increased since PS one Days, to the point that the player now finds it necessary to hide victims bodies to avoid raising alarms. I do love a good stealth game where you end up spending say like fifteen minutes of a time hiding in a locker to keep a xeno more from eating you or random enemies from finding you. I don't know you've done right. They can be very engaging in it.
You're referencing Alien Isolation, which is one of my favorite horror games of recent years. That one is really great. But the one downside I really recall from the game play is that you would spend so long not moving because you'd get scared to move, and then you just sit there and sit there.
Yeah, yeah, and then you're like, Okay, it's gone, and then I know it's coming back. All right, now another five minutes in here should do it. But this is where the skill of the Shinobi comes into play, right, This is the patience and pressverance. That's right, yeah, all right. Nathan continues on the White Ninja. My recollection is foggy on this, but I think how did this get made? Covered Ninja three? The domination and mock the notion of bright colors on a stealth killer an audience member positive a theory that makes as much sense as anything. A true master could defy the shadows and where white in spite, and this master could boast defeating enemies unscathed, as the white would show bloody evidence of any wounds. Looking forward to the next installment. Thanks again, you guys are the best tape them.
Now, what a corniacopia of twentieth century international ninja lore.
I do like that that view of the white ninja. You could I mean, you could basically have a naked ninja like and he doesn't even need clothes, even if he is just obviously naked.
Well, to come back to the Michael Dudikov theme, you could have a ninja wearing an American flag as his costume.
There you go. This is from our discord, but it has to do with ninja's and ninja turtles, so I thought i'd read it really quickly. This one comes to us from Fletch. Fletch writes, You Only Live Twice was definitely my introduction to the concept of ninja. It was the first Bond movie I ever saw. Must have been sometime in the early eighties.
In the UK.
In the late eighties there was a moral panic around ninja and martial arts weapons, shuriken, nunchucks, etc. That resulted in teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles being shown on UK TV as teenage Mutant Hero Turtles.
Is this real?
I don't know.
I'm seeing some articles about a ninja moral panic in the eighties nineties Britain.
Yeah, yep, you're I see references to this that European regions in general sometimes called it teenage mutant hero turtles. I was unaware, but so I was astounded to hear. This is amazing, But it makes sense too, Right when you think about the things ninjas do in films and even in Dja teenagemutant Ninja Turtles, you could see where a moral panic could easily rise up around something. You know, moral panics also typically revolve around something that is either actually imported from outside of a culture or or or are interpreted as being such, So you could imagine that factoring into it as well.
Yeah, but what it's funny the way it would manifest as. It's not like we can't show shows on TV that have cartoon violence in them. It's that you can't call it ninja. Like they can still have the weapons and fight the bad guys, but you have to call them hero not ninja.
That's true. It doesn't sound like they're actually changing content, just this one word that would somehow make it less dangerous for everyone.
Okay, this next message is in response to our series on cicadas. This is from Jeremy, and it's not only responding to our series on cicadas, but it's also replying to a listener male episode that I did by myself in June, and to refresh everyone in that episode, this listener Jeremy wrote in to tell us about another species of insect that rivals the cicada in the loudness contest. This was an insect called the lesser water boatman or Micronecta Schultze, which a study in Plus one from twenty eleven found was the loudest animal on Earth relative to its body size, so not strictly the loudest on Earth, but compared to how small it is, it could make the loudest sound. So this insect is about two millimeters long, and the mail of the lesser water boatmen makes its characteristic sound by rubbing one of its twin sexual organs called parameters, against its abdomen. In some media, this was described as the insect rubbing its penis against its abdomen to make this incredibly loud noise. Whether that's a fair characterization or not, I don't know. Insects have slightly different kinds of sexual appendages, but it was a protruding sexual appendage rubbing against its abdomen, and it gets incredibly loud. This achieves roughly a seventy nine decibel sound pressure level, with peaks of ninety nine to one hundred decibels when measured at a distance of one meter. Also in that email where Jeremy shared this information, he alluded to the idea that there are no cicadas in Europe. That, of course isn't true. There are plenty of cicadas in Europe. And in his follow up here, Jeremy clarifies that he meant to say there were no periodical cicadas in Europe, only annual species, which as far as we know, is correct. But after clearing up all this, Jeremy writes in about something new, Jeremy says, on to my new point. In your recent vault rerun of the Evolution of the Horse's hoof Part two, you mentioned the medical diagnosis trope of if you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras. Please see attached and comment on how this would be interpreted. And so Jeremy attaches a photograph. What are we looking at here? So it's a pasture surrounded by a fence with horses grazing in the distance, and one of the horses is wearing what looks like a zebra patterned overcoat. It's like a blanket that extends from just behind the horse's ears all the way to its tail, and it's draped over the horse's back so that it falls over the flanks and covers the belly and goes down to the tops of the legs.
