Listener Mail: Seraphs Sob at Vermin Fangs

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
My Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow
Your Mind. Listener mail. My name is Joe McCormick. My
regular co host, Robert Lamb is not with me today,
So in an unusual twist, I'm going to be doing
today's episode solo. But for all of the people who

(00:24):
have inquired, nothing weird's going on. Rob and I just
had a couple of awkwardly timed back to back vacations
and we're about to be coming back into recognizable form.
So I'm going to be doing a core episode of
the show tomorrow with a special guest, and then later
on this week, Rob and I will both be back
and ready to chase that fairy fire into the bogs

(00:46):
of October. So I guess with that, I'll jump right
into some of your messages. This first batch came in
response to our series on the Black Death and religious
responses to the second Plague pandemic. I think first, I'm
going to read this message from Olivia. Olivia writes, Dear

(01:09):
Robert and Joe. Hi, my name is Olivia and I'm
a big fan of the show. I was particularly excited
to listen to your recent episodes on God and the
Black Death, as I did some research on that topic
in college. I was actually in the middle of researching
it right as our own plague hit in March of
uh And she actually attaches a a part of a

(01:31):
short paper that she wrote on the subject, but then
explains quote my basic argument is that the poor reaction
of religious authorities in Europe to the Black Death caused
a widespread loss of faith in the Church, which created
an opportunity for new spiritual leaders like mystics to gain followings.
This endo, the hegemony of the church, combined with the

(01:51):
rise of new, more individual focused forms of Christian spirituality,
ultimately paved the way to the Protestant Reformation. And then
she reckoned men's a book that she found helpful in
this subject called From the Brink of Apocalypse by an
author named John a Birth, and then finishes by saying
that aside, thank you both for creating such a great podcast.

(02:12):
I actually enjoy doing laundry and dishes because it's an
excuse to listen to you guys. I really look forward
to part three of the series. All the best, Olivia, Well, Olivia,
as always, thank you for the kind words and thanks
for getting in touch. I don't know enough about this
subject to have a strong opinion on whether the Black
Death weaken the authority of the Catholic Church and whether

(02:34):
it was truly a determining factor in the Protestant Reformation.
It does seem plausible, though, then again, it it got
the gears turning in my head and made me think
about how, though this is not in particular a counter
argument against the claim you're making about the Second Plague
pandemic in the Catholic Church, it did get me thinking
about how things like faith in a religious institution don't

(02:57):
always react to external in puts in predictable ways. Uh.
And the main example that came to my mind is
a famous book in twentieth century psychology called When Prophecy Fails,
A social and psychological study of a modern group that
predicted the destruction of the world. This was a book
by three co authors, Leon Festinger, Henry Reichn, and Stanley Shackter.

(03:22):
And this is a somewhat different issue, different than the
example of the plague, or at least a different type
of undermining of religious authority, but it did make me
think about studies of what happens when religious expectations for
external events are not fulfilled. So this book was originally
published in nineteen fifty six. We talked about Leon Festinger
in some episode that we did recently. He's known for

(03:44):
promoting the theory of cognitive dissonance, where a mismatch between
um between the beliefs that you hold versus your observation
of the external world UH causes a state of discomfort
that you will seek to resolve of through, sometimes through
rather radical means. And in this specific example, the authors

(04:06):
here studied a small UFO cult whose leader claimed to
be receiving messages from another planet. And this cult predicted,
on the basis of these messages that there was going
to be an apocalyptic flood that would destroy human civilization
in the r nineteen fifty four, and of course it
didn't happen. Yet some members of the cult not only

(04:27):
continued believing in the messages and and in the cult
authority structure, but increased their dedication to the cult with
rationalizations about the mismatch between their predictions and observed reality
and and their increased dedication was measured through things like
even more preaching UH, public preaching and sharing of the

