STBYM Listener Mail: Bringer of Jollity

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

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Episode Transcript

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

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. Listener mail.
My name is Joe McCormick. My regular co host, Robert
Lamb is out today, so I'm going to be recording
this episode solo, but Rob is going to be back
with me on Mike for all new episodes very soon.
We'll get to your messages in just a minute, but
first I wanted to say if you're a fan of

(00:30):
the podcast and you've never written in before, now would
be a great time to do it. You can reach
us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
All types of messages are welcome. We love feedback to
recent episodes, especially if you have something interesting you would
like to add to a topic we've talked about. You
can also write in with corrections if necessary, if you've

(00:50):
got questions or you're curious about our opinion on something,
if there's a topic you think would make for a
good episode, or if you just want to say hello,
let us know where you listen from, how you found
out about the show, what you like about the show.
All of that is fair game. Contact at stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com. Okay. This first message comes

(01:11):
from repeat correspondent Renata. This came in after the series
Rob and I did about the great Red Spot of
Jupiter and JJ. If you can, let's throw on a
little bit of Gustav Holst's Jupiter theme from the Planets.

(01:34):
All right, Renata says, Hello, Joe and Rob. I feel
like I hit the jackpot with the episodes on Jupiter's
Red Spot for one thing. As you may have guessed
from my very first email to you about Holst's Planets
and free San, I love Jupiter, especially the red spot,
and you went into cyclones and hot towers and folks.

(01:56):
If you want to go back and listen to the
episode that Renata is referring to there, I think it
was just called Musical Freesan that spelled frissn about that
feeling when music gives you goosebumps. I did that. I
believe I did that as an episode with former producer
Seth Nicholas Johnson. So yeah, you can look that up

(02:16):
in the archive if you want to give it a lesson. Anyway,
Renata's message continues, this is a great opportunity to bring
up Joanne Simpson, the first woman to earn a PhD
in meteorology in nineteen forty nine. Joanne Simpson was a
pioneering atmospheric scientist whose work dramatically advanced our understanding of

(02:37):
tropical meteorology, particularly regarding tropical convection, cloud dynamics, and tropical cyclones.
She got her pilot's license during World War II and
flew into scary storms for her early research. Sometimes she
would even bring her young son. You almost certainly referenced
her work in your research, as well as that of
Robert Simpson, her husband. No relation to the Simpsons, though

(03:00):
I'm sure they did not appreciate the Simpsons getting the
Coriolis effect wrong. Joanne worked for NASA, and while she
worked on satellites for studying clouds on Earth, she didn't
directly study other planets. However, her work on how individual
thunderstorms self organized into larger weather systems like hurricanes helped
scientists theorize how giant storms on Jupiter like the Red

(03:23):
Spot and White Ovals might form and persist. The Tropical
Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM, satellite, which she worked on,
advanced the use of spaceborne radar and microwave instruments to
measure rainfall and vertical cloud structure, helping to design and
interpret data of Juno and earlier missions to Jupiter and Saturn,

(03:44):
especially in understanding moist convection and deep atmospheric motions beneath
the cloud tops. Anyway, I could go on. Also, Joanne
Simpson was my grandma. She passed away in twenty ten.
It's fun to hear her work coming into play in
a Stuff to Blow your Mind episode. Thank you for
All you do, Reanata. Wow, Well, thank you, Renauda. That

(04:06):
is a really cool family connection. So after we got
your email, I went and I read more about Johann
Simpson's biography, including one piece that was her twenty ten
memoriam in EOS, the news journal of the American Geophysical Union.
This was an article by a UVA environmental scientist named
Michael Garstang, and after reading this, I was thinking about

(04:31):
Joanne Simpson's work in the context of Jupiter, and one
interesting parallel is that, as we talked about in the episode,
Jupiter's weather and atmospheric circulation is driven mostly not by
solar energy, but by heat that emanates from deep within
Jupiter itself due to gravitational contraction. The gravitational squeezing of

(04:53):
the planetary mass, so heat wells up from below, and
that heat coming up from below provides most of the
energy that drives Jupiter's weather. Now, Earth is not like that.
By contrast, Earth's atmosphere gets almost all of its energy
ultimately from the Sun. But that does not mean you

