June 27, 2020 • 47 mins
There is a lot – A LOT – to juggling and Chuck and Josh go over the lion’s share of it in this classic episode. Delve into the deep history, physics, how-tos and different types of juggling in this surprisingly sweeping look at a putatively innocuous pastime.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello friends, Chuck here on a Saturday, bringing your my
select pick for the week from January two thousand fifteen.
Jan is uh. It is one of our famous Colon episodes,
Juggling Colon, What the heck learn all about juggling right now?
(00:21):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry
just doing a little tandem juggling with my bra. That's
what we're doing right now. Yeah, yeah, I wish you
(00:42):
guys could see this because we've got pretty good cascade
right now. Look at this half shower, half shower, halfhower. Man,
that was a good one. Broe balls at once. Yeah, Jerry,
come light these torches on fire. Wow man, half shower
of rain and fire. This is really dangerous. Can you juggle? No?
(01:05):
But I want to after this. My brother learned, of course,
of course, I'm sure he's born knowing how to juggle,
came out of the womb. Juggling. Now he learned back
when it like in high school and mastered it pretty quickly.
And now an he can still juggle some I think
it's one of those things. Well, once you learn sort
of the basics, you can always do it, because apparently
a lot of it comes down to muscle memory, which
(01:27):
is to say motor memory. Yeah, and in true Chuck fashion,
I tried to learn to juggle for about an hour
and never finished. Did you like see any progress over
that hour? Yeah? I could. I could do the little
one hand juggling two balls with one hand thing, okay,
But I did a lot of chasing the ball. That's
a problem, which apparently, if you're beginning juggler, you're gonna
(01:49):
be throwing the ball further and further away from you,
just naturally chasing the ball, and they call it chasing it.
So what do they suggest? They suggest that you learn
to juggle close to and facing a wall. Yeah, because
that way you can't move forward or you'll just keep
hitting your head and you'll scratch your face up on
the brick and quit juggling. This is a Jonathan Strickland
joint of tech stuff. It's reeks of Strickland. It does
(02:13):
like even if the byeline hadn't been on there, I
would have been like, this is Strickland. But I remember
when this one was made. It was like right when
I got here, and like he there's a video embedded
of Strickland teaching you how to juggle. It smells, it
reeks of bald head cream and bowling shirts. Yeah, and
it also has an illustration by Marcus who clearly always
(02:34):
wanted to be a comic book illustrator, because the guy
who's in the graph on how to juggle is just
totally ripped like a comic book. Here. I remember, Marcus,
it seems like a million years ago. It was so
juggling history. How long people been juggling? Uh, chuck. People
(02:58):
have been juggling since at least tomb exactly. They found
uh in Egyptian tombs um hieroglyphics showing women toss juggling.
And there are many kinds of juggling, by the way,
and we're mainly going to talk about toss juggling, which
is throwing something up in the air, throwing more things
(03:22):
up in the air than you have hands. Yes, that's
toss juggling. And there are, like you said, a bunch
of other kinds, but if you're a toss juggler, you
probably don't consider the other kinds real juggling. You're like,
those are cool and everything, but that's not real juggling. Yeah.
I asked my friend, our friend Brandon Ross from the
Stuff you Should Know Art Department, clearly a juggler, very
(03:43):
good juggler, and uh I sent a message to him
and did not hear back in time. I was like,
it doesn't here that modern jugglers poopoo things like taking
a bite out of the apple and like some of
those old school tricks. Is that true or not? And
I didn't hear back from him, So maybe crickets, I'll
fall Well, you know, was on Facebook, Okay, so he'll
get to it when he gets to it. So anyway,
(04:04):
we're in ancient Egypt to be exact. That's right. There
were jugglers in Greece and Rome and India and Thebes
and Thebes in Europe, and I think four BC was
when it was actually written down that people were juggling. Yeah,
supposedly in the Talmud a rabbi named Shimon ben Gummlil. Yeah,
(04:26):
I think I probably nailed that. Probably he could juggle
eight torches at once. That's hard to believe because world
records today are like seven I think for clubs, is
it seven I think so. Yeah, But I mean, if
if this rabbi was juggling eight torches, that sounds like
(04:47):
it maybe pumped up a little bit throughout the years,
you know, like it was two and then it was like,
oh it was eight. Although this was the time of miracles,
you know, like enough oil to keep it going for
eight days assuring a siege. Why not a rabbi who
could juggle eight torches. It seems kind of paltry by comparison.
(05:08):
Good point um. Through the Roman era, apparently that jugglers
were actually held in high esteem, but then they kind
of went down into pooper a little bit hilarious because
people associated with them like like magicians, as con artists.
So I don't know if it was like, hey, look
at what this guy's doing while someone else is picking
their pocket, but that's kind of what it seems like
(05:30):
it might have been going on. Yeah, apparently you were
a con artist, Like you said, sure, everybody knows that
you can't trust a juggler a juggalo, well at the
right at the at the at the time, that's how
people thought of jugglers. This seems to be during like
the Holy Roman Empire in the West, right then the
medieval era hits, and suddenly jugglers start to become a
(05:53):
little a little less threatening and actually a little more
clown like. Yeah. Like, Initially they seemed to have been
not revered necessarily, but I thought of in fairly high esteem.
Then they went the opposite direction, and then they came
back as clowns. I wonder how many like um behind
closed doors, how many like emperors and kings tried it
(06:15):
out after seeing it in the door, or just like
morons with it, yeah, and then had someone's head chopped
off frustration. They took the chuck route. Although I didn't
behead anybody, but during the medieval era you could. If
you found a juggler, you probably also found something of
a minstrel or performer and all around entertainer who probably
traveled from town to town, maybe asking people to bring
(06:38):
out there dead for some side work perhaps, and then
juggling corpses, that's right, which must have been a sight
to see. And then in the seventeen hundreds they became
more of a circus act, and in the late eighteen
hundreds and nineteen hundreds vaudeville came along, and of course
any sort of skill like that was big in vaudeville,
(06:59):
and I'd did not know this, but W. C. Fields
was a juggler in the vaudevillian days. I didn't know
that either, before he became just a drunk actor. And
he's not the one who raped anybody, right, Who was it?
I think that was Fatty R Fatty R Buckled, That's
who it was. Yeah, same Aarras, same guys. I looked
it up and I ran across um the Hollywood hell Club.
(07:22):
So apparently before the brat pack, before the rat pack,
there was a group of like early early Hollywood guys,
Errol Flynn who was a rapist, w C. Fields, John
Barrymore that just raised hell in um Hollywood in like
the twenties. Errol Flynn was a rapist, really accused rapist.
(07:42):
I didn't know that. So then vaudeville declines, uh, circuses
sort of decline a little bit for a while, and
then jugglers started hitting the streets, or as Jonathan Strickland said,
or become mathematicians. Yep, we'll get to the math connection,
which is yet, but I don't know that. Like they
(08:03):
formed their own stage shows, performed on street corners, or
became mathematicians. Those were the three options if you were
a juggler. Uh. And then of course, Um, in the
nineteen forties, I say, of course, because it's common knowledge
that these are when the juggling groups and conventions were
formed and held. The International Brotherhood of Magicians UH decided,
(08:24):
you know, at a meeting, Hey, guys like the jugglers
got together and had a few drinks and said, I
don't like being known as a magician. Yeah, you know,
that's how the jugglers tell it. The magicians were like,
get the jugglers. Yeah, and then they went threw down
their smoke bomb when they were gone. So they formed
and splintered off and formed the International Juggling Association. Uh.
(08:46):
And in nineteen sixty nine they started holding championships and
competitions Summer of Juggling. And in two thousand Jason Garfield,
a very famous juggler, formed the World Juggling Federation and
said ESPN and you need to put this stuff on TV.
So once a year they put it on TV progress
(09:06):
along with the spelling b and the dart competition. What
else which I watched the other day? Um, log rolling, yeah,
lumberjacking sure, uh law and darting no, that's illegal. No
more it's like cock fighting. Um, so all right, let's
get into it then, So we're actually gonna teach everybody
(09:28):
how to juggle, like no kidding, Yeah, and if you're
really into this, like we're gonna describe a lot of
things visually, which is always a train wreck for us.
Um So I would recommend you do like I did
and just get on the old YouTube and look up
what cascade juggling looks like. And they're four or five
guys who have tons and tons of videos. There's there's
(09:50):
a few. There's one guy that I believe is kind
of the gold standard for YouTube instructional juggling videos. His
name is Adam Shamsky h O M s k y.
And like, I'm sure I watched him. That guy pops
it into slow motion for you. There's like, um like graphics.
When like he throws something straight up, you might not
(10:11):
have caught it. So it says throwing straight up, he's good, okay,
and he's just doing it for the love of juggling.
You can tell. I think they all do, I would hope. So.
I don't know if you make a ton of money
as a juggler these days, although there is I should
recommend it's gonna wait till the end. There's a great
article on grant land dot com called Dropped by Jason
(10:34):
uh Fagon, and he details a big, long story on
Anthony Gatto, who may be the best juggler on the planet.
He juggled for Circus a Oh, he had a bunch
of the records until recently. Yeah, twelve world records and
he's amazing dude. Um, but he quit last year to
run a concrete resurfacing business after becoming disenchanted with the
(10:58):
juggling scene. They basically calling out all these kids you
stay saying like you filmed something a hundred times and
only nail at once and then you upload it to YouTube.
