August 10, 2011 • 19 mins
So what is a mermaid, exactly, and where do all the mermaid legends come from? Join Caroline and Cristen as they delve into mermaid mythology from around the world, alleged mermaid sightings and more.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff mom never told you?
From house Stop works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline. Caroline. Since it
(00:21):
is the height of summer right now and folks are
taken to the pools, I thought it would be a
good time to talk about mermaids. Do you keep mermaids
in your pool? I wish I had mermaids in my pool.
I wish I had a pool to begin with. I
don't actually have a pool. I have to bum pools
off other people. I'm a pool scavenger. Um. But while
(00:45):
I don't keep mermaids in my pool, I did as
a child play Mermaid. Cool for you? Good? That did
you have? Like the you know, the dolphin dive? And yeah,
it really just involved my butt sticking up above the
water and the lifeguards laughing at me. Sounds like how
I swim now? Um? And it probably we probably played
(01:07):
Mermaid a lot because the Little Mermaid was so popular.
Yeah um growing up and he actually the the cartoon
prince I think was one of my first crushes. Eric. Yeah, Eric,
was very the prince for for a two dimensional character.
I've dated some two dimensional people though. Well. I think
we should note that Hans Christian Anderson, of course wrote
(01:29):
The Little Mermaid in eighteen thirty six. But mermaid mythology
goes back a long long time. Yeah, plenty of the
Elder in the first century a d. He he was
convinced that mermaids existed, and he described them, and actually
his text was one that people sort of relied on
(01:50):
for hundreds of years. Um So, then going forward to
the fifth century, there was a Greek work that I
can't pronounce the a logus shore that one. Uh, it
was all about animals. It was all encompassing, and it
was so all encompassing that it included fake ones like mermaid,
like the Mermaid. Yeah, and the description of mermaids starts
(02:14):
out really good, really really nice, let's hear it, and
it devolves. Okay, let's see they described a mermaid as
a beast of the sea, wonderfully shaping as a maid
from the naval upward and a fish from the naval downward.
And uh, it's okay so far. And then they say,
and this beast is glad and merry and tempest and
stayed and heavy and fair weather kind of moody. Mermaids
(02:38):
are jerks, jerks of the sea. Well, it's interesting because
Professor Anthony Piccolo of Manhattanville College thinks that this mercurial
mermaid nature might have been developed later by Christian writers.
For instance, in the thirteenth century, we have a monk
who wrote that while mermaids did charm sailors, they are
(03:01):
also and this is a quote strong whorse lead men astrae. Dang, well,
it sounds like the sirens in Homer's Odyssey, even though
the sirens are actually winged women of women of a sea. Uh,
we typically associate them with mermaids, right, luring men to
(03:22):
their deaths? Yes, yeah, just blame it on the women. Yeah, sure,
you you wreck your ship. Yeah, just blame it on
the women, but the tails not. I thought this was
an interesting tidbit as well, just to show how how
pervasive this mermaid mythology is. Fourteen eighty three, the Nuremberg
Bible shows a mermaid and a merd dog like that
a murrd dog everybody likes pet swimming near Noah's Ark. Yeah, well,
(03:46):
I guess they got left behind with the unicorns, yeah,
and the dinosaurs being away Noah's Unicorns. Mermaid mythology is
also very prevalent in African cultures as well, and some
scholars think that this might have to do with ships
in the fift hundreds coming over to Africa with the
(04:07):
mermaids on their prows, like statues of mermaids, and maybe
there was some kind of you know, sort of mythology
mixed up that started to happen because there were always
these water spirits among African um mythologies, such as the
Mammy Water, which is one of the most powerful African
water spirits, and she's often portrayed as a mermaid. So
(04:29):
they wonder if maybe the water spirits somehow like evolved
into these mermaid like creatures. And then in the Caribbean
we get Lacerin, it was a mermaid water spirit spirit
as well. And then in Inuit Loure we have a
Sedna who has depicted as a mermaid. And Senna has
(04:49):
a really sad story. Basically, she's the squirrel who just
got had a really rough time and her fingers and
toes end up being Yeah, first her dad tried to
like her out, and then there was a rainstorm, and
he was like, get out of my boat, said now
it was kind of like the reverse of Titanic. Yeah,
it's like throwing her overboard. Um, so she lives in
(05:13):
the sea and her fingers became the whales and the seals.