(05:14):
should think about the Earth's atmosphere and its weather patterns
and atmospheric circulation as being driven by heat from above,
so Garstang writes in this piece about Joanne Simpson. Quote.
Critical to Joanne's understanding of how the fluid systems of
the planet worked was her early clarification of how the
Sun's energy was used. She pointed out that although the

(05:37):
Sun is the sole source of energy, atmospheric circulation is
driven not from above, but from below through its coupling
with the surface of the ocean and the land. This
led her to not only contribute to the fledgling field
of air sea interaction, but also to make notable contributions
to the concepts of heat islands, land, sea breezes, and

(05:59):
other surface atmosphere connections. So, in other words, Joan Simpson
focused on the ways that weather patterns and atmospheric circulation
are driven from below by radiation, convection, and also by
evaporation because evaporated moisture from the ocean and from the land,

(06:19):
that moisture in the air is sometimes referred to in
atmospheric sciences as latent heat. That's still a type of
energy that water vapor can then condense and fall back
down as rain, so that contributes to the energy of
storms as well. But these things, the radiation, the convection,
and the evaporation from the land masses and the sea
water that were originally heated by the sun, those are

(06:40):
the things that really drive atmospheric circulation and weather in storms.
So in a way, though the original source of the
energy is different, Earth and Jupiter both have this weather
from below principle in common. There are also a lot
of great stories about Joan Simpson's preference for actual sensing
of data about clouds from directly in the sky, like

(07:02):
using airplanes equipped with sensors to gather data about clouds
from up in the air and being on those flights herself,
as Renata was talking about. So again, thank you for
not a very very cool connection. Your grandma was a
cool lady. Okay. Next, I think I'm going to jump
into a couple of responses to our series on p Male.

(07:23):
This was a collection of episodes that Rob and I
did about animal communication based on the medium of urine.
Of course, humans have language in its many forms, but
lots of other animals, from dogs to dolphins to lobsters,
apparently share vital, sometimes complex information through their pee. And

(07:43):
one of the things we talked about in these episodes
was the role of old faction, the sense of smell,
which is the main sense that a lot of land
animals like dogs used to read the p male of others.
And it's amazingly weird to imagine living in the smell world,
of a dog being so much more sensitive than us

(08:05):
to olfactory information, being able to read so much of
social and even probably emotional relevance from these volatile chemical signals. So,
I don't know, it's like we talked about imagining a
physical environment all marked up with little bits of smell
based poetry, and from this Rob made a comparison to

(08:27):
a character from a Terry Pratchett novel who is a
werewolf detective with extreme olfactory sensitivity from her wolf side,
so she could kind of see into the past like
who was in what room, where, even where they stood
and so forth because of smells. Anyway, onto this message
from Skuyler, subject line Pemil the Nose. Nose. Hey, there's

(08:56):
a cool TV show, The Sniffer. It's a Russo, Ukraine
and cop show about a consultant with a superhuman sense
of smell that he uses to solve the most impossible
of cases. It's quite good. I watched it on Netflix
a decade or so ago, though I don't know if
it's still there. Great stuff as usual, Skyler. Well, thank you, Skyler.

(09:17):
I've never seen this show. It seems to share an
angle with that example where ib was talking about, because
the idea of is like a super smeller as a detective.
And this got me thinking about other characters with super
senses of smell. Obviously, you've got like comic book heroes
like Wolverine from The X Men. I think maybe saber

(09:38):
Tooth as super smell as well, and in that vein
for rather obvious reasons. Characters with super smell a lot
of times have animal connections. Maybe they're part animal, or
they transform into an animal, or they've been you know,
injected with super animal serum like they're part wolf or something.
You know, that's a pretty clear connection. Why that would
be because we know a lot of animals have more

(10:00):
powerful and more socially relevant senses of smell than us,
So that kind of, you know, grafts on to a
humanoid to a humanoid hero who gets their powers. Of course,
a lot of characters like the one you're bringing up
from this detective show and the one Rob was talking about,
tend to use super smell powers as a kind of
investigation aid, like sensing the past or sensing things that

