Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind Listener Mail. My name is Joe McCormick. My regular co host Robert Lamb is out on the day that I'm recording this, so I'm going to be reading and responding to some listener messages solo today, but Rob should be back with me for tomorrow's episode. We read listener mail every Monday on Stuff to Blow Your Mind. And if you would like to get in touch but you've never done it before, why not give it a try. You can reach us at contact at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's contact at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Any and all types of messages are welcome. If you have feedback on a recent episode, want to provide a correction or add your thoughts on something we discussed, if you'd like to share something random that you think we would find interesting, or if you want to suggest a topic for us to go in the future. Even if you just want to say hi, tell us about your experience listening to the show, Send it on in. It's contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Okay, I'm going to kick things off with some responses to our episodes on the Moons of Uranus. Let's see so. In that series on the Moons of Uranus, we talked about how difficult it is to come up with a visual representation of the Solar System that faithfully communicates the size of objects and the true scale of the distances between them while being comprehensible all at once. You can't really do it in say, a single page illustration in a book, but a number of listeners got in touch about various, often very clever ways people have tried to demonstrate the scale of the Solar System using videos or interactive media. So this message is from Shana. Shana says, Hello, Robin Joe. I'm currently listening to the Moons of Earnest part one. It felt the need to email this before I forgot. While there are no pictures that can show the true distance of planets in our Solar system, a few years ago some folks created a giant scale model in Nevada and created a short film about it. Here's the description directly directly from them quote. On a dry lake bed in Nevada, a group of friends built the first scale model of the Solar system with complete planetary orbits, a true illustration of our place in the universe. And if folks listening want to look this up. The video is called two Scale the Solar System and it's currently on YouTube, at least it was when I recorded this. Shana says, it's very cool and I think y'all would enjoy the video. Well, yes, thank you for sending this, Shana. I think this is totally a very excellent mini documentary. It's by a couple of filmmakers named Wiley Overstreet and Alex Garage, and it's definitely worth a look. So they stage this in a place called Black Rock Desert. Again, this is in sort of the northwest corner of the US state of Nevada, and in order to build a scale model of the Solar System with the Earth pegged to the size of a marble, they figure out that they need about seven miles of flat ground to represent the orbital plane of the Sun and all of its major planets. And they do this, as they say in the description, in a dry lake bed, measuring out the distances with what looks like surveying equipment and then marking the orbital pathways with tire tracks. So they're out there like driving a van around in these giant circles, around in the sand, and in line with our original point in the episode, it is shocking to see suddenly how far out they have to drive after Saturn. Of course, the distances increase as you go out from Earth in Mars to Jupiter and Saturn. After Saturn to mark the orbit of Uranus and then of Neptune, the distances are gargantuan, and in the end, the radius of the orbit of the little ball representing the planet Neptune is five point six kilometers or three point five miles, so the full diameter of the model is about seven miles and absolutely no disrespect at all to what they did here, which again is excellent, but I think it still sort of fails to capture both the scale of the distance and the scale of the objects all at once, because when you zoom out enough to see the full orbit of Neptune, the differences in size between the objects and the model become impossible to detect. In fact, they're impossible to zoomed much further in than that. They're all just points of light traveling around in ellipses in the distance. So I certainly don't think this is a failure on the part of the filmmakers. I suspect that there is just like literally no way to do this given the resolution human vision. Another message on this subject from Brian. Brian says, greetings, I recently enjoyed your Moons of Urines podcasts, and my memory was pricked by one of the comments you made during the first episode. You were talking about how difficult it is to accurately represent both size and distance for depictions of the Solar System. I've seen several videos of various attempts, and then I think he's referring to the one I just described with a beach ball sized Sun leading to a neptune multiple miles away. But there is one easy to access source that blew my mind, and for a brief description, Brian provides a link here. This is a website by a designer named Josh Wirth, and it's called If the Moon Were Only One Pixel, a tediously accurate map of the Solar System, and it begins with a sort of palm of the hand sized representation of the Sun and then to scroll a horizontal scroll through space at accurate scale distances until you reach accurate scale illustrations of the planets, and as the title indicates, Earth's moon is one pixel. If you actually do this, the amount of scrolling required is ludicrous. You will go plaid. Brian continues, this site does a fantastic job at really demonstrating the space between worlds. It's almost impossible to not fast click the scroll bar, even though you skip over some of the author's commentary, just because there is so much empty space. After scrolling and scrolling through endless amounts of space, you finally get to Jupiter and then look at the scroll bar and realize you've not even gone one quarter of the way through. This site goes out to Pluto for your reference. There are lots of informative, pithy and imaginative comments along the way, but I challenge anyone to just scroll using the aero button. You won't be able to do it. This site really slams home how much of