That's kind of cute. Yeah, she must have had giant fingers,
very large ones. And then we have Aboriginal tribes in
Australia who would speak of ancient water spirits called yawk
yawks that also looked like mermaids, so dotted around the globe.
How fascinating is this? We have mermaids. It's not just Copenhagen,
(05:36):
the little mermaids stealing all the mermaid thunder. No, no, no,
We've got a lot of water legends. Yes, yak yawks
and mommy wat does yeah, my next band name. So
while all this mythology developed, there were also a lot
of supposed mermaid sightings. Yeah, people like Christopher Columbus filled
(05:59):
their heads with two many too many fairy tales maybe,
and also they were a little bit lonely on the ocean.
And in around the time that Columbus bumped into what
is now America, he reported seeing three mermaids and he wrote,
They're not as beautiful as they are represented, which is
probably true when you take into account that what he saw,
(06:22):
we're likely manatees. Y. Yeah, no, I not beautiful. No,
maybe in their own way beautiful. I mean I would
like to hug a manatee. Are you kidding? But I
hear that they smell and they don't really look like
you know that if you think about arial, you know,
with the seashell bra and the flowing hair. Yeah, well,
(06:42):
we don't know that manatees many years ago did not
wear sea shells. But this is oh man, I've got
some follow up for search to do. What I get
back to my desk after this podcast. Then we have
in sixteen o eight English explorer Henry Hudson sailing off
the coast of Russia when he reported seeing a mermaid
(07:04):
by his ship and oh wait, but what do you know?
It's tail was that of a porpoise. So yeah, I
would I would just assume that he was a drunk sailor. Um.
But he actually got some backup, granted, you know, two
hundred years later um by a biologist pH Goss, who
said the sailors were too experienced to have mistaken a
(07:25):
seal or dolphin for a mermaid, so naturally they had
to be right. Could he be a drunk biologist? Maybe? Absolutely?
Do you know biologists? Um? And then in the seventeen hundreds,
Christian missionaries in Africa claimed that in Golins were catching
and eating mermaids, but they weren't the only ones. Right.
(07:46):
In the seventeen thirty nine, apparently mermaid meat is in
high demand, a Scottish publication reported that the crew of
a ship sailing in the Caribbean ran low on supplies,
and so to supplement their diets they caught innate mermaid's
and said that they tasted like veal. Really, I am
hungry mermaids tastes like veal, and we would of course
(08:09):
be remiss to not mention the Fiji mermaid. This is
probably the greatest hoax mermaid hoax ever carried out, And
of course the guy behind it was none other than
Pet Barnum, but a huckster, Oh, huckster Barnum. This is
an eighteen forty two p T. Barnum somehow gets his
hands on what is the top half of a monkey
(08:32):
and the tail of a fish sewn together, And it
is even serious. Google image Fiji mermaid and it is well,
there were actually a lot of them well floating around
so to speak. Apparently a lot of people were making
these fake mermaids, fake mermaids and selling them to tourists
(08:53):
and sailors, and so they just sort of got into
the market. Yeah. It was basically supposed to be like
the archaeological remains of Haggard mermaids um and it became
this huge tourist attraction that he displayed at his museum
in New York. But he used a great marketing tactic,
which was to have a poster advertising these three gorgeous,
(09:17):
very traditional mermaids like come come inside, come and see
these lovely dames of the sea. And then you go in,
you pay your your dime and nickel and you you go
and you see this Haggard he mermaids of this snaggle
teeth and claws. Yeah, but people were still, yeah, they
paid money. Amy, what did they have to do back then?