Hmmm, it's like zebra pajamas.
Yeah, exactly, It's like a zebra coat. Jeremy continues by saying, I'm guessing the purpose of this is to protect the horse from flies, as research indicates that zebra stripes confuse flies so that fewer flies land on zebras then similar size to mammals grazing with them, Best regards, Jeremy, and then Jeremy says, PS, this is the second time the subject matter of your podcast has coincided with my cycling past a closely related physical object. The first was the Finn McCool Giant's Causeway episode where I cycled past an art installation representing it. I remember this email Jeremy, so Jeremy has a habit of riding his bike past something that we happen to be talking about on the podcast, taking a picture of it and sending it our way.
Twilight Zone esque gift, you might say.
Yes. In fact, in another strange coincidence, this is not even the only email of this nature that will be in today's episode, Rob, do you remember the other one we're going to be coming up to. Oh, yes, yes, yes, we'll keep it secret for now. We'll get there in a bit. But anyway, to come back to the zebra stripe being draped over the horse's back, Yes, Jeremy, I think your explanation for what you're seeing is correct. I can't vouch directly for it actually working, but there are agricultural suppliers who sell products called things like zebra fly sheets or zebra rugs, and I think this is exactly what we're seeing in the picture. It's a zebra costume for a horse, but the ad copy clarifies that it is meant to repel insects. And like I said, I can't directly vouch from experience whether or not this works on domestic horses, but it is based on some real science. So I found a paper published in Plus one in twenty nineteen by Tim carrow at all called benefits of zebra stripes behavior of tabinid flies around zebras and horses, and to summarize this study, there have been lots of hypotheses about the evolutionary reason for zebra stripes. Some researchers think the stripes help regulate the body temperature to a void overheating in the direct sun. Others have proposed that there's some kind of predator avoidant strategy. Maybe they camouflage or visually confuse predators. But another idea is that they helped deter ectoparasites such as biting flies. This particular study investigated that hypothesis, the flybiding one, and so the author's write in their abstract quote, we examined the behavior of tabanids horseflies in the vicinity of captive planes, zebras, and uniformly colored domestic horses living on a horse farm in Britain. Observations showed that fewer tabanids landed on zebras than on horses per unit time, although rates of tabanids circling around or briefly touching zebra and horse pelage did not differ. In pellage. Of course, means like the thin layer of fur covering the skin. So what they're saying here is that in this experiment, there were equal numbers of flies swarming around the horses and the zebras, but it seems that the flies more difficulty landing on and biting the zebras, even though there were just as many flying around them. In a follow up experiment, the authors tested whether a zebra patterned coat on a horse could reduce landings from horseflies when compared to a coat of just a plain uniform color like pure black or pure white, and once again, the zebra stripes did reduce horsefly landings, though the horseflies still landed on and bit the horse's exposed heads. So why do the zebra stripes prevent horseflies from lighting, landing, and biting the author's right quote. In separate detailed video analyzes, tabanids approached zebras faster and failed to decelerate before contacting zebras, and proportionately more tabanids simply touched rather than landed on zebra pelage in comparison to horses. So it seems like there's something about the black and white stripes that prevents the flies from decelerating and landing on the animal's skin correctly, so instead they're more likely to like miss or bump into the surface of the animal and bounce off. I would add that I read an article in the BBC about the question of the biological function of zebra stripes, and there is some controversy remaining, Like some zebra researchers are not convinced this is the reason for the striping, since they think the evolutionary pressure to avoid fly bites is relatively low. So it's not like this question is totally settled by this study, but it does seem like there's pretty good evidence that zebra patterns greatly reduce landings and bites from horseflies. So yeah, that is probably what is going on in that picture, Jeremy, as you guessed from looking at it. However, I have a question about this. Maybe it's a dumb question since I don't know anything about caring for horses, But if you can get a horse to wear a cloth covering, wouldn't, like any cloth covering keep horseflies from biting them? Like, even if they land on the claw, would the cloth itself not protect the horse or could the flies bite through it? I guess I don't know, but that's what I would have thought. Farmers and ranchers. Fill me in. How does this work?
