February 21, 2025 • 26 mins
Holly talks about her gardening efforts and an amusing machine reading error. Tracy talks about her expectations of researching the epizootic of 1872, and My Little Pony toys turning 40.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
I am Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We
talked about hydroponics this week.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
We did one of my current obsessions, which is I'm
in a dangerous place with the plant situation. Yeah, I
don't know what's going to happen here in this house.
I was at a friend's a friend's house over the
weekend and it was not a hydroponic setup, but it
was a bookshelf by the window that had a lot
(00:38):
of plants on it. And we currently don't have a
lot of indoor plants in our house because when we
tried that, the candies liked to dig the dirt out
with their paws. Yeah, they didn't use the bathroom in there,
which would have been worse, but like they like there was.
I was just constantly finding that the dirt had been
(00:59):
put on the floor, and so I have thought of
various strategies to try to do something else. Some other
plants set up that I haven't really worked out. But
this this shelf was so packed with plants that there
would not really be a lot of room for a
cat to get on there, and I was like, what
(01:19):
if what if I did that? Would that work?
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Maybe?
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Possibly your girls are also going to hit that age. Right,
they're six.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
They were born in twenty nineteen, so almost turned.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Six this year. I most cats. This is my experiential evidence,
having had many cats in the ages of six to
seven and then again at twelve to thirteen. They have
a little like gear shift in terms of their behavior
and energy where they just chill out a little bit.
So maybe they'll also be like, it's fine, I don't
(01:57):
care now, don't care about it. Are My hydroponic garden
is in our canteena where the cats don't generally go.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
It is Star Wars themed.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
Because the idea is that we will have fresh garnish
for our cocktails at all times. Right, you told me that,
and I was like, but it's a great idea.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Oh it's so good.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Fresh mint is where it's at. You gotta be careful
with me because it will take over. But we're also
growing lettuce and peppers and other things. But yeah, I'm
obsessed with it. The first thing I do every morning
is I look at the camera when I wake up
to see the plants downstairs, and then when I drag
my Badonka out of bed, I make a coffee and
(02:41):
I go sit with the plants down. But we also
there's an offshoot of this, which is that I always
like plants, and I have gone through various periods where
I'm like, I'm in a garden, and I have mixed results,
usually because I end up moving things outside when it
gets nice, and because it's Georgia and our yard gets
(03:03):
a lot of sun during the day. Some plants that
even though they say full sun cannot hack it, can't
do it now, and they either perish or I try
to move them inside and they become confused and they
like shut down. But this time I'm like, you know what,
We'll put some stuff outside, but I'm going to focus
on developing a whole indoor growing setup. So in addition
(03:25):
to the hydroponic garden in our gym, which we're now
calling the jungle gym because it too has many many
plants in it, I have a lot of grow lights
and a lot of setup. And I knew it was
a lot when my dear friend who watches our cats
and when we travel and is also like a sibling
to me, and is also a very accomplished gardener.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
She had come over.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
To meet our new kiddies and I was like, oh,
I should show you our garden set up in the
gym so that you know, next time you have to
watch the cats that I might need some water help.
And I opened the door and she went.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
And I was like, well, well, it's good for me,
but also I just I love it. I don't it's
it's very good for my mental health. I'm telling you,
my therapist to I feel like I could probably deduct
the plant costs.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
I won't.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
It's fine. I said to you before we started that
I can't decide if Gerrikey was a pill or not. Yeah, yeah,
I mean it seems like I want to I want
to not be judgmental, and I really, honestly do see
a way where the real problems were just that sometimes
people do not agree, and when it's a science like
(04:42):
that that is just getting its footing in terms of
public recognition. Everybody has a different take, and they may
very well feel affronted by the takes of others, and
I want to think it's just that and they maybe
just didn't handle it in the most awesome way, But
(05:03):
then some of the things he writes, I'm like, you
know other people did this, right, do you not know
about the Aztecs?
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Like I don't.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
I also wanted to mention because I'm sure some listeners
were like, question, China, sure, because right, like we always
see images of like rice patties that are flooded with
water and that's how they're growing rice and whatnot. I'm
sure it exists out there, but perhaps not in English language.
(05:32):
Could not really find any good scientific information about any
of that. Yeah, Like I found some theoretical that, oh,
like one sounded very much like a Mother Goose story
where it was like and then the field flooded and
they realized that the rice grew better. And I'm like,
(05:52):
but how do you how do you know that maybe
that is what happened. I don't know, but there was
no like clear thing. And then even the the scientific
articles that I was able to find about hydroponics in
China focused on developments in the nineteen seventies and later
about how they're using those to grow rice, And I'm like,
(06:12):
this doesn't really help what I'm trying to do here.
