February 8, 2019 • 17 mins
From the best place to do your book shopping to a very sweet rodent with too much to carry, Will and Mango explore some of the World Wide Web's weirdest corners.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
I guess what, well, what's that mango? So one of
the things I used to love, and there really isn't
that much of this anymore, But I used to love
all the weird and ridiculous websites that you could find online.
Like there's a page I've mentioned before that's dedicated strictly
to saving the Northwest Pacific tree octopus. And of course,
you know there aren't any endangerous species of octopus that
(00:24):
live in trees, but this page really does its best
to prove that they do. And uh, there's also the
site I remember thinking it was so funny when I
found it called Taco Spin. It's just a page with
a single picture of a taco spinning, and as you're there,
it just counts how many spins you've witnessed for the
length of time you've been on a meaningful site. It
(00:45):
really is. It means a lot to me. And there's
also a site called is it Christmas? Basically type in
is it Christmas dot com and most of the year
it has the word no written on it. One special
day year it changes to it. Yes, I'm not going
to tell you which one because I don't want to
spoil it for you. Don't don't spoil that for anything.
I mean, I also kind of love fossils that are
still on the Internet. Like I don't know why the
(01:07):
original space Jam site is still up there, and you know,
for the longest time, the official Dole Camp six website
was still left up there. I don't know. Maybe somebody's
still holding out hope that they'll somehow win. But it's
just fun to see these, Yeah, I mean, it is bizarre,
especially since someone's actually paying to keep those sites up.
For today's nine things that would be really fun to
(01:30):
just highlight delightful corners of the Internet, let's dig in
(01:54):
a their podcast. Listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm
Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good
friend Man Gueshow Ticketer and sitting behind the soundproof glass
wearing a T shirt. It's been a little while since
he's worn one of his custom T shirts. This one
is of Avocado Rat, which I guess was a Brooklyn
hipster version of Pizza Rat. That's that's our friends and
producer Tristan McNeil so ago. We're talking delightful corners of
(02:18):
the Internet today. But you know, every once in a while,
I look up the blair Witch Project and your name,
just to see if that beautiful story is still there.
I can't believe you brought it up. You actually need
to just remind us all of that story. So you
were in college and you were I think you were
interning somewhere and you and your friends went to go
see the blair Witch Project. Right, yeah, that's right. So
(02:41):
it was when I was living in d C for
the summer and we just submitted this big project at
my office and pulled together like this all night are essentially,
and so our boss decided would be fun to treat
us to a movie. So the Blair Witch Project had
just come out, and we went to go see it,
and during the movie I got motion sick. This like,
I've actually fine generally, like when I'm at movies, I'm
(03:03):
not affected by motion in movies or anything, but very
very occasionally, like shaky camera work can make me a
little nauseous, and the Blair Witch Project had that. So anyway,
the movie ends, we leave the theater and there's this
cub reporter just waiting outside from the Washington Post, just
standing by the exit, and she's asking everyone like like,
(03:23):
did you get sick? Did you get sick? Did anyone
feel sick? So I guess it was enough of the
thing that the Washington Post was like writing a trend
piece on it. Anyway, my friends pointed her to me,
and she comes up to me and she says, I
heard you threw up. It's like, uh no, And she
(03:44):
she says, uh, well, you look really wretched, and and
I was a little confused, and she says, and your
skin looks really palid. And I was like, what is
going on your wretched palette? I need to stop this,
So I said, excuse me. I mean I did not
throw off. I I just got a little off from
the shaky camera work, but nothing else. And you totally
(04:07):
know this, but I used to have, especially in college,
this this nervous habit of not knowing where to put
my hands, and so I just kind of placed them
on my stomach as I talked and as she kind
of scribbled these things. She wrote up her notes and
then ran away. And then the next day my friends
showed me the Washington Post, which had this ridiculous paragraph
all about me. It was ridiculous, and actually I decided
(04:29):
to pull this up because it's just such a delightful
part of the Internet to me. But here is what
it says. It says for some like Maesh Ticket or twenty,
the jittery camera was enough to make him feel wretched
after a recent screening. Looking palid, he stood outside a
few minutes after the show quote the handheld camera stuff
made me sick, he said, clutching his stomach. He did, not, however,
(04:52):
actually hurl, he reported. I can't ever get through it.