That's not the same. He basically his quote is if
you can't do a trick and three tries, you can't
do it. He said, you may have done it, but
it doesn't mean you can do it. It's essentially what
you're talking about. This guy's story is the premise for
(11:20):
Office Space. Yeah, basically, but he's amazing. If you watch
Anthony Gotto juggling, like he will break the record for like, uh,
let's say a number of balls in a rain shower
and um, for the amount of time though he won't
like do it for ten seconds, he'll do it for
like ten minutes. And other jugglers are like, this dude
(11:42):
is insane how long he can keep all these clubs
and balls and torches or whatever in the air. That's
really funny that you mentioned him and what happened to him,
because I noticed his records were like all mid two thousand's,
the most recent ones were, and I wondered what happened
to Anthony Gotto? Now I know it's the Finger. It's
a really good article. Actually it's Nate dropped on grant
(12:03):
land dot com. Alright, so how do you juggle? So Chuck,
here's how you juggle. Basically, you want to start with
three balls, and if you have even half of a
brain half, you will make sure that those balls are
beam bags, because bean bags are dead drops or they
drop dead, You're not gonna chase them all over the room. No,
(12:23):
when they fall, they just stay put. Yeah. Hacky sacks
are good too, or you can buy like my brother did,
the Little um which are basically hacky sacks, a little
juggling kit. Yeah, the complete Klutz's Guide to juggling, isn't
that many. I think it was before the Complete Idiots Guides,
there was something called like something for klutz Is and
it would teach you like things how to how to
(12:45):
juggle dexterity. Yeah, interesing. Um So, anyway, you start with
three bean bags, which in the juggling world what these are.
Anything you juggled are called props, and specifically bean bag
falls under the category of balls. Even though they're not
necessarily balls, they're still under the prop category balls because
it's not a chainsaw or a torch exactly club, which
(13:07):
would fall under the category of clubs. Um So for
most of the time we're gonna say balls. But just
imagine as you're starting out, we're talking about being bags. Okay, okay,
So you get three of them, chuck, Yes, you take
two and you put them in a drawer to start.
That's the first step to learning juggling. Take two of
your three balls and put them away. Yeah, and strickling
(13:30):
and experts say you should literally start with tossing one
back and forth to get your arc down because the
key is consistency. You don't want to and you know
once you get good you can do all sorts of things.
But you don't want to toss one being bag up
four ft and one three ft when you're first starting out.
You want to kind of toss them all about the same. Yeah,
(13:51):
and you need to learn your hand movements, which are
very important. Once you get hand movements down, you can
do variations on the hand movements, but ultimately there's a
basic hand movement that's a scooping motion. And um, the
easiest one to start with to start practicing is the
cascade pattern. Yeah, there's two main patterns, the shower and
the cascade, which we've joked about so far about ten times.
(14:14):
The shower is the one that you see on cartoons
when someone's basically just throwing balls in a big circle
and a big loop. Beautiful, beautiful, very cool looking. The
cascade looks kind of like fireworks if you like, squint
your eyes, use your imagination. I never thought about that. Yeah,
Like as the balls go up and they are out
there basically arcing outward across your body. Yes, um, and
(14:36):
it looks just kind of like you know, one of
those big fireworks where like blows up and then like
this kind of trails downwards slowly. Yeah, that's ultimately what
it looks like. To me, Yeah, I get that. Yeah,
So the cascade, you move your hands in a figure
eight and um. For the regular cascade, your right hand
goes clockwise, your left hand is counter clockwise alternating these tosses.
(14:58):
If you reverse that, it's called a reverse cascade. So
the key here just remember you're using one ball still,
but you're making a scooping motion in towards your torso
like in towards yourself, not away from your body, but
in towards your body, right in front of your chest.
Your your feet are shoulder with apart, because they always
(15:20):
should be when you do anything, and you're tossing the
thing up into an arc in about just above eye level,
that's your that's the one that you start with. And
you usually start with your dominant hand, yeah, because that
will just probably be easier because you're more used to
throwing things with that hand. Right. And I didn't see
it anywhere, but I put two and two together in
(15:40):
this article, and it looks like, oh, it looks like
so I could be wrong everybody, but it looks like
if you are doing a cascade of any kind, reverse cascade,
any anything like that, whatever hand is going clockwise is
the hand that you throw in the highest arc above
your eye level. Okay, so you've got your one bag
(16:00):
and you you make a scooping motion with your right
hand in a counter in a clockwise motion, and you
toss the ball or yeah, you toss the ball in
an arc just above eye level, and then it drops
and you catch it in your left hand, and then
now in your left hand you toss it again. But
this one should be slightly under the arc of the
(16:22):
first one. It's moving in a counter clockwise motion, so
that eventually, when you add more balls and you have
them all in the air, they're not just bumping into
each other at the same place. The one from your
clockwise motion hand is going higher and the one from
your counter clockwise motion hand is following just beneath the
arc of the first ball. That's right, it's inside that
(16:45):
ball's path. Yes, uh, And you're gonna at first be
very frustrated because you're gonna want to throw both of
the balls at the same time when you're just starting
out with the two, just to get used to the motion,
because it's just that sort of like if you've ever
played drums, it's hard to make your right arm your
left arm your right foot your left foot do different things. Yeah,
(17:07):
it's a bit of a brain trick. I think some
people catch on quicker than others, obviously, But um, you
want the two tosses to be distinct and separate. And
one way to do this, Strickland says, is to count
your toss like, toss one, toss two. Ye, toss one,
toss two, And then your little brother is gonna say
what are you doing in there? Shut up nothing, toss
(17:31):
one right. Um, so we might as well add the
second ball. Now, are you ready that we've just been
with one ball? Yeah, because that one toss one is
with your your clockwise hand. Yeah, toss two is with
your counterclockwise hand. You catch the second one, your toss
two with your clockwise hand. Toss one, toss two. You're
(17:52):
still just with one ball here. Now we're gonna add two. Okay,
So you have one in your left hand, you have one.
You're right or doing a cascade, so with your right
hand you're making a clockwise scooping motion. Yes, right, huh, yeah,
(18:12):
I got it right. I wish people could see this one.
So this is delightful. So, um, we're gonna throw the
first ball and as it reaches its zenith just above
our eyes. We're gonna throw the second one just underneath
the arc of the first one. Yeah, you know it's funny,
is it? People that were walking by my desk all
day saw me doing the same thing, because you kind
(18:33):
of do it to yourself to be like, okay, I
get I get the motion. Yeah, like why is struggling
saying here? And we were using no bean bags, no,
just imaginary ones. Exactly. I didn't drop a single one.
I'm a great imaginary juggler. So chuck um with with
this toss one toss to Ultimately, what you're doing is,
let's say it takes a second for you to throw
(18:55):
one ball to your other hand. You threw the second
ball about the halfway mark of that first throw. So
every half second you're throwing a ball, is that the deal?
If you're fast, you are Ultimately you're doing that. But
it doesn't even necessarily have to be a second. Let's
say it takes us two seconds for it to go
(19:18):
up and then down. So every second you're throwing, every
half of whatever beat it takes for the ball to
be tossed and then come down, you're throwing a ball,
right okay, okay, which means that when you finally had
the third ball in there, whoa, you can which, let's
go ahead and do that now. Yeah, you want to
hold two balls in one hand obviously, and uh they
(19:41):
suggest to hold the two and the dominant hand, although
if you're having a problem um making that third toss,
they say, sometimes switch it up and it may help
to hold the two in the non domination because some
people just want to hold one and you're really just
throwing two with another one in your hand, or else
you're throwing one and then two at once, which you
(20:03):
don't want to do either. Yeah, you're gonna be frustrated.
It takes a lot of time in practice. Like, don't
give up like I did when you didn't master it
in one hour. Right, if you think that you're supposed
to be mastering this as we're speaking, we just covered
like six months of work. What you can master in
a minute, though, is just clicking on YouTube and watching
(20:24):
videos of jugglers. Again, I'm almost done, okay, So with
this cascade, you've got the third ball, and just remember
that every half of a beat that it takes, you're
throwing a ball. You're constantly throwing a ball. The cool
thing about the third one is is when you start
with two balls in one hand, you obviously start with
that hand for tossing. You toss it up in the air.
(20:46):
As that one arcs you toss your left one. Is
that one actually tossed your third one, And about the
time you're tossing your third one, your first one's landing.
That's right, And you've just done what's called a flash
of juggling. That's right. And if you have trouble catching
at first, uh, don't worry about it. They recommend just
work on the tossing. And if you drop the ball,
(21:08):
and it's not a big deal at first. You just
want to get that hand motion down and uh learn
basically the motion of the cascade. Uh. And again stand
in front of a wall, because you're gonna find yourself
chasing the bean bag forward because you're tossing it further
away from you. But be careful. Yeah, don't start with chainsaws.
(21:29):
Don't start with chainsaws, which by the way, are modified
their props. They're not using real chainsaws unless you're crazy. Well,
they probably don't have the thing there like the Haunted
House chainsaws. All right, Well, after this break we are
going to get into variations on the casscade. All right, Josh,
(22:06):
you've got the cascade down, try the reverse cascade, which is,
like I said, just the opposite direction clock I'm sorry,
counterclockwise for your right hand, clockwise for your left. You're
scooping your hands inward instead of outward. Right. Oh, I'm
sorry you're scooping outward instead of inward right, which sounds weird.
But if you just do without balls, if you just
(22:27):
do your hands like that, it makes sense. Yeah. You
can just kind of do it in your imagination and
then just change directions. Yeah, and you wait a minute.
I've seen guys do that, right. It will feel like natural. Yeah.
The only the only big differences here is with your
the hand that you throw in a higher arc has changed.
(22:48):
So your first throw is going to be at a
lower arc than the second throw, that's all. And your
hands are moving in different directions. So remember the hand
that's going in counter clockwise motion through in the higher arc.
And that's that's called Josh's law. Okay. Um, So while
you're after you have mastered this, which will take a while.
(23:09):
As we've said a hundred fifty times, Um, you can
start doing little tricks uh thrown in there because just
a regular juggler isn't going to get very far in life.
Where you really make your dough is when you start
throwing in things like the half shower or the tennis move,
which is uh. And you know, if you look all
these up, it basically when you see jugglers just juggling
(23:31):
regular and then there aren't does something crazy looking. That's
what these moves are. Like. We could describe them in detail,
but it's really a lot cooler if you just go look.
But when you're watching juggling, you go, oh man, what
was that? Look what that girl just did with her arm?
That was maybe a tennis move or or Mills mess
invented by juggler Steve Mills, not my uncle Steve Mills.
