Listener Mail: The Crowned and Conquering Child

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

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind a listener mail.
My name is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
And I am Joe McCormick.

Speaker 4 (00:17):
And on these listener mail episodes, we read back messages
that come into the Stuff to Blow your Mind email address.
If you're a fan of the show and you've never
gotten in touch before, this would be a great time
to try it. You can email us at contact at
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. We accept all
types of messages, especially if you have something interesting to

(00:38):
add to a topic we've talked about on the show,
from your own experience or from your expertise. But also
we accept corrections if we ever make any factual misstatements
on the show. We accept just something interesting you'd like
to share with us. If you find a fact or
a source, or a book or a movie that you
think would be up our alleys, send it our way.

Speaker 3 (00:59):
Again.

Speaker 4 (00:59):
That is contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
That's right. That's also the address where you can reach
out to us. If you want access to our discord server.
Just email us say hey, I'd like access to it.
We'll send you the link and you can join as
simple as that. Let's see if anything else we want
to get up get out at the top here. I
guess we should mention once more that where we've mostly

(01:23):
been an audio podcast these many years, and we have
audio archives going back a very long time. However, very
recently we've started doing a video component to the show
as well, where you can just basically observe Joe and
I as we record this podcast.

Speaker 4 (01:39):
And that's not a different show, it's the same show
sames with with video on top of the audio.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
If you're ever wondering what did their faces look like
when they said that? Were they smiling, were they frowning?
Were they looking off to the side, Well, it's all
available to you now. You can answer those questions by
taking in the audio video version of the podcast on Netflix.
Go to NETFLI, look us up, find us, and once
you've found us, give us a couple of thumbs up

(02:05):
and ask to be reminded about new episodes.

Speaker 4 (02:08):
The remind Me button is the way to subscribe on Netflix,
and if you've discovered us on Netflix, check us out
in audio form. Wherever you get your podcasts, take us
with you for other occasions, for driving, for working out
whenever you can't be looking at a screen. If you
want to keep checking out the show. That's we got
your audio podcast ready to go.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
Yeah, download us take us on travel show us the World.

Speaker 4 (02:31):
Okay, so I think we're going to start off with
this message about Boards of Canada. This is what we
got to do first. It's important to put this to
the top. So in the last listener mail episode about
a month ago, we talked about how rob would it
be fair to say this is your favorite musical group
Boards of Canada.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yeah, I would have to. I would have to say
that's the safe bet.

Speaker 5 (02:52):
You know.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
I have varied musical taste and Boards of Canada doesn't
fulfill all of the musical cravings that I have, but
they fulfill a lot of them, and I do listen
to them an awful lot.

Speaker 3 (03:01):
Okay, fair enough.

Speaker 4 (03:02):
I don't know if I have one favorite band either,
but yeah, but something like your favorite musical group, Boards
of Canada released their first album in like twelve or
thirteen years, is that right?

Speaker 5 (03:13):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (03:13):
Yeah, it's been to be called Inferno. I listened to
it for the first time this morning while I was
building this document full of listener emails. Thought it was great,
big thumbs up, really enjoyed it. In fact, I listened
to it like one and a half times this morning.
And several listeners got in touch about this new album
in the lead up to the launch, expecting Rob to

(03:36):
be really excited, and I was just like, wow, how
do people know your musical tastes so well? So we
got this response from Ian subject note to Joe about
Boards of Canada says, Hey, Joe on behalf of all
regular listeners, I wanted to point out that we all

(03:58):
knew Rob was a month's Boards of Canada fan, and
in fact, when the new album popped up in my
Spotify feed, my first thought was, Wow, Rob is going.

Speaker 3 (04:06):
To be jacked about this.

Speaker 4 (04:08):
You guys are the reason I have Boards of Canada
albums in my library. So ironically, even though I was
born in Scotland, where the band is from, and now
live in Canada, which gave its name to the band,
my gateway drug two Boards of Canada was a couple
of guys in Atlanta and stuff to blow your mind.
How's that for quantum entanglement? Strange the way the universe works?

(04:31):
Ian from Canada parentheses, I don't have any boards, so
Ian I stand corrected. I guess I just never know
what to expect about what fans of the show would
remember or notice about what we say about our personal
tastes in our lives. I feel like I would be

(04:52):
surprised if anybody listening knew what my favorite bands were.
And I don't even really remember what musical preferences I've
mentioned on the show.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
Oh oh yeah, I know you mentioned a few, but
I don't want to spoil it for the listeners because
it sounds like we have a listener challenge here right
in if you can, if you can name, if you
can guess Joe's three favorite bands, then we will talk
about it more on listener mail.

Speaker 4 (05:17):
This would be interesting for me. I don't know what
i'd say my three favorite bands are, but I well,
a couple of things are coming to mind that people
might mention, but I shouldn't spoil it.

Speaker 3 (05:25):
Yeah, yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 4 (05:27):
Do you talk about your faves of things more than
I do on the show or do I do it too?

Speaker 2 (05:32):
I mean, I get into a little obsessive kicks about
you know, music that I'm into and films and books
that I'm into, and I'm I'm liable to keep referencing them,
so so yeah, I don't know. Maybe I'm a little
more leaky with that information, but yeah, yeah, I get

(05:52):
I get a little obsessed at times.

Speaker 4 (05:55):
Well, nothing wrong with that, you know. I think the
world could do with more more energy spent on really
liking things.

Speaker 5 (06:02):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:03):
And I do really like the new boards of Canada
album Inferno. In fact, I love it more than any
physical being, I would have to say.

Speaker 3 (06:12):
So I got that reference.

Speaker 2 (06:14):
That's a reference, that's not a true statement. That is
a reference to some of the lyrical contents of the album.

Speaker 4 (06:20):
Okay, do you want to do some responses to our
series on HeLa Monsters.

Speaker 5 (06:25):
Yeah, let's do it.

Speaker 3 (06:27):
You want to do this one from Jeff for a
different one.

Speaker 2 (06:30):
Yeah, I'll jump in with this one from Jeff. This
one was pretty good. It is titled Monsters and Dragons
from Jeff.