It's as his friends, but no doubt grateful for that.
It is so ridiculous and I feel like for years
after that it was like one of the top articles
when you google my name, or at least when you
googled my name with the word wretched. Yep, if you
(05:13):
google Mangesh his name with wretched, you will find this
story anyway, So that may be the best part of
the internet. But anyway, where do you want to go
from here? So? How about a weird bookroom? And this
is a section of a site from a Books which
is an online book dealer. And the weird book Room
is this sort of ever growing assortment of the most bizarre, awkward, unsettling,
(05:36):
like amazingly off the titles you'll ever find and it
isn't just like a photoblog of book covers either. You
can actually buy these obscure titles directly from the site,
but you don't have to buy them. Pruising them is
super fun. And here just a few favorites I found
whilst giving the list. Extreme ironing one oh one, crafting
with cat hair, how to live with an idiot, gobble,
(05:58):
improofing one's chicken coop, the thermodynamics of pizza rats for
those who care, how to make your own dried apple dolls,
old tractors and the men who love them, and nuclear war.
What's in it for you? So good? And this seems
like a great place to do your holiday shopping, just
to find some some real gems out there there definitely
(06:21):
is all right. Well, here is a page I liked.
It's called That's Not How You pipette, and it's basically
a bag of people and pop culture misusing lab equipment.
And so for anyone who doesn't know, a pipette is
this lab tool that's basically the science equivalent of an
eye dropper, like a turkey based or you know, kind
of a kind of a science based or I guess.
(06:41):
But despite how simple pipettes may seem they actually come
in a bunch of different forms and sizes depending on
what you're trying to do, and unfortunately that kind of
nuance often falls by the wayside and TV shows, especially
ones that portray lab text and crime scene investigators. And
so for most to us that's not that big of
a deal because we really can't tell the difference. We're
(07:03):
not used to seeing these in use all the time.
But for someone who works in a chemistry lab or
in medicine, it could be pretty annoying to see a
common tool so badly misused on the screen. And so
that's where this tumbler comes in because it acts as
a running list of all the pipette fails in popular
TV shows, And weirdly, there's actually a wide range of
(07:24):
mistakes to catalog here. So there's some simple stuff like
you know, using one while I'm not wearing gloves, or
using a pipette that's way bigger than the situation requires.
But then there's the really egregious stuff like when a
character uses a pipette to insert you know, an r
F I D chip and somebody's hands they used one
for some reason. So the site has been around since
(07:44):
two thousand thirteen, and and you know, it's kind of
an oldie, but I still like looking back at this one.
So I'm sure a favorite of people who like the
fact check as well. Right like like kind of falls
into a category of I feel like there was an
HR director who looked at the office sin and catalog
how many mistakes the HR department was making with Steve
Carrell's character. But uh, I love that. So you know what,
(08:07):
one of the sites that took the Internet by storm
while back was Stuff on My Cat, which is a
good site for folks who enjoyed the simple pleasure of
seeing random objects put on top of sleeping cats. But
you know, for many that scene has gotten a little
too pedestrian over the years. It's easy to find house
cats sleeping and get them to pose with a bunch
of stuff on top of them, but trying to do
(08:28):
that with a capybara is way harder. So has the
world's largest road in the native of South America. You know,
these can be a little harder to come by to
begin with, and so spotting a capa bara was something weird.
Sitting on top of its back tends to be way
more rewarding and and that's why I love the site.
It's called Animals Sitting on capabaras dot com and it
(08:52):
is just photos of wild animals on top of these
like obliging capa baras. You can find turtles, dogs, monkeys, butterflies.
Sometimes like a group of birds will be on top
of there and just taking advantage of this like oversized roading.
But you know, the blog also features fan art of
(09:12):
where like people depict their favorite animal stacks on top
of cappa barras. That just takes it to another level.
That's alright, Well, since you brought up animals, here's the
thing I like that Gabe happened to tell me about.