(23:53):
I don't think you can juggle or Burke's barrage or
ruben Stein's revenge. Pretty cool stuff. Yeah, these are all
just complex arm crossing patterns as you're juggling. Different variations
on that um another variation that I like, have you
seen this before? Bounce juggling. It's my favorite thing rather
than throwing my favorite juggling okay god yea, Rather than
(24:15):
throwing the balls up in the air to toss juggle
the you throw the balls down on the ground and
bounce something. There's this kid I saw on YouTube if
you just search bounce juggling, it's the first video. It's
the thing, the first thing that comes up on YouTube
that guys could. He starts out in profile, Yeah, and
you're like, what's like his basement or whatever. Yeah, but
(24:35):
then once he I don't know how many balls he
had going he had quite a few. Yeah, And there's
different ways to do in this. You can either lift
bounce it by just sort of tossing it in the
air and letting it bounce, or you can actually throw
it at the ground, which is called a force bounce.
And I even wrote the coolest two of them. Bounce
juggling is really cool looking. Um. There's clawing, which is
(24:57):
basically palms down juggling. Um, so it's just the regular cascade,
but yeah, you're like snatching them out of the air. Yeah,
and it's like that's cool. Look, and you can do
that solely, or you can just throw in a claw
every now and then just delight your nieces and nephews
at Christmas. There is the chop yeah, which I think
this one is where you grab a ball and then
(25:18):
throw it underneath your other arm. You throw it upward
underneath your other arm. Yeah, it's like a diagonal, quick
diagonal move. And like I said it all you'll just
notice if you're not a real juggler, if you're just
watching in the park one day, they'll do some crazy
arm thing. It's just I call it flair. Well, there
(25:38):
is actually something called flair that's a type of juggling,
bartenders flare. Oh you know the movie Cocktail Bartenders flair
that was a type of juggling supposedly. I'm not a fan. Oh,
I thought it was great. I haven't seen the movie,
And yeah, I haven't seen it. And are you a
fan of bartending flair? Though, Hey, I'm a Jerry Thomas fan.
(26:00):
So yes, the answer is yes, all right, I like uh,
I like a bartender to like grump at me and
slide my whiskey down the bar. That's the best of trick.
I want to say. It's fine pretty much like all bartenders. Yeah,
that's true. Yeah, they do it. They're doing God's work.
So Jonathan Strickland says, generally speaking, if you have an
odd number of props, you're gonna require a criss cross pattern.
(26:23):
If you have an even number of props, it's going
to be two separate groups juggled in each hand. Yeah,
I remember you said you could juggle with one hand
kind of yeah, So remember, toss juggling is any kind
of juggling where the more the objects, the number of
objects you're juggling, exceeds the number of hands are using.
So if you use two balls in one hand, that's
(26:45):
toss juggling. It still counts. So if you're if you're
juggling four things, you're basically toss juggling separately with two
hands to two different things. So two bowling pins in
each hand is toss juggle. I don't know if you
could do clubs with one hand, can't you? Yeah? Maybe? Yeah,
you do it in columns and yeah. Yeah, that's that's
(27:09):
some talent right there. That's how That's how most people
do clubs is like one hand. I really I've just
seen like the Cascade mainly. Mhm no, no, evernytime I've
ever seen clubs. It's like one handed to one handed juggling.
You need to get out more. I guess I need
to go to the park. Yeah, that they hang out
(27:31):
there along with the Hackey sackers. Um. Yeah, well, like
you mentioned then, I guess if you're going to be
juggling with one hand, you've got the fountain, which is
the circular pattern, like if I had two balls and
I was just throwing them in a circle, or the
straight up and down which is the column right, and
that can be either synchronous or asynchronous. If you look
(27:52):
up synchronous column juggler on YouTube, they're gonna be doing
the exact same thing at the same time with both hands,
which is pretty neat. I think asynchronis may be a
little tougher though, just judging by the looks of it. Well,
Strickling makes the point that since you most people start
out learning to juggle asynchronous lee, which is like that
cascade is asynchronous. The hands aren't moving at the same time,
(28:14):
they're moving at opposite beats. Um that it's it's actually
easier for people to do that to do asynchronis makes sense.
I guess. Yeah. Even handed juggling, what is that called.
That's the one thing in juggling that doesn't have a name,
where you're just juggling four things at once or like
(28:35):
an even number of things, and you're using both your hands,
but you're juggling two clubs. There's no name for it.
It's driving me crazy. I'm sure there's a name for it. Well,
I don't know what it is. You should name it
after you at any at any term. Oh no, here
it is numbers juggling. Okay, okay. So when you're doing
(28:56):
numbers juggling, you uh, an even number of numbers juggling.
You're just doing it asynchronously, probably to start. Okay, that
was my point of my little tirade. I wonder how
many angry jugglers we have right now. Oh, probably a lot. Uh.
There's a couple of other kinds of juggling that are
(29:16):
fun to watch. Cigar box juggling and shaker cup. Um.
You've probably tried the cigar box thing with two boxes
or whatever. And that's when you have any number of boxes.
You're holding one in each hand, but then you have
quite a few in the middle and you'll toss them
up and flip them and then catch them between the
other two boxes. Yeah, it's pretty neat. And the same
(29:36):
sort of thing goes with the shaker cup. Um. Your
cups are nesting inside one another though, like cocktail cups
and you're you know, tossing those up and catching them.
And they probably was born out of bar tender flare. Yeah,
probably so all right, we mentioned clubs um as an alternative.
They look like the standard club looks sort of like
(29:59):
a modified bowling pin. Yeah, like a slim svelt bowling pin. Yeah,
a sexy bowling pin. Uh. There are European and American versions,
and I think the European version is slimmer and sexier
than the American go figure and um, I think they're
a little more popular as well, right, and the larger
and is meant to fit into a Champagne coop, the
(30:22):
European one, that's pretty neat. Uh. And I think you
said that clubs also if you want to do like
knives and torches, they call that a club as well. Yeah.
I think there's like a so a few broad categories
of props and then clubs that kind of thing, and
then they fall under those subcategories like axes and torches
andories out the na uh, and then there's ring juggling.
(30:45):
Of course, they're very stable, um, because of their gyroscopic
properties and so don't even mention. Well, the point is
that you can juggle a lot more rings at once,
maybe than you might be able to juggle a ball. Yeah,
and that's pretty impressive to see as well. Yeah, and
then there's this thing I found today called contact ring juggling.
(31:09):
Is when you're not throwing rings, ah you really just
you're rolling them along. Well, now that's contact juggling with
like a ball is when you're like doing the Harlem
globe trotter thing and rolling it down your arm and
over your body and stuff. It's pretty cool. But the
contact ring juggling is just just look it up. It's
really cool. It's like, I mean, there's all different shapes,
but the ones I've seen are mainly a figure eight um,
(31:32):
and you're just manipulating them such that they look like
it looks like an illusion, almost like one will be
stationary and it looks like the other ring is circling
around it. Well it is, but uh, just take my
word for contact ring juggling. Everyone go check it out.
Very popular in Asia. It looks like they've mastered it. Okay,
(31:55):
very cool. So let's say you got a buddy and
you both like to go to the park. Well, this
is a big one and pretty cool. It's a thing.
You've seen it. Yeah. Stuggling makes the point that juggling
is kind of a social thing populated by social creatures,
Like there's lots of juggling clubs and that kind of
stuff and that um where you know, you and I
(32:16):
think of juggling. It is like a solitary activity, no way, man.
If you get two good jugglers together, it becomes a
feast for the mind and the eyes. We could add
this to our live show, Juggling Us Juggling, Yeah, all right,
in tandem. We have a lot of practice to do
because what we could do Josh on stage, if we
put a lot of work into it, is something called
(32:37):
stealing and replacing. And that is when you basically will
go up. If you're juggling four clubs, I'll go and
steal one, or maybe steal two, and then three and
then four, and then I'm the one juggling. But the
juggling never stops. Right. It looks as as a seamless
(32:57):
synchronous pattern on an erupted If you just like stop
another person from juggling, it's just being a jerk. The
point of it is that I'm that juggling. Yeah, I
guess so, but you're still juggling the whole time you're
doing that. That's right. The whole point of of juggling
with two people and like stealing and replacing is that
the balls. If you were able to ask these juggled
(33:20):
balls what they think is going on, they would say nothing,
it's the same thing. We're doing the same pattern. Say
Chuck's hands were a little sweatier, right, but what really
happened was I replaced you. Yeah, that's one way to
do it. Or we could stand in front of each
other like four ft apart and uh you know, we're
(33:42):
juggling the clubs and then tossing each other the clubs
and we've got our little uh post stuff. You should
know act all worked out. Yeah, what's cool? So with
stealing replacing with with juggling balls, like I would stand
facing opposite you and just kind of grab yours like
you said, and just ultimately like take over your catches,
and then I would be juggling and then you can
steal it back and we could go back and forth.
(34:03):
And definitely with clubs, I would be standing next to
you and just basically kind of push you out of
the way. Well, that's if you're stealing and replacing. If
we're passing, then we're standing in front of each other
and just throwing them back and forth to each other.
And there's actually a pretty established way of um passing
where it's called the three three ten where we do
three passes where every third toss I passed to you
(34:26):
and you catch it, so you know we're in tandem
and everything's going right. And then after three of those,
you do every second toss. Then after three of those
you do every toss, you toss another one, and then
by that last one, we're just like on fire, just
throwing throwing ones back and forth between ourselves. Yeah, and
we did mention combat juggling. That was not a joke.
(34:49):
It is a thing, and I've seen I looked up
these little competitions. It's when it's sort of like dodgeball.
You get, you know, ten jugglers on a stage and
they all start juggling, and they all start to try
iron thwart the other jugglers juggle while maintaining theirs. So
I would go up and throw mine in the air
(35:09):
and try and knock yours out of your hand, but
you can't, you know, get too crazy because you've gotta
still juggle or else you're out. The way we've been
describing this one, it feels like we've been replaced by
impostors who listened to the show a lot and didn't
know what topic to pick. Isn't that weird? It is weird?