space is well space. Even in our neighborhood, things are so far apart as to be unreachable, and that's just our solar system. The end of the scroll slaps you in the face with the fact that after all that, to get to the next checkpoint, meaning the next star, the closest star to our solar system, you'd need to repeat the entire scroll six seven hundred and seventy one more times. I'd highly encourage you to play around for a bit on this site. It's very instructive and fun. Brian, Thank you Brian once again. Yeah, I think this is an excellent model, but of course it still does not allow you to take it in all at once, which just might not be a thing humans can do. All right, Getting a little bit away from the scale question. Just to other topics raised in our Moons of Urinus series. This is from Jim. Jim says, Hi, guys, guy love the new series. Early in the episode, Joe was talking about planetary distances. I was curious if you've ever discussed the Titious Bode law. That spelled titi Us and then Bode is bode. I don't know if that's a bode or boda. I'm just gonna say bode, And Jim says, which is a mathematical formula that predicts planetary distances from the Sun. Jim, yes, we actually have discussed the Titius Bode law before. I think it came up in our series on hypothetical Solar System objects that either don't exist because they never existed, or maybe once existed but no longer exist. That series was called The Lost Daughters of aten at e n. If you want a deeper treatment, you can go check out those episodes. But the short version is that the titious Bode is a peculiar observation that you can predict the approximate mean orbital distance of all the planets out to Uranus with a simple mathematical formula. It's got a few variables based on planet order and the distance of an astronomical unit. And this was written about in the eighteenth century by two German astronomers named Johan Daniel Tischius and Johann elert Bode. The two Johans and this formula. Yeah, it is a really interesting observation. So it gets very close to predicting the orbital distances of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. There are some cases where it's a little bit off, but it's very close. And at the time of its original publication there was an interesting complication, which was that the prediction seemed to break down because it predicted a planet orbiting at two point eight astronomical unit, so two point eight times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, and that would be between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, where no planet was known at the time. However, this failure was reversed with the discovery of the dwarf Planet Series in eighteen oh one, which we now know to be the largest object in the asteroid belt. So series and the asteroid belt roughly correspond to the gap in the predicted sequence between Jupiter and Mars. Tisitius Bode then also racked up a victory when Uranus was discovered. This was actually earlier, this was in the late eighteenth century, but Tisiu's boat had a victory with the discovery of Uranus because what do you know, it was very close again to what the formula predicted for the next planet after Saturn. But despite this really impressive record, and despite the unfortunate use of the word law sometimes in its name people say the Titius Bode law. Other people just say, like the Titius Bode rule or Titius Bode or something. It is not a law of nature. It totally fails to predict the orbit of Neptune. And as best I can tell, last time I looked into this. Experts in astrophysics are not aware of any reason this formula had to be true or had to hold true, meaning it is not derived from any fundamental facts about how solar systems generally form, or any laws of physics that would apply to all planets and stars in the galaxy. It's probably just a really strange, fascinating coincidence that you can put together a mathematical formula that happens to tell you where most, but not all, of the big things in our solar system are. So maybe the two Johanns were kind of doing the number twenty three, but in space, all right. This next message about moons of Uranus is from Eric. Eric says, Hi, Robin Joe, thanks for the episodes about Uranus and its moons. I've been meaning to read A Midsummer Night's Dream but haven't gotten around to it yet, So I didn't know any thing about the characters for whom many of the moons are named, but it shed some light on an urban fantasy book series that I love, called The Dresden Files. The author borrows mythology from nearly everywhere on the internal principle that all mythology is actually true. Some of the Midsommer characters, including Mab and Titania, feature prominently. Then Eric says, you mentioned Messier and his comet addiction in the first episode, and to refresh, Yeah, this is referring to the French astronomer Charles Messier, one of the people William Herschel wrote to in seventeen eighty one about his discovery of Uranus. At first, William Herschel thought that it wasn't a planet but a comet or something. And Messier was so famous for finding comets that he was nicknamed the Ferret of comets by the French King Louis the fifteenth But back to Eric's message, Eric writes, comics were kind of a big deal in the eighteenth and nineteen century, in that weird period in which people understood that heavenly bodies obeyed natural laws, but they still kind of liked astrology. After Halley, people realized that more of the fuzzy blobs they spotted were comets, so there was kind of a rush to be the first to spot the next comet. Charles Messier was one of those, and he created the Messia catalog, which includes Andromeda M thirty one, the crab Nebula M one, and over one hundred other objects. Interestingly, he cataloged these objects not because he thought them interesting, but because they weren't comets. It was basically his oops list, so he wouldn't waste time looking at fuzzy blob number thirty one night after night in the hope that it would turn out to be a comet. It's ironic that today amateur astronomers typically spend far more time looking at the things on his list than searching for comets. In fact, there are certain times of year when some amateur astronomers will try to complete a Messia marathon, in which they tried to spot each of the one hundred and ten Messia objects in a single