Listener Mail: Let the Lamp Affix its Beam

Once more, it's time for a weekly dose of Stuff to Blow Your Mind and Weirdhouse Cinema listener mail...

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Listener mail. This is Robert Lam and this is Joe McCormick.
And it's Monday, so it's time for us to read
back a few with the messages that you have sent
in over the past week or so, rob do you
mind if I jump right in with this message in

(00:23):
response to our episodes on the invention of the chainsaw?
Go for it all right? This comes from Chris. Chris says, Hi,
Joe and Robert. Longtime listener, first time emailer. I'm currently
listening to your podcast on the chainsaw and just thought
i'd let you know a place where these appear unchained

(00:45):
or with the bar removed completely. In sporting culture, if
you watch pretty much any downhill mountain bike race, there
will be numerous crowd members wielding chainsaws as a way
to cheer on the riders. I believe are a couple
of different reasons behind this. The first and most obvious
is that a lot of mountain biking facilities are built

(01:06):
in forest plantations that are periodically harvested, so it's quite
common to hear chainsaws in the background. To riding. The
second is perhaps a slight stretch. A traditional way to
cheer on a road cyclist is to ring a cow bell.
Similar reasoning, bicycle races take place on rural roads where
the only unnatural sound maybe that of cattle as they

(01:28):
go about the business of being cattle. I believe the
chainsaw represents the newer, more extreme sport of downhill racing.
I thought this was an interesting little side note to
the use of chainsaws. Thanks for the quirky and interesting
topics that you cover. Regards Chris Well, then sounds completely
made up. I don't know I believe any of that that,

(01:49):
but it's so weird. I guess it has to be true. Yeah,
I wonder Well, now I'm wondering if I should have
checked this beforehand. You know what, Chris, if you were
lying to us, and I determined afterwards, I'm gonna cut
this whole message out of the episode. But I was
wondering if, okay, could chainsaws be so that the the
downhill mountain biking person can hear you through a through

(02:12):
a helmet they've got on that would like cover up
their ears and muffle normal applause and cheers. I guess
so I could see that being the case. You know,
they're muffled, they're going fast. Uh, you can't just yell hey,
way to go race that downhill? You know, you need
to maybe something louder. And it's either this or air horns.
And I guess the air horn could be more startling,

(02:33):
whereas the chainsaw could be startling too. I guess if
you're just suddenly wrapping it up, but more of it,
I guess it is just constantly going. Then maybe it's
like a nice ambient roar when they rush by. Yeah,
I guess so, I mean something about it seems vaguely threatening. Yeah. Well, anyway, Chris,
thanks for getting in touch. All right, so that was

(02:56):
a bit of a Halloween listener mail, and it's okay
if those continue to roll, Lynn will continue to read him.
But we also begin to hear from folks in regard
to our Doune episodes. Uh so basically we put out,
you know, two new Science of Dune episodes, and this
was this bit of listener mail comes to us from see, hey, guys,
not normally one to write into podcasts first time, actually,

(03:19):
but I just finished your new episode on the BENI
Jesra like yourselves. I'm a pretty big fan of Doone.
It is my default favorite book in any sort of
favorite book discussions, I give both Done and Done Messiah
a read through every couple of years. Anyway, to the point,
I was really thinking deeply about the box while watching
some late night peanut butter brownies finished baking in the oven,

(03:40):
and a curious thing struck me. I am one that
leans towards the box not being a secret technology but
some parlor trick of the Reverend Mother. As I was
listening to you guys discussed the box and Paul's later
anecdote about not falling for tricks again, it made me
wonder if he would have felt anything at all if
he hadn't asked what was in the box. After all,

(04:01):
the benegestor to have command of the voice, and so
I wonder if the Reverend Mother telling Paul what to
expect in the box, maybe that was enough. I think
maybe the Reverend Mother planted that in his mind, maybe
with the voice, and then Paul's mind created that very
pain that tortured him. So maybe the box is just
simply that a box. Anyway, Thank you guys for the