(09:38):
There were no podcast No, all they had with those
pianos that played themselves right now, yes, this is gonna say, god, um,
so we have all these uh, these mermaid sides. And
there was even up and I think it was reported
in Life Science in two thousand nine. Supposedly there were
some mermaid sightings and real they still pop up every
(10:02):
now and then, which I find pretty fascinating. People want
to see people still drinks. Well, it's kind of like
the lockness monster. We really we want to believe in mermaids.
I mean you and I maybe wanted to when we
were kicking our little butts up trying to swim like mermaids. Um.
(10:23):
We found some pretty great stories of real life mermaids
Like these are women who really identify with the mermaid
life and have even gone to great links to uh
create fins with which to murr around. To murder around
is made of a verb to murder. Um. Yeah, Hannah
(10:46):
Frasier Um took some money that she got when her
grandmother passed and had a mermaid tail maid and she
uses it to to dive to great depths, holds her
breath for a long time. Um. But she also uses
this image of herself that she's created as a mermaid
to draw attention to ocean issues such as dolphin hunting
in Japan. Yeah, and she actually almost got killed by
(11:08):
some fisherman. She claims that they tried to back up
over her and some other people with their propellers. I mean,
it's stuff out there for a mermaid. Well. Then there's
also the story of Nadia Vessey, who had both legs
amputated at a young age, but she was able to
enlist this special effects team to build a high tech
(11:29):
Mermaid tale that took him two years to construct, and
now in her fifties, she still swims with She's able
to swim out in the water with this crazy mermaid tail. Yeah,
and she says that adults seem more enchanted by it
the children do. I wonder if just the kids are like, well, yeah,
of course mermaid and Christopher Columbus saw them, so yeah,
(11:50):
what manatees. But Linda Walbert, if only for her prize
winning quote, which we will read you, I think is
my favorite real life Mermaid. She's just she's into it, Yeah,
Lynda Walbert. Actually, she also uses her mermaid alter ego
to draw attention for to a cause she participates in,
Swim to Empower, which is a nonprofit that helps kids
(12:12):
in the Bahamas learn to swim because they apparently have
a really high drowning rate. Um, and so she said
the magic of having a mermaid do it, you know,
bring attention to these issues. It's almost like a unicorn
trowning up and saying, would you like to learn how
to ride horses? I mean, yes, yes, unicorn, I would
like to ride on your back across a rainbow. Um, well,
(12:35):
then your glittery nain. But one more incredible fact about
Lynda Walburt. She can hold her breath underwater for about
five minutes, and she basically insinuates that you're a wolfe
if you can't, because she said, yeah, you know, you
just have to get over that uncomfortable feeling of being
able to breathe dying. Yeah, but the real life Mermaids
that we must talk about. And I wanted to save
(12:56):
this for last because I you can't get any kitchier.
And WEEKI watching oh yeah, the Home of Mermaids, and
we watch in WEEKI watche that's hard to say really fast.
In WEEKI watching Florida. Um, take it away, Caroline, I
will speechless. Yeah I know. Newton Perry is a former
(13:16):
Navy steal so tough guy. Yeah yeah, And he started
WEEKI watching springs. He apparently there were some some natural
springs with a lot of junk like people just tossed
refrigerators in or whatever. He cleared it out. He put
up a sign in the road that said, you know,
WEEKI Watching Springs. He hired some lovely bathing beauties and
taught them how to breathe underwater using hoses. This is
(13:36):
a nineteen forty six he opens up the WEEKI WATCHI
attraction and it was a huge surge attraction, especially in
the sixties. They would perform eight shows a day to
sell out crowds. And you can YouTube some great videos
of vintage wiki Watche Mermaids shows, because there was one
I saw of the It was like a news real
(14:00):
type of thing, um showing the beauties in training, the
mermaids and training, and the narrator was like the bathing
beauties smiling on the waters. Incredible um and and I
think it was in nineteen sixty one. Even Elvis visited,
but he was all like, why didn't you build this
like in New York instead of down here in Florida. Well,
(14:21):
there were no refrigerator springs New York, I guess, But sadly,
I mean, Wicky watch you has been through some tough times,
as you can imagine, with things like oh I don't
know Serula and it's underwater or just television. I mean,
I don't know. I don't really want to drive to Florida.