night. I've never done it because I'm a very, very lazy amateur astronomer. Thanks for the great episodes. While I would be perfectly happy to have you put out episodes on space objects every week, I think it's better for all of your other listeners to space out pun unintended these types of episodes. Hope you were all well, Eric, Thank you Eric. Okay, this next message comes from Constantine and it concerns our episodes. On the beaver, and also a little bit on the moons of Uranus. Constantine says, gents, thank you for reading my email last week. I have gained tremendous cool points in my household after that. Mind you, those points are self assigned, but they are valued just the same. Yeah. As a reminder, Constantine wrote us a really excellent, highly detailed message about Greek pronunciation in English, especially as it applies to the names of planets. Constantine says, I didn't think I would be writing in so soon again, but I have a small complaint to register with the authorities. How can you have not one, but two beaver episodes and not mention that this mighty, mighty rodent is the national animal of Canada. The beaver even appears on our nickel see attached. All right, so I am looking at a picture of the beaver side the beaver face I guess of the Canadian nickel. This one is minted nineteen sixty five, and I'm going to put on my art critic hat for the Canadian nickel. I have to say I sense a lot of pathos in this beaver. This beaver looks far less whimsical and substantially more aggressive than most. So it is head down, ears, back muscles tensed, four paws in advance, with claws digging into the wet log below. The beaver, I would say, on the nickel looks not like a herbivorous rodent, but like a predator preparing to strike. But it's a beaver, so what is it going to strike? Like a willow stump? And then there's another layer of emotion underneath the predatory pose. There is a thwarted, frustrated sadness in its posture. It even made me think of the Rilka poem The Panther, which is about a panther kept in a zoo in Paris, and in the translation by Stephen Mitchell, the poem begins his vision from the constantly passing bars has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars, and behind the bars no world. So I was thinking about this, and finally it hit me. I think the beaver inside the nickel wants to break out everywhere it goes. Maybe it hears the sound of water running, the trickling sound that that drives the beaver mad, and it knows it must find and plug the leak. But to do that it has to escape the confines of the coin, and maybe one day it will. So back to Constantine's message, sure, America has its eagle and the UK has its lion, but we knooks wear the best smile, with debucktoothed beaver as our national animal of choice, so beware lest you upset us, and we wave our sticks at you. Ah. Very nice. Despite this regal creature being part of everyday Canadian life, I was shocked to learn that the beaver has a cloaca. Even my wife, the veterinarian, was surprised that that detail did not make it into her curriculum at VET school. And now I work this fact into every conversation I have with folks back in our maple leaf land. By the way, I forgot to mention in my email on Uranus that in Greek we call the eight planets of the Solar system by the Greek god names. So it is Hermes that would be Mercury, Aphrodite, that would be Venus, Gaya that would be Earth. Though Constantine us last time that in Greek Gaya is pronounced ye Ares, which is Mars, Zeus, which is Jupiter Chronos which is Saturn Uranus and Poseidon, which is Neptune. Take that Romans. As for the planet Pluto planet in quotation marks, I guess because of Pluto no longer being considered a major planet for whatever reason, it went rogue and goes by both Hades and Pluto in Greek, and that is the real reason that the Greek illuminati had Pluto acted from the pantheon of planets. I'm just saying, don't cross us. Things happen, stay groovy. Cheers regards Constantine. All right, thank you, Constantine. All right, I'm going to do a little bit of weird house cinema response. This is about our episode on The Super Mario Brothers nineteen ninety three. It is from Andrew says, Hi, Robert and Joe love the show. Thank you for all your hard work and making it happen. But after the most recent weird house I had to leap to the defense of a film that, if not great or even really good, was one of my favorites of all time. I loved the Super Mario Brothers movie when I was a kid. It's hard to overstate just how cool and grown up it felt to my seven year old brain. I saw it in the theater with my best friend at the time, and it became regular viewing for me after my father rented it on VHS and copied it to our Beta Max. A few years ago, it was available to stream and I watched it again with my kids, and yeah, it's not good. There's still a lot to love, the chemistry between John Leguizamo and Bob Hoskins, despite both allegedly being drunk for much of the production, all the stoogely antics of Iggy and Spike, the big dopey grin, all the goombas have, But yeah, it's a mess. You talked in the podcast about what a challenge it would have been to develop a plot around something as narratively thin as a Mario game. However, to place the film in context, there were already at least three separate Super Mario cartoons available for Saturday morning viewing on cable at the time of its release. Those of us who watched them were already accustomed to these characterizations and stories in Mario's world. The film just gave us an edgier take on everything, which fit perfectly with the zeitgeist of the early nineties. You know, off, Mike Rob and I were discussing other adaptations of Super Mario Brothers to different media, and he shared with me something that I think somebody sent him on the discord. So I don't actually remember at this point what the media was, but it was a Super Mario Brothers cartoon that may have been from Japan that I think predates the live action movie, and I just watched a clip from part of it. It is the Super Mario Brothers hiking through the desert with some kind of blue pet, like a blue dog like creature at their side, and there's a musical number and the lyrics in translation include lines like don't cry any more, baby, I'm right here for you. We are super, but I don't know. We're super, but what to do with my love?

Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind Listener Mail. My name is Joe McCormick. My regular co host Robert Lamb is out on the day that I'm recording this, so I'm going to be reading and responding to some listener messages solo today, but Rob should be back with me for tomorrow's episode. We read listener mail every Monday on Stuff to Blow Your Mind. And if you would like to get in touch but you've never done it before, why not give it a try. You can reach us at contact at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's contact at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Any and all types of messages are welcome. If you have feedback on a recent episode, want to provide a correction or add your thoughts on something we discussed, if you'd like to share something random that you think we would find interesting, or if you want to suggest a topic for us to go in the future. Even if you just want to say hi, tell us about your experience listening to the show, Send it on in. It's contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Okay, I'm going to kick things off with some responses to our episodes on the Moons of Uranus. Let's see so. In that series on the Moons of Uranus, we talked about how difficult it is to come up with a visual representation of the Solar System that faithfully communicates the size of objects and the true scale of the distances between them while being comprehensible all at once. You can't really do it in say, a single page illustration in a book, but a number of listeners got in touch about various, often very clever ways people have tried to demonstrate the scale of the Solar System using videos or interactive media. So this message is from Shana. Shana says, Hello, Robin Joe. I'm currently listening to the Moons of Earnest part one. It felt the need to email this before I forgot. While there are no pictures that can show the true distance of planets in our Solar system, a few years ago some folks created a giant scale model in Nevada and created a short film about it. Here's the description directly directly from them quote. On a dry lake bed in Nevada, a group of friends built the first scale model of the Solar system with complete planetary orbits, a true illustration of our place in the universe. And if folks listening want to look this up. The video is called two Scale the Solar System and it's currently on YouTube, at least it was when I recorded this. Shana says, it's very cool and I think y'all would enjoy the video. Well, yes, thank you for sending this, Shana. I think this is totally a very excellent mini documentary. It's by a couple of filmmakers named Wiley Overstreet and Alex Garage, and it's definitely worth a look. So they stage this in a place called Black Rock Desert. Again, this is in sort of the northwest corner of the US state of Nevada, and in order to build a scale model of the Solar System with the Earth pegged to the size of a marble, they figure out that they need about seven miles of flat ground to represent the orbital plane of the Sun and all of its major planets. And they do this, as they say in the description, in a dry lake bed, measuring out the distances with what looks like surveying equipment and then marking the orbital pathways with tire tracks. So they're out there like driving a van around in these giant circles, around in the sand, and in line with our original point in the episode, it is shocking to see suddenly how far out they have to drive after Saturn. Of course, the distances increase as you go out from Earth in Mars to Jupiter and Saturn. After Saturn to mark the orbit of Uranus and then of Neptune, the distances are gargantuan, and in the end, the radius of the orbit of the little ball representing the planet Neptune is five point six kilometers or three point five miles, so the full diameter of the model is about seven miles and absolutely no disrespect at all to what they did here, which again is excellent, but I think it still sort of fails to capture both the scale of the distance and the scale of the objects all at once, because when you zoom out enough to see the full orbit of Neptune, the differences in size between the objects and the model become impossible to detect. In fact, they're impossible to zoomed much further in than that. They're all just points of light traveling around in ellipses in the distance. So I certainly don't think this is a failure on the part of the filmmakers. I suspect that there is just like literally no way to do this given the resolution human vision. Another message on this subject from Brian. Brian says, greetings, I recently enjoyed your Moons of Urines podcasts, and my memory was pricked by one of the comments you made during the first episode. You were talking about how difficult it is to accurately represent both size and distance for depictions of the Solar System. I've seen several videos of various attempts, and then I think he's referring to the one I just described with a beach ball sized Sun leading to a neptune multiple miles away. But there is one easy to access source that blew my mind, and for a brief description, Brian provides a link here. This is a website by a designer named Josh Wirth, and it's called If the Moon Were Only One Pixel, a tediously accurate map of the Solar System, and it begins with a sort of palm of the hand sized representation of the Sun and then to scroll a horizontal scroll through space at accurate scale distances until you reach accurate