So you know how Twitter is obviously this mixed bag
of information and of course trolls, But there's one account
on there that's so sweet and simple it almost makes
(09:34):
up for everything. And it's called I've Pet that Dog
and it follows this ten year old boy named Gideon
Kid who's on this ongoing quest to meet and hopefully
pet every dog he possibly can. I love it, and
you know, and and that's that's really all there is
to it. Like every post includes a photo of Gideon
(09:55):
posing alongside the latest dog that he pets, and below
it as this right up summer Rising the encounter. I mean,
it's so good. And actually here's one from a week
or so ago when Gideon met this dog, Coco. Here's
what he writes, I pet Coco. Today is his first birthday.
He's an English chocolate lab. He loves music, so he
was named after the movie Coco. He's a smart dog
(10:16):
who will bring you his food if you say, bring
me a can. He loves bananas and wines for them.
And Coco is the happiest when you scratch his armpits.
So anyway, apparently I've pet that dog has amassed nearly
two hundred thousand followers since it launched last April, and
in that time, Gideon has personally met more than seven
hundred and fifty dogs. So I mean, I like dogs
(10:39):
a lot, and I think that feels like more dogs
than all pen in my life. Like he's really he's
only ten. He's on a mission. There's no doubt about them,
all right, So what do you have next? So I've
got a super quick and super weird one. It's called
gold Bloomings, and gold Bloomings is nothing but flowers in
bloom feed during Jeff Goldblum's head or a picture of
(11:02):
him popping out of him, both really funny and really disturbing,
which I think makes it worth mentioning. Yeah, that kind
of sounds like maybe just like a weird dream you
would have, like where all the flowers would have Jeff Goldblum,
but he's like perky and every one of the pictures. Yeah,
so weird. Al Right, Well, I'm gonna go with a
(11:23):
little bit longer of a fact. And this is what
the site I found called Ask the Past, and it's
part blog, part advice column. But the twist is that
all the advice is taken from very old or even
ancient books, so obviously most of the advice is really terrible.
So for instance, there's a question on how to tell
if someone is dead or not and the answer is
from the thirteen eighties. Here's what it says. If there's
(11:46):
any doubt as to whether a person is or is
not dead, apply lightly roasted onion to his nostrils, and
if he be alive, he will immediately scratch his nobs.
A's simple as that. Don't feel for a pull, Just
life has to get an onion yeah, it's a it's
a great hack. Or if you want to improve your memory,
you could always follow this advice taken from a sixteenth
(12:07):
century medical journal. So pay attention, mengo. This is important
advice here, and it says to sleep hosed and showed,
especially with foul socks, don't hinder the memory because of
the reflection of the vapors, which feeblit the sight and
causes the body to burn. Is that not profound? I
am not sure what that means. Can you explain it? Well?
(12:28):
I wasn't sure either, But basically you might have assumed
that your poor memory was due to stress or lack
of sleep, but it's actually due to sock vapors from
dirty socks plugging up your brain. They're also blinding and
burning you, apparently. Anyway, asked the past is this lovingly
curated collection by a JOHNS Hopkins history professor named Elizabeth Archibald.
(12:52):
And she's actually got some pretty funny answers on everything
from how to interpret small hands to how to serve
a flaming bird. That is great to know. And I
know we've got two more spots on the internet to
fill out now, but before we do that, let's take
a quick break. Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where
(13:23):
we're talking about some delightfully strange corners of the Internet.
And there are obviously too many of these to get
to it. If you're listening and you've got a great one,
please do share them with us because we want to
hear your favorites. But anyway, will it's your last fact
where you're gonna take it. Well, there's this site I
love that everybody should investigate, and it's called Scouting New York.
And I like it because you get to see what
(13:45):
a movie scout sees when they kind of wander through
a city, and how different a city might look through
their eyes. And so the site was created by this
guy named Nick Carr, and it's amazing what he finds.
Like he'll walk into a hardware store and notice a
strange arch, and you know, it's it's just this hardware
store that's packed with these things in midtown Manhattan. But
(14:07):
he'll follow the seams of the arch and find a
little statue on both sides and get curious about that.
And so he'll go back and do some research and
show you how this little nondescript hardware store actually used
to be this gorgeous ornate movie theater, and he spots
these things in the details, so you know, the site
is full of these delightful little findings, like this fishing
(14:29):
village and the Bronx, or the story behind this George
Jets and like house hidden in the New York skyline,
or you know why every Hollywood film seems to shoot
at the same Chinese restaurant. It's it's really a wonderful site.