But no. Actually, in talking about this, I uncovered a
repressed memory that I think my parents took me to
(14:42):
Wiki watch you when I was literally maybe because I
feel like we went to Disney World, uh for a
little bit, for a weekend, and maybe on the way
back we stopped there because I distinctly remember sitting in
a in a theater that was built sort of below ground,
up against this giant glass plate under the spring or whatever,
and I remember being so disappointed that the mermaids had
(15:05):
to breathe through water hoses. I thought, fakes you phone,
you thought that you should be able to just yeah.
And I feel like someone even told me, you know,
this is young Caroline, like six years old. Oh, they're
just they're just practicing. They just need the hoses. If
you come back next time, they won't use them. You're like,
there will be no net, You're you know this is
(15:27):
this is no mermaid hacks. Um. Yeah. Now, since I've
been reading about all this Mermaid stuff, I really want
to watch Splash as soon as possible. Uh, done it,
don't need to do it again. I was really hoping
to just not do any research for this podcast except
watch watch Splash and just see how how it go.
(15:47):
I don't know, I have bad memories of that movie
Tom Hanks and dary Lenna. I guess. I mean I
like the mermaid aspect of it when I was a kid. Yeah,
I don't think I need to see it again. Yeah,
it was kind of I was hoping to run across
some kind of analysis, like feminist analysis of Mermaids, you know,
because especially like uh because Arial is a great example
(16:08):
of the impossible um body proportions at Disney Will will
give their female She also has a giant head with
all that she's got, Her waist is like the size
of a pencil, and then she's got this ginormous head
prompt to shoulders. Maybe she's actually just a manatee, that's
(16:31):
all it is. Uh So, Yeah, if you, if you
all know any Mermaids out there, any wiki watching fans listening,
I'd like to hear from you. And if anybody out
there wants to defend Mermaids against their horace reputation, I'd
like to hear that too. Yes, write us in with
all of your all of your mermaid thoughts. Um, we
(16:53):
hope you enjoyed. Uh surprisingly robust mythology of Mermaids spans
the globe who knew? I did not know that and
now I do so. Anyway, if you would like to
email us our address his mom stuff at how suffworks
dot com and in the meantime, I have just one
email here to read today on our episode on whether
(17:16):
women can be aggressive in dating, let's hear it. So
I've got a pretty detailed story here on a woman
who wants to be anonymous who asked a guy out
and it just so. She says, I feel like women
can't be aggressive in dating, especially in high school when
(17:39):
there's so much stress put on social status, high school gossip,
and keeping your ego and image intact. I thought that
was out of high school for me. Uh. There was
this guy who I knew liked me, and it acted
all confident around me when he was with his friends,
but when it was just him, he got nervous and fidgety.
So I finally approached him and talked to him directly,
(17:59):
and then I did the worst thing you can do.
I asked him if he'd like to hang out over
Facebook message never asked someone to hang out over Facebook.
I had no confidence and I sounded so awkward and pathetic. Anyway,
when I mentioned it in person, he basically said, Oh, yeah,
I've been busy with football, but maybe when it's over,
(18:20):
I'll get back to you. I was so mad that
he pulled the whole whole. I'm such a cool jock
that it's that I'm busy being a hot shot and
having girls loved me from afar. It was so horribly
embarrassing that I ignored him in my classes for the
rest of the year. But once I stopped talking to
him and avoided him, he suddenly liked me again and
started being the aggressor. But I had lost all interest
(18:41):
in him because of the humiliation I suffered for money
to hang out with him in the first place. It
seems like guys start to like you once you stopped
liking them and completely stop trying It's It can be
confusing for sure, for sure, so keep keep the stories
of confusion and date ing coming our way. It's mom
(19:02):
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(19:24):
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are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff mom never told you?
