Listener Mail: Turtle of Enormous Girth

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

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
I Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your
Mind listener mail. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick, and it's Monday, the day of the week.
We read back some messages that you have sent into
the show, Rob do you want to get us started today?
With this message from Daniel. This one actually in a

(00:25):
in a rare cameo comes from the Facebook module and
it's in response to some previous listener mail about the
vegetable lamb of tartary. Yeah. Yeah, the Stuff to Blow
your Mind discussion module. You can look that up on
Facebook and request to join if you want. Um And
I'm going to see about getting that added to the

(00:48):
the I Heart Listening for our website. I was just
noticing that that some other podcasts in our network have
additional links on there. It's like, hey, we can throw
some stuff on those links. Why not? Uh? But anyway,
Daniel writes, um r E colin the listener maile mentioning
eventually grown meat cultured from human celebrity tissue cage sneaks. Yes,

(01:09):
Daniel rights. It comes up in anti viral from not
the main plot hook more as background world building, but
exactly what he suggested fans by steaks grown from their
idol sell samples to be close to them. Daniel continues
had never heard of the film before, just happened to
spot it on my local public libraries DVD shelves last

(01:31):
week and noticed it was written and directed by Brandon
Cronenberg and wondered how much like his dad's movies his
would be? Quite was the answer? Nice, I had no
idea this existed. I also don't think I knew that
David Cronenberg had a son who was also a filmmaker. Yeah,
I knew that this existed, but I just I hadn't

(01:52):
watched it. Um not that I wasn't interested, but but
it is good to hear that the chron in Burghs
don't fall too far from the Cronenberg tree. It's a
weird tree. Speaking of the the film collections at public libraries,
I have a very weird member. There was a period

(02:12):
where I was I had figured out whoa I can
save money Instead of like looking for scratch DVDs at
the local used book and CD store, I can save
money by renting DVDs from the library for free, but
their selection was so odd. I remember there being a
shelf that the main items that caught my attention on

(02:33):
it were disks for Inland Empire, The Treasure of the
Sierra Madre, and Flubber. You know, I don't remember ever
renting a movie from the library public library, but I
remember they had them, and I do have family members
to this day who I think get most of their
movies from the public library, which, yeah, I mean, go
for it. Why not? Libraries are great. Now. On the

(02:55):
the issue of Brandon Cronenberg, however, I can't help but
think that the David Cronenberg was being a little bit
of a hypocrite just naming his son a normal, boring
name like Brandon, when he comes up with such remarkably creative,
weird names for characters in his movies. Yes, why was
his Why was his child not named like uh, fleshly

(03:17):
rector Cronenberg or something? Yeah? Why not? Alright? This next
message comes from Cindy, also about vegetable name of tartary,
adding to the long chain of responses we've got about
people eating raw potatoes. Cindy says, my first time writing
in I often have the urge to write in while

(03:38):
listening to an episode, but I usually procrastinate until I forget. Luckily,
the raw potato topic has come up in two listener
males in a row, so I had no excuses this time.
One of my favorite dishes at Angelo Pietro, a Japanese
style Italian restaurant in Honolulu, Hawaii, is their raw potato salad,

(03:59):
and she and lads a link to a photo which
looks to me. I've never had a raw potato salad,
but just in a low rez photo, it looks kind
of like a shredded dike on salad, you know, just
like strips of white vegetable matter, apparently dressed and covered
in some herbs. Cindy goes on the link, describes the
dish and provides a recipe directly from the restaurant. The

(04:20):
shredded potato salad is definitely served raw. It is crisp
and delicious and readily takes on the flavor of the dressing.
I've had it many times during my visits and when
I lived there, and I don't recall any gastro intestinal
upset after consuming it. So maybe Cindy's here to put
fears to rest about too many worries about upset stomach
after eating raw potato, assuming it's not greening and full

(04:42):
of solanine. Cindy goes on. Unfortunately, the article does not
provide the origins of the dish. My googling did not
turn up any information on whether it's a specialty of
either Japanese or Italian food culture. The only thing similar
that I can think of is Sichuanese. Um. I'm gonna
try to say this chong ban too. So see a