So if you feel like China was left out, I
promise you. I did not want to, but I also
didn't feel like we could say anything yeah that had
any merit. I also felt like folks to just take
for granted that when we're talking about hydroponics, we are
talking about growing growing plants without the benefit of the
(06:37):
soil when they don't typically grow that way, right, Right,
Because there are plants that grow on the water, right,
and maybe they have long roots that get down to
the soil at some point, but like they're mostly on
the water. Like that's just that's not we were talking about.
We did talk about ever so briefly in that Francis
(06:57):
Bacon quote, right, but we were talking about about plants
that that's not typically how they grow.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
Right.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Francis Bacon's writings on the natural world are spectacular, wrong,
very funny. I don't mean to laugh at the man.
But they didn't have stuff figured out yet.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Well, and I say we still don't. I say, in four.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Hundred years, right, we're still reading stuff that our scientists
were incredibly confident about that we're not in fact right
way there. Yeah, But also I love that I don't
have it open in front of me, but the way
everything is phrased It is like exactly what we're always told,
especially you know when we've worked in more journalistic efforts
(07:45):
that you should not do, which is like and some
say like that's how everything in his list of natural
things starts, which just cracks me up. I will also
tell you about the very best, the very best, incorrect
and beautiful transfer from a book that has been scanned
(08:07):
in on internet archive too.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Okay, when you click the thing that says full text
and it just takes you to a plain text version
of it.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
Yeah, and often.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
You know, there's machine reading going on, so often they
don't get the words right. But this is where I
found what might be my new favorite word, hydraponies. And
I was like, this is a spinoff cartoon of my
little pony, the hydroponies that all have a garden. I
(08:37):
don't know what's going on, but it happened repeatedly in
one of the books, and I was cackling every time.
It would be like the merits of hydroponies, and I'd be.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Like, this is so funny. Hydroponies.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
When I was in college, I went to the National
Conference on Undergraduate Research and the university that was hosting
it people have sent in their abstracts for their papers
that they were going to deliver at this conference, and
they had been run through some kind of like OCR
situation to turn the physical pieces of paper that we
(09:11):
sent in with our transcripts, or transcripts we send them
with their applications to transfer that into a book full
of all of the abstracts. And this one person in
one of the literature she went to a different school,
and she was talking about how at the very last
minute an advisor on her paper had said, well, so
(09:33):
and so wasn't a modern poet, though he was a
postmodern poet. And she got very freaked out because in
my memory this was a woman. I could be making
it up wrong, but she got very freaked out. She
was like, oh no, when I sent in my abstract,
did I say that this was a modern poet or
did I say a postmodern poet? And because of the
(09:55):
OCR process that had not gone flawlessly, her abstract said
that he that this poet was a modem poet.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Oh, of course, I super.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
Love finding the wild you know, recognition errors in those
kinds of things when doing research for the Chapones delighted
me thoroughly. There was also to go back to Gerrikey
a very funny, brief sort of description of him in
(10:31):
a Time magazine write up, and I don't know what
they were getting at, So I will read it to
you and you tell me what you think it reads.
Quote when Newshawks ask him whether he expects to make
a lot of money out of hydroponics, he just smiles,
shows two gold teeth. The look on your face is
(10:55):
so good. I don't know if they're saying, yes, he's
flash and he thinks he's gonna make a bunch of money,
or if they're like, he's just a dude with dental
stuff going on.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
I don't know what they're saying. Ah, but I'm grateful
for the work because I'm enjoying my you're enjoying your
hydroponic garden.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
I am. I have like many things. I have, you know,
several dozen things growing. It's all very exciting. It's very exciting.
I I will laugh and tell you this story, which
is that I would say a solid fifty to sixty
percent of the time when I tell someone that I
have a hydroponic garden in my canteena, they immediately think
(11:42):
I am growing drugs, right, and I'm like, hello, it's Romaine.
I'm sorry, it's not very exciting. I'm two square.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
More than twenty years ago, I knew somebody who had
a hydroponic setup in the basement and a ward fully
contained right, but even with the wardrobe doors closed, there
was like a purple glow that that would come out
through the cracks, and was getting ready to sell his
(12:13):
house and trying to figure out what to do because
that setup was fully not legal in any way in
North Carolina. Twenty however, many years ago, and trying to
think of a story to explain the strange wardrobe in
the basement with a purple glow.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
I really really.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Love bell peppers all year round. I'm like Tiberius, I
need my fruits and vegetables every day. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I'm very boring. The wildest thing I'm growing, which is
not in the hydroponic garden, is a plant that is
colloquially called a buzz button. This is also for cocktail purposes.