From house Stop works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline. Caroline. Since it
(00:21):
is the height of summer right now and folks are
taken to the pools, I thought it would be a
good time to talk about mermaids. Do you keep mermaids
in your pool? I wish I had mermaids in my pool.
I wish I had a pool to begin with. I
don't actually have a pool. I have to bum pools
off other people. I'm a pool scavenger. Um. But while
(00:45):
I don't keep mermaids in my pool, I did as
a child play Mermaid. Cool for you? Good? That did
you have? Like the you know, the dolphin dive? And yeah,
it really just involved my butt sticking up above the
water and the lifeguards laughing at me. Sounds like how
I swim now? Um? And it probably we probably played
(01:07):
Mermaid a lot because the Little Mermaid was so popular.
Yeah um growing up and he actually the the cartoon
prince I think was one of my first crushes. Eric. Yeah, Eric,
was very the prince for for a two dimensional character.
I've dated some two dimensional people though. Well. I think
we should note that Hans Christian Anderson, of course wrote
(01:29):
The Little Mermaid in eighteen thirty six. But mermaid mythology
goes back a long long time. Yeah, plenty of the
Elder in the first century a d. He he was
convinced that mermaids existed, and he described them, and actually
his text was one that people sort of relied on
(01:50):
for hundreds of years. Um So, then going forward to
the fifth century, there was a Greek work that I
can't pronounce the a logus shore that one. Uh, it
was all about animals. It was all encompassing, and it
was so all encompassing that it included fake ones like mermaid,
like the Mermaid. Yeah, and the description of mermaids starts
(02:14):
out really good, really really nice, let's hear it, and
it devolves. Okay, let's see they described a mermaid as
a beast of the sea, wonderfully shaping as a maid
from the naval upward and a fish from the naval downward.
And uh, it's okay so far. And then they say,
and this beast is glad and merry and tempest and
stayed and heavy and fair weather kind of moody. Mermaids
(02:38):
are jerks, jerks of the sea. Well, it's interesting because
Professor Anthony Piccolo of Manhattanville College thinks that this mercurial
mermaid nature might have been developed later by Christian writers.
For instance, in the thirteenth century, we have a monk
who wrote that while mermaids did charm sailors, they are
(03:01):
also and this is a quote strong whorse lead men astrae. Dang, well,
it sounds like the sirens in Homer's Odyssey, even though
the sirens are actually winged women of women of a sea. Uh,
we typically associate them with mermaids, right, luring men to
(03:22):
their deaths? Yes, yeah, just blame it on the women. Yeah, sure,
you you wreck your ship. Yeah, just blame it on
the women, but the tails not. I thought this was
an interesting tidbit as well, just to show how how
pervasive this mermaid mythology is. Fourteen eighty three, the Nuremberg
Bible shows a mermaid and a merd dog like that
a murrd dog everybody likes pet swimming near Noah's Ark. Yeah, well,
(03:46):
I guess they got left behind with the unicorns, yeah,
and the dinosaurs being away Noah's Unicorns. Mermaid mythology is
also very prevalent in African cultures as well, and some
scholars think that this might have to do with ships
in the fift hundreds coming over to Africa with the
(04:07):
mermaids on their prows, like statues of mermaids, and maybe
there was some kind of you know, sort of mythology
mixed up that started to happen because there were always
these water spirits among African um mythologies, such as the
Mammy Water, which is one of the most powerful African
water spirits, and she's often portrayed as a mermaid. So
(04:29):
they wonder if maybe the water spirits somehow like evolved
into these mermaid like creatures. And then in the Caribbean
we get Lacerin, it was a mermaid water spirit spirit
as well. And then in Inuit Loure we have a
Sedna who has depicted as a mermaid. And Senna has
(04:49):
a really sad story. Basically, she's the squirrel who just
got had a really rough time and her fingers and
toes end up being Yeah, first her dad tried to
like her out, and then there was a rainstorm, and
he was like, get out of my boat, said now
it was kind of like the reverse of Titanic. Yeah,
it's like throwing her overboard. Um, so she lives in
(05:13):
the sea and her fingers became the whales and the seals.