Speaker 4 (06:37):
Oh wait, sorry, and I had a note about the
context of this one part of a series of emails
from Jeff so in previous Listener Mail episodes, Jeff had
shared some intries from a series of books about nature
written for children in the sixties and seventies. These were
the books with titles like Reptiles Do the Strangest Things

(06:57):
and Fish Do the Strangest Things. The authors are Leonora
and Arthur Hornblow, and these were notable because they have
very had very funny ways of talking about animals, like
they would refer to I don't know, it's not in
this particular example, but they might refer to the Helo
monster as like mister HeLa Monster, and refer to the

(07:19):
female as missus HeLa Monster, and make kind of strangely
moralistic statements about the animals.

Speaker 2 (07:25):
A lot of moralistic, gender normative writing about an Yeah.

Speaker 4 (07:29):
Yeah, okay, but sorry that aside. This is Jeff's message.

Speaker 2 (07:39):
All right, jess As Greetings, gentlemen. I have been remiss
lately in supplying you with somewhat inaccurate and occasionally judgmental
intrigues from my favorite series of books. So here I
include relevant stories about the HeLa Monster, Komodo Dragon, Horned Toad,
and Soorrow. The first three are from Reptiles Do the
Strangest Things, and the souarro as is from Plants Do

(08:01):
Amazing Things. The Plant's book has a different author and
artist from the Strangest Things series and came out a
bit later than the originals. It seems more attuned to
the science and is therefore less amusing, as it typically
does not, for example, described species as lazy or untrustworthy.
I remembered the HeLa monster entry from when I was

(08:22):
a kid, but reading it now, I am a little
disappointed that the authors didn't tell us not to turn
our backs around them, whether or not we should attempt
to keep them as a pet, shake them, or ride them,
or any anecdotes about how over the years people have
found creative ways to harness or exploit them for laughs.
There is a nice story about how for fun, boys
in Malaysia will tie a string around a gecko, climb

(08:44):
up to a low roof, lower the gecko onto men's
hats so they'll grip them, then raise the string and
pull the hats off their heads.

Speaker 4 (08:51):
Oh, it's like the sticky hand that you would get
in the party favor baskets this kid.

Speaker 2 (08:56):
Yeah that, except it has an organism on the end
of the string. They pass no judgment on the boys,
but have no qualms about referring to various reptiles as
fat or ugly, and casually inform us that quote babies
like to play with snakes and pat their skinny, their
shiny skins, shiny skins, pat their shiny skins.

Speaker 3 (09:17):
Everybody knows that.

Speaker 2 (09:18):
Well, I mean, I don't know. I haven't really, I
haven't held a snake up to a baby recently. It's
just not part of my denomination, I guess. But at
any rate, Jeff says, thanks for continuing to defend the
honor and integrity of our herpetological friends.

Speaker 3 (09:34):
Jeff, Thank you, Jeff.

Speaker 5 (09:36):
So.

Speaker 4 (09:36):
Jeff includes photos of intrigues from these books about, as
he said, the HeLa Monster, Komodo dragon, horned lizard, and
the Souaro cactus. The Suaro cactus chapter in the book
is called the Thirsty One. No, I can't read all
of these pages, but I.

Speaker 2 (09:52):
Thought I've seen the Helo monsters Instagram feet, so I
know it's a pretty thirsty lizard.

Speaker 4 (09:59):
We should, yeah, we should talk about the HeLa monster
page at least. So The title of this page is
the Magic Tail, and it says, of all the lizards,
only two kinds have venom. These dangerous reptiles. Are they dangerous?
And I guess you don't want to be bit in
by one? It's not pleasant. These dangerous reptiles are the

(10:20):
Mexican beaded lizard and his cousin, the HeLa monster. The
HeLa monster doesn't like the heat. He sleeps in the day.
When the sun goes down, he goes out to hunt
for eggs and helpless baby animals. The HeLa has an
odd way of storing food. When he eats a lot,
his tail gets fat. Then he can stop eating. His

(10:40):
body slowly uses up the fat after several months. The
HeLa may not be hungry, but he has a very
thin tail. Hard to say why. This is not as
moralistic as some of the other ones, but it's still
kind of funny. But he has a very thin tail.
I don't know if I've seen one with a very
thin tail, but I have seen some tale plumper than others.

Speaker 2 (11:02):
Yeah, yeah, I do like the writing style here. It
does you know, obviously this is aimed at children, and
it's trying to develop, you know, a childlike engagement with
them about these these reptiles. So as you know, a
first step in introducing something like the HeLa monster.

Speaker 5 (11:17):
Man, sure, this seems fine.

Speaker 4 (11:18):
The pages that Jeff attached about the swarrow cactus claim
that sometimes after so it's talking about how the cactus
can absorb a lot of water when it rains through
its roots structure. You know, it sucks up the water
and it can hold a lot of water inside it,
which is all very true of the sorrow it is,
you know, in many ways, like a like a drum

(11:39):
full of water. But it also says that the sowarrow
cactus can absorb so much water sometimes that it bursts.

Speaker 3 (11:47):
I don't know about that claim.

Speaker 5 (11:48):
I was.

Speaker 4 (11:49):
I know overwatering them is not good for them, but
I don't remember anything from the series about them bursting,
unless this is talking about them like falling over and
hitting the ground and bursting maybe, which can happen sometimes.

Speaker 3 (12:00):
But did you read anything about it?

Speaker 5 (12:02):
I did not.

Speaker 2 (12:03):
I feel like we had some very good sources for
that series, and if this had been a thing, I
feel like we would have come across it. But we
didn't even come across it as a myth.

Speaker 4 (12:12):
So I don't know, can't totally rule it out. But
I raised my eyebrow at the bursting. Also, it says
about I wanted to read a passage from the pages
about the Komodo dragon. It says like snakes, the dragon
picks up smells in the air with his tongue. He
looks for a dead animal. If he doesn't find one,
he kills a wild pig, a deer, or a goat.

(12:33):
Then he has a messy feast.

Speaker 2 (12:37):
I mean it's essentially accurate. I think maybe I don't know.
It makes it sound like he can't find a dead
animal and then he just loses it, like whales on
a pig.

Speaker 5 (12:49):
So there is that. And then I mean, as we discussed.

Speaker 2 (12:52):
In that series two, the older way of interpreting the
Komodo dragon was to think of it as more of
a scavenger that also praise and I think nowadays we
have a better understanding of its role as an active
apex predator and its environments. But I don't know. This
passage doesn't lean super hard on that older interpretation either.