(10:22):
are invisible. I was trying to think about other characters.
It's been a long time, long time since I've read it,
but I remember the narrator of Midnight's Children by Salmon
Rushdi had a large nose that was like always getting
infected or congested or something. And then he has a
medical operation and after this it turns out he can
like smell lies and smell the future and stuff. But anyway,

(10:47):
I started thinking about how in fiction, heightened physical senses
are often not just a literal physical senses, but they're
also metaphors for special emotional or cognitive sensibilities or sensitivities.
Like I was thinking about characters who are described as

(11:08):
having sharp physical eyesight. I think that's a lot of
times a metaphor for mental powers of observation and anticipation,
like you see things at a distance and thus see
them coming earlier. And it tends to be a physical
metaphor for cognitive attention to detail. So there's like an
association between visual acuity and the psychological trait of conscientiousness.

(11:32):
Powerful hearing, I think a lot of times is a
metaphor for the cognitive trait of discernment, like the ability
to judge and decide well, and the ability to isolate
relevant information and ignore what's irrelevant. I guess literally the
mental power to separate signal from noise, an information term

(11:53):
borrowed from auditory senses. So supersite and superhering I think
are the most common super sin is in fictional storytelling,
but super smell does pop up sometimes. One trend I
think is that heightened smell is often treated as a
bit more mysterious than supersiited or superhering. It is associated

(12:14):
with spooky cognitive traits like intuition. You get a feeling
about something or someone, but you couldn't say exactly why,
and in fact, now that I think about it, smell
as a physical metaphor for intuition is already there in
common expressions in English, at least, like somebody saying of
a situation, this doesn't smell right, or calling something fishy.

(12:38):
You know that manifests in my imagination at least as
a fishy smell. And this is what we say when
we have a feeling that something is not to be trusted.
But it's difficult to spell out exactly why, Like you
can't consciously connect to the dots, but something just feels
off and I don't know. Yeah, for some reason, we

(12:58):
associate that with smell that may be connected to real
physical and maybe neurological things about the sense of smell
that you know, smell is it's less connected to our
conscious decision making, but it still connects to our emotions,
like smells are quite powerful in creating motivation states. For

(13:20):
a smell can very easily create an overwhelming attraction like
to food, or it can create repellent disgust. You know,
there's hardly anything that drives you away from something faster
than like a rotten smell, And yet it's harder to
identify the point of origin for a smell than it
is for an image in the mind or a sound. Also,

(13:43):
it's common in nature for a smell to exist and
be highly motivating even though you don't know exactly what's
causing it, Like a putrid smell can repel you, even
if you couldn't say what it was. Not sure what
all this adds up to, but I don't know. I
guess I think it's interesting that we have this tendency
to use super superpowers, including super senses, as ways of illustrating.

(14:06):
They're kind of a shortcut to character development in a way.
They serve as these metaphors for cognitive traits that you
want to illustrate or psychological tendencies. So I wonder if
this applies to this detective the Russo Ukrainian Detective show
that I've never seen before, Like, does this detective character
also tend to have a greater sense of intuition about

(14:28):
things or something else that we tend to associate with
with sensing the invisible? Okay, this next message is from Kenna,
and it's also about femail. This message is referring to

(14:48):
how in those episodes we talked about a study of
urine scent marking behavior in dogs, which found that the
smaller a dog is typically the wider the angle of
its legs when it does raise leg you'rein scent marking
and there could be a number of reasons to explain that,
But one of the possible explanations was that smaller dogs

(15:12):
were working harder to quote lie about their size in
your incent marking, hoping to pee up higher on the
object that they're marking in order to seem like they're
a bigger dog than they are. Again, that interpretation's not
for sure, but if that is in fact the reason,
that's rather amusing imagining these little dogs trying to pretend

(15:33):
to be big. Kenna says Hi, Robert and Joe. I
was listening to your episode on Pea Communication and was
surprised that the veterinarian you cited for reasons small dogs
might lift their legs at a higher angle than large
dogs didn't mention what I thought was obvious. In general,
the larger and heavier the dog, the more likely they
are to have hip or knee injuries. Our vet from

(15:56):
My Childhood Dogs said that this was especially true for
some pure breeds, such as retrievers. But I'm not sure
how much of that is sampling bias. Since labs and
goldens are such popular breeds, you will get a lot
more labs in lab mixes in practice than say, purebred spaniels.
Love the show, keep peeing scientific information directly into our faces, Kenna. Okay.