That's amazing. I really did like that, and I love that,
you know, so many people can see the same city
and not see what he sees, right, It's like pretty
(14:50):
pretty impressive. So my last site doesn't follow the rules,
but I love it so much I kind of had
to give it a tribute. There's a site that the
comedy superstar and your Bloomfeld created when he was a
much younger comedian, and it's called Phalondromes and uh. While
the original site doesn't exist today, you can still find
links on the way Back Machine pretty easily. But for
(15:12):
some reason, Amir decided to make a site full of phalindromes,
which he defines as quote fake palindromes, and though they
cannot be read the same forwards and backwards like their
sister palindromes. Their peculiar structure makes them appear as if
they can So I don't know why it's so funny
to me, but the fact that he wasted all this
(15:32):
time constructing phrases that seem like they can be read
back and forth is really funny. So I'm gonna read
a few of them to you. Oh gin need a dingo,
I a cd rom ribbed a bearded Mordecai. I mean,
you know, it's it sounds like a palindrome, but it's
(15:54):
it's not quite. I guess that it makes it a phalondrome.
This makes sense. There's one more. It goes able Sidler's
race cars. I dress Elba and I feel like, I
feel like that's exactly what pound rooms, so many pound
rooms are. They're like, don't quite make sense, but like
you want them to make sense because they're structured nicely.
But I love that side. It's just so funny. It
(16:14):
makes me laugh every time I look at it. I
think that one it may be one of my favorites.
I do want to admit I have seen those before,
and I think I was in tears. I was laughing
so hard at reading these and so for that, I
think you deserve today's trophy. Mango. Well, I can't fault
you there. I think that's it for today's part time genius.
You know, I know you and I had so much
(16:35):
fun looking this stuff up. Like I said earlier, I'd
really love for any suggestions to come in. So if
you've got great corners, great little secrets about the Internet
that you want to send in, please please hit us
up on email, Facebook, Twitter, where a part time genius
at I heart media dot com and from gave Tristan
willem Me thank you so much for listening to the
(17:04):
d
I guess what, well, what's that mango? So one of
the things I used to love, and there really isn't
that much of this anymore, But I used to love
all the weird and ridiculous websites that you could find online.
Like there's a page I've mentioned before that's dedicated strictly
to saving the Northwest Pacific tree octopus. And of course,
you know there aren't any endangerous species of octopus that
(00:24):
live in trees, but this page really does its best
to prove that they do. And uh, there's also the
site I remember thinking it was so funny when I
found it called Taco Spin. It's just a page with
a single picture of a taco spinning, and as you're there,
it just counts how many spins you've witnessed for the
length of time you've been on a meaningful site. It
(00:45):
really is. It means a lot to me. And there's
also a site called is it Christmas? Basically type in
is it Christmas dot com and most of the year
it has the word no written on it. One special
day year it changes to it. Yes, I'm not going
to tell you which one because I don't want to
spoil it for you. Don't don't spoil that for anything.
I mean, I also kind of love fossils that are
still on the Internet. Like I don't know why the
(01:07):
original space Jam site is still up there, and you know,
for the longest time, the official Dole Camp six website
was still left up there. I don't know. Maybe somebody's
still holding out hope that they'll somehow win. But it's
just fun to see these, Yeah, I mean, it is bizarre,
especially since someone's actually paying to keep those sites up.
For today's nine things that would be really fun to
(01:30):
just highlight delightful corners of the Internet, let's dig in
(01:54):
a their podcast. Listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm
Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good
friend Man Gueshow Ticketer and sitting behind the soundproof glass
wearing a T shirt. It's been a little while since
he's worn one of his custom T shirts. This one
is of Avocado Rat, which I guess was a Brooklyn
hipster version of Pizza Rat. That's that's our friends and
producer Tristan McNeil so ago. We're talking delightful corners of
(02:18):
the Internet today. But you know, every once in a while,
I look up the blair Witch Project and your name,
just to see if that beautiful story is still there.