Speaker 5 (13:13):
So we know.

Speaker 2 (13:13):
I like it. Yeah, they capitalize dragon, which is which
is respectful.

Speaker 4 (13:18):
Yeah, okay, are you ready for me to do another
one of the HeLa monster messages?

Speaker 5 (13:32):
Yes, more Helas.

Speaker 4 (13:33):
Let's do this one is from Michael. We have like
three messages, three or four messages today from different varieties
of Mike's and Michaels. It's just serendipity, common name all
the all the Michaels coming into the inbox. Okay, So
Michael in this case has a subject line Green HeLa
Monsters question mark. I have been listening to your podcast

(13:54):
for several years now from Australia and want to say
a big thank you for researching and sending out your
episodes into the world each week. Episode one of HeLa
Monsters was fantastic and sent me down an online rabbit
hole or two. Not unlike the behavior of the monsters themselves.

Speaker 3 (14:11):
That's good.

Speaker 4 (14:12):
Some baby cottontails, so Michael says. The mental image of
these black and orange reptiles sluicing their venom around in
their mouths in preparation for action won't fade from memory
for a long time until your episode. I thought HeLa
monsters were black and green. Thanks to a guitar pedal,

(14:34):
I have of all things image attached. We can talk
about that at the end of the message, Michael says,
and I noticed in popular culture depictions of HeLa monsters
they are sometimes green too. Could this be from an
extinct subspecies? If you're thinking about more reptilian themed episodes,
the Australian monitor lizards you mentioned in the episode aka

(14:55):
goanas locally are pretty incredible athletes. I remember travel in
western Queensland and seeing one sprinting over the ground and
without breaking stride, going straight up a pole. By for now, Michael,
so to comment on multiple things here on the Australian
Monitor lizards. I have seen videos of these things. I

(15:18):
don't know if this is a common behavior, but like
chasing like grown adult people like being very you know,
territorially defensive or something, so, you know, acting like really
standing up for themselves so you can respect that. As
for the green HeLa monsters or other green helodermatids, I

(15:39):
didn't read any evidence about this in the series, and
then after your message, I went and looked to see
if I could find anything about green HeLa monsters or
related lizards, and I couldn't find anything at all. So
I don't think any such animal ever existed. So I
think probably what's going on here is just people not
being bound by realism in illustrations, you know, like drawing

(16:02):
a red dinosaur or something.

Speaker 2 (16:04):
I mean, I have a couple of theories here. One
is that these guitar pedals are some sort of an
ancestral echo and we're actually through these petals recalling heala
monster relatives that have gone extinct that could have theoretically
been green. But I think a more likely possibility is

(16:25):
perhaps older sources had photographs of these animals. And first
of all, sometimes some beaded lizards i've read can take
on a more yellowish coloration, that is possible. And then
if you're dealing with imperfect or faded printing, you know,
in color printing, or maybe some sort of like a
three color printing scenario where they just throw in green

(16:48):
just to have something there, or it's just straight up
black and white, and since we often think of lizards
as being green, people were just sort of imagining the
green there. I don't know, those are some possible abilities,
so they just come to mind.

Speaker 4 (17:01):
I realized a minute ago the example I reached for
was just saying a red dinosaur, but for all we know,
there could have been right red dinosaurs. I don't actually know.
I should have said more like the you know, the
Rainbow Bears of like the Grateful Dead, you know, something
something that you definitely don't see in nature, but people
are just doing for illustration. But you're probably right too
that some amount of just fading of materials and other

(17:24):
you know, physical effects could be causing that. The other
thing I want to say is, so this guitar pedal
that Michael has identified is called the Hila Mondo pedal
by a boutique pedal manufacturer called mister Black that I'd
never heard of before, but I admit boutique guitar pedals
are definitely one of my silly consumer weaknesses. Like I'd

(17:47):
see pedals like this and I'm like, ooh, I want that.
Though I was surprised about what kind of pedal it was.
I think because this is probably my brain because of
the the King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizards song a Monster,
which is definitely a metal song, I would have assumed
this is a gnarly distortion pedal. It is not the
HeLa Mondo pedal. Here is a phaser pedal, so that's

(18:10):
going to produce an oscillating kind of phasing kind of sound.
And also the I went to the website of this
pedal and maker and they say that it has a
super slow crawling oscillation speed, which I think maybe is
the conceptual connection to the heel a Monster, which is
not a.

Speaker 2 (18:28):
Fast moving desert lizard kind of a vibe.

Speaker 4 (18:31):
Okay, Michael, you didn't mention a review of the pedal.
I mean, do you like playing with it? Send us,
send us an audio sample. What is it sound like?

Speaker 5 (18:39):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (18:39):
Yeah, Joe and JJ will especially.

Speaker 5 (18:41):
Dig into that.

Speaker 3 (18:42):
JJ and I geek ob but pedals sometimes.

Speaker 2 (18:46):
All right, well, let's keep things desert y. Looks like
we have some listener mail regarding our series on sand Or. Right,
I guess it was one episode on sand Or. Did
we do a second episode? I can't remember.

Speaker 3 (18:57):
I don't recall either.

Speaker 5 (18:58):
I think we did.

Speaker 3 (18:59):
I think just one.

Speaker 2 (19:00):
We did, the Baja mor episode, and then I think
we left the door open like we may come back
for more sand, but I honestly can't remember if we did.

Speaker 4 (19:07):
So, yeah, that's right, that's the one we did while
we were on the road. Yeah yeah, okay, cool, Well,
well yeah we can do that one. So one of
the things we talked about in the sand episode was fulgarite,
which is a type of material that's a glass like
material that's created when lightning strikes sand and it makes
this naturally fused glass tube.

Speaker 3 (19:29):
From the lightning.

Speaker 4 (19:31):
And so Angelo wrote in about that. Oh wait a minute,
but let's see, are you reading this one or should.

Speaker 2 (19:35):
I Yeah, I'll go and read this one. I'm excited
for this one. This one gets all marvelly on us
here and the subject line is fulgarite in fantasy media,
because one of the things that I mentioned was like, Hey,
this is Folgarites are really fascinating. It's you know, high
energy interacting with sand. It seems like we should have
some dragon fire producing these things, some wizard battles producing

(19:56):
these things. That's sort of you know, that sort of flavor.
And so Angela reports in and says, hi, guys been
a bit behind on episodes. When I recently heard the
discussion on fulk right in fantasy movies and TV, two
came to mind. One was in the latest Spider Noir
series on Amazon Prime, starring Nicholas Cage as an alternate

(20:17):
universe version of Spider Man Joe. If you're not familiar
with this character, like, imagine Spider Man like black and
white mask, wearing a trench coat, wearing a hat, solving
crimes very much in a film noir universe.