scale illustrations of the planets, and as the title indicates, Earth's moon is one pixel. If you actually do this, the amount of scrolling required is ludicrous. You will go plaid. Brian continues, this site does a fantastic job at really demonstrating the space between worlds. It's almost impossible to not fast click the scroll bar, even though you skip over some of the author's commentary, just because there is so much empty space. After scrolling and scrolling through endless amounts of space, you finally get to Jupiter and then look at the scroll bar and realize you've not even gone one quarter of the way through. This site goes out to Pluto for your reference. There are lots of informative, pithy and imaginative comments along the way, but I challenge anyone to just scroll using the aero button. You won't be able to do it. This site really slams home how much of space is well space. Even in our neighborhood, things are so far apart as to be unreachable, and that's just our solar system. The end of the scroll slaps you in the face with the fact that after all that, to get to the next checkpoint, meaning the next star, the closest star to our solar system, you'd need to repeat the entire scroll six seven hundred and seventy one more times. I'd highly encourage you to play around for a bit on this site. It's very instructive and fun. Brian, Thank you Brian once again. Yeah, I think this is an excellent model, but of course it still does not allow you to take it in all at once, which just might not be a thing humans can do. All right, Getting a little bit away from the scale question. Just to other topics raised in our Moons of Urinus series. This is from Jim. Jim says, Hi, guys, guy love the new series. Early in the episode, Joe was talking about planetary distances. I was curious if you've ever discussed the Titious Bode law. That spelled titi Us and then Bode is bode. I don't know if that's a bode or boda. I'm just gonna say bode, And Jim says, which is a mathematical formula that predicts planetary distances from the Sun. Jim, yes, we actually have discussed the Titius Bode law before. I think it came up in our series on hypothetical Solar System objects that either don't exist because they never existed, or maybe once existed but no longer exist. That series was called The Lost Daughters of aten at e n. If you want a deeper treatment, you can go check out those episodes. But the short version is that the titious Bode is a peculiar observation that you can predict the approximate mean orbital distance of all the planets out to Uranus with a simple mathematical formula. It's got a few variables based on planet order and the distance of an astronomical unit. And this was written about in the eighteenth century by two German astronomers named Johan Daniel Tischius and Johann elert Bode. The two Johans and this formula. Yeah, it is a really interesting observation. So it gets very close to predicting the orbital distances of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. There are some cases where it's a little bit off, but it's very close. And at the time of its original publication there was an interesting complication, which was that the prediction seemed to break down because it predicted a planet orbiting at two point eight astronomical unit, so two point eight times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, and that would be between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, where no planet was known at the time. However, this failure was reversed with the discovery of the dwarf Planet Series in eighteen oh one, which we now know to be the largest object in the asteroid belt. So series and the asteroid belt roughly correspond to the gap in the predicted sequence between Jupiter and Mars. Tisitius Bode then also racked up a victory when Uranus was discovered. This was actually earlier, this was in the late eighteenth century, but Tisiu's boat had a victory with the discovery of Uranus because what do you know, it was very close again to what the formula predicted for the next planet after Saturn. But despite this really impressive record, and despite the unfortunate use of the word law sometimes in its name people say the Titius Bode law. Other people just say, like the Titius Bode rule or Titius Bode or something. It is not a law of nature. It totally fails to predict the orbit of Neptune. And as best I can tell, last time I looked into this. Experts in astrophysics are not aware of any reason this formula had to be true or had to hold true, meaning it is not derived from any fundamental facts about how solar systems generally form, or any laws of physics that would apply to all planets and stars in the galaxy. It's probably just a really strange, fascinating coincidence that you can put together a mathematical formula that happens to tell you where most, but not all, of the big things in our solar system are. So maybe the two Johanns were kind of doing the number twenty three, but in space, all right. This next message about moons of Uranus is from Eric. Eric says, Hi, Robin Joe, thanks for the episodes about Uranus and its moons. I've been meaning to read A Midsummer Night's Dream but haven't gotten around to it yet, So I didn't know any thing about the characters for whom many of the moons are named, but it shed some light on an urban fantasy book series that I love, called The Dresden Files. The author borrows mythology from nearly everywhere on the internal principle that all mythology is