(04:47):
cult's message. And I know there's been some later criticism
of the author's methodology in this book. For example, I
think how their their documentation of the cult might have
actually influenced the behavior of the members. So think this
is a uh not without its critics. But given that
we can observe lots of other instances similar to this,
I think there's still probably something useful to be learned

(05:10):
from the explanation that the authors gave here, which is
basically that when the cult members were faced with extremely
uncomfortable cognitive dissonance, and this dissonance would be caused by
the mismatch between I predicted X would happen. I predicted
there would be an apocalyptic flood versus I observed that
in fact, not X happened that or that Y happened,

(05:31):
that there was no apocalyptic flood. And because they had
already sacrificed so much on the basis of that prediction,
so you can think of those in multiple ways, and
they may have sacrificed wealth, social capital, and so forth.
One natural way to alleviate that excruciating dissonance is to
double down. So you double down on the original belief

(05:51):
you believe it even more strongly, you preach it even
more fervently, thereby potentially adding new believers and increasing the
faith of other believers, and thus increasing social support within
the cult belief structure. As I mentioned earlier, these are
clearly two very different ways that a religious authority could
be potentially undermined, one by making predictions that don't come true,

(06:14):
and the other by simply failing to be able to
do anything about the cataclysmic human suffering caused by the
Second Plague pandemic. But I can't see some parallels, and
so so I wonder I think you could well be
correct in your characterization that uh, that the Second Plague
pandemic led to a series of social outcomes that undermined
faith in the Catholic Church, led to these alternative forms

(06:36):
of spirituality, maybe more individually focused, and eventually paved the
way to the Protestant Reformation. That does seem quite plausible,
though I don't know. I also do find it very
interesting how uh, things like religious faith and and faith
in the authority of religious institutions doesn't always react to
external events in a way that's strictly predictable from the outside. Alright,

(07:03):
this next message comes to us from Ed. Ed is
also reacting to the Plague series and he says, Hi, guys,
while listening to your series on the plague images in
a montage in the nineteen thirty six film Things to
Come kept coming to mind, as you may recall, after
civilization is destroyed in Never Ending Wars. I think he

(07:24):
means in the movie plagues ravage the world. What do
you think of the film? Thanks? Ed? And this one
definitely caught my interest because I've never seen this movie before.
I don't think I was even aware of it if
it If I was, I'd forgotten about it. But I
looked it up and it does indeed look fascinating. So
this is a British science fiction movie from nineteen thirty

(07:46):
six written by H. G. Wells, who we talked about
in the Weird House Cinema episode on Time after Time.
But it was based on a book that he wrote
called The Shape of Things to Come, which I have
not read, but which seems to operate as a kind
of speculative future history. So it's a book that spans
multiple generations of time beyond the horizon of of Wells

(08:08):
or the filmmakers, and so the broad outline is that
Wells predicted a global war would break out in nineteen
forty and rage for decades after that, so partially prescient there, uh,
And that the war would be so brutal and devastating
that it would cause the world to descend into a
new dark Age, especially because towards the end of the

(08:29):
conflict the belligerents turned from conventional weapons to biological weapons,
unleashing new forms of disease and plague that kills something
like half the people on Earth. And after this all
government falls away in the world descends into anarchy and barbarism,
and everybody lives in this warlord hell of plague vikings. Eventually, though,

(08:51):
the Earth is saved by some sort of international coalition
of strangely pilots and engineers. They're called Wings over the World,
and they're they're based out of a of a hub
in Iraq, and they fly around re establishing order the
outlaw war. They rebuild lost scientific and technological capability so

(09:11):
that its benefits can be spread to all of the
people of the planet. And I thought it was interesting
here that Wells identified airplanes as one of the technologies
primarily associated with future progress. So there there's also a
thing in the movie where there's a final section set
far in the future and the inhabitants of Earth are

(09:32):
planning a mission to the Moon, which I guess is
another extension of the air travel principle taken to the
next level. And uh and I don't know. I thought
it was curious that we do in science fiction today
still associates space travel with UH with sort of the
cutting edge of future technology, one of the things that
is emblematic of technological progress overall, but not so much