I will have to ask the various horse people in my in my family. They may have the answers here as well.
Oh yeah, let me know if you hear anything. But anyway, thank you Jeremy for this interesting question. This was a fun rabbit hole to dive down.
All right. This next one comes to us from someone calling themselves pilot Light. I think it'll be obvious why.
In a second.
They ride in and they say, Robert and Joe. I was laughing so hard at your recent Hair on Fire Part one episode that I nearly had to pull off the road on my way to work. Joe's admission that he misunderstood the phrase somebody light a match to be an expression of excitement in anticipation of some methane based pyrotechnics drove me to tears, as did the tacit suggestion that one could potentially light here to cover and especially trip to the bathroom. One can only guess at the old factory adventure that would result from the combination of those two smells in an enclosed space. Anyway, keep up the good work and thanks for the much needed pick me up on the way to a dreary friday at work. Feel free to use this on the air, and if you do, you can refer to me as pilot light.
As you can see pilot light. That is exactly what we did. Well. Yes, now we want to be clear. We said this in the episode, but to be clear again, we are not suggesting that anyone light hair on fire in a bathroom to cover up a poop smell. But we were just observing that the operative thing that seems to cause a lit match to cover up any sort of body or digestion related smells is the presence of the sulfur compounds that are liberated when you strike a match head. There's usually some kind of sulfur in a matchhead, and that our noses and brains are especially sensitive to sulfur related smells. The smell of sulfur compounds like sulfur dioxide, and so they sort of take over our sense of smell and make us not smell the other smell in the background. And because there are similar sulfur based there's some similar sulfur based olfactory chemistry at work. When we smell burning hair, it's possible that a burning hair smell could do a similar job. Again, not suggesting it.
All right.
This next message comes from Kenny, and this is a response to the papers we talked about in the first part of the Burning Hair series about research about the combustibility of human hair in enriched oxygen environments, especially for space exploration. It was all about ways that hair can catch on fire in spacecraft environments with different types of atmospheric composition. So Kenny says, Hi, Rob, Joe and jj I really enjoyed the Burning Hair episodes. I wanted to add some thoughts to Joe's discussion about the atmospheric mix in spacecraft and how that might relate to the safety of astronauts in zero G. Many astronauts report reductions in their senses of taste and smell. This is due to a build up of fluid in the face and sinuses that would normally have drained away at least for the first few weeks of emission. While these symptoms are at their worst, it's possible your colleague's hair could be on fire and you wouldn't be able to smell it. Yeah, the stuffy nos astronauts syndrome is very common observation, and from what I've read, and we've talked about this on the show before, it's one reason that a lot of astronauts really enjoy, especially kind of spicy foods like the shrimp cocktail, which I guess has a kind of very horse radishing sauce.
Yeah. Yeah, much preferred over the corn bread.