Speaker 4 (20:31):
Okay, like a cross between Peter Parker and Sam Spade.

Speaker 2 (20:35):
Yeah, yeah, that's pretty much the vibe.

Speaker 5 (20:37):
Cool.

Speaker 2 (20:38):
So here, Angela is going to include a spoiler, so
if you want to go into that series spoiler free,
you know, skip over. I haven't watched it yet either,
but this actually makes me a little more excited to
check it out. OK, So here it goes some spoilers.
Near the end, there was a fight between the versions
of Sandman and Electro. Using his electric powers, Electro was

(20:58):
able to turn Sandman's arm into glass and break it. WHOA,
So to remind everyone out there, I think Samman was
in one of the major films, but Sandman is made
out of sand Electro it has the powers of electricity.

Speaker 4 (21:12):
Sandman was I think played by Thomas Hayden Church in
the third Sam Raimi Spider Man. Yeah, he's wearing like
the green striped shirt.

Speaker 5 (21:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:20):
Weirdly, I never saw that one, you know. I loved
the one right before that with Doc Cock in it,
but for some reason I was I was out by
that point.

Speaker 4 (21:29):
The third one that was not the best in my opinion.
The second one, second Sam Ramie Spider Movie I remember
being great, but the third one was a little rough.

Speaker 5 (21:38):
All right.

Speaker 2 (21:38):
Well, Angelo continues talking about this fight. Usually whenever Sandman
gets hit the sand just reaconfigures but in this case
he couldn't. Later on we see him with his arms
in a sling and hiding what seems to be a
missing limb. It's a nice little detail that shows how
lightning strikes create full garride.

Speaker 3 (21:56):
Very cool.

Speaker 2 (21:58):
The other movie is the classic rom com Sweet Home Alabama,
starring Reese Witherspoon. Yes, I consider rom COM's fantasy.

Speaker 5 (22:07):
Again.

Speaker 2 (22:08):
Do you know this film, Shoe? I know of it,
but I don't think I ever saw it.

Speaker 4 (22:12):
I have not seen this movie, but I was aware
of this fact from off my conversations.

Speaker 2 (22:18):
Oh yeahah, I remember the off my conversation now. So yeah,
it wasn't an episode, but it was. It was work chatter. Okay, yeah,
so or work adjacent chatter at any rate. So anyway,
the email continues again potential spoilers, So if you don't
want to be spoiled about Sweet Home Alabama, skip ahead.
A little Folgarite is an actual plot point in the movie.

(22:39):
The movie starts with a young version of the main
characters seeing what happens to sand when hit by lightning.
The reveal at the end is that Reese Witherspoon's character
finds out that her love interest in the movie was
her one true love, partially because he was able to
use folgarite to build a successful commercial art business. Oversimplifying,
of course, but it was the last thing that made

(22:59):
her real, is it anyway? Keep up the good work.
Looking forward to the next episodes.

Speaker 4 (23:03):
Angelo, Okay, wait, so does he create a He's using
fullgar like he's making it like he's electrocuting sand in order.

Speaker 5 (23:13):
I think so.

Speaker 2 (23:14):
Something about high power wires and then they but then
they excite the earthworms, and the earthworms begin to rise
up and eat people. I think, yeah, I think this
is I'm remembering the film correctly.

Speaker 4 (23:23):
Yes, yeah, that is the plot of Sweet Home, Alabama. Yeah,
and the worms get chainsaws.

Speaker 5 (23:29):
Yeah yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 (23:32):
Okay, Well, thank you Angelo. Okay, let's do some messages
related to our series about diatoms and diatamacous earth. Diatoms
to refresh, are those single celled photosynthetic algae that are
notable for building glass like shells out of silica called frustules,
which can have quite beautiful and bizarre appearances. One of

(23:54):
the things we talked about in the series was how
the silica frustul is made of two haves that fit
together like a pill box or like a board game box,
with one half sliding over the other, and the diatoms
reproduced by asexual cell division. I just mentioned that because
that comes up in one of the messages that somebody
was writing in about which we may or may not

(24:14):
get to. But first I'm going to read this message
from Ahmed subject vault organelles. Ahmed says, Hey, guys, Ahmed
again here, While admittedly not strictly related to diatoms, your
recent episodes about their cell biology and lineage brought the

(24:35):
topic of the vault to mind for me. Named after
vaulted cathedral ceilings, this is a mysterious and oft forgotten organelle,
even though we've known about it for forty years, and
even in medical slash scientific training, you don't hear about
it much at all. Compared to ribosomes, mitochondria, et cetera,

(24:56):
vaults are really poorly understood. We know that their big
barrel shaped structures with a hollow central cavity made of
RNA and proteins, but knocking out their parts in mice
the parentheses the standard what does it do functional experiment
doesn't seem to do much at all. There are thousands

(25:17):
of vaults per cell and even more in some immune cells,
which maybe hints at a function Evolutionarily, they seem to
date back to the last eukaryotic common ancestor and are
conserved among eukaryotes that have them, but it's quite patchy.
For example, slime molds have them, but insects don't. Amobas

(25:37):
have them, but plants don't. It seems like diatoms don't
have vaults, but I couldn't find much on that. That
lack of solid ground on what vaults do hasn't stopped
scientists from trying to use them in slick ways, though
there have been efforts to use them for drug delivery before.
But my favorite was a recent paper attached where where

(26:00):
the authors used them as time capsules for gene expression
to capture and store the messenger RNAs or mRNAs a
cell is making for later analysis, called time vault. Their
technique involved modifying vaults to have an mRNA grabbing protein
in their internal cavity that would be produced only when
cells were treated with a drug molecule. So when experimenters

(26:23):
treated cells with this molecule, vaults made by the cell
going forward would be grabbing and storing mRNAs floating around
the half life of these captured mRNAs was almost two
weeks compared to about a day for free floating mRNAs,
and the authors did some cool proof of concept experiments
in lung cancer to see what mRNAs these cells were

(26:44):
making before and after an anti cancer treatment. I thought
it was a great story of scientific creativity and finding
a fresh use for something old. Anyways, keep up the
great work, Ahmed. Thank you so much.