(12:59):
It makes a little flower that it has a natural
numbing and it's gotten very very popular in cocktails in
the last few years, where like sometimes some places will
put like a whole flower in a drink is a garnish.
But also if you go to Galaxy's Edge and you've
ordered a drink that has that foam on top, that's
what it is. That's what's causing it a fuzzy tontan.
(13:22):
It just numbs your mouth a little bit while you drink.
So that's the wildest thing I'm growing. The rest is like, ooh,
purple cauliflower very wide. This week, we talked about the
(13:44):
Great Episootic of eighteen seventy two by listener request. Yeah,
a couple of things didn't make it into the episode
because I couldn't figure out a great place.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
To put them. What was that there?
Speaker 1 (13:56):
I don't know if this actually happened, but there was
definitely rumor of kind of a horse speculation that was
going on where people would buy critically ill horses for
very low amounts of money, hoping to sell them if
and when they recovered from the horse blu.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
My gosh, horse flipping. Yeah, that's wild. It's wild. It
seems like I don't know, I can imagine this really happening.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
But also once this was well underway, like word had
really spread that this was a thing that most horses
recovered from if they were allowed to rest and taken
care of while they were sick. So it seems like
the only people that would have been still working their
horses really hard and then selling them off for cheap
would have been horrible people in my opinion.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Right, horrible people would do.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Well, here's what I see as a possibility, Okay, people
that were really struggling to survive without their day to
day income. Sure, and some person swooped in and was
like and knew that the horse would probably recover, and
was like, oh, by your horse. Yeah, And so it
looked probably like a decent thing to be, like, I'll
(15:12):
get X amount of money today to feed my family. Yeah,
But then like they would be kind of left in
the lurch down the road. I could see that person
who maybe wasn't able to let their horse rest or
pay for treatment selling their horse. You're being more sympathetic
than me, and in this particular I am, because people
(15:35):
in desperate moments will make maybe not the best long
term decisions to survive. Yeah, sure, I understand that. Usually
I feel like not maybe not usually I think sometimes
our positions are reversed and like, who is having the
most sympathetic read on a thing. Well, it depends greatly
on the thing. Yeah, there are places where I have
(15:57):
grace and others where I do not. Another thing that
felt like a whole kind of big digression. So I
originally had it in the outline and then I took
it out.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
Was like, it became.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
Pretty clear among people who knew what they were talking
about that this was a contagion that was being spread.
There were, of course still people who thought that there
was something else going on, but there was also an
almost conspiracy theory put forth by this guy named Joseph Walkup,
who was the editor of The Plasser Harold, which was
(16:34):
a I don't remember what state the Plaser Harold was in,
but this was like in the mining country of the West,
and he was not a fan of Grant Ulysses Grant
or of General Phillip Sheridan and kind of cooked up
(16:56):
this whole story claiming that after the Marius Massacre, which
was three years before this, the army had stolen all
of the indigenous people's horses and taken them to Canada,
and that that was what had introduced this disease to
Canada in the first place, which is just like this
(17:19):
was way more about his disagreement with Grant and Grant's
policies and Sheridan than anything actually about Indigenous people or
their horses. But it was kind of weird to see
this conspiracy theory cooked up out of whole cloth in
relation to this influenza outbreak among the horses. It is
(17:40):
the second time in pretty recent memory that that massacre
has come up on the show, and I had said
previously that it could be a whole episode of its own,
So maybe that's a sign that it should be one
in the nearish future.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
We'll see, maybe maybe When I first.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Got the listener request for this topic, I just a
thought that it was something that had been a lot
more lethal to horses than it had been. I did
not realize that, as you know, if horses were allowed
to rest and care for that most of them did recover,
but the number of horses that died was still a
(18:26):
major thing. Like that was still a major thing. And
then the disruption while the horses were sick also a
really major thing. So I don't know for sure that
bird flu is what prompted the episode request, but it
does seem like it could have been. Yeah, oh for sure,
A reasonable a reasonable information, information, a reasonable inspiration. I
(18:48):
could have responded and asked, but I did not get
that done before we came in here to record this.
I have been thinking, as we've been discussing this that
I was never a horse girl.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
Yeah, I never went through the horse face.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
And I know why, Okay, which is that, like, I
think they're beautiful and I really like them as animals, Yes,
but I remember reading when I was very young, probably
eight or nine, that horses are always like a second
away from madness. The whole thing that like, they have
an unpredictability that they could, if startled, become essentially a
(19:26):
different animal than you have known. And I think that
rooted in my brain so hard that I'm like, I
think you're beautiful, but I don't trust you for a second,
which I'm sure horse people listening to this are like,
oh yeah, but it's just this. It's the size combined
with the possibility of unpredictable behavior that made me scared.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
As a kid.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
Yeah. So I grew up kind of out in the country.