Kenney's message goes on. Secondly, it is of course true that pure oxygen at standard atmospheric pressure enormously increases the risk and severity of fire. Yeah, And that's what these papers were about. They were about historical space missions that have had enriched oxygen atmospheres, or it was also about specific scenarios where there can be locally elevated oxygen levels, for example, if someone is being given supplemental oxygen through a mask for a medical reason. Kenny goes on, However, we have been using pure oxygen equivalent to its partial pressure in Earth's atmosphere for a long time. Put simply, if your ship has a pure oxygen atmosphere at zero point two bar, you would breathe perfectly normally and there would be no greater risk of fire than aboard the ISS with a full gas mix and one bar of pressure. There are several advantages to this. You don't need to bring a buffer gas to orbit with you, your pressure vessel doesn't have to be built to contain one bar, so it can be lighter, and your life support systems are less complex. The downside is that astronauts must endure decompression after boarding while the pressure is lowered. Anyway, Thanks for a fascinating topic, Kenny, and yep, Kenny, that's exactly right. Some of the stuff I was looking at also discussed the idea of using lower pressure gas environments that did just use pure oxygen but at lower pressure to reduce the risk of fire. So yeah, that is another solution to this problem.
All right. This next one comes to us from David. David writes it and says a longtime listener, second time emailer, I was listening to part one of the Hair on Fire episode and did not expect what sounded like a very niche subject to lead into so many interesting rabbit holes, so many rabbit holes, just a step in, so many rabbit holes and good stuff to belie your mind series. I wanted to write because when listening to the discussion of the danger of burning hair and of accidental ignition in spacecraft. My brain made a weird or maybe not so weird association jump. When I was growing up, I was very interested in paranormal phenomena. I watched Leonard Nimoy's In Search of had a couple books, the titles of which I don't remember anymore, etc. In addition to examples of alien abductions, psychic phenomena, encryptids, these books include another strange topic, spontaneous human combustion.
So I saw so many like documentaries about this on TV when I was a kid. I thought it was an incredibly common phenomenon.
Yeah. Yeah, we've chatted about this before on the show, singling out things like In Search Of, which when I was a kid ran and rerun ran as reruns on any I think, also unsolved mysteries and various other topics tabloids, et cetera that just really hammered home things like spontaneous human combustion and alien abduction and UFOs, And there wasn't or at least I don't feel like I was properly exposed to the skeptical analysis of all of this media. And so as a kid, that's like I really felt like these things were possible and could occur at any moment.
I feel like if they brought somebody on to provide a skeptical point of view, it would almost just be to like, look at this nerd who doesn't get it.
Yeah, and you know that does get to the heart. It's like the idea of spontaneous human combustion and psychic phenomena and so forth, Like all of these ideas are are far more exciting than the idea that they don't exist. Uh So, Anyway, that being said, these topics are not all equal. They're you know, the the scientific analysis of them is different depending on the topic. So getting back to the listener mail here and more specifically to spontaneous human combustion, which we have talked about on the show in the past, I believe, and it has come up on of course Weird House Cinema as well. We did the Toby Hooper film with spontaneous combustion Spontaneous Human which.
Was not about spontaneous combustion, it was about pyrokinesis.
Anyway, the email continues situations where a completely charred body would be found in a house, often sitting on a couch, but other than the portion of the furniture where the person was sitting. Nothing else had burned, so the act was if the person had simply spontaneously burst into flame and been quickly consumed. Now, I think these stories are basically debunked. Like many of the paranormal reports, they tended to omit other surrounding facts, and a simple explanation was the person fell asleep drunk while holding a cigarette, which ignited some alcohol soaked on a portion of the couch. I haven't listened to part two yet, Impossibly you cover this spoiler. We did not, But given the flammability of hair, could a very simple explanation of spontaneous human combustion be something like cigarettes igniting hair.
Well, I wouldn't want to make a definitive statement about what could or could not happen for sure, but I will say that the papers we were looking at in that series about hair being a potent fuel source to that would allow a flame to quickly spread if there was an ignition point saying a spacecraft. We're specifically looking at enriched oxygen environments, and I think there's a lot less concern about that if there's just the normal atmospheric composition that we live in on Earth. When there's high levels of oxygen, things, things that are not normally a dangerous source to fuel a flame can become such hair is, you know, lightly combustible in regular atmosphere, but in enriched oxygen it becomes very rapidly combustible.