Speaker 3 (26:56):
Ahmed.

Speaker 4 (26:56):
Always love your emails. And if anybody wants to look
up the paper for themselves, the lead author is Yu
Kai Chow last name Chow Chao, and the paper is
called a Genetically Encoded Device for Transcriptome Storage in Mammalian Cells,
published in the journal Science this year.

Speaker 3 (27:24):
Okay, do we.

Speaker 4 (27:26):
Want to do any other messages about diatoms or should
we move on?

Speaker 2 (27:31):
Let's see, I mean we did have the one referencing
Doctor Who.

Speaker 4 (27:35):
Okay, we were perplexed about whether to feature this one
because neither of us understand the context of what's happening
in the show.

Speaker 2 (27:42):
I half way understand it, so okay, yeah, I have
to I have to to remind everyone that I mean,
I'm far from current on Doctor Who. Occasionally I watch
a little like Baker era Doctor Who. I'm a little
more up on some of the older stuff, And like
I was telling Joe off my here, it's like I
try and keep up with who the current doctor is.

(28:02):
I feel like that's that's kind of just you know,
your cultural responsibility to know who's playing the doctor right now.

Speaker 3 (28:08):
But I don't know who's the doctor right now.

Speaker 2 (28:10):
I'm not kept up. Get you got to keep up?
You got It's like knowing what time it is. But
at any rate, I was not familiar with the particular
scenario in the particular episode that.

Speaker 5 (28:19):
Is being referenced here.

Speaker 2 (28:20):
Mike writes in and says, when you were talking about
the board game box analogy, I could help but think
of Doctor Who. In recent seasons, we have seen that
the Doctor's race are capable of by generation, where they
split into two people after they die. In the show,
when this happens, each of the Haves have some of
the clothes of the original Love the show, and Mike

(28:42):
here includes a clip which if you don't know anything
about Doctor Who, it's going to be really confusing, And
if you know a little bit about Doctor Who, it
can still be a little confusing, But I think basically
the idea is when the doctor kind of like dies
and they you know, passes on, he like readates or
comes back or continues on, except in a new manifestation

(29:05):
in other words, played by a new actor.

Speaker 5 (29:07):
And this has been the.

Speaker 2 (29:08):
Way that you know, they've recast the character over and
over again while still you know, keeping like a linear
progression of plot.

Speaker 4 (29:16):
Right, Okay, so actually it's kind of like a body
hopping scenario in a way, but a but a benign,
positive kind of body hopping.

Speaker 2 (29:23):
Yeah, and I don't think stealing anybody's body or anything,
just like the body.

Speaker 4 (29:27):
Changes innately, generating a totally different body each time, but
the same kind of soul or spirit is moving through them.

Speaker 5 (29:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (29:34):
Yeah, that's you know who fans writing and correct us
on the details of this. But essentially, I think this
is a scenario where, for some reason that is probably
more apparent if one watches the full episode.

Speaker 5 (29:50):
In the full story arc.

Speaker 2 (29:52):
In this case, the doctor, instead of becoming the next
incarnation of the doctor, also becomes a previous incarnation of
the doctor. So in this scene, like he becomes the
new doctor plus a previous version of the doctor. I
think I could be wrong on that, but I think
that's what's happening here.

Speaker 4 (30:09):
Well, at least I know what Mike is referring to
with the doctor splitting in two into two beings and
each of them getting some of the clothes of the
original because that's like the diatom reproduction process or the
asexual division process at least, where when the parent cell
splits into two, each it's got the two halves of
the frustula, the you know, the shell, and each daughter

(30:34):
cell takes one half of the original shell, and then
they generate a new smaller half. They treat that as
the bigger top half and generate a new smaller half,
which over time, over generations does lead to some of
these lines of cells shrinking down and becoming smaller and
smaller because they're using the smaller halves of the shells
as they're starting shells. And so eventually we talked about

(30:57):
how this does have to be remedied. They have to
get sexually frustulated to get new new shells or to
get back to the original size.

Speaker 3 (31:06):
But okay, yes, so thank you, Mike.

Speaker 4 (31:08):
I apologize that my doctor, who knowledge cannot I cannot
even grapple with what's happening here? He's being the doctor
is being blasted by a laser by Is that a
Neil Patrick Harris sitting in there or somebody else?

Speaker 2 (31:21):
It did look like him, you know, I did not
know that he had an appearance on the show, but yeah,
that certainly looked like him as the villain.

Speaker 4 (31:27):
Yeah, let's do this response to the thing before the beginning. Now,
if you don't remember, that series was focused on creation
narratives from religions around the world, and we were specifically
looking at how these creation narratives often describe what the
world was like before the creation event or before the beginning,

(31:48):
because counterintuitively, in most creation stories, there is some kind
of way the world was before it was made into
the world we know. And one of the subjects that
came up in the series, one thing that you brought up, Rob,
is about how newer religions often deal with creation stories
differently from ancient religions, maybe in part because they emerge

(32:11):
from a culture in which we have more fleshed out
physical and scientific information about the cosmos.

Speaker 3 (32:17):
So maybe in some.

Speaker 4 (32:19):
Cases updated pictures of the universe, informed by astronomy in physics,
or even by science fiction these things could be feeding
into the shape of new religious creation narratives, and one
of the strands of that discussion was about religions that
explicitly acknowledge the possibility of life on other planets, for example,

(32:41):
the Latter day Saints, And then that also led into
a brief aside about how LDS theology, in its restatement
of the Genesis creation story from the Bible, might in
some ways be more accurate to the original intention and
understanding of that story than the common interpretation of most

(33:03):
Christians today, because most Christians today interpret the Genesis story
as describing a creation of the universe x nihilo, the
total creation out of nothing, but a lot of scholars
of the Hebrew text now think that that story in
Genesis is more accurately interpreted as describing a creation x

(33:23):
materia out of a pre existing universe, you know, a
universe that's not very nice from our point of view,
kind of a deep of waste and dark, you know,
churning waters, taking that pre existing state of affairs and
organizing and furnishing it. And the interesting thing being that
the common Mormon interpretation of that creation is actually that