Like I've talked about, We grew all our own vegetables.
My neighbor had cows. Neigh also had a pasture that
he rented out for people to keep their horses in,
and so whenever there were horses being kept in this pasture,
(20:12):
we would walk down there with my mom and look
at the horses.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
And I love to look at the horses. And I
knew people.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Through school or church who rode horses and took horseback
riding lessons and in one case had a horse of
her own.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
I guess two cases.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
There was like one person who lived on a farm
they had horses. One person who was in the higher
economic echelon of where I grew up and had a
horse in a fancy way. Yeah, and like I really
wanted a horse, had no concept of how expensive a
horse was. And in my head, I was like, but
the neighbor has this pasture, the horse could live there,
(20:51):
And it's like that has been so easy, It would
be so easy. That does not take into account anything
involved with them. To stress this I was a child again,
does not involve anything involving all of the expensive courses.
What I did have, though, was a lot of my
little ponies. Oh and I sure did love the my
(21:12):
little ponies. And boy have I been getting a lot
of advertisements on the internet about fortieth anniversary anniversary collections
of the Little Ponies that I had as a child,
which has just kind of been causing me some existential
feelings about the age that I am and how long
(21:32):
ago forty years was when I was a child getting
the Little Ponies. I am just enough older than you
that My Little Ponies missed me by a year or two. Yeah,
but I do remember the commercials distinctly. Yeah, I could
still sing you, but I won't the My Little Ponies
show Stable commercial in its entirety. Yeah, I didn't want it.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
I just knew it.
Speaker 3 (21:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
There was one year where I got the show stable
for Christmas. My brother got this skeletor castle thing from he.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
Yeah, and.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
My brother.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
Quote accidentally found the Christmas presence. Yeah in quotation marks accidentally. Yeah,
I know that accident. I had that same accident a
few times. Yeah, he accidentally ran We had a in
the basement that we had a basement with a concrete floor,
and we would ride the big wheel in circles around
the basement and he quote accidentally ran into this little
(22:50):
metal storage thing that was in the basement and it
accidentally opened the door, and he accidentally saw what was inside,
which was our Christmas presence is a perfectly.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
Normal accident, even understand.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Yeah, I was so livid about being told what was
gonna be happening for Christmas? You were, Yeah, I didn't.
I wanted to be I wanted to be surprised. Oh yeah,
oh yeah, No, that's not how we worked it at
our house at all.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
Now.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
No, we literally would steam open the ends of wrap packages,
slide the box out, investigate and notate, slide it back
in and retape it. Yeah, things that were already wrapped
in under the tree we would kind of try to guess,
but these were not wrapped yet, these were in uh hidden.
(23:40):
I still would have been fine because that was where
I could put in my tiny child planner, all the
ways I was going to play with it. That was
like the way I engaged with pre gift time gift information,
and then I'm going to put the following seven ponies
in the following order in the show's table, Like that's
how I would have done that.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Yeah, because I loved to know.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
I did.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
I did have an accident that was a legit accident
once that I cannot take full responsibility for because, as
you know, I have been sewing since I was three. Yeah,
and one of the things that my mom used to do.
And I'm not sure why it landed there because she
(24:25):
had like sewing areas in the house, but she used
to when I was very small, kept like a plastic
bag of tiny scrap fabric and a plastic bag of
yarn in her closet, and there had been times where
she I would be like, Hey, do we have fabric
this color?
Speaker 2 (24:44):
I can use it.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
You'd be like, I don't know, go check the scrap bag,
and I would, and one time, without asking her first,
I went and checked the scrap bag and I found
the raggedy anole that she had made me for Christmas.
And I didn't need anyone clocket that it was for
me for Christmas. I literally walked out of her room, going,
oh my god, this is so cool.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Who is it? What is this about?
Speaker 1 (25:04):
And she was just like horrified, and I was like,
oh no, I was just trying to find yarn and fabric.
I don't Yeah, and I did, but it was formed
into a cool thing already. Oh well, yeah, but I
had that accident a few other times. Accident with the
air quotes. Yeah, yeah, well that was much more cheerful
(25:26):
than the general topic of the episode that inspired this conversation. Hey,
whatever is coming up on your weekend, I hope it
goes well. I know stuff is chaos for a lot
of people right now, so I'm gonna say, just try
to be kind to yourselves. I'm trying to be kind
(25:47):
to myself and sometimes it's easier than others, but try
to be kind to yourselves, kind to other people. Let's
be kind to my printer, which has chosen this moment
to start cleaning itself. And I'm just going to continue
recording over it rather than stopping like normal. That prints
are just just needs.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Let it happen. That's its self care. It's fine.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Yes, So we'll be back tomorrow with Saturday Classic and
something brand new on Monday. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
(26:30):
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
I am Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We
talked about hydroponics this week.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
We did one of my current obsessions, which is I'm
in a dangerous place with the plant situation. Yeah, I
don't know what's going to happen here in this house.