(16:21):
This next message is also from Kenna, responding to our
last listener mail episode, and in that episode, a listener
named Jeff wrote in about an old nature book series
from the sixties and seventies called Animals Do the Strangest Things.
I think there was also one called Fish Do the

(16:42):
Strangest Things. Oh yeah, that was it, because they had
the archerfish and the anglerfish. And among the many funny
things about these books were that they would frequently refer
to mating pairs of animals as husband and wife. And
also they had these passages with a sad clipped prosdy

(17:02):
and word choice, so they ended up sounding like confessional poetry.
I remember there was a there was some passage in
the Fish book that was talking about anglerfish and it
was like the husband anglerfish is now fused to his
bride's body. He doesn't have to go fishing anymore. Now
he will never lose his wife in the dark anyway.
Following up on that, Kenna says, Hi, Robin Joe in

(17:24):
response to your listener mail, I too had a copy
of Fish Do the Strangest Things and Birds Do the
Strangest Things, and my brother and I used to try
to copy the drawings mentioned in Fish was Granddad the
lungfish who lived at the Shed Aquarium in Chicago. We
begged to go meet him. The tickets were expensive, but

(17:45):
eventually our parents relented on the condition that we were
actually going to spend the whole day at the aquarium
and not begged to go see the Field Museum, our
favorite part of Chicago. Halfway through we did keep our promise,
but our parents were not impressed by how long we
spent with our faces smashed against the glass, waiting for
a large mudcolored fish fish tube to wake up and move. Sadly,

(18:10):
Granddad is long gone, but I have passed the series
on by way of a link to a secondhand book
website to multiple friends' children, some of whom now quote
the passages about bower birds building houses for their wives.
I guess someone is going to have to explain bigamy
to them when they learned about herd animals. But that
is not my problem. Kenna. Well, thank you so much, Kenna.

(18:32):
And as a special treat I went looking for it
and I managed to find at least part of the
bower bird section from Birds Do the Strangest Things on
the Internet. So this book, by the way, I believe
the whole series, but at least this book is by
Leonora and Arthur Hornblow, and it's got a section on
the bower birds called the Builder. I'm going to read

(18:55):
one of the passages here. Quote. One kind of bower
bird makes a garden of moss around a tree. Then
he builds a house of twigs. Sometimes he builds it
six feet tall. He wants his house and garden to
be pretty. He puts leaves and moss and ferns all around.
He makes little piles of berries, stones, shells, and flowers.

(19:16):
When the flowers die, he throws them out and brings
fresh ones. Bower birds are always looking for pretty things.
They will even steal them from another bird's bower. Okay.
This next message is following up from a listener mail
discussion after our series on cynicism. We were talking about
whether the ever present threat of digital scams is making

(19:40):
us more cynical. Unfortunately, I think the answer is probably yes.
I can explain more about that after the message, But
this email is from Ian Ian writes subject line digital Scammers,
Dear Robin Joe. I wanted to respond to another listener

(20:02):
mail about scams surrounding home purchases and protective measures banks
advise people to take, such as never clicking links, etc.
Regarding phone scams specifically, I have read, though cannot vouch
for myself, that the scammers deliberately do things that should
be read flags early in the call in an attempt

(20:23):
to filter out people who are on alert for scams
and not waste their time with them. That way, only
people who are more likely to go through the whole
process make it beyond the first few seconds of the call,
and the scammers can better focus their efforts. Yeah, Yan,
I've read about this, but it was in the context
of email. I think this was an explanation for why

(20:47):
a lot of these initial scam emails seems like more
grammar and spelling mistakes and weird formatting and things like
that than you would expect. The explanation given is that
this actually does help the scammer, because yeah, it helps
narrow things down. You can imagine that the biggest bottleneck

(21:07):
on money flowing into the scam operation is actually the
human scam operator's time, so they don't waste time going
through the early steps in the scam with victims who
are less likely to hand over the money in the end. Anyway,
back to Ian's email, Having said that, I may be
telling them myself by admitting that I was recently almost