That's kind of cute. Yeah, she must have had giant fingers,
very large ones. And then we have Aboriginal tribes in
Australia who would speak of ancient water spirits called yawk
yawks that also looked like mermaids, so dotted around the globe.
How fascinating is this? We have mermaids. It's not just Copenhagen,
(05:36):
the little mermaids stealing all the mermaid thunder. No, no, no,
We've got a lot of water legends. Yes, yak yawks
and mommy wat does yeah, my next band name. So
while all this mythology developed, there were also a lot
of supposed mermaid sightings. Yeah, people like Christopher Columbus filled
(05:59):
their heads with two many too many fairy tales maybe,
and also they were a little bit lonely on the ocean.
And in around the time that Columbus bumped into what
is now America, he reported seeing three mermaids and he wrote,
They're not as beautiful as they are represented, which is
probably true when you take into account that what he saw,
(06:22):
we're likely manatees. Y. Yeah, no, I not beautiful. No,
maybe in their own way beautiful. I mean I would
like to hug a manatee. Are you kidding? But I
hear that they smell and they don't really look like
you know that if you think about arial, you know,
with the seashell bra and the flowing hair. Yeah, well,
(06:42):
we don't know that manatees many years ago did not
wear sea shells. But this is oh man, I've got
some follow up for search to do. What I get
back to my desk after this podcast. Then we have
in sixteen o eight English explorer Henry Hudson sailing off
the coast of Russia when he reported seeing a mermaid
(07:04):
by his ship and oh wait, but what do you know?
It's tail was that of a porpoise. So yeah, I
would I would just assume that he was a drunk sailor. Um.
But he actually got some backup, granted, you know, two
hundred years later um by a biologist pH Goss, who
said the sailors were too experienced to have mistaken a
(07:25):
seal or dolphin for a mermaid, so naturally they had
to be right. Could he be a drunk biologist? Maybe? Absolutely?
Do you know biologists? Um? And then in the seventeen hundreds,
Christian missionaries in Africa claimed that in Golins were catching
and eating mermaids, but they weren't the only ones. Right.
(07:46):
In the seventeen thirty nine, apparently mermaid meat is in
high demand, a Scottish publication reported that the crew of
a ship sailing in the Caribbean ran low on supplies,
and so to supplement their diets they caught innate mermaid's
and said that they tasted like veal. Really, I am
hungry mermaids tastes like veal, and we would of course
(08:09):
be remiss to not mention the Fiji mermaid. This is
probably the greatest hoax mermaid hoax ever carried out, And
of course the guy behind it was none other than
Pet Barnum, but a huckster, Oh, huckster Barnum. This is
an eighteen forty two p T. Barnum somehow gets his
hands on what is the top half of a monkey
(08:32):
and the tail of a fish sewn together, And it
is even serious. Google image Fiji mermaid and it is well,
there were actually a lot of them well floating around
so to speak. Apparently a lot of people were making
these fake mermaids, fake mermaids and selling them to tourists
(08:53):
and sailors, and so they just sort of got into
the market. Yeah. It was basically supposed to be like
the archaeological remains of Haggard mermaids um and it became
this huge tourist attraction that he displayed at his museum
in New York. But he used a great marketing tactic,
which was to have a poster advertising these three gorgeous,
(09:17):
very traditional mermaids like come come inside, come and see
these lovely dames of the sea. And then you go in,
you pay your your dime and nickel and you you go
and you see this Haggard he mermaids of this snaggle
teeth and claws. Yeah, but people were still, yeah, they
paid money. Amy, what did they have to do back then?
(09:38):
There were no podcast No, all they had with those
pianos that played themselves right now, yes, this is gonna say, god, um,
so we have all these uh, these mermaid sides. And
there was even up and I think it was reported
in Life Science in two thousand nine. Supposedly there were
some mermaid sightings and real they still pop up every
(10:02):
now and then, which I find pretty fascinating. People want
to see people still drinks. Well, it's kind of like
the lockness monster. We really we want to believe in mermaids.