actually true. Some of the Midsommer characters, including Mab and Titania, feature prominently. Then Eric says, you mentioned Messier and his comet addiction in the first episode, and to refresh, Yeah, this is referring to the French astronomer Charles Messier, one of the people William Herschel wrote to in seventeen eighty one about his discovery of Uranus. At first, William Herschel thought that it wasn't a planet but a comet or something. And Messier was so famous for finding comets that he was nicknamed the Ferret of comets by the French King Louis the fifteenth But back to Eric's message, Eric writes, comics were kind of a big deal in the eighteenth and nineteen century, in that weird period in which people understood that heavenly bodies obeyed natural laws, but they still kind of liked astrology. After Halley, people realized that more of the fuzzy blobs they spotted were comets, so there was kind of a rush to be the first to spot the next comet. Charles Messier was one of those, and he created the Messia catalog, which includes Andromeda M thirty one, the crab Nebula M one, and over one hundred other objects. Interestingly, he cataloged these objects not because he thought them interesting, but because they weren't comets. It was basically his oops list, so he wouldn't waste time looking at fuzzy blob number thirty one night after night in the hope that it would turn out to be a comet. It's ironic that today amateur astronomers typically spend far more time looking at the things on his list than searching for comets. In fact, there are certain times of year when some amateur astronomers will try to complete a Messia marathon, in which they tried to spot each of the one hundred and ten Messia objects in a single night. I've never done it because I'm a very, very lazy amateur astronomer. Thanks for the great episodes. While I would be perfectly happy to have you put out episodes on space objects every week, I think it's better for all of your other listeners to space out pun unintended these types of episodes. Hope you were all well, Eric, Thank you Eric. Okay, this next message comes from Constantine and it concerns our episodes. On the beaver, and also a little bit on the moons of Uranus. Constantine says, gents, thank you for reading my email last week. I have gained tremendous cool points in my household after that. Mind you, those points are self assigned, but they are valued just the same. Yeah. As a reminder, Constantine wrote us a really excellent, highly detailed message about Greek pronunciation in English, especially as it applies to the names of planets. Constantine says, I didn't think I would be writing in so soon again, but I have a small complaint to register with the authorities. How can you have not one, but two beaver episodes and not mention that this mighty, mighty rodent is the national animal of Canada. The beaver even appears on our nickel see attached. All right, so I am looking at a picture of the beaver side the beaver face I guess of the Canadian nickel. This one is minted nineteen sixty five, and I'm going to put on my art critic hat for the Canadian nickel. I have to say I sense a lot of pathos in this beaver. This beaver looks far less whimsical and substantially more aggressive than most. So it is head down, ears, back muscles tensed, four paws in advance, with claws digging into the wet log below. The beaver, I would say, on the nickel looks not like a herbivorous rodent, but like a predator preparing to strike. But it's a beaver, so what is it going to strike? Like a willow stump? And then there's another layer of emotion underneath the predatory pose. There is a thwarted, frustrated sadness in its posture. It even made me think of the Rilka poem The Panther, which is about a panther kept in a zoo in Paris, and in the translation by Stephen Mitchell, the poem begins his vision from the constantly passing bars has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars, and behind the bars no world. So I was thinking about this, and finally it hit me. I think the beaver inside the nickel wants to break out everywhere it goes. Maybe it hears the sound of water running, the trickling sound that that drives the beaver mad, and it knows it must find and plug the leak. But to do that it has to escape the confines of the coin, and maybe one day it will. So back to Constantine's message, sure, America has its eagle and the UK has its lion, but we knooks wear the best smile, with debucktoothed beaver as our national animal of choice, so beware lest you upset us, and we wave our sticks at you. Ah. Very nice. Despite this regal creature being part of everyday Canadian life, I was shocked to learn that the beaver has a cloaca. Even my wife, the veterinarian, was surprised that that detail did not make it into her curriculum at VET school. And now I work this fact into every conversation I have with folks back in our maple leaf land. By the way, I forgot to mention in my email on Uranus that in Greek we call the eight planets of the Solar system by the Greek god names. So it is Hermes that would be Mercury, Aphrodite, that would be Venus, Gaya that would be Earth. Though Constantine us last time that in Greek Gaya is pronounced ye Ares, which is Mars, Zeus, which is Jupiter Chronos which is Saturn Uranus and Poseidon, which is Neptune. Take that Romans. As for the planet Pluto planet in quotation marks, I guess because of Pluto no longer being considered a major planet for whatever reason, it went rogue