I was at a friend's a friend's house over the
weekend and it was not a hydroponic setup, but it
was a bookshelf by the window that had a lot
(00:38):
of plants on it. And we currently don't have a
lot of indoor plants in our house because when we
tried that, the candies liked to dig the dirt out
with their paws. Yeah, they didn't use the bathroom in there,
which would have been worse, but like they like there was.
I was just constantly finding that the dirt had been
(00:59):
put on the floor, and so I have thought of
various strategies to try to do something else. Some other
plants set up that I haven't really worked out. But
this this shelf was so packed with plants that there
would not really be a lot of room for a
cat to get on there, and I was like, what
(01:19):
if what if I did that? Would that work?
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Maybe?
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Possibly your girls are also going to hit that age. Right,
they're six.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
They were born in twenty nineteen, so almost turned.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Six this year. I most cats. This is my experiential evidence,
having had many cats in the ages of six to
seven and then again at twelve to thirteen. They have
a little like gear shift in terms of their behavior
and energy where they just chill out a little bit.
So maybe they'll also be like, it's fine, I don't
(01:57):
care now, don't care about it. Are My hydroponic garden
is in our canteena where the cats don't generally go.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
It is Star Wars themed.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
Because the idea is that we will have fresh garnish
for our cocktails at all times. Right, you told me that,
and I was like, but it's a great idea.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Oh it's so good.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Fresh mint is where it's at. You gotta be careful
with me because it will take over. But we're also
growing lettuce and peppers and other things. But yeah, I'm
obsessed with it. The first thing I do every morning
is I look at the camera when I wake up
to see the plants downstairs, and then when I drag
my Badonka out of bed, I make a coffee and
(02:41):
I go sit with the plants down. But we also
there's an offshoot of this, which is that I always
like plants, and I have gone through various periods where
I'm like, I'm in a garden, and I have mixed results,
usually because I end up moving things outside when it
gets nice, and because it's Georgia and our yard gets
(03:03):
a lot of sun during the day. Some plants that
even though they say full sun cannot hack it, can't
do it now, and they either perish or I try
to move them inside and they become confused and they
like shut down. But this time I'm like, you know what,
We'll put some stuff outside, but I'm going to focus
on developing a whole indoor growing setup. So in addition
(03:25):
to the hydroponic garden in our gym, which we're now
calling the jungle gym because it too has many many
plants in it, I have a lot of grow lights
and a lot of setup. And I knew it was
a lot when my dear friend who watches our cats
and when we travel and is also like a sibling
to me, and is also a very accomplished gardener.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
She had come over.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
To meet our new kiddies and I was like, oh,
I should show you our garden set up in the
gym so that you know, next time you have to
watch the cats that I might need some water help.
And I opened the door and she went.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
And I was like, well, well, it's good for me,
but also I just I love it. I don't it's
it's very good for my mental health. I'm telling you,
my therapist to I feel like I could probably deduct
the plant costs.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
I won't.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
It's fine. I said to you before we started that
I can't decide if Gerrikey was a pill or not. Yeah, yeah,
I mean it seems like I want to I want
to not be judgmental, and I really, honestly do see
a way where the real problems were just that sometimes
people do not agree, and when it's a science like
(04:42):
that that is just getting its footing in terms of
public recognition. Everybody has a different take, and they may
very well feel affronted by the takes of others, and
I want to think it's just that and they maybe
just didn't handle it in the most awesome way, But
(05:03):
then some of the things he writes, I'm like, you
know other people did this, right, do you not know
about the Aztecs?
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Like I don't.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
I also wanted to mention because I'm sure some listeners
were like, question, China, sure, because right, like we always
see images of like rice patties that are flooded with
water and that's how they're growing rice and whatnot. I'm
sure it exists out there, but perhaps not in English language.
(05:32):
Could not really find any good scientific information about any
of that. Yeah, Like I found some theoretical that, oh,
like one sounded very much like a Mother Goose story
where it was like and then the field flooded and
they realized that the rice grew better. And I'm like,
(05:52):
but how do you how do you know that maybe
that is what happened. I don't know, but there was
no like clear thing. And then even the the scientific
articles that I was able to find about hydroponics in
China focused on developments in the nineteen seventies and later
about how they're using those to grow rice, And I'm like,
(06:12):
this doesn't really help what I'm trying to do here.