I'm myself? Are you yourself? No? I'm you? Oh god, weird. Well,
(35:33):
we'll get to the bottom of this right after these
messages and that chuck comes the darkest time? Is this
Josh actual? Yeah? Okay, yeah, I'm replaced. I replaced the replacement. Okay, um, nope,
(36:01):
still here saying bizarre stuff like I replaced the replacement.
All right, And we're talking about the physics of juggling
fun fun, which is it's actually kind of straightforward. It's
stuff you would think of, but it's nice to put
it into terms where we can say that we covered
the physics of juggling. That's right. Like, so, the main
factor acting on juggling, probably the most important part in
(36:25):
the whole thing, is our good friend gravity, that's right. Uh.
An acceleration due to gravity specifically is nine point eight
m slash s to the second power, meaning nine point
eight meters per second every second, So when you drop something,
speed is going to increase by nine point eight meters
per second. And don't bother us, we're not including any
(36:48):
kind of error resistance. We're in a vacuum. To demonstrate
all of our physics were always in a vacuum, right,
our little stuff you should know vacuum part next to
the way back machine. Um. So, it's a constant acceleration
and because of that, the only way to slow down
your pattern is by throwing something higher. Yeah, and so
the more things that you add into your pattern, the
(37:11):
higher you're going to have to throw, because you have
a constant acceleration downward acceleration after your toss. Um. So
that means you have to open up your pattern by
throwing it higher up the more stuff you have, because
you simply would not have enough time to throw x
amount of balls in the air. I mean, you can
increase your hand speed somewhat, but at a certain point
(37:32):
you just can't do it exactly. They're gonna be bean
bags everywhere. Another um factor is that it's not really
a factor. It's more of a fact. When you're throwing
your balls, you're throwing them in a parabola, which means
that the only, uh, the only velocity that counts is
the is the vertical velocity, the vertical acceleration. When you
(37:54):
throw something up, you're exerting your own force upward and
and what's it peaks ex gravity is pushing it back downward.
That's right, it's gonna have a horror zonal velocity, but
that's going to be constant, so there's no force acting
on it. There's no change in velocity. I guess with
the column it's pretty much straight up and down. But
(38:15):
generally speaking, uh, you're gonna be have both, right. Yeah,
it's moving horizontally, but there's no force pushing it. There's
no change in I'm sorry, there's no change in acceleration.
It's constant exactly, Okay. And then of course the mass
of your props also count, yeah, which is why if
you've ever seen the old trick where someone's doing a
(38:35):
bowling ball with a tennis ball with a club, it's
super impressive because it's much much easier to juggle things
with the same mass. Yeah, because you're just making the
same motion over and over again. When you are juggling
things with three different maths, meaning they have three different
um three different amounts of inertia or they require more
(38:59):
different amounts of force to overcome inertia. Um. Then yes,
like you said, that's kind of impressive. It just requires
that much more mental acuity. That's right. Is that all
the physics. Now we get into the math. I know
this actually kind of interested me a little bit, despite
the fact that it is math and I'm well known
(39:19):
to not love it. But um. There was a mathematician
who named Claude Shannon who proposed a juggling theorem um
that basically describes the relationship of of a cask or
well just of a juggle. Right, keep saying juggle? Is
that a thing? Yeah? Did I make it up? No?
(39:40):
I think it's a thing. I think it's called something
else though, a juggle. Yeah, oh a flash, a flash,
there you go. That's a round of juggling, one single
round where all three, year, all five, or all seven
of your balls have been tossed once at least. But
to the layman it's called a juggle. Right, so everyone
knows what I mean. Uh, And this is uh in
(40:00):
parentheses F plus d um, and then that would be
times eight right outside the parentheses equals v plus d
in printheses times in when F is the time the
ball is in the air, D as the time as
a ball in the hand, h is a number of hands,
v is time that the hand is empty, and in
as the number of balls being juggled. So basically, what
(40:22):
he's saying is, if you add together the amount of
time the ball spends in the air plus the amount
of time it spends in the hand, right, which is
the full amount of time that that ball exists during
a flash, multiply that times your hands to the number
of hands. That's going to equal the time your hand
is empty. Uh, plus the time the ball spends in
(40:43):
the hand times the number of balls being juggled. I
saw no reason for this equation whatsoever. Like at first,
I was like, oh, that's that's pretty cool, And then
I spelled it out to myself in a It's like, yeah,
the amount of time the balls out of the hand
plus the amount of time the balls in the hand
times the number of balls that what. Yeah. I didn't
(41:06):
understand what the point of it was. So Claude Shannon,
please get in touch with us. Well, that's why he
did it so people would write stuff about it, you know. Well,
the thing is I guess the problem is that it
says Shannon build the juggling robots. So I guess this
formula allows robotics to happen. Yeah, and I saw the
juggling robots, different robots that toss things and catch things, right,
(41:30):
It's kind of cool. Okay. Yeah, So if if that's
the point of the Shannon theorem, is that what that's called,
sure the Claude's Claude's law, then then I understand it.
And I take it back. What if there's some Claude's
law that's something awful that we don't know about. That's
(41:52):
the case. And then there is site swapping um, which
is another math application. It's sort of like musical akin
to a musical score to a musician, as a form
of notation describing the juggling pattern, and is what jugglers
use two um. Basically, if you were going to write
(42:13):
out your juggling pattern and send it to your buddy,
you wouldn't say, take your right hand and blah blah blah.
You would use numbers to represent it. Which this actually
does make sense. Yeah, this made a little more sense
to me for sure. Yeah. And um, so like a
normal three ball cascade is three, three, three. Each throw
takes three beats. A zero is a rest on an
(42:33):
empty hand, and a one is handoff from one to
the other. And you can actually if you add them
all together and take the average, you can tell how
many balls are in that pattern. Right, So in a three, three,
three you add those together, that's nine divided by three
because there's three different numerals, and you've got three or
four five one four one is also three, right, matth
(42:54):
that sounds pretty difficult. The four one, you know, Yeah,
the three three makes intuitive sense to me. But that's
you know, the four one five four five one four one.
That's tough. Oh man, is anyone still listening though? Can
you hear the echo? I can. Uh. If you look
(43:17):
at a juggler, you might notice that they're probably not
looking at their hands like at the catching. The catching
is sort of automatic. Uh, they're kind of looking sort
of up at the arc um. And they have done
experiments to see where um your eyes go um A A. M.
Van Santvoord. Peter J. Beck did some experiments that actually
(43:38):
found that while the peak is important, if you see
the first one hundred milliseconds of the flight path, then
you can juggle successfully, yeah, which is pretty impressive. They
found that jugglers are relying more on feel sure, then
and then vision. That's why you can juggle blindfolded if
you're really good. Supposedly some people can. I've seen it.
Oh yeah, yeah, I bet Brandon Ross can. I could
(44:01):
see that dude is talented, So Chuck, we could probably
keep talking about juggling for the next five years because
there's a lot to it. Yeah, man, this is just
a primer. Hopefully you guys are inspired, or at least
were inspired in the first maybe twenty minutes. The good
part of this episode to go out and um and
learn to juggle. I know I was. And while we
(44:21):
hate ourselves, we don't hate ourselves that much. Right, we're
gonna end this one. Yeah, So, uh, we think that
you should learn about juggling, and you can start by
typing that word into the search bar at how stuff
works dot com. Since I said search bar, it's time
for listener mail. Uh. This is a really touching story,
(44:43):
oddly enough, from Jennifer Grace. She's an actor in New
York City who um played a very long run of
Our Town on stage and had to go there without
her husband. At first because they were in Chicago and
stuff you should know turned out to be the thing
that linked them together before he finally moved to New
York to join her. Um. They've been together for thirteen
(45:05):
years now and they had their son, Emmett last fall,
and a month before Emmett turned one. Uh Tom, her
husband was admitted to the hospital and has been there
ever since. UM. He has a very rare issue with
his bone marrow that they finally uh diagnosed as a
plastic anemia. So basically he has no immune system, which
(45:26):
means he can't risk getting sick, which means her son,
their son, can't even visit him, which is just unbelievably sad. Um.
She can visit, bring mask and gloves and gown, but
they can't even touch each other, the husband and wife.
And this came on suddenly too, right, Yeah, she said,
it's pretty much the worst thing ever. I mean, they
spent a lot of time even diagnosing this thing before
(45:48):
they came. I know, it's just so terrible and they're
just really really great people. Um she said, Uh, it
looks like we will be going forward though with a
bone marrow transplant because as a brother who was a
match and he does have a good chance of recovering
with this bone marrow transplant and a round of chemo
followed by this transplant in the new year. She says,
(46:09):
There's not a lot that I can give him by
way of a Christmas present this year, given the circumstances,
but I'm hoping that perhaps you would give him a
shout out on an episode. It's been a very special
shared experience for us. It really brightened his day. So Tom, dude.
They also sent me a video of them playing a
song together in the kitchen doing uh Springsteen song and
(46:31):
it was just like they're the cutest couple ever and
they're really great. And UM, I'm gonna plug their go
fund me site because um, they didn't even ask me to.
That's why I'm plugging it. Uh. It is go fund
me dot com slash F seven five nine z G
and that will help out offset um their hospital builds
a little bit. And there's really nice folks. Since Tom
(46:54):
get better soon, man, I hope that operation goes great. Yeah, Tom,
here's to your buddy, and uh yeah, and keep us
keep us posted, you guys. Yeah, please do, Jennifer, that
would be great. Uh, and we should totally post that
go fund me stuff too on social Yeah, yeah, we'll
do that. Well. If you have a great story about
how Chuck and I brought you together with your s O,
(47:16):
or helped you through a rough time, or did anything good,
we want to hear about it. You can tweet to
us at s y s K podcast. You can join
us on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know,
and you can send us an email to stuff Podcast
at how stuff worst dot com and it's always joined
us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should
Know dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
(47:40):
of iHeart Radios. How Stuff Works for more podcasts for
my Heart Radios at the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hello friends, Chuck here on a Saturday, bringing your my
select pick for the week from January two thousand fifteen.