and goes by both Hades and Pluto in Greek, and that is the real reason that the Greek illuminati had Pluto acted from the pantheon of planets. I'm just saying, don't cross us. Things happen, stay groovy. Cheers regards Constantine. All right, thank you, Constantine. All right, I'm going to do a little bit of weird house cinema response. This is about our episode on The Super Mario Brothers nineteen ninety three. It is from Andrew says, Hi, Robert and Joe love the show. Thank you for all your hard work and making it happen. But after the most recent weird house I had to leap to the defense of a film that, if not great or even really good, was one of my favorites of all time. I loved the Super Mario Brothers movie when I was a kid. It's hard to overstate just how cool and grown up it felt to my seven year old brain. I saw it in the theater with my best friend at the time, and it became regular viewing for me after my father rented it on VHS and copied it to our Beta Max. A few years ago, it was available to stream and I watched it again with my kids, and yeah, it's not good. There's still a lot to love, the chemistry between John Leguizamo and Bob Hoskins, despite both allegedly being drunk for much of the production, all the stoogely antics of Iggy and Spike, the big dopey grin, all the goombas have, But yeah, it's a mess. You talked in the podcast about what a challenge it would have been to develop a plot around something as narratively thin as a Mario game. However, to place the film in context, there were already at least three separate Super Mario cartoons available for Saturday morning viewing on cable at the time of its release. Those of us who watched them were already accustomed to these characterizations and stories in Mario's world. The film just gave us an edgier take on everything, which fit perfectly with the zeitgeist of the early nineties. You know, off, Mike Rob and I were discussing other adaptations of Super Mario Brothers to different media, and he shared with me something that I think somebody sent him on the discord. So I don't actually remember at this point what the media was, but it was a Super Mario Brothers cartoon that may have been from Japan that I think predates the live action movie, and I just watched a clip from part of it. It is the Super Mario Brothers hiking through the desert with some kind of blue pet, like a blue dog like creature at their side, and there's a musical number and the lyrics in translation include lines like don't cry any more, baby, I'm right here for you. We are super, but I don't know. We're super, but what to do with my love?

Now?

Now?

If only the live action movie had had more of that painful, yearning emotional core to it. You know, I can almost hear Bob Hoskins saying it, We're super, but I don't know what to do with my love Anyway. Back to Andrew's message, Andrews says the film also gave me one of my first cultural Easter egg hunts. There were the big obvious references to the game franchise, like pipe travel, the red and green coveralls, the mushrooms, jump boots, etc. But there were also a number of more subtle nods as well. The cartridges they load into their boots have faces painted on them like bullet bills. The brutalist architecture inside Koopa's tower invokes blocks that make up the fortress levels in Super Mario Brothers three, and the lady in red in the movie is called big Bertha, like the large angry fish that tries to swallow you whole in some of the water levels. Some of these references seem a little lazy in retrospect, but I can still remember how exciting it seemed for me as a child to keep noticing these details. So yeah, it's definitely not a great film, But contrary to your assessment, I think there was a lot there for children of the decade to latch onto, particularly at a time when there was a very different standard for what was appropriate for kids to see. In spite of all its shortcomings, Super Mario Brothers nineteen ninety three is easily one of my favorite films just in terms of how much enjoyment I got out of it when I was young and remember, this was considered to be the first ever game to film adaptation, and none of us had any idea what that was supposed to look like. There was no formula for a feature like this, so the filmmakers chucked us into a bizarre, violent world with sticky reptilian sexuality and alternately gross and imposing locales. That's a huge swing, and even if it didn't totally connect, it's still infinitely more interesting than almost any video game movie that came after. Finally, I'm convinced there is a deep bonus joke hidden behind the layers of membranous fungus and garbage. You remarked on how all the cars have mad Max spikes and shoot sparks and have old skeletons hanging off of their grills. You probably also notice that they all have electrical leads that contact metal cages above the streets like bumper cars, and that the police car that Mario and Luigi Steele loses power once they exit the city. It would seem that the people of dino Hattan are pioneering the electric car, presumably because the descendants of dinosaurs would be reluctant to develop fossil fuel sources parentheses. You and I know that oil is the remains of oceanic plants, animals, and bacteria. But I'll bet the filmmakers didn't. Thank you again for all you do to make my work days more bearable and educate me on subjects I had never even heard of. Andrew, Well, thank you so much, Andrew, I point taken. You know, whatever the film's shortcomings, I