(33:45):
it is a creation x materia more like the modern
scholarly consensus. So anyway, this all feeds into this email
from Josh subject lines science and LDS theology. Hi, Robin Joe,
I am a little behind on my podcast, so sorry

(34:06):
if this is a little late. I wanted to offer
some personal context to your discussion on before the beginning,
specifically on the segment on the Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter day Saints. First, thank you for the respect
with which you treated the topic. It's pretty rare to
hear someone talk about religion without some sort of agenda.
I am a lifelong member of the church and wanted

(34:27):
to offer a little more on the topics of our scripture,
matching newer scholarship and on inhabited worlds. The context of
our religion is that certain elements of the Gospel were
lost in the time between Jesus and Joseph Smith. The
Book of Mormon refers to these as quote plain and
precious truths. I don't think whether or not creation was

(34:49):
ex Nihilo was in that category, but it was interesting
that the creation narrative that we use matches the original
meaning of the Bible narrative on the topic of inhabited
world In LDS theology, those worlds would be inhabited by
people like us. And then I should say, Josh has
a little science fiction aside that I don't want to

(35:11):
include because I don't want to spoil a story for people.
But I see your reference, Josh, I don't want to
spoil the discovery of an alien character in something. But
Josh says, this gets interesting when you start thinking about
the Fermi paradox. There's one term of the Drake equation
set to one. In the framework of LDS doctrine. You

(35:33):
can actually solve the Fermi paradox. Imagine we made contact
with an alien civilization that was biologically indistinguishable from us.
The odds of that happening without divine intervention are essentially zero.
The ability to choose whether you believe in God is
a central part of the purpose of living on Earth.

(35:54):
We would never meet an alien because it is counterproductive
to the purpose of mortal life. That is just my
thought experiment. By the way, this isn't doctrine. I fully
realize I am extrapolating back and forth from science and religion,
which is problematic. I would love to be proven wrong
so that Daniel Whiteson can have his interplanetary science conference.
Oh yeah, this is from the book.

Speaker 3 (36:16):
Well, I forget the name of it.

Speaker 4 (36:17):
I think it is something like how to talk to
Aliens about Physics. It's something like that Daniel Whiteson's book
that he and I talked about on an episode of
the show, and a good book, by the way. And
Josh finishes by saying, thanks again for the respect with
which you treated the religious discussion. I have no corrections
on what you said about what we believe. Josh. Well,

(36:37):
thank you, Josh. Yeah, I really appreciate you adding the
personal perspective here. You know, I have mixed thoughts on
what you said about us not having agendas. I won't
say that we don't have opinions about religion, like I
do have opinions about religion, and I talk about those
opinions on the show. Sometimes those opinions might not always

(36:59):
make people happy. But also I think I do think
it's very important, not just on our show but in
life to be able to talk about a subject descriptively
and to accurately talk about what it is without the
conversation automatically just transforming into me sharing all of my
feelings and opinions about it, but sometimes we are going

(37:21):
to say what we think about stuff.

Speaker 2 (37:22):
Yeah, obviously we've talked about things like you know, witchcraft,
persecution on the show before, and similar destructive exercises that
are tied to religious fanaticism and fundamentalism and so forth.
But on the other hand, I think just like universally,
you know, all religions are trying to achieve certain goals
or trying to answer certain questions, you know, smaller questions,

(37:46):
individual questions, and of course broader universal cosmological questions, and
I think all of that's always interesting. So generally, I
think it is the latter that we're looking at when
we're bringing up religion, and in these particular apps, so's
we had a very specific focus that we were entertaining,
and that is, how do different faiths consider a world

(38:09):
before the creation or the emergence of reality.

Speaker 4 (38:12):
Which is a factual and descriptive question, you know, apart
from how we might feel about just other doctrines of
the given religion or whatever. I guess another way I
would put it is just that I don't want to
let how I feel about something interfere with me give
understanding and giving an accurate description of what it is.

(38:33):
So you know, I feel like I want to get
to the descriptive understanding first, but that's not going to
stop me ultimately from having feelings about it.

Speaker 2 (38:41):
Yeah yeah, all right, Well we're going to skip ahead
with to another listener mail here. This one is in
response to an Artifact episode I did a while back.
This was I think well over a year ago, but

(39:03):
it was on Roman dodecahedrons, and if you're wondering what
are those, well, I'm just gonna actually read from my
original script for this artifact. The Artifact and Monster Fact
episodes are scripted, as you know, by by ourselves, and
if I'm if I'm doing one, it's it's one that
I've scripted. So this is this is what I said

(39:24):
in the original episode. They're typically small, hollow objects with
twelve flat pentagonal faces cast from a copper alloy. Each
face has a hole of different size, and each corner
features a knob. The overall vibe is that of a
twelve sided die smashed up with an ancient Roman lament configuration,
with a dash of ornate incense burner and maybe like

(39:45):
bronze age coronavirus model look up, look, look up. Some
images of them. They are hard to describe, but once
you see them you might be like, oh, yeah, those things.
And there's not just one Roman do decahedron. It's not like, oh,
they found it and it's held here.

Speaker 5 (39:59):
No.

Speaker 2 (40:00):
According to a at the time the source I was
looking at it was a January twenty twenty four Smithsonian
magazine article by Sonia Anderson. Another mysterious Roman dodecahedron has
been unearthed in England, and in that article it says
that the current total stood at more than one hundred
to one hundred and thirty of these that were found
throughout the Roman Empire's northwest provinces, as well as thirty

(40:22):
three of those being from Roman Britain specifically. And so
there's been a lot of discussion among historians and even
a lot of like amateur historian energy going into the
question of what were these four You know, they're the Romans,
so you might think, well, they must have been used
for war, and so some have tried to answer that

(40:43):
could these be a weapon, But they're on the whole
a bit too fragile for that.

Speaker 4 (40:47):
Generally, that sounds like it feels like the sex and violence,
bias and interpretation of ambiguous data.

Speaker 5 (40:53):
Yeah, we've talked.

Speaker 4 (40:54):
About in biology. Actually, when there's an animal with an
unusual character, kind of visually interesting characteristic, people ask why
is that, And there's kind of a bias to assume
that it's either for fighting or for mating, which, of
course you know those are things animals do, so it
could be for that, but it might also be for
temperature regulation or the things that just don't come to

(41:16):
mind as easily because they're not as salient as sex
and violence.