(21:29):
caught by a Smischer Smischer for SMS text message scamming.
I received a text message purporting to be from easy
Pass that my out of state toll road bill was
due by coincidence. I had in fact driven on an
out of state toll road a couple of months before,
but never received a bill, so I had in the

(21:50):
back of my mind that I should be receiving one
at some point. When I saw the text, which in
retrospect should have raised red flags, my first thought was oh,
fie finally, and I clicked the link. It was a
standard short link format and didn't appear suspicious. It took
me to a website that appeared legitimate at first Blush,
and I made it past the point of entering my

(22:11):
address and phone number and it was only on the
page to enter my payment information that I noticed it
was for the wrong state that set off warning bells.
And then in looking closer, I noticed that the URL
for the page was a gibberish url and not something
legitimate like company dot com or state dot gov. At

(22:31):
that point I closed the page thankfully before entering my
credit card. But it was a close thing. I'm an
attorney and consider myself well educated, reasonably intelligent, and appropriately skeptical.
But because the text happened to catch me at the
right time and happened to be something I'd been expecting,
I almost fell for it. That's something that could happen

(22:53):
to anyone. Thanks for a great show, Ian. Ps I
have never been billed for my real toll room usage. Well,
thank you, Ian. This is weird because literally within about
twenty four hours of this email coming in, I also
personally got an easy Pass branded toll road scam text

(23:14):
and I'd never seen one of those before. So, Ian,
I wonder if you and I were both part of
some kind of rolling mass text wave. But anyway, I
really appreciate you writing in about this because I think
this example illustrates several things about these scams that are
really important to remember. You do not have to be

(23:35):
dumb or gullible to fall for one of these scams.
Just like Ian says, the fact that you're capable, at
least in some situations of skeptical thinking does not make
you immune. And the reason for this is that nobody
actually operates in skeptic mode all the time. That would
be impractical, obnoxious, and absurd. You can't go through all

(24:01):
of life and all situations looking for hard evidence and
evidential verification. If I'm the grocery store and I'm about
to get a bunch of bananas and my wife tells
me we already have bananas at home, I just blindly
believe her. I don't need to go back home and
do a fruit check to verify she's probably right. The

(24:21):
cost of being wrong about this is trivial. There's just
no reason to put my guard up and go into
evidence testing mode. And no matter how practiced of a
skeptic you are, even if you're Carl Sagan or James Randy,
you have to operate in banana faith mode for most
situations in life. In fact, I think one of the

(24:44):
core skills necessary for being a skeptic effectively is having
a good sense for when to turn off your automatic
trust and go into critical evidence seeking mode. In fact,
some of the studies we looked at in the Cynicism
episodes talked about this. I think the researchers called it
discriminate ability. That's the ability to tell the difference between

(25:09):
situations where you should just trust and situations where you
should not trust. But nobody is going to have a
perfect record at this Scammers often get around your skeptical
impulses by crafting their pitch in a way that is
designed to bypass skeptical review. So the scam doesn't exactly

(25:29):
defeat your evidence testing powers, it manages to slip by
without you ever using them, sometimes by disguising itself as
a plausible, mundane, familiar type of transaction. I think Ian's
email is a good example here. So pay for usage
of a road of a toll road, complete this form

(25:52):
to receive your parcel. I've bet a lot of people
out there have gotten this one. You get a text
message it's like, hey, you're waiting on a package, but
it can't be delivered. Come in or your address. And
it turns out this is a scam that's going to
lead you to a form to fill in a bunch
of information. There's like, oh, check out this email attachment,
just kind of a strange email. Please open the spreadsheet. Oh,
you know, update your password, et cetera. These are all

(26:16):
normal types of or at least seemingly normal types of
communications from institutions and service providers. Nothing about them unless
you're on the lookout for scams of this sort would
really set off a red flag. They also take advantage
of scale, like the scale of the number of different

(26:37):
victims they can reach out to to leverage coincidences. This
comes back to Ian's example with the toll road. So
you know, maybe the toll road scammer has some way
of associating your phone number or your email address with
usage data for toll roads. But I doubt that. If
I had to guess, I'd say Ian probably just got