think I hope it came through at least that it was worthy of a deep, deep look. And I still stand by my comment that I would read a book length work going into the making and significance of Super Mario Brothers. The movie. It is, if nothing else, and absolutely fascinating. How did this happen? Artifact? Okay, I think we're going to call it there for today. We will have more listener mail to feature next Monday. On Tuesdays and Thursdays of each week we do our core stuff to blow your mind episodes, which are most often about science and culture in some way. On Wednesdays we do a short feature called The Art Fact or the Monster Fact, and on Fridays we do our series called Weird House Cinema that's a more relaxed atmosphere where each week we just watch and discuss a strange film, good or bad, well known or obscure, as long as it's weird. And on Saturdays we run an episode from the vault. If you are not subscribed to the show, do it, do it now. We're called Stuff to Blow Your Mind and you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Look us up, hit subscribe, keep getting us in your feet huge thanks 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 even just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

If only the live action movie had had more of that painful, yearning emotional core to it. You know, I can almost hear Bob Hoskins saying it, We're super, but I don't know what to do with my love Anyway. Back to Andrew's message, Andrews says the film also gave me one of my first cultural Easter egg hunts. There were the big obvious references to the game franchise, like pipe travel, the red and green coveralls, the mushrooms, jump boots, etc. But there were also a number of more subtle nods as well. The cartridges they load into their boots have faces painted on them like bullet bills. The brutalist architecture inside Koopa's tower invokes blocks that make up the fortress levels in Super Mario Brothers three, and the lady in red in the movie is called big Bertha, like the large angry fish that tries to swallow you whole in some of the water levels. Some of these references seem a little lazy in retrospect, but I can still remember how exciting it seemed for me as a child to keep noticing these details. So yeah, it's definitely not a great film, But contrary to your assessment, I think there was a lot there for children of the decade to latch onto, particularly at a time when there was a very different standard for what was appropriate for kids to see. In spite of all its shortcomings, Super Mario Brothers nineteen ninety three is easily one of my favorite films just in terms of how much enjoyment I got out of it when I was young and remember, this was considered to be the first ever game to film adaptation, and none of us had any idea what that was supposed to look like. There was no formula for a feature like this, so the filmmakers chucked us into a bizarre, violent world with sticky reptilian sexuality and alternately gross and imposing locales. That's a huge swing, and even if it didn't totally connect, it's still infinitely more interesting than almost any video game movie that came after. Finally, I'm convinced there is a deep bonus joke hidden behind the layers of membranous fungus and garbage. You remarked on how all the cars have mad Max spikes and shoot sparks and have old skeletons hanging off of their grills. You probably also notice that they all have electrical leads that contact metal cages above the streets like bumper cars, and that the police car that Mario and Luigi Steele loses power once they exit the city. It would seem that the people of dino Hattan are pioneering the electric car, presumably because the descendants of dinosaurs would be reluctant to develop fossil fuel sources parentheses. You and I know that oil is the remains of oceanic plants, animals, and bacteria. But I'll bet the filmmakers didn't. Thank you again for all you do to make my work days more bearable and educate me on subjects I had never even heard of. Andrew, Well, thank you so much, Andrew, I point taken. You know, whatever the film's shortcomings, I think I hope it came through at least that it was worthy of a deep, deep look. And I still stand by my comment that I would read a book length work going into the making and significance of Super Mario Brothers. The movie. It is, if nothing else, and absolutely fascinating. How did this happen? Artifact? Okay, I think we're going to call it there for today. We will have more listener mail to feature next Monday. On Tuesdays and Thursdays of each week we do our core stuff to blow your mind episodes, which are most often about science and culture in some way. On Wednesdays we do a short feature called The Art Fact or the Monster Fact, and on Fridays we do our series called Weird House Cinema that's a more relaxed atmosphere where each week we just watch and discuss a strange film, good or bad, well known or obscure, as long as it's weird. And on Saturdays we run an episode from the vault. If you are not subscribed to the show, do it, do it now. We're called Stuff to Blow Your Mind and you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Look us up, hit subscribe, keep getting us in your feet huge thanks 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 even just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my Heart Radio to the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my Heart Radio to the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.