Speaker 2 (41:19):
Right, And then of course what you can you could
still potentially answer the question with used for war by
getting into some of the some other uses for it,
like saying maybe it was used to measure time or distance.
But I think this is a little shaky because you
get into you get into some analysis that that makes
it clear that well, maybe they're not really standardized sizes

(41:40):
in place here, so maybe it's not a measurement tool.
Folks disagree on this, Some say it might be a
holy symbol of some kind. There has actually been some
very interesting work that has gone into the hypothesis that
they could be knitting aids like that I used to
make gloves I think people have demonstrated how it could

(42:01):
possibly work, but my understanding and I haven't really looked
into it a lot recently, but last last I really
checked in. Most likely we're looking at something that was
somewhere between pure novelty and maybe religious symbol. But I
don't think we really know before, or we didn't until
we got this listener mail.

Speaker 4 (42:21):
I think I just read this on the Wikipedia for them,
so I don't know how widely accepted this is. But
one idea that struck me as interesting is just that
it was a mimetic format to show off the skills
of a metal workers, kind of like the you know,
the test page that a printer prints you might have.
This is like, okay, you want to show me that

(42:41):
you could be in my metalworking apprentice, you got to
make one of these dodecahedrons.

Speaker 5 (42:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (42:46):
I don't know if.

Speaker 4 (42:47):
That's widely accepted, but that that's just like we don't
often think about things like that, but those things are
present in our culture.

Speaker 5 (42:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:55):
I think that that would be an that would be
a way you could file it under novel Like that's
a different type of novelty, Like it's not pure novelty
and that it does have a function, but it is
to perhaps to showcase skill and say like, this is
the sort of detailed work we could bring to your
decorative or functional project. Yeah, but anyway, Mike writes in

(43:15):
and says, yeah, way back in November twenty twenty four,
there was an Artifact episode about the mysterious Roman dodecahedrons.
The newest issue of Fantastic Four. In Marvel's The Fantastic
Four suggests they were created by mister Fantastic and Human Torch,
who had traveled through time to stop an alien invasion.
Mystery soft and Mike was kind of enough to include

(43:39):
some images from the comic book here, and yeah, that
seems to take care of it. These were created by
members of the Fantastic Four whilst time traveling.

Speaker 4 (43:50):
So in the panel on the comic, it's showing a
museum display with one of these dotecahedrons behind glass, And
first there's a plaque that offers possible interpretations for what
it could have been used for. And then underneath the
plaque someone is the I guess the curator has taped
up a note saying never mind, they were made by superheroes.

Speaker 2 (44:09):
We know this now, yep, yep, so I love that.
That's that's that's see, that's nice. I applauded.

Speaker 4 (44:18):
Okay, I'm gonna read this message from Hannah. Hannah says, hi,
an unusual omnibus of random thoughts on sand. I thought
for sure you would have gotten a lot of letters
in this, but maybe there aren't as many kitchen tinkerers
out there who are apt to write in. But sanding
sugar is totally a thing. In the episode, you'd remarked

(44:39):
that while sand refers to a grain texture or a
grain size that could describe granulated sugar, it would feel
weird to say you put some sand in your coffee.
As it happens, sanding sugar is a coarse sugar, often
dyed a bright color, used for decorating baked treats. So

(45:00):
go ahead and throw that sand in your coffee.

Speaker 2 (45:03):
After all, this is like the red and the green
sugary bets that you put on holiday cookies.

Speaker 4 (45:09):
It's like glittery looking kind of sugar. Okay, often colored. Yeah,
Hannah goes on to say, weird house. Anyway, we could
get a Tarzan film in there. Just seems like a
summer thing. Smiley face. Thank you again for your wonderful
show and hours of companionship, and for humoring my emails
and suggestions warmly. Hannah, Well, thank you, thank you very much, Hannah.

(45:31):
Oh and then actually, so Rob responded to this email
and said, yeah, maybe we could do something Tarzan related.
And then in another reply, Hannah continues her thoughts on Tarzan.
She says, eightes ago in undergrad I fell down an
Edgar Rice Burrow's rabbit hole. There's some interesting and strange
tail takes on a lot of his stuff. Sometimes I
think of Tarzan media and Tarzan ripoffs parentheses Tourson's Ramzan's

(45:58):
I think maybe that's a grom reference as a as
a kind of litmus test for the phobias and fragilities
of that era's masculinity. What is idealized or exaggerated most,
who is the enemy? What's his relationship with Jane Food
for thinking so, thank you, Hannah. And also this made

(46:19):
me realize I don't think I've ever seen a full
Tarzan film. I do have very I think I've mentioned
this on the show before. I do have very vivid
memories of watching at least parts of the movie Gray
Stoke with Christoph Lambert on TV when I was a kid.
I don't think I saw the whole thing, but I
really remember a scene where Ian Holme is running around

(46:42):
in the jungle in a pith helmet and he gets
shot with a bunch of arrows, and then Christoph Lambert
comes out of the forest in a loin cloth and
heals him or something. I think maybe takes him back
to his Ape family to take care of him. I
do know that somehow Tarzan of the Apes in up
on the planet Mars. I don't know how that happens,

(47:03):
but I am aware that's a thing. So if there's
a movie of that seems up our.

Speaker 2 (47:07):
Alley, Yeah, yeah, I mean Edgar Rice Burroughs was quite
a dreamer and has several different worlds that he spent
a lot of time in, you know, multiple books that
take place there. So I would love to get into
some like either. Yeah, I would love to just do
a Tarzan movie at some point, if we could find
a good one. That's maybe a little bit weird, and
we haven't really done a proper like Beefcake movie in

(47:29):
a stretch here. I don't think we've had like a
Hercules movie or even a film, yeah, or even a
proper luchador movie. But now that I say that, I
realized we do have we do sort of have a
beefcake movie coming up, so or at least it's half beefcake.
You know, it's an Adam and Eve movie, so fifty
percent beefcake. But as far as Edgar Rice Burrows goes that,

(47:52):
there are a couple of film adaptations of his of
his work that are on the list that we might
come back to. I think both the ones, for me,
he does not play Tarzan, but I think both of
them do feature Doug McClure.

Speaker 5 (48:07):
Who is it was?

Speaker 2 (48:10):
It was a terrifically entertaining actor.