(05:04):
spiced shredded potato salad where the potatoes are briefly blanched
or stir fried to lightly cook them and keep them
crispy and crunchy before being dressed. It's usually served cold.
Since this is not an American food culture thing crisp
raw potatoes as a vegetable, I thought a different perspective
was interesting. Anyway, keep up the wonderful work. I truly

(05:25):
enjoy all of the episodes, be they science or myth heavy.
They keep my brain working and continuously learning. Thank you, Cindy. Oh,
I had to look up this restaurant. I don't I'm
not planning to be back in Honolulu anytime soon, but
it looks great. It looks like a place I'd love
to check out. Sichuan ease food is one of my
favorite kinds of food, but I've never I've read about

(05:46):
this uh shredded potato salad before, but I've never tried it,
and I would very much like to. Maybe I'll have
to figure out how to make this at home. I
have been working on my ability to make Sichuan cuisine
at home because I found an online market that's sells
a lot of good ingredients you need, like the Sichuan
peppercorns and the UH and the zatsi and stuff like that. Yeah,

(06:06):
you were telling me about this, Yeah, all right. Our
next bit of listener mail is in response to a
Monster Fact episode about World Turtles. Uh. Specifically, we we
lead in that episode with it being about a Pokemon
that is a turtle with like a forest on its back,

(06:30):
but ultimately is it Squirtle? Is it the one Pokemon
I know? No, No, it's it's tort Tara. It's not Squirtle,
though the Squirtle is great too. This one is like
an enormous turtle with generally depicted as having like a
tree growing out of its um at the top of
its shell, like a forest on its shell. Nice. Yeah,
and there they are featured in the the entertaining motion

(06:52):
picture Pokemon Detective Pikachu. When you get around to seeing
that one, Joe, does that one have the baby Pikachu
in it? Um? I don't remember seeing the baby Pikachu
Pechu in that movie, though my son says that he
was there, or we saw one in a cut scene
or something. I don't know. He does not factor heavily

(07:13):
into the plot. Anyway, this listener was writing in in
regard to some of the the more pop culture references
to this idea of a world turtle, a turtle that
is upon which the world is placed, or you know
that they're various versions of this, and anyway, Mike writeson
And says, when you were talking about examples of mythological
turtles with the world on their back, I immediately thought

(07:36):
of Maturin from Stephen King's books. In it, Maturin is
the is the force of good that opposes Pennyworth, Pennyworth,
penny Wise, penny Wise. This confusing with Alfred from Batman.
I well, uh, yeah, I'm sure Mike means the penny Wise. Uh.
And in the Dark Tower series, Maturin exists as a

(07:57):
mythological character for the people of Midward World. The main
character in the Dark Tower series tells the others about
a poem from his childhood quote see the turtle of
enormous girth on his shell, he holds the earth. His
thought is slow but always kind. He holds us all
within his mind on his back. All vows are made.

(08:17):
He sees the truth but mayn't aid. He loves the land,
and loves the sea, and even loves a child like me.
Thanks for the show. It's always entertaining and educational. Well,
you know, um, this is a great point. I forgot
all about, um the world Turtle from Stephen King's Dark Tower.

(08:38):
And also Yet. Yeah, it does show up, and it's
been a very long time since I read that. But
there's all that additional stuff that I don't think made
it into the movies, about the the ritual of Chud
and the World Turtle and so forth. I think that's
one of those books that must be paired down, even
if made into multiple movies or a four hour mini series. Yeah.