I can't believe you brought it up. You actually need
to just remind us all of that story. So you
were in college and you were I think you were
interning somewhere and you and your friends went to go
see the blair Witch Project. Right, yeah, that's right. So
(02:41):
it was when I was living in d C for
the summer and we just submitted this big project at
my office and pulled together like this all night are essentially,
and so our boss decided would be fun to treat
us to a movie. So the Blair Witch Project had
just come out, and we went to go see it,
and during the movie I got motion sick. This like,
I've actually fine generally, like when I'm at movies, I'm
(03:03):
not affected by motion in movies or anything, but very
very occasionally, like shaky camera work can make me a
little nauseous, and the Blair Witch Project had that. So anyway,
the movie ends, we leave the theater and there's this
cub reporter just waiting outside from the Washington Post, just
standing by the exit, and she's asking everyone like like,
(03:23):
did you get sick? Did you get sick? Did anyone
feel sick? So I guess it was enough of the
thing that the Washington Post was like writing a trend
piece on it. Anyway, my friends pointed her to me,
and she comes up to me and she says, I
heard you threw up. It's like, uh no, And she
(03:44):
she says, uh, well, you look really wretched, and and
I was a little confused, and she says, and your
skin looks really palid. And I was like, what is
going on your wretched palette? I need to stop this,
So I said, excuse me. I mean I did not
throw off. I I just got a little off from
the shaky camera work, but nothing else. And you totally
(04:07):
know this, but I used to have, especially in college,
this this nervous habit of not knowing where to put
my hands, and so I just kind of placed them
on my stomach as I talked and as she kind
of scribbled these things. She wrote up her notes and
then ran away. And then the next day my friends
showed me the Washington Post, which had this ridiculous paragraph
all about me. It was ridiculous, and actually I decided
(04:29):
to pull this up because it's just such a delightful
part of the Internet to me. But here is what
it says. It says for some like Maesh Ticket or twenty,
the jittery camera was enough to make him feel wretched
after a recent screening. Looking palid, he stood outside a
few minutes after the show quote the handheld camera stuff
made me sick, he said, clutching his stomach. He did, not, however,
(04:52):
actually hurl, he reported. I can't ever get through it.
It's as his friends, but no doubt grateful for that.
It is so ridiculous and I feel like for years
after that it was like one of the top articles
when you google my name, or at least when you
googled my name with the word wretched. Yep, if you
(05:13):
google Mangesh his name with wretched, you will find this
story anyway, So that may be the best part of
the internet. But anyway, where do you want to go
from here? So? How about a weird bookroom? And this
is a section of a site from a Books which
is an online book dealer. And the weird book Room
is this sort of ever growing assortment of the most bizarre, awkward, unsettling,
(05:36):
like amazingly off the titles you'll ever find and it
isn't just like a photoblog of book covers either. You
can actually buy these obscure titles directly from the site,
but you don't have to buy them. Pruising them is
super fun. And here just a few favorites I found
whilst giving the list. Extreme ironing one oh one, crafting
with cat hair, how to live with an idiot, gobble,
(05:58):
improofing one's chicken coop, the thermodynamics of pizza rats for
those who care, how to make your own dried apple dolls,
old tractors and the men who love them, and nuclear war.
What's in it for you? So good? And this seems
like a great place to do your holiday shopping, just
to find some some real gems out there there definitely
(06:21):
is all right. Well, here is a page I liked.
It's called That's Not How You pipette, and it's basically
a bag of people and pop culture misusing lab equipment.
And so for anyone who doesn't know, a pipette is
this lab tool that's basically the science equivalent of an
eye dropper, like a turkey based or you know, kind
of a kind of a science based or I guess.
(06:41):
But despite how simple pipettes may seem they actually come
in a bunch of different forms and sizes depending on
what you're trying to do, and unfortunately that kind of
nuance often falls by the wayside and TV shows, especially
ones that portray lab text and crime scene investigators. And
so for most to us that's not that big of
a deal because we really can't tell the difference. We're
(07:03):
not used to seeing these in use all the time.
But for someone who works in a chemistry lab or
in medicine, it could be pretty annoying to see a
common tool so badly misused on the screen. And so
that's where this tumbler comes in because it acts as
a running list of all the pipette fails in popular
TV shows, And weirdly, there's actually a wide range of
(07:24):
mistakes to catalog here. So there's some simple stuff like
you know, using one while I'm not wearing gloves, or
using a pipette that's way bigger than the situation requires.