(26:58):
hit with a coincidence, the fact that he had used
a toll road was expecting maybe to get a bill
and then actually got one. And this actually wouldn't be
very uncommon because lots of people use toll roads. The
scammers are spamming lots of phone numbers, and the same
thing with text messages about like a parcel delivery. At

(27:18):
any given time, a pretty large percentage of people are
going to be waiting on some kind of package. In
other cases, the scam tries to bypass your skepticism, not
by appearing to be something kind of innocuous and mundane,
but by creating a heightened state of emotion and motivation

(27:38):
that clouds your judgment. Sometimes they do this by taking
advantage of our desire for something like money or romantic relationships.
You know, there are a lot of get rich quick
scheme scams or romance scams, or they work by creating
a state of fear, like this message is from the IRS.

(27:59):
You owe back taxes and if you don't pay within
twenty four hours, we will issue an arrest warrant and
you'll be subject to up to ten years in prison.
They're trying to create a sense of fear and urgency
to keep you from slowing down and thinking clearly about
what's going on. So anyway, the point in the end being,
these tactics really do work, and they don't just work

(28:20):
on dumb people or people who don't have the ability
to think skeptically. They work on people who are capable
of thinking clearly and skeptically in other situations by getting
you to not think that way in this situation. And
this brings me back to what I originally said when
we talked about this in the episodes. The thing that

(28:44):
I was saying was that I think digital scams are
a much bigger problem than just what happens when the
scam is successful, then just the resources lost when somebody
actually does, you know, make the payment, and those numbers
are huge, by the way. I think probably most people
listening know at least one person, maybe an older relative

(29:04):
or maybe not somebody else in their life, who has
lost a ton of money to a digital scam like this.
But the even more insidious effect of these scams is
that I think they have toxic general effects on culture
because again, most people, most of the time are pretty trustworthy.

(29:25):
This is actually this was confirmed by experiments that we
talked about in the Cynicism series. We tend to overestimate
the selfishness and the untrustworthiness of strangers. Most people, most
of the time you can trust, but especially in the
modern technology age, a relatively small number of people, with

(29:48):
the aid of digital technology, are able to initiate attempts
attempts to scam an asymmetrically huge number of victims, and
even though most of those attempts fail, each contact point
between the scammer and the potential victim undermines general social trust.

(30:09):
The fact that you are getting, you know, scam texts
and scam emails and stuff is just creating this feeling
in you that you know, there are a lot of
lies out there. There's a lot of you gotta have
your guard up, which is bad because it makes us
feel less like we are safe to operate in banana

(30:29):
faith mode, even though we really are for the most part. Yeah,
so these things are insidious. Okay, This next message is
from Dave. This is about Weird House Cinema. Dave says, Howdye,

(30:49):
Joe and Rob. I'm a pretty new listener. First discovered
your podcast on your Zoo Warriors from the Magic Mountain
episode last year. That was one of my favorites, and
Dave says, and have been subscribed ever since. I don't
recall how I came across it. I hadn't heard of
Zoo Warriors before that, but I had a feeling to
dive in, and I'm so glad I did. I've always

(31:11):
enjoyed movies and cinema, even worked in a theater during
high school. But growing up in the nineties and working
at a theater, I really only paid attention to movies
as they came out, So your podcast helped open my
eyes to some of the gyms, polished and unpolished, from
before that time. One of the other reasons I'm writing
is I'm sure you're already aware, but I recently saw

(31:32):
that Mondo Vision is releasing a four K of on
the Silver Globe later this month and figured you'd be interested.
It looks pretty dynamite, features some docs I guess documentaries,
and a commentary from Zuovski, the director Andrew Zuovski from
twenty twelve. I really enjoy your show, standard and Weird
House episodes, and please keep up the good work. Thank

(31:55):
you both for the countless hours of sharing knowledge and entertainment.
Best Dave from Wasson. Well, thank you, Dave. Actually I
was not aware of this. I am looking it up
right now. Ooh yeah, this does look like a beautiful set. Yeah,
so I was not aware of this. I also don't
really know anything about Mondo Vision, but they have a

(32:16):
great website. It looks like I feel like I'm in
the year two thousand and two. But yeah, the set
looks great with the nice cover art. Looking forward to that. Okay,
on to the next Weird House Cinema message. This is
from Pat, Pat says Rob Joe. As ever, thanks for

(32:40):
the great shows. Today I write about the two part
Weird House wicker Man episodes. Again, you chose to speak
of a unique film. I appreciate your comments and lively
fan talk. I would like to expand some of the
thoughts expressed. This film is an expression of art. The
producer and director present an idea to spark debate and analysis.