I mean you and I maybe wanted to when we
were kicking our little butts up trying to swim like mermaids. Um.
(10:23):
We found some pretty great stories of real life mermaids
Like these are women who really identify with the mermaid
life and have even gone to great links to uh
create fins with which to murr around. To murder around
is made of a verb to murder. Um. Yeah, Hannah
(10:46):
Frasier Um took some money that she got when her
grandmother passed and had a mermaid tail maid and she
uses it to to dive to great depths, holds her
breath for a long time. Um. But she also uses
this image of herself that she's created as a mermaid
to draw attention to ocean issues such as dolphin hunting
in Japan. Yeah, and she actually almost got killed by
(11:08):
some fisherman. She claims that they tried to back up
over her and some other people with their propellers. I mean,
it's stuff out there for a mermaid. Well. Then there's
also the story of Nadia Vessey, who had both legs
amputated at a young age, but she was able to
enlist this special effects team to build a high tech
(11:29):
Mermaid tale that took him two years to construct, and
now in her fifties, she still swims with She's able
to swim out in the water with this crazy mermaid tail. Yeah,
and she says that adults seem more enchanted by it
the children do. I wonder if just the kids are like, well, yeah,
of course mermaid and Christopher Columbus saw them, so yeah,
(11:50):
what manatees. But Linda Walbert, if only for her prize
winning quote, which we will read you, I think is
my favorite real life Mermaid. She's just she's into it, Yeah,
Lynda Walbert. Actually, she also uses her mermaid alter ego
to draw attention for to a cause she participates in,
Swim to Empower, which is a nonprofit that helps kids
(12:12):
in the Bahamas learn to swim because they apparently have
a really high drowning rate. Um, and so she said
the magic of having a mermaid do it, you know,
bring attention to these issues. It's almost like a unicorn
trowning up and saying, would you like to learn how
to ride horses? I mean, yes, yes, unicorn, I would
like to ride on your back across a rainbow. Um, well,
(12:35):
then your glittery nain. But one more incredible fact about
Lynda Walburt. She can hold her breath underwater for about
five minutes, and she basically insinuates that you're a wolfe
if you can't, because she said, yeah, you know, you
just have to get over that uncomfortable feeling of being
able to breathe dying. Yeah, but the real life Mermaids
that we must talk about. And I wanted to save
(12:56):
this for last because I you can't get any kitchier.
And WEEKI watching oh yeah, the Home of Mermaids, and
we watch in WEEKI watche that's hard to say really fast.
In WEEKI watching Florida. Um, take it away, Caroline, I
will speechless. Yeah I know. Newton Perry is a former
(13:16):
Navy steal so tough guy. Yeah yeah, And he started
WEEKI watching springs. He apparently there were some some natural
springs with a lot of junk like people just tossed
refrigerators in or whatever. He cleared it out. He put
up a sign in the road that said, you know,
WEEKI Watching Springs. He hired some lovely bathing beauties and
taught them how to breathe underwater using hoses. This is
(13:36):
a nineteen forty six he opens up the WEEKI WATCHI
attraction and it was a huge surge attraction, especially in
the sixties. They would perform eight shows a day to
sell out crowds. And you can YouTube some great videos
of vintage wiki Watche Mermaids shows, because there was one
I saw of the It was like a news real
(14:00):
type of thing, um showing the beauties in training, the
mermaids and training, and the narrator was like the bathing
beauties smiling on the waters. Incredible um and and I
think it was in nineteen sixty one. Even Elvis visited,
but he was all like, why didn't you build this
like in New York instead of down here in Florida. Well,
(14:21):
there were no refrigerator springs New York, I guess, But sadly,
I mean, Wicky watch you has been through some tough times,
as you can imagine, with things like oh I don't
know Serula and it's underwater or just television. I mean,
I don't know. I don't really want to drive to Florida.