(04:23):
years of podcasting excellence. And I look forward to any
more cheers. See. Yeah, you know, I pretty much suspect
this is what Herbert had in mind, that actually the
box itself doesn't do anything, and it is the Reverend
mother who is the who is the active principle, who
is causing the the sensations of pain that Paul is feeling. Yeah,

(04:45):
I too think that's probably more in line with with
the way he seems to operate. And it's certainly the
way that the Reverend Mothers seemed to operate. It's a
it's kind of it's like a distraction to a certain extent,
and it's a method of of of tweaking our perception
of things. Um, but I wonder what would happen if
she had said something other than pain, Like what if

(05:05):
she had said, it's filled with like what's in the paint?
What's in the box? And and she says, well, it's eyeballs,
it's a witch's hair from a witch who once lived
in this house. Now it's the intestines of a murderer. Yeah,
it would have that. It would have been interesting. Have
you ever done one of those Halloween parties the field,

(05:26):
the Field, the Ikey's I remember it is a child.
I remember going to some sort of uh, you know,
I don't know, it's like an Elks Club Halloween or something,
I don't know, and uh, and somebody had that set
up and I remember thinking it was pretty neat because
you had the other spaghetti for guts I think, and
then skinned grapes, particularly skinned grapes for for eyeballs. And yeah,

(05:49):
I can't remember what those are, the two big ones.
I was like, Yeah, these aggress I guess another way
of framing it is you could say that if if
the Reverend Mother is just doing something, you know, psychologically
manipulated of de Paul with her own voice and stuff,
that the box could be considered misdirection. You know, the
classic uh, one of the most common tricks used by
stage magicians is misdirection. And that like they will draw

(06:11):
your attention to an object or to what they're doing
with one of their hands or something. You know, the
whole point is to get you to look at this
thing while the real trick is happening somewhere else in
their other hand or something. Now, there's nothing really presented
as far as I know, to doubt the the the
idea that the needle that the gone jibar itself has

(06:33):
has poisoned at the tip of it. But I mean,
if if the box doesn't really have pain in it,
if the box is just a box, is it possible
if the gonjibar is just a needle and that if
she has to poke you with it, you're just gonna
get poked with the needle. You're not actually gonna die.
Or is it a similar situation where if you draw
your hand out, you're gonna believe you're gonna die when
you're when you're spiked with that gone jibar needle poison

(06:55):
or no poison, Like, you don't need the meticyanide. It's
like the matrix your mind makes it real. Yeah, whoa dude, Yeah,
that that's Dune. That's how the Dune works on you.
All right? What else we have? Joe? Alright? This next
message is also in response to the Dune episodes. This

(07:17):
comes from e k ek Ses, Robert, and Joe. I've
enjoyed your podcast for quite a while. As a psychiatrist, artist,
and D and D enthusiasts. There are a number of
topics you cover that cross over with my professional and
personal interests. Your latest episode and the discussion on pain
and the psychological inputs certainly touched on a topic that
I frequently discussed with my patients. You mentioned hypnosis briefly,

(07:41):
and although I do not practice it myself, during my training,
I've seen video documentation of patients undergoing surgery under hypnosis
instead of anesthetics, including a Sissyrian section. This is a
profound reduction in pain rather than a moderate effect size,
although of course hypnosis this is really only an option

(08:01):
for a select population. This is what we're talking about
in the episode that while it does seem like hypnosis
is pretty efficacious for people who are susceptible to it,
not everybody is susceptible to it. But e K goes
on that said, I think we all have experience of
not noticing an injury and feeling pain only when we
notice the scrape or blister later. In my work with

(08:23):
individuals with anxiety and depression, I've found that people in
a negative state of mind often experience worse pain. In
the same way, the brain gives more value to negative
thoughts and words of discouragement when depressed, the brain also
pays more attention to negative physical inputs like pain. Thus,
I find that treating depression and anxiety often improves physical