All right, David has just a little bit more to say. David says, now the somewhat stream of consciousness comments and questions. Did you ever do an episode on this subject before? I don't think I've heard about spontaneous human combustion in years. Is it still making the rounds as one of the unexplained phenomena. I'm also reminded of your discussion of how pseudoscience thrives in low information and environments. I think an episode on the transition of paranormal ideas into and out of public consciousness over time could be very interesting. Once again, thank you for the great podcast, David.
I think that is a really interesting idea. David'scific. What I'm picking up your saying here is not so much just looking at because often when we cover these types of paranormal ideas, we look at them and say, like, what are people saying about them?
Like?
What is the evidence? And then looking at you know what, what could a more likely explanation be than these than the supposed paranormal explanation. But a different way of looking at these things is as historical social phenomena, like what what makes a certain idea attractive at a certain time and within a certain culture? Why does it become more popular and more prevalent in people's minds? And then why does it fade away? If it does? And uh and when?
Yeah. A great example of this would be some episodes we did in the past couple of years. I think maybe it's older than that on cattle mutilation as as as as an alleged phenomena. And when you get into the to the like the timeliness of it, and the like the social analysis of it, it's really interesting because it gets down to like what what kind of anxieties were it were on people's minds? Uh, you know, what was going on in the world uh, politically? Uh? And then what sort of low res information was out there to turn with all of this in mind.
Yeah, yeah, So we looked at a paper in that episode that was about the history of agriculture in the United States, and it made some I recall very interesting arguments about why it was specifically in the nineteen seventies that people were inclined to come across a you know, a cows or a horse or you know, some animal on a ranch that had suffered some kind of death or injuries and interpret it as part of a conspiracy or a broader phenomenon had to do with like economic pressures affecting ranchers in the seventies.
Yeah, yeah, so yeah, it would be I think we should come back and do spontaneous human combustion because I mean, I think there is an obvious case to be made about about low res information playing a role here because I've I just remember from having read about it and watched documentaries in the past. You do see some at times rather blurry forensic photos, like crime scene photography of somebody who has burned, and you know, it's grizzly shocking, but you don't necessarily know what you're looking at. And even if you're dealing a situation like this or just in you know, in the broader sense, when you're dealing with forensic photos. Forensic photos are a great example of something that can be very impactful but requires expertise to properly analyze what you're looking at. And if you do not have the proper expertise to analyze those photographs and the context in which to analyze them, you can certainly go in various directions with them and use them to prop up any pet idea you have in your head.
Yeah, yeah, exactly as we talked about in that episode, Unjustified spurious conclusions thrive in a space where where information is low, both in the sense of the direct information you're looking at, say like the resolution of a photograph of a crime scene or the number of details you have about it, but also when information is low as background knowledge, like you don't have the expertise or the experience, you know, looking at scenes like this to know what something usually means when it's present. Anyway, thank you, David. Let's see Rob. I'm gonna do this message from Ahmed.
All right, light it up.