Jan is uh. It is one of our famous Colon episodes,
Juggling Colon, What the heck learn all about juggling right now?
(00:21):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry
just doing a little tandem juggling with my bra. That's
what we're doing right now. Yeah, yeah, I wish you
(00:42):
guys could see this because we've got pretty good cascade
right now. Look at this half shower, half shower, halfhower. Man,
that was a good one. Broe balls at once. Yeah, Jerry,
come light these torches on fire. Wow man, half shower
of rain and fire. This is really dangerous. Can you juggle? No?
(01:05):
But I want to after this. My brother learned, of course,
of course, I'm sure he's born knowing how to juggle,
came out of the womb. Juggling. Now he learned back
when it like in high school and mastered it pretty quickly.
And now an he can still juggle some I think
it's one of those things. Well, once you learn sort
of the basics, you can always do it, because apparently
a lot of it comes down to muscle memory, which
(01:27):
is to say motor memory. Yeah, and in true Chuck fashion,
I tried to learn to juggle for about an hour
and never finished. Did you like see any progress over
that hour? Yeah? I could. I could do the little
one hand juggling two balls with one hand thing, okay,
But I did a lot of chasing the ball. That's
a problem, which apparently, if you're beginning juggler, you're gonna
(01:49):
be throwing the ball further and further away from you,
just naturally chasing the ball, and they call it chasing it.
So what do they suggest? They suggest that you learn
to juggle close to and facing a wall. Yeah, because
that way you can't move forward or you'll just keep
hitting your head and you'll scratch your face up on
the brick and quit juggling. This is a Jonathan Strickland
joint of tech stuff. It's reeks of Strickland. It does
(02:13):
like even if the byeline hadn't been on there, I
would have been like, this is Strickland. But I remember
when this one was made. It was like right when
I got here, and like he there's a video embedded
of Strickland teaching you how to juggle. It smells, it
reeks of bald head cream and bowling shirts. Yeah, and
it also has an illustration by Marcus who clearly always
(02:34):
wanted to be a comic book illustrator, because the guy
who's in the graph on how to juggle is just
totally ripped like a comic book. Here. I remember, Marcus,
it seems like a million years ago. It was so
juggling history. How long people been juggling? Uh, chuck. People
(02:58):
have been juggling since at least tomb exactly. They found
uh in Egyptian tombs um hieroglyphics showing women toss juggling.
And there are many kinds of juggling, by the way,
and we're mainly going to talk about toss juggling, which
is throwing something up in the air, throwing more things
(03:22):
up in the air than you have hands. Yes, that's
toss juggling. And there are, like you said, a bunch
of other kinds, but if you're a toss juggler, you
probably don't consider the other kinds real juggling. You're like,
those are cool and everything, but that's not real juggling. Yeah.
I asked my friend, our friend Brandon Ross from the
Stuff you Should Know Art Department, clearly a juggler, very
(03:43):
good juggler, and uh I sent a message to him
and did not hear back in time. I was like,
it doesn't here that modern jugglers poopoo things like taking
a bite out of the apple and like some of
those old school tricks. Is that true or not? And
I didn't hear back from him, So maybe crickets, I'll
fall Well, you know, was on Facebook, Okay, so he'll
get to it when he gets to it. So anyway,
(04:04):
we're in ancient Egypt to be exact. That's right. There
were jugglers in Greece and Rome and India and Thebes
and Thebes in Europe, and I think four BC was
when it was actually written down that people were juggling. Yeah,
supposedly in the Talmud a rabbi named Shimon ben Gummlil. Yeah,
(04:26):
I think I probably nailed that. Probably he could juggle
eight torches at once. That's hard to believe because world
records today are like seven I think for clubs, is
it seven I think so. Yeah, But I mean, if
if this rabbi was juggling eight torches, that sounds like
(04:47):
it maybe pumped up a little bit throughout the years,
you know, like it was two and then it was like,
oh it was eight. Although this was the time of miracles,
you know, like enough oil to keep it going for
eight days assuring a siege. Why not a rabbi who
could juggle eight torches. It seems kind of paltry by comparison.
(05:08):
Good point um. Through the Roman era, apparently that jugglers
were actually held in high esteem, but then they kind
of went down into pooper a little bit hilarious because
people associated with them like like magicians, as con artists.
So I don't know if it was like, hey, look
at what this guy's doing while someone else is picking
their pocket, but that's kind of what it seems like
(05:30):
it might have been going on. Yeah, apparently you were
a con artist, Like you said, sure, everybody knows that
you can't trust a juggler a juggalo, well at the
right at the at the at the time, that's how
people thought of jugglers. This seems to be during like
the Holy Roman Empire in the West, right then the
medieval era hits, and suddenly jugglers start to become a
(05:53):
little a little less threatening and actually a little more
clown like. Yeah. Like, Initially they seemed to have been
not revered necessarily, but I thought of in fairly high esteem.
Then they went the opposite direction, and then they came
back as clowns. I wonder how many like um behind
closed doors, how many like emperors and kings tried it
(06:15):
out after seeing it in the door, or just like
morons with it, yeah, and then had someone's head chopped
off frustration. They took the chuck route. Although I didn't
behead anybody, but during the medieval era you could. If
you found a juggler, you probably also found something of
a minstrel or performer and all around entertainer who probably
traveled from town to town, maybe asking people to bring
(06:38):
out there dead for some side work perhaps, and then
juggling corpses, that's right, which must have been a sight
to see. And then in the seventeen hundreds they became
more of a circus act, and in the late eighteen
hundreds and nineteen hundreds vaudeville came along, and of course
any sort of skill like that was big in vaudeville,
(06:59):
and I'd did not know this, but W. C. Fields
was a juggler in the vaudevillian days. I didn't know
that either, before he became just a drunk actor. And
he's not the one who raped anybody, right, Who was it?
I think that was Fatty R Fatty R Buckled, That's
who it was. Yeah, same Aarras, same guys. I looked
it up and I ran across um the Hollywood hell Club.
(07:22):
So apparently before the brat pack, before the rat pack,
there was a group of like early early Hollywood guys,
Errol Flynn who was a rapist, w C. Fields, John
Barrymore that just raised hell in um Hollywood in like
the twenties. Errol Flynn was a rapist, really accused rapist.
(07:42):
I didn't know that. So then vaudeville declines, uh, circuses
sort of decline a little bit for a while, and
then jugglers started hitting the streets, or as Jonathan Strickland said,
or become mathematicians. Yep, we'll get to the math connection,
which is yet, but I don't know that. Like they
(08:03):
formed their own stage shows, performed on street corners, or
became mathematicians. Those were the three options if you were
a juggler. Uh. And then of course, Um, in the
nineteen forties, I say, of course, because it's common knowledge
that these are when the juggling groups and conventions were
formed and held. The International Brotherhood of Magicians UH decided,
(08:24):
you know, at a meeting, Hey, guys like the jugglers
got together and had a few drinks and said, I
don't like being known as a magician. Yeah, you know,
that's how the jugglers tell it. The magicians were like,
get the jugglers. Yeah, and then they went threw down
their smoke bomb when they were gone. So they formed
and splintered off and formed the International Juggling Association. Uh.
(08:46):
And in nineteen sixty nine they started holding championships and
competitions Summer of Juggling. And in two thousand Jason Garfield,
a very famous juggler, formed the World Juggling Federation and
said ESPN and you need to put this stuff on TV.
So once a year they put it on TV progress
(09:06):
along with the spelling b and the dart competition. What
else which I watched the other day? Um, log rolling, yeah,
lumberjacking sure, uh law and darting no, that's illegal. No
more it's like cock fighting. Um, so all right, let's
get into it then, So we're actually gonna teach everybody
(09:28):
how to juggle, like no kidding, Yeah, and if you're
really into this, like we're gonna describe a lot of
things visually, which is always a train wreck for us.
Um So I would recommend you do like I did
and just get on the old YouTube and look up
what cascade juggling looks like. And they're four or five
guys who have tons and tons of videos. There's there's
(09:50):
a few. There's one guy that I believe is kind
of the gold standard for YouTube instructional juggling videos. His
name is Adam Shamsky h O M s k y.
And like, I'm sure I watched him. That guy pops
it into slow motion for you. There's like, um like graphics.
When like he throws something straight up, you might not
(10:11):
have caught it. So it says throwing straight up, he's good, okay,
and he's just doing it for the love of juggling.
You can tell. I think they all do, I would hope. So.
I don't know if you make a ton of money
as a juggler these days, although there is I should
recommend it's gonna wait till the end. There's a great
article on grant land dot com called Dropped by Jason
(10:34):
uh Fagon, and he details a big, long story on
Anthony Gatto, who may be the best juggler on the planet.
He juggled for Circus a Oh, he had a bunch
of the records until recently. Yeah, twelve world records and
he's amazing dude. Um, but he quit last year to
run a concrete resurfacing business after becoming disenchanted with the
(10:58):
juggling scene. They basically calling out all these kids you
stay saying like you filmed something a hundred times and
only nail at once and then you upload it to YouTube.