(33:00):
You hesitate to call the film horror and point out
that it is mostly mystery. You might be interested to
know that the makers have presented a novelization which expands
the story. Particularly covered is the question of how Sergeant
Howie was chosen by the people of summer Isle. Oh yeah,
this was one of our questions, Pat says. Not part

(33:22):
of the film was a subplot that had Howie's superior
in contact with Lord Summerle Oh no, set up by
his boss. That's rough. Pat says, on seeing the film
as horror, what defines this genre? Is it common tropes
from a great many movies or something deeper. There are
plenty of reasons to feel horror throughout the film. Howie

(33:45):
is horrified by the blatant paganism he encounters. He sees
deadly sins constantly. He is a devout Christian witnessing damnation.
The residents of the island see a high handed imperialist
threatening their way of life. Meaning in this film can
be found in this duality presented is an argument pitting
an establishment against an outlying school of thought. The filmmakers

(34:07):
assume that the viewers are aware of the power of
the establishment and the dire consequences of Howie's report. Howie
represents an established culture well known for stamping out the other.
The ending makes sense to me in that it is
keeping it is in keeping with pagan beliefs, and represents
a victory over encroachment, while simultaneously allowing a counter thought

(34:29):
on Christian reverence. The viewer must judge. I found myself
thinking about Joseph Campbell and his Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake.
Campbell shows that the scholar Joyce, meaning James Joyce, the
author of the novel Finnegan's Wake. Joyce challenges his reader
to look deeply at his content, to see the symbolism
in every reference. So too, can one look at Wickerman.

(34:54):
This film is redolent with symbolism. Rich is it with
images and dialogue that invite for thought? Why this seems
like it was written in Lord summerle voice? Rich is
it with images? The organic nature of the island, which
can be seen as a celebration of animism. The blatant
sexual worship of the islanders, which can be seen as

(35:14):
holy rites. The endless references to reproduction, which can be
seen as obligations. The use of song to express ancient
pagan beliefs, which could be seen as a reference to
oral tradition and a connection to the deep past. I
found myself counting the references to seamen, pollination, phallic worship, orgies,
sea foam, the foam from the ale, offering to the sea,

(35:36):
and more. The importance of Howie's virginity cannot be overstressed.
His seed must be potent to appease the gods. His
struggle to maintain his virginity against temptation proves his worthiness.
There is also the element of mystery. What is the
nature of the beliefs of the people of Summer Isle.
I am surprised you did not suggest a connection to

(35:57):
the theories of Julian James. How do these modern people
connect to ancient beliefs oral tradition. The filmmakers, in my opinion,
assume that the viewers have some knowledge of paganism connections
of the ancient calendar. This film is set at Beltane
on Walpurgas Eve at a Hinge. I find it compelling
to think that the population of the island are experiencing

(36:19):
a direct relationship to their past. The filmmakers present us
with this mystery. How is this connection made? Thanks again,
Pat Well, Thanks Pat, This is a great question at
the end. We talked about this a little bit in
the episode, but there is something I've always wondered about
the Wickerman. In the scene where Christopher Lee is explaining

(36:41):
to how how his grandfather converted the island from Christianity
to the Summerle form of Celtic Paganism, he makes it
sound like there was no force or even effort required
for this mass conversion. I think his exact words are,
he gave them back their joyous old gods. Implying that

(37:03):
the people were just waiting to receive them Nuada and
all the rest, like, Ah, finally we can just be
pagans again. Like I said in the episode, I do
not buy the interpretation that the movie is just saying
Paganism good, Christianity bad. I don't know how you can
see the ending and really think that is the point