But no. Actually, in talking about this, I uncovered a
repressed memory that I think my parents took me to
(14:42):
Wiki watch you when I was literally maybe because I
feel like we went to Disney World, uh for a
little bit, for a weekend, and maybe on the way
back we stopped there because I distinctly remember sitting in
a in a theater that was built sort of below ground,
up against this giant glass plate under the spring or whatever,
and I remember being so disappointed that the mermaids had
(15:05):
to breathe through water hoses. I thought, fakes you phone,
you thought that you should be able to just yeah.
And I feel like someone even told me, you know,
this is young Caroline, like six years old. Oh, they're
just they're just practicing. They just need the hoses. If
you come back next time, they won't use them. You're like,
there will be no net, You're you know this is
(15:27):
this is no mermaid hacks. Um. Yeah. Now, since I've
been reading about all this Mermaid stuff, I really want
to watch Splash as soon as possible. Uh, done it,
don't need to do it again. I was really hoping
to just not do any research for this podcast except
watch watch Splash and just see how how it go.
(15:47):
I don't know, I have bad memories of that movie
Tom Hanks and dary Lenna. I guess. I mean I
like the mermaid aspect of it when I was a kid. Yeah,
I don't think I need to see it again. Yeah,
it was kind of I was hoping to run across
some kind of analysis, like feminist analysis of Mermaids, you know,
because especially like uh because Arial is a great example
(16:08):
of the impossible um body proportions at Disney Will will
give their female She also has a giant head with
all that she's got, Her waist is like the size
of a pencil, and then she's got this ginormous head
prompt to shoulders. Maybe she's actually just a manatee, that's
(16:31):
all it is. Uh So, Yeah, if you, if you
all know any Mermaids out there, any wiki watching fans listening,
I'd like to hear from you. And if anybody out
there wants to defend Mermaids against their horace reputation, I'd
like to hear that too. Yes, write us in with
all of your all of your mermaid thoughts. Um, we
(16:53):
hope you enjoyed. Uh surprisingly robust mythology of Mermaids spans
the globe who knew? I did not know that and
now I do so. Anyway, if you would like to
email us our address his mom stuff at how suffworks
dot com and in the meantime, I have just one
email here to read today on our episode on whether
(17:16):
women can be aggressive in dating, let's hear it. So
I've got a pretty detailed story here on a woman
who wants to be anonymous who asked a guy out
and it just so. She says, I feel like women
can't be aggressive in dating, especially in high school when
(17:39):
there's so much stress put on social status, high school gossip,
and keeping your ego and image intact. I thought that
was out of high school for me. Uh. There was
this guy who I knew liked me, and it acted
all confident around me when he was with his friends,
but when it was just him, he got nervous and fidgety.
So I finally approached him and talked to him directly,
(17:59):
and then I did the worst thing you can do.
I asked him if he'd like to hang out over
Facebook message never asked someone to hang out over Facebook.
I had no confidence and I sounded so awkward and pathetic. Anyway,
when I mentioned it in person, he basically said, Oh, yeah,
I've been busy with football, but maybe when it's over,
(18:20):
I'll get back to you. I was so mad that
he pulled the whole whole. I'm such a cool jock
that it's that I'm busy being a hot shot and
having girls loved me from afar. It was so horribly
embarrassing that I ignored him in my classes for the
rest of the year. But once I stopped talking to
him and avoided him, he suddenly liked me again and
started being the aggressor. But I had lost all interest
(18:41):
in him because of the humiliation I suffered for money
to hang out with him in the first place. It
seems like guys start to like you once you stopped
liking them and completely stop trying It's It can be
confusing for sure, for sure, so keep keep the stories
of confusion and date ing coming our way. It's mom
(19:02):
stuff at how stuff works dot com. You can also
head over to Facebook and say hello and leave a comment,
and follow us on Twitter. If you'd like, We're at
mom Stuff Podcast. And then lastly, you can read our
blog during the week It's stuff Mom Never told You
at how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check
(19:24):
out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join
how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising
and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The How Stuff Works I
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