(09:54):
for air travel. If a similar future history were written today,
I wonder if it be instead of pilots, who would
be the people who come in to try to re
establish order. I don't know if it would be uh,
I T professionals or something. But anyway, so poking around
a bit in the movie. I have not watched the
whole thing, but it does look really interesting. Uh. And
at some point, I guess things are supposed to be

(10:17):
taking place in the far future, and everybody's addressed and
they're they're living in the technological utopia, but everybody is
also dressed in medieval tunics, and so they look kind
of like Bunny Breckenridge in Plan nine from Outer Space,
which which I found funny but definitely looks like it
is worth a watch. Alright. One more message in response

(10:43):
to the Black Death episodes. This one came in from
our listeners, a big Nif, and this was a really
good clarification that that's worth pointing out. So the Big
Nief got in touch to say that to to comment
on when we were talking in the third Plague episode
about anti submitted conspiracy theories that arose in Christian Europe

(11:04):
during the Black Death, so there would be these mass
delusions that Jews had somehow caused the plague epidemics by
poisoning wells, and uh this led to massacres of Jewish
people in communities throughout Europe. And we mentioned something about
how there have been recent echoes, more recent echos at least,
of this type of thinking in which people falsely accused

(11:25):
minority groups, sometimes specifically Jews, of causing infectious disease, and
Rob mentioned I think what he said was a Polish
poster from World War Two blaming Jews for typhus, and
Zbignia wrote in to emphasize that though this poster was
written in Polish, it was a German Nazi poster that
was hung up in Nazi occupied Poland, and this is

(11:46):
why it was written in Polish. And yeah, that's very
good to point out if that was unclear to anyone,
the poster was Polish and since that it was in
the Polish language, not a poster of Polish origin. So
thank you very much for that clarification. It's a big
NIF all right now, I think I'm going to be
moving on from the from responses to the Black Death series,

(12:10):
and I'm going to read a message from our listener, Raj.
Raj says, Hello, gentlemen. I know you've received many emails
regarding mirrors, but here is one more to add to
the wall. I was working out recently and was on
a stationary bike that happened to be facing a window.
Since it was early in the morning and the lights

(12:30):
in the studio were not too bright, I could easily
see my reflection in the window, thus acting as a
pseudo mirror. Noticing this observation, my mind immediately went to
your episodes regarding the mirror, and I then remembered a
listener mail episode where Joe explained how mirrors work. I
apologize for not remembering the specifics, but it had something
to do with the notion that mirrors reverse the image

(12:52):
along the Z axis and not the X or Y axes. Yeah,
I guess I'll interject here if this helps to give
a quick refresher. I was answering a question about why
a mirror appears to flip our image horizontally, so your
left hand becomes your reflections right hand, even though it's
still the image of your left hand, but at the

(13:13):
same time does not flip your image vertically. You don't
seem to notice any equivalent phenomenon going on with the
reversal of your head and your feet. And my conclusion
was actually that this impression we have about it reversing
the horizontal axis but not the vertical is an illusion
that's predicated on the fact that human bodies are horizontally symmetrical. Uh.

(13:35):
And you can test this out a bit just by
imagining that human bodies looked exactly the same except they
floated sideways in the air. So imagine a human body
floating sideways. If it raises its left arm to its side,
it's going to be pointing toward the ground. If it
raises its right arm to the side, as if you know,
to the side, as of doing a jumping jack, it's
gonna be pointing towards the sky. In this case, it

(13:59):
would be exactly the opposite. If humans floated sideways like this,
a mirror would appear to flip you vertically, but not horizontally.
And so I think the most accurate way to describe
what a mirror does to your image is neither horizontal
nor vertical flipping. It's actually turning your image inside out.
The mirror reverses your image along the axis of depth

(14:21):
a distance from the mirror, not height or width. And
human bodies just happened to be constructed in such a
way that an inside out image of our front facing
side is confusing like this. So you raise your left hand,
and your reflection raises the hand that would be the
right hand if it was another person looking at you