But then there's the really egregious stuff like when a
character uses a pipette to insert you know, an r
F I D chip and somebody's hands they used one
for some reason. So the site has been around since
(07:44):
two thousand thirteen, and and you know, it's kind of
an oldie, but I still like looking back at this one.
So I'm sure a favorite of people who like the
fact check as well. Right like like kind of falls
into a category of I feel like there was an
HR director who looked at the office sin and catalog
how many mistakes the HR department was making with Steve
Carrell's character. But uh, I love that. So you know what,
(08:07):
one of the sites that took the Internet by storm
while back was Stuff on My Cat, which is a
good site for folks who enjoyed the simple pleasure of
seeing random objects put on top of sleeping cats. But
you know, for many that scene has gotten a little
too pedestrian over the years. It's easy to find house
cats sleeping and get them to pose with a bunch
of stuff on top of them, but trying to do
(08:28):
that with a capybara is way harder. So has the
world's largest road in the native of South America. You know,
these can be a little harder to come by to
begin with, and so spotting a capa bara was something weird.
Sitting on top of its back tends to be way
more rewarding and and that's why I love the site.
It's called Animals Sitting on capabaras dot com and it
(08:52):
is just photos of wild animals on top of these
like obliging capa baras. You can find turtles, dogs, monkeys, butterflies.
Sometimes like a group of birds will be on top
of there and just taking advantage of this like oversized roading.
But you know, the blog also features fan art of
(09:12):
where like people depict their favorite animal stacks on top
of cappa barras. That just takes it to another level.
That's alright, Well, since you brought up animals, here's the
thing I like that Gabe happened to tell me about.
So you know how Twitter is obviously this mixed bag
of information and of course trolls, But there's one account
on there that's so sweet and simple it almost makes
(09:34):
up for everything. And it's called I've Pet that Dog
and it follows this ten year old boy named Gideon
Kid who's on this ongoing quest to meet and hopefully
pet every dog he possibly can. I love it, and
you know, and and that's that's really all there is
to it. Like every post includes a photo of Gideon
(09:55):
posing alongside the latest dog that he pets, and below
it as this right up summer Rising the encounter. I mean,
it's so good. And actually here's one from a week
or so ago when Gideon met this dog, Coco. Here's
what he writes, I pet Coco. Today is his first birthday.
He's an English chocolate lab. He loves music, so he
was named after the movie Coco. He's a smart dog
(10:16):
who will bring you his food if you say, bring
me a can. He loves bananas and wines for them.
And Coco is the happiest when you scratch his armpits.
So anyway, apparently I've pet that dog has amassed nearly
two hundred thousand followers since it launched last April, and
in that time, Gideon has personally met more than seven
hundred and fifty dogs. So I mean, I like dogs
(10:39):
a lot, and I think that feels like more dogs
than all pen in my life. Like he's really he's
only ten. He's on a mission. There's no doubt about them,
all right, So what do you have next? So I've
got a super quick and super weird one. It's called
gold Bloomings, and gold Bloomings is nothing but flowers in
bloom feed during Jeff Goldblum's head or a picture of
(11:02):
him popping out of him, both really funny and really disturbing,
which I think makes it worth mentioning. Yeah, that kind
of sounds like maybe just like a weird dream you
would have, like where all the flowers would have Jeff Goldblum,
but he's like perky and every one of the pictures. Yeah,
so weird. Al Right, Well, I'm gonna go with a
(11:23):
little bit longer of a fact. And this is what
the site I found called Ask the Past, and it's
part blog, part advice column. But the twist is that
all the advice is taken from very old or even
ancient books, so obviously most of the advice is really terrible.
So for instance, there's a question on how to tell
if someone is dead or not and the answer is
from the thirteen eighties. Here's what it says. If there's
(11:46):
any doubt as to whether a person is or is
not dead, apply lightly roasted onion to his nostrils, and
if he be alive, he will immediately scratch his nobs.