So this one is also about hair on fire, and the subject line is sulfur in hair and disulfide bonds. Again, the context of this message was the part of our discussion about the characteristic smell of burning hair and how it's primarily due to the presence of sulfur in the keratin of our hair, which gets liberated by combustion and forms volatile sulfur compounds like sulfur dioxide, which has a very pungent smell. Ahmed says, hey, guys, I wanted to write in about your recent episodes on burning hair and especially the role of sulfur. Particularly, I wanted to mention how these structural properties of hair and its high sulfur content are no coincidence. As you have mentioned on the show before, Our proteins are made of twenty one canonical amino acids that come in many flavors, differing in size, charge no charge versus positive versus negative, hydrophilicity versus hydrophobicity, etc. That dictate how a protein folds in three D space. Two of these amino acids contain sulfur, and the sulfur containing one that's relevant for this is cysteine that's spelled cystei. The cool thing about cysteine is that it has a sulfur bonded to a hydrogen jutting out from the protein backbone, but that it easily can lose the hydrogen to bond with another cysteine, and this forms the structure that sort of goes protein sulfur sulfur protein. Unlike the weaker and more wiggly bonds between positive and negative, between hydrophobic and hydrophobic, or between hydrophilic and hydrophilic, these disulfide bonds can really staple a protein into a shape, and because of the way a protein folds in three dimensions, you can have parts that are very far away in linear space looping back on each other and getting bolted into that conformation by disulfides. The twenty one natural amino acids aren't universally represented in the human proteome, and cystine is on the rarer side, making up just about two percent of amino acids used for our proteins. However, for hair keratins, the big rope like proteins that are the main component of hair, skin, nails, et cetera, a wopping eighteen percent of its amino acids are cystine. Not all cystines exist in a disulfide bonded state, though, and an even larger percentage of the cystine in nail and horn keratins exist as disulfide bonds. Again, that's protein sulfur sulfur protein, rather than as free proteins, at least partially explaining the spectrum of toughness in keratin rich tissues. On a more basic biology note, cystines are said to be oxidized when disulfide bonded and to be reduced when having just a hydrogen. Many cellular pathways are devoted to striking this balance of an oxidizing versus a reducing environment just right. And this is something that can change even depending on what part of a cell you're in. So next time somebody is pushing an overpriced berry bowl on you because it's a good source of antioxidants, I encourage you to yell at them about how you don't want to undo all of your disulfides and melt into a pile of unstructured goo. Thank you very much. Anyways, keep up the great work, Ahmed. Well, thank you, Ahmed. Very interesting and informative email. Love people who love it when listeners can fill in chemistry details like this. That's wonderful. But hey, don't knock berry bowls. Berries are great. I love berries.
Berry They're great and they're good for you. They're just a little pricey.
Here's a science fact. I want to know. How can you tell before you bite into a blueberry, whether it's going to be like delicious and juicy or grainy. I can't figure out away by looking at the outside.
You just got to go for it. That's the only way sometimes. Yeah, fruit in general, it's an experience. You don't know until you cut open that watermelon if it's going to be pretty good or great. You don't know if the candle ope is going to be life changing or like a little gross. It just it varies tremendously. For my own part, I would say the candle ope is that the riskiest of the melons to cut into. You never know what you're going to get. It could be life changing, it could be extremely bland or even a little sickly tasting.
Have we ever talked about savory preparations of melons on the show before? I don't know that we have the thing that would would have come up. I don't know. I'm a fan of that. When you get like a good like savory salad with honeydew, melon and candleope in it, that's right. Sometimes with like pershudo, or you can just have it with a sort of like savory vinaigrette.
Yeah, there's the recipe we would make of the house that is a vegetarian poke bowl that uses watermelon in place of fish, and it's really quite good. Yeah, it's like you have the watermelon sl I says, and you have your dressing and some salt on those sliced watermelon, and yeah, it scratches the edge for sure.
Nice.
All right. Well, as we begin to move in towards the end of this episode, let's let's look at a few weird house cinema centric listener mails. This first one comes to us from Lex, and we teased this one out earlier. Lex writes and says, Robin Joe, this is a short message, but I felt like I had to write in. I was listening to your weird house rewind about the beast with five fingers when I walk past a statue that is near my office called Judy's Hand. Your description about disembodied hands gave me a new appreciate appreciation for this weird piece of public art in Cleveland. It is kind of hard to appreciate how strange this thing is to see in person. It is huge, twenty one feet tall in weighs seven tons. It was based on a cast of the hand of the artist's wife, and is in part of a commentary on the original form of shelter. From the elements being the hand, it is large enough for a group of people to stand underneath. I also included some links about the piece and also yeah, some photographs. They are quite quite intimidating and amazing because it is to be clear, the hand is very much in the sort of pose we imagine for a disembodied hand crawling around on a table. Looks like thing from the Adams family, except again twenty one feet tall and you know, has like a silvery or grayish coloration to it.
Yeah, I just looked it up. It's apparently it's sort of a cross from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, Ohio. And it's so it is meant in a way as a public shelter, like lex says here. So it's like, I guess, like a bus station cover, you know, like you can stand under it if it's raining. But there and the name of the the artist, by the way, is Tony Tassit, and the is his wife, Judy Ledgerwood. But the crazy thing about this is it's kind of flexed, so it looks like any moment the hand is going to close on whatever is beneath it? Do you know what I'm saying?