(14:42):
from your mirror images position, but it is the image
still of your left hand. Uh. And so that this, uh,
this is just not something we encounter in everyday life
anywhere except looking into a mirror. So it kind of
short circuits the brain. Anyways, Raj continues, I was recalling
this memory while I happened to be looking at my
reflected feet, and all of a sudden, my feet looked

(15:05):
as if they were peddling backwards. Not only that, I
then began to feel as if I were physically peddling backwards.
I tried to make sense of this, but trying to
reconcile my confused perception with trying to understand how mirrors work,
all while keeping up with my workout was too mentally taxing,
and I ultimately had to look away from my reflection
to reorient myself. Looking back to this moment, I'm still

(15:28):
not sure what happened, and trying to make sense of
it just invokes more confusion. But in the end, it's
still a comical memory to think about, and so I
thought i'd share it with you, Laurage. I I don't
know exactly what to make of that. That that's very interesting,
and I'd be interested if if other listeners have insights
on what's going on here. It almost seems like a
combination of the way mirrors mess with our heads. But

(15:48):
then also, um, I don't actually know what the name
for it is, but the the optical illusion where there
is the twirling ballerina and you can see it twirling
either direction. It appears to twirl either clockwise or counterclockwise,
depending on just sort of Nothing changes about the The
animation is just the way your brain sees it. You

(16:09):
can look that up and find the name of it
if you're trying to figure out what I'm talking about,
but ultimately I don't know. Yeah, that's very curious, so
Rage goes on moving on. I was thinking about addle
audels one day, as one does, and I thought to myself,
that would be a pretty cool weapon to wield in
D and D. I don't recall D and D being
brought up in the addle addle episode, but it made
me wonder if it was an actual item. It turns

(16:32):
out it exists in both D and D and Pathfinders,
some of which are cannon and some are homebrew extensions.
I'm not sure where or how I'd be able to
fit the audle addle in any of my current D
and D or Pathfinder campaigns, but I'm excited at the
prospect of being able to use it. I wonder if
either of you have considered using it in any of
your campaigns. Well, Rage, this would be fun to ask

(16:54):
Rob about once he gets back. We may have to
revisit this in the next listener mail episode if we
were called to bring it up. But I have not
used it. I don't know that that seems like a
It seems like a weapon for a for a brawnier
and more courageous character than mine, who is who is
mostly a liar and a coward. Um. So so yeah,

(17:14):
I have not gotten around to the autolatal use yet,
but maybe in the future anyway, uh find Moving on
to Roger's last point about whispering weapons, Roger says, another
great episode and once again another tie into D and D.
In one of the campaigns I'm playing in, one of
the players got his sword as part of a loot.
Since that player's character doesn't use swords, my character eventually

(17:36):
got his hands on it. Shortly afterward, my character started
to hear a voice in his head, and it was
the sword. My mind immediately went to your episode on
the whispering sword, so I asked it what its name was.
It replied that no one had ever thought to ask
it that question, so it didn't have a name. So,
like with any great weapon, I'll have to give it
a name, though admittedly that's still a work in progress.

(17:58):
More excitement of bounds as I might have to go
back and re listen to that episode and get some
inspiration on how to role play with this new item.
Thanks as always for the wonderful content and keep up
the great work. Cheers Raj. Well, yeah, Raj, thanks as
always for writing in and very intriguing about the sword.
You'll have to keep us updated on on how it
turns out, though I would be slow to trust a

(18:19):
sword that speaks. I'm I'm not quite sure why. Okay,
maybe one last message here about Weird How Cinema and warning.
The following email contains some Gaelic that I am I'm
sure I'm going to fail at pronouncing um. This is
from Aaron. Aaron says, Hi Robert and Joe Dia Dewet