(08:59):
I did really enjoy the first of the two recent
I in general both film adaptations of Yet. I liked
the first part and wasn't crazy about the second part. Yep, yep,
I'm pretty much right there. You know who directed the
TV mini series of it, the original one with Tim Curry.
Oh yeah, they tie into something we were watching us,

(09:20):
Tommy Lee Wallace, director of Halloween three season. That's right,
that's right. Well, there's some great stuff in that. In
that that old the first part of the old mini
series version of it that came out in Okay, Rob,

(09:41):
you ready for this one from Lurch? Yes, let's hear
from Lurch. Okay, this is an about an old episode
on tidally locked planets. Lurch says, good morning, gentlemen. I
am interrupting my driving out here in the back of
Beyond to offer some thoughts on a very old episode.
I apologize for not being very pacific. I listened to
it months ago and just don't remember the title, but

(10:03):
it's been percolating in the dark recesses of my mind
ever since. At the end of the episode, you asked
for a listener input on what we thought the weather
might be like on a relatively earthlike planet if said
planet was tidally locked to the local star, and a
quick reference at tidal locking means that the planet's rotation

(10:23):
has become synchronous with its orbit around something, either around
the planet or around a star, so the same side
of the planet always faces into the into the thing
that it's orbiting. Yeah. So like if it was an
earthlike world, it would mean that one side of the
Earth it's locked in perpetual daylight and the other side
of perpetual darkness. Yeah. Earth's moon is tidally locked with

(10:47):
the Earth, so the same side of the Moon is
always facing the Earth. You never see the far side
of the Moon unless from like a spacecraft photo. Right.
Lurch goes on to say, if said planet was tidally
locked to the local star, I don't think it would
be earth like for very long geologically speaking. Once it
stopped rotating in relatively short order, there would be a

(11:07):
continuous wind storm racing it hundreds of miles per hour
or faster from the dark side to the light side
than rising as the air warms near the center of
the sunlit face, before racing back to the night side,
where it cools and sinks to ground level and flows
sunward again. The air flow cross section would look rather
like a stretched out rubber band, but it's a mistake

(11:30):
to think it would be that simple. The surface of
a planet is not really homogeneous. Some places will warm
more and faster than others. This would twist the wind flow.
Eventually there would be a ginormous cyclonic storm centered at
the most sunward point in the hemisphere, where all the
shrieking winds will eventually run out of room and fountain

(11:51):
up towards space, driven by the mass of air coming
up behind. As the air races to the sunlit side,
it will soon scour away anything in its path. Even
mountains will be erased. In a few million years, When
the mass of the air piles up, it will slow
and drop most of the dust it's been carrying. As
the mountains elsewhere erode, a new single mountain, comprised of

(12:15):
their dust and bones will grow and take shape at
the center of the sunward vortex. Eventually it will make
Olympus Mons, the biggest mountain on Mars, look like an
ant hill. The dark side is not without it's called
a tourists though. Just as on the day side, uneven
ground temperatures will set up a hemisphere spanning vortex as
the air being pushed from the hot side cools and

(12:37):
sinks instead of a mountain of dust and debris. Though
the water carried by the air will condense and freeze,
leading to another mountain of ice not stone. It seems
to me this mountain will probably be smaller than the
daylight one. I think it likely that much of the
water will continue to cycle from the cold side to
hot then back again somewhere near the terminator, and that

(12:58):
would be the border between the lit side. In the
dark side of the planet, liquid water runoff from the
ice sheet will flow sunward, carrying sediment and dust that
got blown to the cold zone. Eventually, the streams and
rivers will vanish as the wind whips the surface of
the water to a froth and carries the spray away
on another cycle. At either weather pole. The lightning display

(13:20):
would be phenomenal given the amount of static electricity that
would be generated by the winds. Life could even survive
on such a planet, though I'm of the opinion it
would buy necessity be small, too much cross section, and
the winds would tear it apart. Whether it be a
dirt dweller or airborne bacteria and the like. Yeah, subsurface
marine life, yes, even something like coral capable of building small,

(13:44):
low lying shelters might work. Tarte grades would probably call
it an amusement park with a heck of an e
ticket ride, but I doubt anything bigger than a quarter
could cut it. Maybe at the relative center of the vortices,
and I'm pretty sure the atmosphere wouldn't freeze out, not
so long as the star provides enough heat to drive
the weather engine of such things, does the occasional truck

(14:05):
driver ponder on the long highways. Thank you for taking
the time to read this. Thanks for easing my day's lurch.
Oh thanks lurch. This is a great email, um, and
it lines up somewhat with with with hypothetical scenarios I've
read in the past. It's been a while, so I
forget some of the details, but yeah, this seems to
line up mostly with the kinds of things I've read