A's simple as that. Don't feel for a pull, Just
life has to get an onion yeah, it's a it's
a great hack. Or if you want to improve your memory,
you could always follow this advice taken from a sixteenth
(12:07):
century medical journal. So pay attention, mengo. This is important
advice here, and it says to sleep hosed and showed,
especially with foul socks, don't hinder the memory because of
the reflection of the vapors, which feeblit the sight and
causes the body to burn. Is that not profound? I
am not sure what that means. Can you explain it? Well?
(12:28):
I wasn't sure either, But basically you might have assumed
that your poor memory was due to stress or lack
of sleep, but it's actually due to sock vapors from
dirty socks plugging up your brain. They're also blinding and
burning you, apparently. Anyway, asked the past is this lovingly
curated collection by a JOHNS Hopkins history professor named Elizabeth Archibald.
(12:52):
And she's actually got some pretty funny answers on everything
from how to interpret small hands to how to serve
a flaming bird. That is great to know. And I
know we've got two more spots on the internet to
fill out now, but before we do that, let's take
a quick break. Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where
(13:23):
we're talking about some delightfully strange corners of the Internet.
And there are obviously too many of these to get
to it. If you're listening and you've got a great one,
please do share them with us because we want to
hear your favorites. But anyway, will it's your last fact
where you're gonna take it. Well, there's this site I
love that everybody should investigate, and it's called Scouting New York.
And I like it because you get to see what
(13:45):
a movie scout sees when they kind of wander through
a city, and how different a city might look through
their eyes. And so the site was created by this
guy named Nick Carr, and it's amazing what he finds.
Like he'll walk into a hardware store and notice a
strange arch, and you know, it's it's just this hardware
store that's packed with these things in midtown Manhattan. But
(14:07):
he'll follow the seams of the arch and find a
little statue on both sides and get curious about that.
And so he'll go back and do some research and
show you how this little nondescript hardware store actually used
to be this gorgeous ornate movie theater, and he spots
these things in the details, so you know, the site
is full of these delightful little findings, like this fishing
(14:29):
village and the Bronx, or the story behind this George
Jets and like house hidden in the New York skyline,
or you know why every Hollywood film seems to shoot
at the same Chinese restaurant. It's it's really a wonderful site.
That's amazing. I really did like that, and I love that,
you know, so many people can see the same city
and not see what he sees, right, It's like pretty
(14:50):
pretty impressive. So my last site doesn't follow the rules,
but I love it so much I kind of had
to give it a tribute. There's a site that the
comedy superstar and your Bloomfeld created when he was a
much younger comedian, and it's called Phalondromes and uh. While
the original site doesn't exist today, you can still find
links on the way Back Machine pretty easily. But for
(15:12):
some reason, Amir decided to make a site full of phalindromes,
which he defines as quote fake palindromes, and though they
cannot be read the same forwards and backwards like their
sister palindromes. Their peculiar structure makes them appear as if
they can So I don't know why it's so funny
to me, but the fact that he wasted all this
(15:32):
time constructing phrases that seem like they can be read
back and forth is really funny. So I'm gonna read
a few of them to you. Oh gin need a dingo,
I a cd rom ribbed a bearded Mordecai. I mean,
you know, it's it sounds like a palindrome, but it's
(15:54):
it's not quite. I guess that it makes it a phalondrome.
This makes sense. There's one more. It goes able Sidler's
race cars. I dress Elba and I feel like, I
feel like that's exactly what pound rooms, so many pound
rooms are. They're like, don't quite make sense, but like
you want them to make sense because they're structured nicely.
But I love that side. It's just so funny. It
(16:14):
makes me laugh every time I look at it. I
think that one it may be one of my favorites.
I do want to admit I have seen those before,
and I think I was in tears. I was laughing
so hard at reading these and so for that, I
think you deserve today's trophy. Mango. Well, I can't fault
you there. I think that's it for today's part time genius.
You know, I know you and I had so much
(16:35):
fun looking this stuff up. Like I said earlier, I'd
really love for any suggestions to come in. So if
you've got great corners, great little secrets about the Internet
that you want to send in, please please hit us
up on email, Facebook, Twitter, where a part time genius
at I heart media dot com and from gave Tristan
willem Me thank you so much for listening to the
(17:04):
d
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