(37:25):
of the film. But I do think it's suggesting that
paganism somehow comes more naturally to us, that Christianity is
something that can only be maintained with great effort and suffering,
that it is a perhaps noble burden, and whenever it

(37:45):
breaks under strain or when it breaks us, Nuada and
the rest of the gods are just there waiting. They're
kind of a rest state that we return to automatically
and pat this comes to your question about the can
in the movie of the Islanders to the ancient beliefs.
It doesn't make literal sense that upon abandoning whatever your

(38:09):
current religion is, you would just return automatically to the
full semantic content of your ancestors beliefs from thousands of
years ago, Like how would you know the names of
the gods and what they represented? All that would have
to be taught in some way. But I think it
is more plausible, not necessarily that I think this is true,

(38:33):
but it's at least plausible in principle that some types
of religions are just more comfortably tailored to biological facts
about the human brain and the way we relate to
the planet we live on. So it could be that
religions based more on nature and fertility represents something more

(38:56):
like a rest state for us, easy to return to
when a vact forms in the absence of another religion.
And I think again that would be plausibly because these
types of beliefs are more tied to inescapable facts about
like our bodies and our physical surroundings, about us as animals,
and about our environment. But at the same time, there's

(39:20):
this good question in the movie of like, how exactly
do the specific beliefs of summer Isle's lost paganism, like
the names of the gods and their domains and so forth,
how do those beliefs make their way to the modern islanders.
That's a really good question, And Pat, I think you're
right to flag the idea of songs here that could

(39:43):
be a kind of narrative explanation for why folk music
is so prominent in the movie. Songs transmit messages from
the past, even when the singer is not attempting to
do so, and song lyrics are kind of interesting in
this way as like a as a meme type, because
song lyrics can become free writing or even parasitic information

(40:08):
information content that get repeated and spread regardless of their
value to the singer. Think about how often you sing
a song without necessarily believing what the lyrics of the
song are saying. The lyrics are just part of the
musical content of the song, but they're also words, so
they do carry a message if you think about them,

(40:29):
but you know they're attached to this tune you like,
and you definitely discover this weird free writing information content
when you like, Like if you have a child and
you find yourself singing English nursery rhymes to them, you're
suddenly thinking, what is Humpty Dumpty about? Why is three
blind mice so horribly violent? And so yeah, there's just

(40:52):
this like information content stashed in song lyrics that you
often don't think about because the song in your the
song when you think about it standing back from it
is just music, but it does have words, and you
could imagine, based on what we see in the movie
that the drinking songs, the pub songs of the Summer Islanders,

(41:15):
may have contained a lot of information about the pagan
pantheon long after the island had historically been converted to Christianity,
and maybe those same songs persisted across the hundreds of
years and helped with the transition back to what Christopher
Lee calls the joyous old Gods. So anyway, I guess

(41:35):
that's my riff pat on your suggestion about the role
of oral tradition in the islanders connection to their past. Okay,
I think I'm going to have to wrap this episode
up here, but hey, if you would like to get
in touch and perhaps have your message featured on a
listener Mail episode in the future, as I said at

(41:56):
the beginning, you can always write us at contact at
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. We love all
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we really do appreciate everybody who takes the time to

(42:18):
write in it genuinely means a lot to us. Let's see, Hey,
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going on with stuff to blow your mind? This is
a listener mail episode. We typically are a science and
culture podcast. You know, science is sort of our main beat,
but we smash it in with a bunch of other disciplines.

(42:38):
We like to talk about science and history, science and religion, psychology, folklore,
all kinds of things like that. We do our core
episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and on Fridays we do
a different kind of show called Weird House Cinema, where
each week Rob and I just talk about a weird movie.

(42:58):
We talk about well known movies, obscure movies, good bad.
The only real criteria is that it's got to be weird.
On Wednesdays we do a short form episode, and on
Saturdays and Mondays we run episodes from the vault, older
episodes of the show. Let's see. Oh huge, thanks as
always to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway. And as

(43:23):
I've said several times now, if you would like to
get in touch with us with feedback on this episode
or any other. To suggest a topic for the future,
or just to say hello, you can email us at
contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (43:42):
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