Speaker 3 (48:14):
George Kennedy ever played Tarzan?

Speaker 2 (48:17):
About Johnnyngar, Oh yeah, I mean not that I know of,
But I did go down a rabbit hole looking at Tarzan.
There was there was some sort of a weird nineties
Tarzan adaptation that that had some some weird folks involved
in it.

Speaker 3 (48:35):
Wait, are you not thinking of gray Stoke.

Speaker 2 (48:38):
I'm not thinking of Gray Stark. No, Graystoke. Greystoke is
supposed to be tremendous. I mean that was I think
the only Tarzan movie that was nominated for Academy award
or won some Academy awards. But the one that was
on that I came up in my search is one
of those situations where it's a TV movie but it's
also technically like three episodes or four episodes of a

(48:59):
TV show, and that is Tarzan the Epic Adventures from
nineteen ninety six. And the director was none other than
Brian Yuzna, who we've talked about on the show before.
You know, a lot of great like slimy body horror
energy there, and this one looks like it might be fun,

(49:20):
could be fun. I'm not sure, but it definitely got
my attention, certainly an example of like nineties Tarzan weirdness.

Speaker 4 (49:28):
Trying to think what straight up Brian Yazna film I've seen.
I think of him mainly as a collaborator with Stuart Gordon,
but maybe I can't tell which one made which films.

Speaker 2 (49:40):
Yeah, yeah, they've they've worked together a lot. I mean
as a director, just glancing real quick, trying to remember Society.

Speaker 5 (49:48):
Was a big one of course that he helmed.

Speaker 2 (49:51):
He did some reanimator sequels, He did an Ecronomicon Book
of the Dead that we considered for Weird House, but
then shied away from an anthology and some some installments
and then anthology are better than others.

Speaker 4 (50:04):
An necronomicon movie has it has some high highs, but
then it also just has some some segments are just
gross and difficult to get through.

Speaker 5 (50:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (50:14):
Yeah, I feel like if we do more anthology uh
selections for Weird House, we should have a standard rule
that we get to skip one anthology segment, like if
we want to, we can cover them all, but we
get one pass.

Speaker 4 (50:29):
So because like two that are fun and one that's miserable.

Speaker 2 (50:32):
Yeah, yeah, that's the case that we get to we
get to skip one, and we can recommend that to
listeners as well if they so so desire cool.

Speaker 4 (50:40):
Oh I see that Yasna made the film Beyond Reanimator,
which has that song reanimate.

Speaker 3 (50:45):
Your feet or that's right, move your.

Speaker 4 (50:48):
Dead bones, bones bones, Yeah, reanimate your feet.

Speaker 3 (50:56):
Look that one up, folks.

Speaker 2 (50:57):
So yeah, if you have folks out there, if you
have any Tarzan recommendations or Tarzan like media, right in
and we will definitely consider it.

Speaker 4 (51:05):
All right, you want to wrap up by doing a
few Weird House cinema messages.

Speaker 5 (51:10):
All right?

Speaker 2 (51:10):
Yeah, well, yeah, let's properly get into some weird house
feedback here. This one comes to us from Mike subject
movie suggestion, Hey, Joe and Rob. I was looking something
up on IMDb and ran into a movie that might
be right up your alley from two thousand and five.
Gingerbread Man, a Charles Band director parody of Child's play.

(51:34):
Gary Busey plays the dead psycho apparently brought back to
life as a giant gingerbread cookie. If you guys haven't
already covered this, I think you ought to look into it.
Just the fact that it was directed by Charles Band
is enough to almost make it qualify Mike.

Speaker 4 (51:49):
I don't know if our spirits are strong enough. Also,
I think, Mike, I think the I think the autocorrect
to gotcha, it's not gingerbread Man.

Speaker 3 (51:56):
It is Ginger dead Man, Buddy.

Speaker 5 (51:58):
Yeah, Ginger dead Man. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:00):
This is a I mean they are multiple Ginger, Ginger
dead Man and Killer Bong. They're part of you know,
the the sort of the more recent world. And by recent,
I guess it's like the last couple of decades at least.
Of Charles Band's directorial and production work, it is generally
content that is maybe a little bit I don't know,

(52:24):
a little a little bit more self aware than I
like my horror. I'm more of an earlier Charles Band fan. However,
you know, I'm loath to dismiss it completely. I haven't
seen it, so it might be a real gas it.
It does look I mean, it's it does look interesting.
I don't know, but but yeah, the question is are

(52:47):
we ready for it?

Speaker 4 (52:48):
Movies like this sometimes can just feel kind of overly
lazily ironic to me in a way that that actually
kind of blunts the enjoyment of the absurdity. I I
feel like there needs to be some at some level,
some kind of earnestness in a movie like this for
it to work. It can be maybe partially ironic, but

(53:09):
something there needs to be some ambition about it, if
that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (53:14):
Yeah, yeah, I don't know. But then again, I love
a monster mashup. I love a versus, and there is
a Ginger dead Man versus Evil Bong. So I don't know,
And maybe that's where I should just skip right to that.

Speaker 4 (53:26):
Maybe, thank you, thank you, Mike the different mic.

Speaker 3 (53:31):
Yeah, should we call it there for today?

Speaker 2 (53:33):
I guess so, Yeah, Ginger dead Man good place to
leave it. But yeah, we'll just go ahead and make
the usual call out here. If you have anything to
say about anything we discussed in this episode of Listener Mail,
do write in, and just a reminder that we read
everything that comes in. We don't have time to read
everything on listener Mail, we don't have time to respond

(53:55):
to everything that comes in, but we do appreciate everyone
who takes time out of their day to write in
with this stuff. Whether it is just a one off
like here's a weird film we think you guys might like,
or if it's a field report on something that we've
discussed on the show, like it's all fair game and
we love hearing from you totally.

Speaker 3 (54:15):
Thank you to everyone who writes in.

Speaker 2 (54:16):
Always just a reminder to everyone out there that stuff
to blow your mind is primarily a science and culture podcast,
with core episodes in Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes
on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns,
so just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 4 (54:30):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode, or any other to suggest
a topic for the future, to suggest a movie for
Weird House Cinema, or just to do whatever kind of
message to potentially be featured on a listener mail episode
like this one. You can email us at contact at
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (54:56):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more pot casts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.