(14:27):
people describing about what a planet like that might be like. Though,
I wonder how far away a planet can be from
a star and and be tidally locked to that star.
I would think that tidle locking, I think tends to
happen when things are closer to the thing they're orbiting,
And of course, as a rocky world gets closer to

(14:47):
it's uh, it's host star, there's there's a greater and
greater chance that this atmosphere is just blown away into space. Yeah, yeah,
this isn't. This is a much older episode. I don't
remember how this episode is. It's old enough that I
have on occasion recently thought I wonder if that's a
topic that we should revisit on the show. But after
an email this good, maybe we don't have to. So Yeah, bravo, lurch.

(15:10):
Richly imagined and as far as I can tell, mostly
pretty physically plausible. If anybody in the geophysical sciences wants
to chime in and agree, disagree, or expand on this scenario,
please write in as well. Anyway, it's it's a fascinating
topic and one that's been explored in numerous uh sci
fi treatments and uh and speaking of science fiction, let's

(15:30):
get into a little weird house cinema. Oh yeah, man,
we got some messages from people who have more diver
knowledge than I would have imagined existed. Yeah. Yeah, I
was pleasantly surprised with the amount of giver feedback we
we heard. You know, I wasn't sure if this one

(15:51):
was one where I just didn't know what kind of
a following the Giver had. But this one comes to
us from Matthias. Matthias says, Hey, Robert and j I
normally don't listen to the Weird House Cinema episodes because
I'm not much of a movie buff, but I happened
to be a fan of Geiver. When I saw that
episode pop up in my feed, I listened to it immediately.

(16:11):
My history with Geiver goes back to when I was
a child in the mid nineties. I rented the VHS
anime tapes from the likes of Blockbuster and Rogers Video
or no Rogers Video. Maybe it's a regional thing. Wait,
is that a compound? Is it Blockbuster and Rogers Video? No?
Unless that is a regional thing at any rate, is is?
Uh uh? And I was hooked, although I'm not sure

(16:33):
why my parents allowed me to watch them with all
the violence and swearing. When I was older, I discovered
the live action Guiver movie, the one you guys watched.
And it wasn't until my late teens, when I showed
the movie to my friends that I discovered Mark Hamill
is in fact not the Giver. As a kid, I
knew Mark Hamill was Luke Skywalker, but I didn't understand
that he looked that way in the seventies and this

(16:56):
movie was from the nineties. I then associated the person
that look the closest to Luke Skywalker as Mark Hamill.
It's something my friends and I still laugh about to
this day. So he thought that the young guy in
the movie, what's the character, Sean or whatever, the blonde
boy that was Mark Hamill, when really Mark Hamill is
this mustache man. That's interesting because we we speculated and

(17:19):
has been speculated by others as well, of course, that
this is what the filmmakers intended. They're like, well, Mark's
too old to play this character. Can we get somebody
who kind of looks like Mark Hamill to play this part? Uh?
The kids won't know the difference, and lo and behold,
Uh it seems to be the case. Right, So we
have his name on the box and that'll get you
in there, and then you just assume it's this guy. Yeah. Now,

(17:42):
Matthias shares a lot of excellent information about the Guy
over franchise, including various clips, and I will share you Matthias.
I looked at these. Uh, there's one when we pointed
out that there's a great fight scene in one of
the animes, and I did check that out. I'm always
game for some sort of a great weird alien versus

(18:03):
dude in alien costumes suit. But I'm not going to
go through all of these tidbits just because I don't
know how. I don't know how deep the thirst is
for most listeners when it comes to to the Gueiver.
But here's here's one thing that Mathiah shares about the sequel,
Geiver Dark Hero quote. The live action sequel Geiver Dark
Hero took itself a lot more seriously than it's prequel,

(18:25):
but it is entertaining enough if you wanted to kill time.
There's a lot more superhuman martial arts that goes on.
While Sean now David Hayter, well known as the voice
of Solid Snake, searches for information on Chronos, the Geiver
and the aliens that created the Geiver unit, I don't
think it's Memi enough to warrant a weird House Cinema episode.