(08:46):
pain as well, even if it does not take away
the physical ailment that causes it. I believe there was
also a World War two physician who found that service
members wounded in the battlefield often needed less morphine than
civilian who had similar gunshot wounds. The theory is that
the soldier's injury meant going home and returning as a hero,

(09:07):
and thus had a different meaning than, for example, a
shopkeeper who was wounded in a robbery and had only
lost as a result. In psychiatry, of course, we deal
with how the meaning of things affects perceptions and experiences,
and this is definitely true when it comes to pain.
Keep up the good work. Enjoy the podcast. E K Yeah,
I feel like we've discussed the the scenario with the

(09:30):
World War two physician. UM believe this is coming. I
think so, either in some of our past episodes on
perceptions of pain or perhaps placebo. Okay, I guess that
didn't stick in my brain for some reason. Maybe I'll
mean or it could be possible that I assembled it
wholesale in my own brain. I could be misremembering, but

(09:50):
it rings a bell or chainsaw well, e K. Thank
you very much for sharing your insight from clinical experience.
Always great to hear from from people working in a
professional capacity in the subjects we cover all right, Here

(10:13):
is one from zach Uh. This is in response to
our episode on the leshy Uh. This was put out
as a vault episode, but it was one of our
favorite Halloween episodes from the previous year. Zach rides high.
In the recent fault episode, Joe was listing the subtle
ways in which a lesh she might have a subtle
detail wrong with it, enabling the hero of the folk

(10:34):
tale to realize that they're encountering Aleshi. I think this
has come up before in your episodes about Incubi and succuby.
I think you guys mentioned how Christian authors interpreted this
feature of monsters as being imposed by God to provide
righteous Christians with the opportunity to realize they were being
tempted by an evil monster. This reminds me of how
scam emails or texts will always have crazy misspellings or

(10:57):
bad grammar. If you're a scammer sending issuing emails to people,
it's as if no matter how well written the email is,
God will alter the text of the email in transit
to insertain misspellings and give the recipients an opportunity to
realize they are being scammed. Thank you God for protecting
me from modern day lescies, Zach. It's it's strange how often,

(11:21):
uh this is true. Yeah, yeah, So you know the
thing that we've discussed in that I think it's come
up a few times before, is yeah, this this medieval um,
I don't know, it's late medieval and kind of post
medieval concept as well, that these demons could take human
form um in order to deceive people and uh and

(11:42):
make them give into their sins. But God being just
would not allow the devil and his minions uh to
have a complete advantage over the righteous, and so there
would always be that telltale sign such as uh, duck
feet on an otherwise, you know, attractive female form, that
sort of thing. And so as long as you looked
for the duck feet, acknowledge the duck feet, and then

(12:04):
corrected your course, you know appropriately, you'd be all right. Uh.
So I do like this comparison. I mean, it's certainly
you can't rely on this absolutely, but it's one of
those things they frequently teach you. I know, we're always
getting warnings at work about how to look out for
phishing emails, and that's one of the things. They're like,
look for the airs, look for the duck feet. But

(12:25):
I do want to reemphasize what you said, Rob. You know,
it shouldn't be your only fail safe, because hey, some
scammers must have really good grammar. It's just the law
of large numbers. All right. Maybe we should finish up
with uh with the message or too About Weird how Cinema.

(12:45):
This one comes from Greg Gregg, says, Hi, gentlemen, you
mentioned during this week's Weird howse Cinema episode, which was
Highway to Hell, that you couldn't recall a sofa slash
easy chair horror film. I think the context was I
was saying, you know, there's like, there's a horror movie
for every type of media technology. Uh. There's like The
Ring where you watch a videotape and then it kills you.