That's not the same. He basically his quote is if
you can't do a trick and three tries, you can't
do it. He said, you may have done it, but
it doesn't mean you can do it. It's essentially what
you're talking about. This guy's story is the premise for
(11:20):
Office Space. Yeah, basically, but he's amazing. If you watch
Anthony Gotto juggling, like he will break the record for like, uh,
let's say a number of balls in a rain shower
and um, for the amount of time though he won't
like do it for ten seconds, he'll do it for
like ten minutes. And other jugglers are like, this dude
(11:42):
is insane how long he can keep all these clubs
and balls and torches or whatever in the air. That's
really funny that you mentioned him and what happened to him,
because I noticed his records were like all mid two thousand's,
the most recent ones were, and I wondered what happened
to Anthony Gotto? Now I know it's the Finger. It's
a really good article. Actually it's Nate dropped on grant
(12:03):
land dot com. Alright, so how do you juggle? So Chuck,
here's how you juggle. Basically, you want to start with
three balls, and if you have even half of a
brain half, you will make sure that those balls are
beam bags, because bean bags are dead drops or they
drop dead, You're not gonna chase them all over the room. No,
(12:23):
when they fall, they just stay put. Yeah. Hacky sacks
are good too, or you can buy like my brother did,
the Little um which are basically hacky sacks, a little
juggling kit. Yeah, the complete Klutz's Guide to juggling, isn't
that many. I think it was before the Complete Idiots Guides,
there was something called like something for klutz Is and
it would teach you like things how to how to
(12:45):
juggle dexterity. Yeah, interesing. Um So, anyway, you start with
three bean bags, which in the juggling world what these are.
Anything you juggled are called props, and specifically bean bag
falls under the category of balls. Even though they're not
necessarily balls, they're still under the prop category balls because
it's not a chainsaw or a torch exactly club, which
(13:07):
would fall under the category of clubs. Um So for
most of the time we're gonna say balls. But just
imagine as you're starting out, we're talking about being bags. Okay, okay,
So you get three of them, chuck, Yes, you take
two and you put them in a drawer to start.
That's the first step to learning juggling. Take two of
your three balls and put them away. Yeah, and strickling
(13:30):
and experts say you should literally start with tossing one
back and forth to get your arc down because the
key is consistency. You don't want to and you know
once you get good you can do all sorts of things.
But you don't want to toss one being bag up
four ft and one three ft when you're first starting out.
You want to kind of toss them all about the same. Yeah,
(13:51):
and you need to learn your hand movements, which are
very important. Once you get hand movements down, you can
do variations on the hand movements, but ultimately there's a
basic hand movement that's a scooping motion. And um, the
easiest one to start with to start practicing is the
cascade pattern. Yeah, there's two main patterns, the shower and
the cascade, which we've joked about so far about ten times.
(14:14):
The shower is the one that you see on cartoons
when someone's basically just throwing balls in a big circle
and a big loop. Beautiful, beautiful, very cool looking. The
cascade looks kind of like fireworks if you like, squint
your eyes, use your imagination. I never thought about that. Yeah,
Like as the balls go up and they are out
there basically arcing outward across your body. Yes, um, and
(14:36):
it looks just kind of like you know, one of
those big fireworks where like blows up and then like
this kind of trails downwards slowly. Yeah, that's ultimately what
it looks like. To me, Yeah, I get that. Yeah,
So the cascade, you move your hands in a figure
eight and um. For the regular cascade, your right hand
goes clockwise, your left hand is counter clockwise alternating these tosses.
(14:58):
If you reverse that, it's called a reverse cascade. So
the key here just remember you're using one ball still,
but you're making a scooping motion in towards your torso
like in towards yourself, not away from your body, but
in towards your body, right in front of your chest.
Your your feet are shoulder with apart, because they always
(15:20):
should be when you do anything, and you're tossing the
thing up into an arc in about just above eye level,
that's your that's the one that you start with. And
you usually start with your dominant hand, yeah, because that
will just probably be easier because you're more used to
throwing things with that hand. Right. And I didn't see
it anywhere, but I put two and two together in
(15:40):
this article, and it looks like, oh, it looks like
so I could be wrong everybody, but it looks like
if you are doing a cascade of any kind, reverse cascade,
any anything like that, whatever hand is going clockwise is
the hand that you throw in the highest arc above
your eye level. Okay, so you've got your one bag
(16:00):
and you you make a scooping motion with your right
hand in a counter in a clockwise motion, and you
toss the ball or yeah, you toss the ball in
an arc just above eye level, and then it drops
and you catch it in your left hand, and then
now in your left hand you toss it again. But
this one should be slightly under the arc of the
(16:22):
first one. It's moving in a counter clockwise motion, so
that eventually, when you add more balls and you have
them all in the air, they're not just bumping into
each other at the same place. The one from your
clockwise motion hand is going higher and the one from
your counter clockwise motion hand is following just beneath the
arc of the first ball. That's right, it's inside that
(16:45):
ball's path. Yes, uh, And you're gonna at first be
very frustrated because you're gonna want to throw both of
the balls at the same time when you're just starting
out with the two, just to get used to the motion,
because it's just that sort of like if you've ever
played drums, it's hard to make your right arm your
left arm your right foot your left foot do different things. Yeah,
(17:07):
it's a bit of a brain trick. I think some
people catch on quicker than others, obviously, But um, you
want the two tosses to be distinct and separate. And
one way to do this, Strickland says, is to count
your toss like, toss one, toss two. Ye, toss one,
toss two, And then your little brother is gonna say
what are you doing in there? Shut up nothing, toss
(17:31):
one right. Um, so we might as well add the
second ball. Now, are you ready that we've just been
with one ball? Yeah, because that one toss one is
with your your clockwise hand. Yeah, toss two is with
your counterclockwise hand. You catch the second one, your toss
two with your clockwise hand. Toss one, toss two. You're
(17:52):
still just with one ball here. Now we're gonna add two. Okay,
So you have one in your left hand, you have one.
You're right or doing a cascade, so with your right
hand you're making a clockwise scooping motion. Yes, right, huh, yeah,
(18:12):
I got it right. I wish people could see this one.
So this is delightful. So, um, we're gonna throw the
first ball and as it reaches its zenith just above
our eyes. We're gonna throw the second one just underneath
the arc of the first one. Yeah, you know it's funny,
is it? People that were walking by my desk all
day saw me doing the same thing, because you kind
(18:33):
of do it to yourself to be like, okay, I
get I get the motion. Yeah, like why is struggling
saying here? And we were using no bean bags, no,
just imaginary ones. Exactly. I didn't drop a single one.
I'm a great imaginary juggler. So chuck um with with
this toss one toss to Ultimately, what you're doing is,
let's say it takes a second for you to throw
(18:55):
one ball to your other hand. You threw the second
ball about the halfway mark of that first throw. So
every half second you're throwing a ball, is that the deal?
If you're fast, you are Ultimately you're doing that. But
it doesn't even necessarily have to be a second. Let's
say it takes us two seconds for it to go
(19:18):
up and then down. So every second you're throwing, every
half of whatever beat it takes for the ball to
be tossed and then come down, you're throwing a ball,
right okay, okay, which means that when you finally had
the third ball in there, whoa, you can which, let's
go ahead and do that now. Yeah, you want to
hold two balls in one hand obviously, and uh they
(19:41):
suggest to hold the two and the dominant hand, although
if you're having a problem um making that third toss,
they say, sometimes switch it up and it may help
to hold the two in the non domination because some
people just want to hold one and you're really just
throwing two with another one in your hand, or else
you're throwing one and then two at once, which you
(20:03):
don't want to do either. Yeah, you're gonna be frustrated.
It takes a lot of time in practice. Like, don't
give up like I did when you didn't master it
in one hour. Right, if you think that you're supposed
to be mastering this as we're speaking, we just covered
like six months of work. What you can master in
a minute, though, is just clicking on YouTube and watching
(20:24):
videos of jugglers. Again, I'm almost done, okay, So with
this cascade, you've got the third ball, and just remember
that every half of a beat that it takes, you're
throwing a ball. You're constantly throwing a ball. The cool
thing about the third one is is when you start
with two balls in one hand, you obviously start with
that hand for tossing. You toss it up in the air.
(20:46):
As that one arcs you toss your left one. Is
that one actually tossed your third one, And about the
time you're tossing your third one, your first one's landing.
That's right, And you've just done what's called a flash
of juggling. That's right. And if you have trouble catching
at first, uh, don't worry about it. They recommend just
work on the tossing. And if you drop the ball,
(21:08):
and it's not a big deal at first. You just
want to get that hand motion down and uh learn
basically the motion of the cascade. Uh. And again stand
in front of a wall, because you're gonna find yourself
chasing the bean bag forward because you're tossing it further
away from you. But be careful. Yeah, don't start with chainsaws.
(21:29):
Don't start with chainsaws, which by the way, are modified
their props. They're not using real chainsaws unless you're crazy. Well,
they probably don't have the thing there like the Haunted
House chainsaws. All right, Well, after this break we are
going to get into variations on the casscade. All right, Josh,
(22:06):
you've got the cascade down, try the reverse cascade, which is,
like I said, just the opposite direction clock I'm sorry,
counterclockwise for your right hand, clockwise for your left. You're
scooping your hands inward instead of outward. Right. Oh, I'm
sorry you're scooping outward instead of inward right, which sounds weird.
But if you just do without balls, if you just
(22:27):
do your hands like that, it makes sense. Yeah. You
can just kind of do it in your imagination and
then just change directions. Yeah, and you wait a minute.
I've seen guys do that, right. It will feel like natural. Yeah.
The only the only big differences here is with your
the hand that you throw in a higher arc has changed.
(22:48):
So your first throw is going to be at a
lower arc than the second throw, that's all. And your
hands are moving in different directions. So remember the hand
that's going in counter clockwise motion through in the higher arc.
And that's that's called Josh's law. Okay. Um, So while
you're after you have mastered this, which will take a while.
(23:09):
As we've said a hundred fifty times, Um, you can
start doing little tricks uh thrown in there because just
a regular juggler isn't going to get very far in life.
Where you really make your dough is when you start
throwing in things like the half shower or the tennis move,
which is uh. And you know, if you look all
these up, it basically when you see jugglers just juggling
(23:31):
regular and then there aren't does something crazy looking. That's
what these moves are. Like. We could describe them in detail,
but it's really a lot cooler if you just go look.
But when you're watching juggling, you go, oh man, what
was that? Look what that girl just did with her arm?
That was maybe a tennis move or or Mills mess
invented by juggler Steve Mills, not my uncle Steve Mills.