Yeah, Yeah, there's kind of a sense of like the wrathful hand of God coming down from above here, but also the sheltering hand of God. I guess it depends on your exact theological perspective here, but.
It is very, very beast with five fingers.
Yes, so Le says, thanks as always for making such an awesome show. Here's hoping it goes on for many, many years to come. All right, now, I'm just going to preface for the next couple of weird house cinema messages. These have to do with the Devil Bat movie. And in our episode on the Devil Bat, I quoted a Michael Weldon review or I honestly can't remember as Michael Weldon or one of the other authors that are sometimes the reviewers in his books, but anyway, it's from the Psychotronic Film Guides, and it points out that the sequel to the Devil Bat What Devil Bat's Daughter something like that Daughter Bad something like that pointed out that it is a cheat sequel. It is a sequel that like betrays what you actually saw on scene on screen in the first film like makes you like to it basically like Gaslights, you about everything that came before in the franchise, and we heard from some people who made a connection between this and another film we've talked about on the show before.
That's right, okay. So our first message, the more belligerent of the two, is from our listener Rob. The subject line Highlander two. Rob says, I tried to be open minded when you ran two episodes about Highlander two, the Quickening. You ridiculed hardcore Highlander fans like me who saw the original in the theater and then loathed that sequel when it came out, implying that we were closed minded about the movie. I usually trust your cinematic recommendations, but nope, you could not convince me. Uh okay. And then in this next paragraph, Rob makes an analogy to a movie without naming it that I'm not sure I get, but maybe we can hash this out afterwards. Rob goes on to say Highlander two is like if you were watching a certain movie about a doctor and a boy, avoiding spoilers, being blown away by the ending, then going back and rewatching the restaurant scene to find that the doctor and his wife had a long conversation argued about who would pay the check, hugged, kissed, and then walked out hand in hand. If I could rewatch Highlander and be blown away to realize that they were aliens the whole time, sure I'd be on board. But No, Highlander two is inconsistent with the original and negates everything that was great about it. I was letting your lapse in judgment about the movie slide until I just finished listening to the Devil Bat episode in which you ridicule the sequel because it is so inconsistent with the original. I couldn't hold my tongue slash pen slash keyboard any longer. Love your show except for two episodes. Well, thank you, Rob, and I appreciate the passion. Let's see. Yeah, what is the difference there?
I don't know.
I guess it's that, like Highlander two was, it is so silly and so fun that it's just hard to really care. I guess part of my opinion when we were doing that episode was to give give people the freedom to set yourself free from concerns about canon. You know, it's like storytelling. Storytelling is fluid that you may find that, you know, maybe you don't feel this way, but you may find you're more able to enjoy storytelling when you're less concerned about consistency.
But you know, to each their own, Yeah, I mean I agree with that. I mean I also agree with what Rob said. It's I mean, it's a fair cop that that Highland Or two does make drastic changes to what worked in the first film and what people loved about the first film. So yeah, you know, I want to be clear, if you don't like high Or two and you're like a Highlander one is all you want and all you need, it's totally fine. Highlander one is a super fun film, says. I think it's still a super weird film and it definitely has its own goofiness going on. But you know, fair enough if you don't want to ride the Highland or two train as well.
I think we were scoffing at the idea of Devil Bat's daughter, I would say, at least for my part, because I hadn't seen it, and it sounded like a movie that there aren't actually any devil bats in so so I don't know that made me less sympathetic to it. I think maybe if I saw a devil Bat's daughter and I was like, oh, this is a this is a heck of a fun ride. Then I would probably also be saying about that, like who cares that it completely negates everything that happened in the first movie.
Yeah. Now, as for the film with the doctor and the Boy that he's referencing, I could be wrong. I think maybe he's referencing the sixth sense here and more maybe more generally, referencing a certain type of twist ending film that doesn't really bear repeat viewings, because if you know what the twist is, it doesn't work, you know. Yeah, I think two thousand and three is high tension as an example of this for me. I mean it has some other I think noticeable flaws that don't hold up well for other reasons, but it also depends a lot on a twist, and if you rewatch it knowing what the twist is, I don't know if it works.