So if you feel like China was left out, I
promise you. I did not want to, but I also
didn't feel like we could say anything yeah that had
any merit. I also felt like folks to just take
for granted that when we're talking about hydroponics, we are
talking about growing growing plants without the benefit of the
(06:37):
soil when they don't typically grow that way, right, Right,
Because there are plants that grow on the water, right,
and maybe they have long roots that get down to
the soil at some point, but like they're mostly on
the water. Like that's just that's not we were talking about.
We did talk about ever so briefly in that Francis
(06:57):
Bacon quote, right, but we were talking about about plants
that that's not typically how they grow.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
Right.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Francis Bacon's writings on the natural world are spectacular, wrong,
very funny. I don't mean to laugh at the man.
But they didn't have stuff figured out yet.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Well, and I say we still don't. I say, in four.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Hundred years, right, we're still reading stuff that our scientists
were incredibly confident about that we're not in fact right
way there. Yeah, But also I love that I don't
have it open in front of me, but the way
everything is phrased It is like exactly what we're always told,
especially you know when we've worked in more journalistic efforts
(07:45):
that you should not do, which is like and some
say like that's how everything in his list of natural
things starts, which just cracks me up. I will also
tell you about the very best, the very best, incorrect
and beautiful transfer from a book that has been scanned
(08:07):
in on internet archive too.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Okay, when you click the thing that says full text
and it just takes you to a plain text version
of it.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
Yeah, and often.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
You know, there's machine reading going on, so often they
don't get the words right. But this is where I
found what might be my new favorite word, hydraponies. And
I was like, this is a spinoff cartoon of my
little pony, the hydroponies that all have a garden. I
(08:37):
don't know what's going on, but it happened repeatedly in
one of the books, and I was cackling every time.
It would be like the merits of hydroponies, and I'd be.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Like, this is so funny. Hydroponies.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
When I was in college, I went to the National
Conference on Undergraduate Research and the university that was hosting
it people have sent in their abstracts for their papers
that they were going to deliver at this conference, and
they had been run through some kind of like OCR
situation to turn the physical pieces of paper that we
(09:11):
sent in with our transcripts, or transcripts we send them
with their applications to transfer that into a book full
of all of the abstracts. And this one person in
one of the literature she went to a different school,
and she was talking about how at the very last
minute an advisor on her paper had said, well, so
(09:33):
and so wasn't a modern poet, though he was a
postmodern poet. And she got very freaked out because in
my memory this was a woman. I could be making
it up wrong, but she got very freaked out. She
was like, oh no, when I sent in my abstract,
did I say that this was a modern poet or
did I say a postmodern poet? And because of the
(09:55):
OCR process that had not gone flawlessly, her abstract said
that he that this poet was a modem poet.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Oh, of course, I super.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
Love finding the wild you know, recognition errors in those
kinds of things when doing research for the Chapones delighted
me thoroughly. There was also to go back to Gerrikey
a very funny, brief sort of description of him in
(10:31):
a Time magazine write up, and I don't know what
they were getting at, So I will read it to
you and you tell me what you think it reads.
Quote when Newshawks ask him whether he expects to make
a lot of money out of hydroponics, he just smiles,
shows two gold teeth. The look on your face is
(10:55):
so good. I don't know if they're saying, yes, he's
flash and he thinks he's gonna make a bunch of money,
or if they're like, he's just a dude with dental
stuff going on.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
I don't know what they're saying. Ah, but I'm grateful
for the work because I'm enjoying my you're enjoying your
hydroponic garden.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
I am. I have like many things. I have, you know,
several dozen things growing. It's all very exciting. It's very exciting.
I I will laugh and tell you this story, which
is that I would say a solid fifty to sixty
percent of the time when I tell someone that I
have a hydroponic garden in my canteena, they immediately think
(11:42):
I am growing drugs, right, and I'm like, hello, it's Romaine.
I'm sorry, it's not very exciting. I'm two square.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
More than twenty years ago, I knew somebody who had
a hydroponic setup in the basement and a ward fully
contained right, but even with the wardrobe doors closed, there
was like a purple glow that that would come out
through the cracks, and was getting ready to sell his
(12:13):
house and trying to figure out what to do because
that setup was fully not legal in any way in
North Carolina. Twenty however, many years ago, and trying to
think of a story to explain the strange wardrobe in
the basement with a purple glow.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
I really really.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Love bell peppers all year round. I'm like Tiberius, I
need my fruits and vegetables every day. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I'm very boring. The wildest thing I'm growing, which is
not in the hydroponic garden, is a plant that is
colloquially called a buzz button. This is also for cocktail purposes.
(12:59):
It makes a little flower that it has a natural
numbing and it's gotten very very popular in cocktails in
the last few years, where like sometimes some places will
put like a whole flower in a drink is a garnish.