(23:53):
I don't think you can juggle or Burke's barrage or
ruben Stein's revenge. Pretty cool stuff. Yeah, these are all
just complex arm crossing patterns as you're juggling. Different variations
on that um another variation that I like, have you
seen this before? Bounce juggling. It's my favorite thing rather
than throwing my favorite juggling okay god yea, Rather than
(24:15):
throwing the balls up in the air to toss juggle
the you throw the balls down on the ground and
bounce something. There's this kid I saw on YouTube if
you just search bounce juggling, it's the first video. It's
the thing, the first thing that comes up on YouTube
that guys could. He starts out in profile, Yeah, and
you're like, what's like his basement or whatever. Yeah, but
(24:35):
then once he I don't know how many balls he
had going he had quite a few. Yeah, And there's
different ways to do in this. You can either lift
bounce it by just sort of tossing it in the
air and letting it bounce, or you can actually throw
it at the ground, which is called a force bounce.
And I even wrote the coolest two of them. Bounce
juggling is really cool looking. Um. There's clawing, which is
(24:57):
basically palms down juggling. Um, so it's just the regular cascade,
but yeah, you're like snatching them out of the air. Yeah,
and it's like that's cool. Look, and you can do
that solely, or you can just throw in a claw
every now and then just delight your nieces and nephews
at Christmas. There is the chop yeah, which I think
this one is where you grab a ball and then
(25:18):
throw it underneath your other arm. You throw it upward
underneath your other arm. Yeah, it's like a diagonal, quick
diagonal move. And like I said it all you'll just
notice if you're not a real juggler, if you're just
watching in the park one day, they'll do some crazy
arm thing. It's just I call it flair. Well, there
(25:38):
is actually something called flair that's a type of juggling,
bartenders flare. Oh you know the movie Cocktail Bartenders flair
that was a type of juggling supposedly. I'm not a fan. Oh,
I thought it was great. I haven't seen the movie,
And yeah, I haven't seen it. And are you a
fan of bartending flair? Though, Hey, I'm a Jerry Thomas fan.
(26:00):
So yes, the answer is yes, all right, I like uh,
I like a bartender to like grump at me and
slide my whiskey down the bar. That's the best of trick.
I want to say. It's fine pretty much like all bartenders. Yeah,
that's true. Yeah, they do it. They're doing God's work.
So Jonathan Strickland says, generally speaking, if you have an
odd number of props, you're gonna require a criss cross pattern.
(26:23):
If you have an even number of props, it's going
to be two separate groups juggled in each hand. Yeah,
I remember you said you could juggle with one hand
kind of yeah, So remember, toss juggling is any kind
of juggling where the more the objects, the number of
objects you're juggling, exceeds the number of hands are using.
So if you use two balls in one hand, that's
(26:45):
toss juggling. It still counts. So if you're if you're
juggling four things, you're basically toss juggling separately with two
hands to two different things. So two bowling pins in
each hand is toss juggle. I don't know if you
could do clubs with one hand, can't you? Yeah? Maybe? Yeah,
you do it in columns and yeah. Yeah, that's that's
(27:09):
some talent right there. That's how That's how most people
do clubs is like one hand. I really I've just
seen like the Cascade mainly. Mhm no, no, evernytime I've
ever seen clubs. It's like one handed to one handed juggling.
You need to get out more. I guess I need
to go to the park. Yeah, that they hang out
(27:31):
there along with the Hackey sackers. Um. Yeah, well, like
you mentioned then, I guess if you're going to be
juggling with one hand, you've got the fountain, which is
the circular pattern, like if I had two balls and
I was just throwing them in a circle, or the
straight up and down which is the column right, and
that can be either synchronous or asynchronous. If you look
(27:52):
up synchronous column juggler on YouTube, they're gonna be doing
the exact same thing at the same time with both hands,
which is pretty neat. I think asynchronis may be a
little tougher though, just judging by the looks of it. Well,
Strickling makes the point that since you most people start
out learning to juggle asynchronous lee, which is like that
cascade is asynchronous. The hands aren't moving at the same time,
(28:14):
they're moving at opposite beats. Um that it's it's actually
easier for people to do that to do asynchronis makes sense.
I guess. Yeah. Even handed juggling, what is that called.
That's the one thing in juggling that doesn't have a name,
where you're just juggling four things at once or like
(28:35):
an even number of things, and you're using both your hands,
but you're juggling two clubs. There's no name for it.
It's driving me crazy. I'm sure there's a name for it. Well,
I don't know what it is. You should name it
after you at any at any term. Oh no, here
it is numbers juggling. Okay, okay. So when you're doing
(28:56):
numbers juggling, you uh, an even number of numbers juggling.
You're just doing it asynchronously, probably to start. Okay, that
was my point of my little tirade. I wonder how
many angry jugglers we have right now. Oh, probably a lot. Uh.
There's a couple of other kinds of juggling that are
(29:16):
fun to watch. Cigar box juggling and shaker cup. Um.
You've probably tried the cigar box thing with two boxes
or whatever. And that's when you have any number of boxes.
You're holding one in each hand, but then you have
quite a few in the middle and you'll toss them
up and flip them and then catch them between the
other two boxes. Yeah, it's pretty neat. And the same
(29:36):
sort of thing goes with the shaker cup. Um. Your
cups are nesting inside one another though, like cocktail cups
and you're you know, tossing those up and catching them.
And they probably was born out of bar tender flare. Yeah,
probably so all right, we mentioned clubs um as an alternative.
They look like the standard club looks sort of like
(29:59):
a modified bowling pin. Yeah, like a slim svelt bowling pin. Yeah,
a sexy bowling pin. Uh. There are European and American versions,
and I think the European version is slimmer and sexier
than the American go figure and um, I think they're
a little more popular as well, right, and the larger
and is meant to fit into a Champagne coop, the
(30:22):
European one, that's pretty neat. Uh. And I think you
said that clubs also if you want to do like
knives and torches, they call that a club as well. Yeah.
I think there's like a so a few broad categories
of props and then clubs that kind of thing, and
then they fall under those subcategories like axes and torches
andories out the na uh, and then there's ring juggling.
(30:45):
Of course, they're very stable, um, because of their gyroscopic
properties and so don't even mention. Well, the point is
that you can juggle a lot more rings at once,
maybe than you might be able to juggle a ball. Yeah,
and that's pretty impressive to see as well. Yeah, and
then there's this thing I found today called contact ring juggling.
(31:09):
Is when you're not throwing rings, ah you really just
you're rolling them along. Well, now that's contact juggling with
like a ball is when you're like doing the Harlem
globe trotter thing and rolling it down your arm and
over your body and stuff. It's pretty cool. But the
contact ring juggling is just just look it up. It's
really cool. It's like, I mean, there's all different shapes,
but the ones I've seen are mainly a figure eight um,
(31:32):
and you're just manipulating them such that they look like
it looks like an illusion, almost like one will be
stationary and it looks like the other ring is circling
around it. Well it is, but uh, just take my
word for contact ring juggling. Everyone go check it out.
Very popular in Asia. It looks like they've mastered it. Okay,
(31:55):
very cool. So let's say you got a buddy and
you both like to go to the park. Well, this
is a big one and pretty cool. It's a thing.
You've seen it. Yeah. Stuggling makes the point that juggling
is kind of a social thing populated by social creatures,
Like there's lots of juggling clubs and that kind of
stuff and that um where you know, you and I
(32:16):
think of juggling. It is like a solitary activity, no way, man.
If you get two good jugglers together, it becomes a
feast for the mind and the eyes. We could add
this to our live show, Juggling Us Juggling, Yeah, all right,
in tandem. We have a lot of practice to do
because what we could do Josh on stage, if we
put a lot of work into it, is something called
(32:37):
stealing and replacing. And that is when you basically will
go up. If you're juggling four clubs, I'll go and
steal one, or maybe steal two, and then three and
then four, and then I'm the one juggling. But the
juggling never stops. Right. It looks as as a seamless
(32:57):
synchronous pattern on an erupted If you just like stop
another person from juggling, it's just being a jerk. The
point of it is that I'm that juggling. Yeah, I
guess so, but you're still juggling the whole time you're
doing that. That's right. The whole point of of juggling
with two people and like stealing and replacing is that
the balls. If you were able to ask these juggled
(33:20):
balls what they think is going on, they would say nothing,
it's the same thing. We're doing the same pattern. Say
Chuck's hands were a little sweatier, right, but what really
happened was I replaced you. Yeah, that's one way to
do it. Or we could stand in front of each
other like four ft apart and uh you know, we're
(33:42):
juggling the clubs and then tossing each other the clubs
and we've got our little uh post stuff. You should
know act all worked out. Yeah, what's cool? So with
stealing replacing with with juggling balls, like I would stand
facing opposite you and just kind of grab yours like
you said, and just ultimately like take over your catches,
and then I would be juggling and then you can
steal it back and we could go back and forth.
(34:03):
And definitely with clubs, I would be standing next to
you and just basically kind of push you out of
the way. Well, that's if you're stealing and replacing. If
we're passing, then we're standing in front of each other
and just throwing them back and forth to each other.
And there's actually a pretty established way of um passing
where it's called the three three ten where we do
three passes where every third toss I passed to you
(34:26):
and you catch it, so you know we're in tandem
and everything's going right. And then after three of those,
you do every second toss. Then after three of those
you do every toss, you toss another one, and then
by that last one, we're just like on fire, just
throwing throwing ones back and forth between ourselves. Yeah, and
we did mention combat juggling. That was not a joke.
(34:49):
It is a thing, and I've seen I looked up
these little competitions. It's when it's sort of like dodgeball.
You get, you know, ten jugglers on a stage and
they all start juggling, and they all start to try
iron thwart the other jugglers juggle while maintaining theirs. So
I would go up and throw mine in the air
(35:09):
and try and knock yours out of your hand, but
you can't, you know, get too crazy because you've gotta
still juggle or else you're out. The way we've been
describing this one, it feels like we've been replaced by
impostors who listened to the show a lot and didn't
know what topic to pick. Isn't that weird? It is weird?