But I'd say extra credit to a movie that where the twist makes a rewatch even more interesting.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, ultimately, that's one thing that I often stick to. It's like spoilers, Yeah, avoid spoilers, Yeah, go into a film fresh. But a really good movie is not going to be spoiled by its spoilers, you know, because it's not just about what will happen, it's how are you going to get there, How are you going to portray it, how are you going to bring that to life on the screen.
Yeah, well, I would say a really good story is not going to be completely spoiled by knowing plot things that come. There are other pleasures than just the discovery of the plot, but the discovery of the plot is one of the pleasures of a story. So, like, you know, there's still a you know, there's still a reason to want to not know the ending in advance, if it's if it's a really great story, and especially if the ending is something that's not formulaic and one wouldn't be likely to see coming. Yeah, but I agree with you, it's not everything there is.
All right. Well, here's another take on it. This is from Lawrence. Lawrence says, Hey, guys, I'm writing you immediately following viewing Devilbats Daughter, the sort of sequel to the Devil Bat which you recently discussed on Weird House. I love the initiative. Way back when you covered Highlander two, I got on my phone just minutes into the podcast and purchased both the Zeist and Renegade versions. I found a package deal on eBay where I could buy them both on two VHS tapes for six dollars total. Back to that later.
Wow, hats off to you, Lawrence getting those VHS tapes from eBay. That's beautiful.
When you started talking about The Devil Bat having a sequel, I went on Amazon and order DVDs of both films. The original came in a couple of days, but I had to wait longer for the second film. I really enjoyed The Devil Bat, thanks for bringing it to my attention. I like Devil Bat's Daughter as well, but it's a rather different film. While the first film has much of the look and feel of the Warner Brothers horror franchise, Daughter doesn't fit easily into any genre. It's part psychological drama, part romance, part detective story, and maybe a little film noir. Like the first film, it has a few lovely performances in small character roles, and while No One and Daughter has the star power of Legosi, Rosemary Laplanche is compelling as Nina, the late doctor Carruthers strange daughter and Michael Hale is deliciously creepy as her strict and controlling psychotherapist daughter is a bit of a slow burn, especially toward the start. But I think it's worth going the distance about Highlander too. When I listened to your podcast, I couldn't remember if i'd seen it. When I viewed it, I knew I had my brother, my dad, and I had rented Highlander on VHS and watched it together. We loved it. When the sequel out on VHS, we watched that as well. We enjoyed it, but it felt more like a send up of the original than a sequel, and more comedy adventure than a fantasy film. We especially thought Sean Connery was magnificent in it. He does have that great monologue towards the end.
Yeah, most people have a full measure of life.
In some ways. Perhaps the relationship devil Bat's daughter has to the Devil Bat is a bit like that of the quickening to Highlander. In each case, the second film stands well enough on its own, but neither is an especially satisfying sequel to its other. Both sequels feel disconnected from their predecessors, at least to me, but both very worth watching in their own ride. If you haven't seen Devil Bat's Daughter yet, I recommend it. Oh and I didn't care for the renegade version of the Quickening at all. They got it as right as they were going to get it the first time. Thanks guys, Lawrence.
Bravo Lawrence. Well, I think that's going to have to be it for today's listener mail episode. But we still have some great messages that we did not have time to get to today, so we may be doing another one of these sooner than expected. Who knows.
Yeah, yeah, these may be a nice option to roll out in between series, you know, three or four part series and so forth. So yeah, there will be more listener mails, so keep them coming in. We also had plenty that we didn't get to in this episode, so we will be back for more. Just a reminder. The Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays we do a short form episode. On Fridays we do a weird House Cinema episode. That's when we set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird film, and then we have a Vault episode on Saturdays, and then currently in the Monday slot, we're doing Weird House Cinema rewinds.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. 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.
Stuffed Blow your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