But also if you go to Galaxy's Edge and you've
ordered a drink that has that foam on top, that's
what it is. That's what's causing it a fuzzy tontan.
(13:22):
It just numbs your mouth a little bit while you drink.
So that's the wildest thing I'm growing. The rest is like, ooh,
purple cauliflower very wide. This week, we talked about the
(13:44):
Great Episootic of eighteen seventy two by listener request. Yeah,
a couple of things didn't make it into the episode
because I couldn't figure out a great place.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
To put them. What was that there?
Speaker 1 (13:56):
I don't know if this actually happened, but there was
definitely rumor of kind of a horse speculation that was
going on where people would buy critically ill horses for
very low amounts of money, hoping to sell them if
and when they recovered from the horse blu.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
My gosh, horse flipping. Yeah, that's wild. It's wild. It
seems like I don't know, I can imagine this really happening.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
But also once this was well underway, like word had
really spread that this was a thing that most horses
recovered from if they were allowed to rest and taken
care of while they were sick. So it seems like
the only people that would have been still working their
horses really hard and then selling them off for cheap
would have been horrible people in my opinion.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Right, horrible people would do.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Well, here's what I see as a possibility, Okay, people
that were really struggling to survive without their day to
day income. Sure, and some person swooped in and was
like and knew that the horse would probably recover, and
was like, oh, by your horse. Yeah, And so it
looked probably like a decent thing to be, like, I'll
(15:12):
get X amount of money today to feed my family. Yeah,
But then like they would be kind of left in
the lurch down the road. I could see that person
who maybe wasn't able to let their horse rest or
pay for treatment selling their horse. You're being more sympathetic
than me, and in this particular I am, because people
(15:35):
in desperate moments will make maybe not the best long
term decisions to survive. Yeah, sure, I understand that. Usually
I feel like not maybe not usually I think sometimes
our positions are reversed and like, who is having the
most sympathetic read on a thing. Well, it depends greatly
on the thing. Yeah, there are places where I have
(15:57):
grace and others where I do not. Another thing that
felt like a whole kind of big digression. So I
originally had it in the outline and then I took
it out.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
Was like, it became.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
Pretty clear among people who knew what they were talking
about that this was a contagion that was being spread.
There were, of course still people who thought that there
was something else going on, but there was also an
almost conspiracy theory put forth by this guy named Joseph Walkup,
who was the editor of The Plasser Harold, which was
(16:34):
a I don't remember what state the Plaser Harold was in,
but this was like in the mining country of the West,
and he was not a fan of Grant Ulysses Grant
or of General Phillip Sheridan and kind of cooked up
(16:56):
this whole story claiming that after the Marius Massacre, which
was three years before this, the army had stolen all
of the indigenous people's horses and taken them to Canada,
and that that was what had introduced this disease to
Canada in the first place, which is just like this
(17:19):
was way more about his disagreement with Grant and Grant's
policies and Sheridan than anything actually about Indigenous people or
their horses. But it was kind of weird to see
this conspiracy theory cooked up out of whole cloth in
relation to this influenza outbreak among the horses. It is
(17:40):
the second time in pretty recent memory that that massacre
has come up on the show, and I had said
previously that it could be a whole episode of its own,
So maybe that's a sign that it should be one
in the nearish future.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
We'll see, maybe maybe When I first.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Got the listener request for this topic, I just a
thought that it was something that had been a lot
more lethal to horses than it had been. I did
not realize that, as you know, if horses were allowed
to rest and care for that most of them did recover,
but the number of horses that died was still a
(18:26):
major thing. Like that was still a major thing. And
then the disruption while the horses were sick also a
really major thing. So I don't know for sure that
bird flu is what prompted the episode request, but it
does seem like it could have been. Yeah, oh for sure,
A reasonable a reasonable information, information, a reasonable inspiration. I
(18:48):
could have responded and asked, but I did not get
that done before we came in here to record this.
I have been thinking, as we've been discussing this that
I was never a horse girl.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
Yeah, I never went through the horse face.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
And I know why, Okay, which is that, like, I
think they're beautiful and I really like them as animals, Yes,
but I remember reading when I was very young, probably
eight or nine, that horses are always like a second
away from madness. The whole thing that like, they have
an unpredictability that they could, if startled, become essentially a
(19:26):
different animal than you have known. And I think that
rooted in my brain so hard that I'm like, I
think you're beautiful, but I don't trust you for a second,
which I'm sure horse people listening to this are like,
oh yeah, but it's just this. It's the size combined
with the possibility of unpredictable behavior that made me scared.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
As a kid.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
Yeah. So I grew up kind of out in the country.
Like I've talked about, We grew all our own vegetables.