I'm myself? Are you yourself? No? I'm you? Oh god, weird. Well,
(35:33):
we'll get to the bottom of this right after these
messages and that chuck comes the darkest time? Is this
Josh actual? Yeah? Okay, yeah, I'm replaced. I replaced the replacement. Okay, um, nope,
(36:01):
still here saying bizarre stuff like I replaced the replacement.
All right, And we're talking about the physics of juggling
fun fun, which is it's actually kind of straightforward. It's
stuff you would think of, but it's nice to put
it into terms where we can say that we covered
the physics of juggling. That's right. Like, so, the main
factor acting on juggling, probably the most important part in
(36:25):
the whole thing, is our good friend gravity, that's right. Uh.
An acceleration due to gravity specifically is nine point eight
m slash s to the second power, meaning nine point
eight meters per second every second, So when you drop something,
speed is going to increase by nine point eight meters
per second. And don't bother us, we're not including any
(36:48):
kind of error resistance. We're in a vacuum. To demonstrate
all of our physics were always in a vacuum, right,
our little stuff you should know vacuum part next to
the way back machine. Um. So, it's a constant acceleration
and because of that, the only way to slow down
your pattern is by throwing something higher. Yeah, and so
the more things that you add into your pattern, the
(37:11):
higher you're going to have to throw, because you have
a constant acceleration downward acceleration after your toss. Um. So
that means you have to open up your pattern by
throwing it higher up the more stuff you have, because
you simply would not have enough time to throw x
amount of balls in the air. I mean, you can
increase your hand speed somewhat, but at a certain point
(37:32):
you just can't do it exactly. They're gonna be bean
bags everywhere. Another um factor is that it's not really
a factor. It's more of a fact. When you're throwing
your balls, you're throwing them in a parabola, which means
that the only, uh, the only velocity that counts is
the is the vertical velocity, the vertical acceleration. When you
(37:54):
throw something up, you're exerting your own force upward and
and what's it peaks ex gravity is pushing it back downward.
That's right, it's gonna have a horror zonal velocity, but
that's going to be constant, so there's no force acting
on it. There's no change in velocity. I guess with
the column it's pretty much straight up and down. But
(38:15):
generally speaking, uh, you're gonna be have both, right. Yeah,
it's moving horizontally, but there's no force pushing it. There's
no change in I'm sorry, there's no change in acceleration.
It's constant exactly, Okay. And then of course the mass
of your props also count, yeah, which is why if
you've ever seen the old trick where someone's doing a
(38:35):
bowling ball with a tennis ball with a club, it's
super impressive because it's much much easier to juggle things
with the same mass. Yeah, because you're just making the
same motion over and over again. When you are juggling
things with three different maths, meaning they have three different
um three different amounts of inertia or they require more
(38:59):
different amounts of force to overcome inertia. Um. Then yes,
like you said, that's kind of impressive. It just requires
that much more mental acuity. That's right. Is that all
the physics. Now we get into the math. I know
this actually kind of interested me a little bit, despite
the fact that it is math and I'm well known
(39:19):
to not love it. But um. There was a mathematician
who named Claude Shannon who proposed a juggling theorem um
that basically describes the relationship of of a cask or
well just of a juggle. Right, keep saying juggle? Is
that a thing? Yeah? Did I make it up? No?
(39:40):
I think it's a thing. I think it's called something
else though, a juggle. Yeah, oh a flash, a flash,
there you go. That's a round of juggling, one single
round where all three, year, all five, or all seven
of your balls have been tossed once at least. But
to the layman it's called a juggle. Right, so everyone
knows what I mean. Uh, And this is uh in
(40:00):
parentheses F plus d um, and then that would be
times eight right outside the parentheses equals v plus d
in printheses times in when F is the time the
ball is in the air, D as the time as
a ball in the hand, h is a number of hands,
v is time that the hand is empty, and in
as the number of balls being juggled. So basically, what
(40:22):
he's saying is, if you add together the amount of
time the ball spends in the air plus the amount
of time it spends in the hand, right, which is
the full amount of time that that ball exists during
a flash, multiply that times your hands to the number
of hands. That's going to equal the time your hand
is empty. Uh, plus the time the ball spends in
(40:43):
the hand times the number of balls being juggled. I
saw no reason for this equation whatsoever. Like at first,
I was like, oh, that's that's pretty cool, And then
I spelled it out to myself in a It's like, yeah,
the amount of time the balls out of the hand
plus the amount of time the balls in the hand
times the number of balls that what. Yeah. I didn't
(41:06):
understand what the point of it was. So Claude Shannon,
please get in touch with us. Well, that's why he
did it so people would write stuff about it, you know. Well,
the thing is I guess the problem is that it
says Shannon build the juggling robots. So I guess this
formula allows robotics to happen. Yeah, and I saw the
juggling robots, different robots that toss things and catch things, right,
(41:30):
It's kind of cool. Okay. Yeah, So if if that's
the point of the Shannon theorem, is that what that's called,
sure the Claude's Claude's law, then then I understand it.
And I take it back. What if there's some Claude's
law that's something awful that we don't know about. That's
(41:52):
the case. And then there is site swapping um, which
is another math application. It's sort of like musical akin
to a musical score to a musician, as a form
of notation describing the juggling pattern, and is what jugglers
use two um. Basically, if you were going to write
(42:13):
out your juggling pattern and send it to your buddy,
you wouldn't say, take your right hand and blah blah blah.
You would use numbers to represent it. Which this actually
does make sense. Yeah, this made a little more sense
to me for sure. Yeah. And um, so like a
normal three ball cascade is three, three, three. Each throw
takes three beats. A zero is a rest on an
(42:33):
empty hand, and a one is handoff from one to
the other. And you can actually if you add them
all together and take the average, you can tell how
many balls are in that pattern. Right, So in a three, three,
three you add those together, that's nine divided by three
because there's three different numerals, and you've got three or
four five one four one is also three, right, matth
(42:54):
that sounds pretty difficult. The four one, you know, Yeah,
the three three makes intuitive sense to me. But that's
you know, the four one five four five one four one.
That's tough. Oh man, is anyone still listening though? Can
you hear the echo? I can. Uh. If you look
(43:17):
at a juggler, you might notice that they're probably not
looking at their hands like at the catching. The catching
is sort of automatic. Uh, they're kind of looking sort
of up at the arc um. And they have done
experiments to see where um your eyes go um A A. M.
Van Santvoord. Peter J. Beck did some experiments that actually
(43:38):
found that while the peak is important, if you see
the first one hundred milliseconds of the flight path, then
you can juggle successfully, yeah, which is pretty impressive. They
found that jugglers are relying more on feel sure, then
and then vision. That's why you can juggle blindfolded if
you're really good. Supposedly some people can. I've seen it.
Oh yeah, yeah, I bet Brandon Ross can. I could
(44:01):
see that dude is talented, So Chuck, we could probably
keep talking about juggling for the next five years because
there's a lot to it. Yeah, man, this is just
a primer. Hopefully you guys are inspired, or at least
were inspired in the first maybe twenty minutes. The good
part of this episode to go out and um and
learn to juggle. I know I was. And while we
(44:21):
hate ourselves, we don't hate ourselves that much. Right, we're
gonna end this one. Yeah, So, uh, we think that
you should learn about juggling, and you can start by
typing that word into the search bar at how stuff
works dot com. Since I said search bar, it's time
for listener mail. Uh. This is a really touching story,
(44:43):
oddly enough, from Jennifer Grace. She's an actor in New
York City who um played a very long run of
Our Town on stage and had to go there without
her husband. At first because they were in Chicago and
stuff you should know turned out to be the thing
that linked them together before he finally moved to New
York to join her. Um. They've been together for thirteen
(45:05):
years now and they had their son, Emmett last fall,
and a month before Emmett turned one. Uh Tom, her
husband was admitted to the hospital and has been there
ever since. UM. He has a very rare issue with
his bone marrow that they finally uh diagnosed as a
plastic anemia. So basically he has no immune system, which
(45:26):
means he can't risk getting sick, which means her son,
their son, can't even visit him, which is just unbelievably sad. Um.
She can visit, bring mask and gloves and gown, but
they can't even touch each other, the husband and wife.
And this came on suddenly too, right, Yeah, she said,
it's pretty much the worst thing ever. I mean, they
spent a lot of time even diagnosing this thing before
(45:48):
they came. I know, it's just so terrible and they're
just really really great people. Um she said, Uh, it
looks like we will be going forward though with a
bone marrow transplant because as a brother who was a
match and he does have a good chance of recovering
with this bone marrow transplant and a round of chemo
followed by this transplant in the new year. She says,
(46:09):
There's not a lot that I can give him by
way of a Christmas present this year, given the circumstances,
but I'm hoping that perhaps you would give him a
shout out on an episode. It's been a very special
shared experience for us. It really brightened his day. So Tom, dude.
They also sent me a video of them playing a
song together in the kitchen doing uh Springsteen song and
(46:31):
it was just like they're the cutest couple ever and
they're really great. And UM, I'm gonna plug their go
fund me site because um, they didn't even ask me to.
That's why I'm plugging it. Uh. It is go fund
me dot com slash F seven five nine z G
and that will help out offset um their hospital builds
a little bit. And there's really nice folks. Since Tom
(46:54):
get better soon, man, I hope that operation goes great. Yeah, Tom,
here's to your buddy, and uh yeah, and keep us
keep us posted, you guys. Yeah, please do, Jennifer, that
would be great. Uh, and we should totally post that
go fund me stuff too on social Yeah, yeah, we'll
do that. Well. If you have a great story about
how Chuck and I brought you together with your s O,
(47:16):
or helped you through a rough time, or did anything good,
we want to hear about it. You can tweet to
us at s y s K podcast. You can join
us on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know,
and you can send us an email to stuff Podcast
at how stuff worst dot com and it's always joined
us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should
Know dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
(47:40):
of iHeart Radios. How Stuff Works for more podcasts for
my Heart Radios at the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Josh Clark
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