(13:08):
There's h there's fear dot com where you go to
a website and it kills you. There is Uh. Those
came out I think right around the same time, and
we're extremely similar movies. By the way, there was another
one called nine seven six Evil we were talking about,
which I've never seen, but it allegedly is about a
phone number you call and it kills you. But I
was like, well, surely nobody ever made a movie where
there's a reclining chair and you sit in it and

(13:30):
it kills you. But apparently I was wrong. Greg says,
look no further than Killer Sofa nineteen from the Fine
Folks at High Octane Pictures. This New Zealand horror comedy
was most recently available on Amazon Prime, alongside sure to
be classics like Veloci Pastor, in which a priest transforms
into a velociraptor. At least, give the Killer Sofa trailer

(13:53):
a look. The image of a recliner evil e peering
out of a second floor window says it all. Thanks Greg.
You know, Greg, I gotta be honest. I did not
have high hopes for this, and I went and looked
at because I mean, movies like this A lot of
times they when you're trying this hard to make a
silly or bad movie on purpose. You know this level

(14:14):
of irony from the conceptual origins. It just doesn't usually
work in its final form. I don't know why, but
most of the time, it's it's not as fun as
the concept would seem. But I gotta say, I watched
the trailer for this and it it looks dope. I'm sold. Uh.
It's got these great shots of like menacing springs poking

(14:35):
out into the into the frame, and there's something quite
infectious about the way the characters in the trailer just
keeps saying the word recliner over and over and not
switching out for synonyms like chair. Yeah, this is I
think in that episode, Um, I said that I thought
that I had seen some sort of a killer or

(14:56):
couch or or whatever movie not seen. That's the poster
for it, and I believe this is the one. This
must have come up for me in Amazon or something. Um.
You have my sincere apology for for not heeding you. Um. Now,
as as far as I understand, this is not a
part of like the full Moon universe, so I don't

(15:17):
think we can currently have killer Sofa Battle um, like
Killer Ball or anything like that, which is which is
a shame. It seems like this creation would fit well
in that universe. Oh within band camp. Yeah, I'm not
seeing Killer Ball either, but that to me, Again, I
don't want to pre judge. I haven't seen it, but

(15:38):
that sounds like the kind of movie I was talking
about that usually doesn't doesn't really do it for me. Yeah,
all right, and here's one more. This one comes to
us from Mike. Mike says, Hey, Joe, he's got beef
with me, apparently to start, I've been enjoying this podcast

(16:00):
for the last five years and playing older episodes in
between your new ones, catching up constantly. I'm a fan
of horror slasher films of the seventies and eighties. On
multiple occasions, I've heard you state that Jason Vorhees essentially
becomes a revenant after the seventh God Awful film. Here's
my gripe, though, isn't Jason a behemoth revenant from the
beginning first film? He drowned at Crystal Lake and died.

(16:25):
He is the uncaring, unfeeling, unstoppable, monolithic beast from the start.
Any thoughts, Mike, Well, Mike, I I appreciate all the aggression.
Uh uh No, I think you're wrong. Uh So. I
will admit that the early films are not quite consistent
on this point. Uh so. Yeah. In the first Friday

(16:48):
Thirteenth movie, the premise is that Jason died and uh,
and of course it is revealed that it's his mother
who is doing the killings that are that are being
blamed on him. But uh my, my basic understanding was
that this is just sort of ignored in rhet cond
in the second film where Jason does show up. I
think just because the first one was successful, they wanted

(17:10):
to make another one. They thought it would make money.
They're like, okay, well, Mrs Voor, he's got her head
cut off at the end of the first film, so
we can't really use her again. Well what if we
just say that, like, Jason wasn't actually dead, he was alive.
Uh So that's what we got Jason, and it turns
out is alive. He is a psychotic killer adult man
in the second movie, and uh, then again in the

(17:33):
third movie, then again in the fourth movie. In the
fourth movie, Corey Feldman waxed him in the head with
the machette and he is no more. The fifth movie
features a copycat. And yes, it is the sixth film.
I think you got the order a little off because
you were saying the seventh it's the sixth film. Where
finally they're just like, ahh to hell with it. Okay,
he's he's undead. It's magic now, I you know what,