My neighbor had cows. Neigh also had a pasture that
he rented out for people to keep their horses in,
and so whenever there were horses being kept in this pasture,
(20:12):
we would walk down there with my mom and look
at the horses.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
And I love to look at the horses. And I
knew people.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Through school or church who rode horses and took horseback
riding lessons and in one case had a horse of
her own.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
I guess two cases.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
There was like one person who lived on a farm
they had horses. One person who was in the higher
economic echelon of where I grew up and had a
horse in a fancy way. Yeah, and like I really
wanted a horse, had no concept of how expensive a
horse was. And in my head, I was like, but
the neighbor has this pasture, the horse could live there,
(20:51):
And it's like that has been so easy, It would
be so easy. That does not take into account anything
involved with them. To stress this I was a child again,
does not involve anything involving all of the expensive courses.
What I did have, though, was a lot of my
little ponies. Oh and I sure did love the my
(21:12):
little ponies. And boy have I been getting a lot
of advertisements on the internet about fortieth anniversary anniversary collections
of the Little Ponies that I had as a child,
which has just kind of been causing me some existential
feelings about the age that I am and how long
(21:32):
ago forty years was when I was a child getting
the Little Ponies. I am just enough older than you
that My Little Ponies missed me by a year or two. Yeah,
but I do remember the commercials distinctly. Yeah, I could
still sing you, but I won't the My Little Ponies
show Stable commercial in its entirety. Yeah, I didn't want it.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
I just knew it.
Speaker 3 (21:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
There was one year where I got the show stable
for Christmas. My brother got this skeletor castle thing from he.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
Yeah, and.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
My brother.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
Quote accidentally found the Christmas presence. Yeah in quotation marks accidentally. Yeah,
I know that accident. I had that same accident a
few times. Yeah, he accidentally ran We had a in
the basement that we had a basement with a concrete floor,
and we would ride the big wheel in circles around
the basement and he quote accidentally ran into this little
(22:50):
metal storage thing that was in the basement and it
accidentally opened the door, and he accidentally saw what was inside,
which was our Christmas presence is a perfectly.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
Normal accident, even understand.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Yeah, I was so livid about being told what was
gonna be happening for Christmas? You were, Yeah, I didn't.
I wanted to be I wanted to be surprised. Oh yeah,
oh yeah, No, that's not how we worked it at
our house at all.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
Now.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
No, we literally would steam open the ends of wrap packages,
slide the box out, investigate and notate, slide it back
in and retape it. Yeah, things that were already wrapped
in under the tree we would kind of try to guess,
but these were not wrapped yet, these were in uh hidden.
(23:40):
I still would have been fine because that was where
I could put in my tiny child planner, all the
ways I was going to play with it. That was
like the way I engaged with pre gift time gift information,
and then I'm going to put the following seven ponies
in the following order in the show's table, Like that's
how I would have done that.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Yeah, because I loved to know.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
I did.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
I did have an accident that was a legit accident
once that I cannot take full responsibility for because, as
you know, I have been sewing since I was three. Yeah,
and one of the things that my mom used to do.
And I'm not sure why it landed there because she
(24:25):
had like sewing areas in the house, but she used
to when I was very small, kept like a plastic
bag of tiny scrap fabric and a plastic bag of
yarn in her closet, and there had been times where
she I would be like, Hey, do we have fabric
this color?
Speaker 2 (24:44):
I can use it.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
You'd be like, I don't know, go check the scrap bag,
and I would, and one time, without asking her first,
I went and checked the scrap bag and I found
the raggedy anole that she had made me for Christmas.
And I didn't need anyone clocket that it was for
me for Christmas. I literally walked out of her room, going,
oh my god, this is so cool.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Who is it? What is this about?
Speaker 1 (25:04):
And she was just like horrified, and I was like,
oh no, I was just trying to find yarn and fabric.
I don't Yeah, and I did, but it was formed
into a cool thing already. Oh well, yeah, but I
had that accident a few other times. Accident with the
air quotes. Yeah, yeah, well that was much more cheerful
(25:26):
than the general topic of the episode that inspired this conversation. Hey,
whatever is coming up on your weekend, I hope it
goes well. I know stuff is chaos for a lot
of people right now, so I'm gonna say, just try
to be kind to yourselves. I'm trying to be kind
(25:47):
to myself and sometimes it's easier than others, but try
to be kind to yourselves, kind to other people. Let's
be kind to my printer, which has chosen this moment
to start cleaning itself. And I'm just going to continue
recording over it rather than stopping like normal. That prints
are just just needs.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Let it happen. That's its self care. It's fine.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Yes, So we'll be back tomorrow with Saturday Classic and
something brand new on Monday. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
(26:30):
to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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