(18:42):
from Ireland. I have to say that I think Weird
How Cinema is probably my favorite offering from your good selves.
If I haven't seen the film being discussed, I normally
listen to the first part of the podcast to see
if it's something i'd be interested in watching. It usually is,
much to the dismay of my wife, uh the not
less into the rest of the podcast after watching the film,

(19:02):
or more often just start the whole thing over from
the beginning. My favorite part of the podcast is usually
the plot breakdown section. It can be interesting to see
what strange moments you pick out to talk about, and
I sometimes find myself laughing out loud if we noticed
the same things, such as the young fella's nail collection
in the Russian space movie. Oh Yeah, teens in the Universe,

(19:24):
that was a good one, Aaron says. I found this section.
I guess the plot breakdown conspicuous in its absence from
your cast about time after time. I really enjoyed the
film and was looking forward to the plot summary, but
this didn't occur, and instead you were careful to avoid
any spoilers. Is this a new direction you're heading in?
I hope not, because your take on the proceedings and
some seriously crazy films can be hilariously entertaining. I hope

(19:48):
this doesn't come across as being overly critical. I really
enjoy listening to YouTube rambling on about stuff I would
I would genuinely never consider in a million years, especially
like the October monster stuff and the prom us of
a new anthology of horror episode. Anyway, all the best,
uh Slow August banoched Aaron oh and then finally, Aaron says, ps,

(20:09):
one of the bits I hoped you'd mentioned in Time
after Time was the bit where Malcolm McDowell hailed the
cab by imitating the woman doing it before him. I
must have rewound that part about twelve times. Malcolm mcdwell
could be seriously funny when he wanted to be. Uh well, Aaron, No,
this is not a general direction. I think we'll just
go case by case, and some movies seem like it

(20:29):
would be more fun to break down the plot in detail.
I know we've got one coming up this week where
we go into great detail. I think it may have
been maybe our longest weird house yet because we got
so wrapped up talking about it. But yeah, with others,
it just feels more appropriate to talk about the movie
from a higher altitude, so or sometimes somewhere in between.
It just depends on the movie. Oh well, one one

(20:55):
last short message before we go, Um, this will be
This will be from Tom subject line Tom bomba Dill.
These of course keep pouring in, and Tom suggests a
so far unique one that we've not heard this one yet.
The pick is Elton John very interesting. You know that
these casting choices never ceased to amaze me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Okay,

(21:18):
I'm a big fan of the tumble Weed Connection, in
which Elton John it was one of his earlier albums
and which he sort of, uh he sort of performs
as a cowboy. I don't know if that's too far
off from from becoming a sort of uh jolly god
of the woods. So yeah, I can see it anyway.
I guess that's going to close things out for this episode,
but hey, stay tuned for the rest of the week.

(21:39):
There is going to be so I'm going to do
a core episode with special guests tomorrow and then later
in the week after that or Rob's going to be back.
We'll rejoin me for some uh some great October content
that we've been excited about all years. So so stick
around and uh and uh and and keep listening. You can,
of course, if you're not subscribed to this podcast, you

(22:00):
can find it probably anywhere you get podcast. It is
the stuff to blow your mind podcast. Uh what. We
do a number of different episodes in our in our
daily offerings today, So on Monday's we do listener mail
episodes like this one, though usually Rob is here with
me on Tuesdays and Thursdays we do Core episodes, which
are our classic style episodes. They tend to be usually
focused around UH science and science intersecting with other cultural topics.

(22:25):
On Wednesdays we tend to do an episode called The Artifact,
which is a short form series usually UH sub ten
minutes and focused on a particular object, idea, or a
moment in time. And then on Friday as we do
Weird House Cinema. Rob and I both love strange movies
and that's our time to talk about them. And then
on Saturday, as you will get a vault episode, an

(22:45):
older episode of the show that we've selected to rerun.
So if you're not subscribed to the podcast, please do subscribe.
Thanks as always to our wonderful audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
And if you would like to get in touch with
us with feedback on this episode or any other, to
suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow

(23:06):
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for
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