(17:54):
I think it's it was a smart move on their part,
good choice. Yeah, like I said, there's a progression there.
I haven't. Like I said, for me, most of them
are kind of a blur, and they kind of blur
together because I was probably watching them on you know,
USA or TNT back in back in the day, and
I would catch like parts of one late at night,

(18:14):
and Uh, in isolation like that, they can seem much
the same. Um, So I trust your your judgment on this.
They are much the same. Uh. They have extremely similar
structures across most of them. Now here's the question. Has
he remained a revenant since then or have the newer
films kind of gone back and made him human again. Uh?

(18:35):
There was a remake film in about two thousand nine
or so, which I have not seen since I saw
it in the theater then. But my my memory is
that he is a regular human in that one. I
guess we could alway, if there's any there any films
that come out subsequently, uh that we're not fond of,
we can always say that they were just a holidack
simulation aboard the Starship Grendel from Jason Jason X. Yes,

(19:01):
I gotta say that, actually, Jason X is. It has
one of the most inspired moments of the entire series,
which is which is when the characters distract Jason by
putting him in the hollow deck and supplying him with
fake holographic victims. It's kind of a perfect solution, right
because then like he's not actually hurting anybody, and of
course you know you can't stop him because he's unkillable,

(19:23):
but you just like let him busy himself playing video
games for the rest of eternity. I should I need
to go back and watch it at some point, because
there's raises the question like how they get him? How
did he ever escape from the Holio deck. Couldn't they
have just programmed in infinite victims and then he'd be
happy in this simulated world. I think the problem was
that the Holidack broke or ran out of power or something, okay,

(19:47):
because because otherwise it seems like it could be a
good fit. Though on the other hand, the other side
of looking at it is or don't ethical concerns arise
if we are creating this endless simulation where their endless
victims for Jason to dispatch. Um, I think we get
into murky territory pretty quickly with that. What, like your word,
is it not fair to do this to Jason? Well,

(20:10):
I'm not not really concerned about Jason. I'm thinking about
the simulation, like what are they? What are these simulars
or these conscious holographic victims? Yeah, um, I'm gonna yeah,
I'm not sure how I feel about that. Would he
eventually get it out of his system? Maybe he reached
the point where he's like, killing brings me no jewel anymore.
Now Jason becomes a creator, Yeah, he becomes yeah, okay,

(20:32):
now he's a peaceful artist because he saw the error
of his ways. Oh man, that that would actually, I
think that would work as a sequel. Would be kind
of like the Creature Walks among Us, where Jason has changed.
He goes out into the world and he's this artist
or something, but of course he makes pottery. But eventually
he's going to backslide, and there's your movie. He backslides

(20:54):
because of rude gawkers at the craft's fair who come
by the tent but never buy anything. Well, you should
have had some postcards everything most people will buy a postcard.
All right, now that we have that settled, let's I
guess we'll go ahead and close it out for today.
But we appreciate everyone who wrote in UM. As we
we often stressed we don't we don't have time to

(21:14):
respond to everybody via email. We we do try and
read everything that comes in and and we do get
to feature a lot of listener mail UM on the
listener mail segments. But yeah, keep it coming. If you
have response to past episodes, UM, hopes and desires for
future episodes, let us know we would love to hear
from you. In the meantime, If you would like to

(21:35):
check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
you'll find them in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind
podcast feed Core episodes on Tuesday and Thursdays, more listener
mails every Monday, Artifact episodes on Wednesday, and on Friday's
we do a little Weird how Cinema. That's our time
to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about
a strange film. Huge thanks as always to our wonderful
audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to

(21:58):
get in touch with us with feedback on this episode
or any other to suggest a topic for the future,
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 I Heart Radio. For

(22:18):
more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.