(18:45):
What do you mean by Mimi? At any rate? Mathiah
shares some more tidbits from the Geiver universe, and I
enjoyed learning more about it. But also ends with I
don't want to bomb you guys with too much Geiver lore,
so I'll leave it at that. Thanks for the episode.
It was fun, Matthias and the Guiver males. Do not

(19:10):
stop because next we've got one from Devon. Devon says, Hello,
Rob and Joe. I've been a fond listener of your
podcast for several years now, but have not been moved
to right until now. With two Weird House Cinema episodes
touching on pieces of my teenage life and stray mentions
of the movie version of my favorite book, I decided
the time is now. I was a large anime geek

(19:31):
in the nineties, as was the style at the time,
and was a fan of both the Za Ram's anime
counterpart za Ram was another movie we did about an
alien and a bounty hunter uh and the Giver anime.
To hear you both talk about these series brought me
into a rabbit hole of nostalgia. Well, I don't have
much to add to the Za Ram discussion the Guiver discussion.

(19:53):
I can shed some light on Geivers anime only lasted
twelve episodes, covering the Chronos Japan arc from the manga
This is the same plot that the first movie roughly covers.
While condensing and americanizing the plot, some of the broader
strokes are intact with a PG. Thirteen schlock coating to
cover the disturbing gore of the anime series. Geiver was

(20:15):
an attempt at a dark tokusatsu series. As at the time,
traditional tokusatsu was on a bit of a decline in
Japan and late eighties and early nineties, anime and manga
were being pulled in a dark, violent and sexual direction.
As such, combining the style of other popular dark body
horror anime, they did their own spin on the tokusatsu hero.

(20:38):
This is why the original Geiver had the coloration of
Ultraman Hey, Ultraman uh from what was the movie we
did uh Hanuman and the Seven Ultraman Devon goes on
and many features reminiscent of Kaman Rider, a still very
popular tokusatsu series. These are the ones that are much
more directly similar or to the Power Rangers. Devon writes,

(21:02):
what caught me most about this film was that it
tried to keep most of the creature design and translated
to rubber suit monsters, you can actually draw parallels between
some of the monsters in the manga and those in
the American movie. This plus a number of details and
dedication to the gross cronin Bergeean aspects that were a
staple of the original. In fact, I remember that the

(21:24):
second movie actually tries to rhet con in a lot
of information and characters left out of the first movie,
such as the second geiver unit. Oh boy, uh that
is damaged and working for Chronos, the Chronos Corporation. Something
tells me that screaming Mad George was actually a fan
of the original source material. Uh. Now there's more of

(21:45):
this email that I think we don't have time to
get into today, where Devon goes into great detail about
the movie of the Last Unicorn, which we may come
to someday. Um, But but I think we'll have to
leave it there for now. Though, I have to share
Devon's transition, which is saying, now that we have eaten
the meat we slapped together, let's take a slightly more
wholesome turn. Very very well done, Yes, and I do

(22:09):
appreciate that the additional tidbits about the Last Unicorn. It's
been been a while since I read that, And actually,
when I think back. I think I only read the
first half to my son and then we had to
return the book to the library. But the book of
the book was pretty pretty good as well. I definitely
read up through uh the end of the cycle with
with Mommy Fortuna, who is wonderfully voiced in that by

(22:32):
Angela Lansbury. Um, great, great, which voice, And really that's
the I think that's the best part of the That's
the best part of the movie to the first half
in my opinion, but well worth checking out. All right,
We're gonna go ahead and close up the mail bag
on this episode, but we will be back with more
Listener Mail in the future. Some Monday in the future,

(22:54):
you will check the Stuff to Blow your my own
podcast feed and lo and behold, there will be a
new episode of listener Mail, and then following that on
a Tuesday, there will be a core episode of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind, followed by a Monster Factor and Artifact,
followed by another core episode on a Thursday, followed by
a Weird House Cinema on a Friday. That's our time
to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about

(23:15):
a weird film. Huge thanks as always to our excellent
audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to
get in touch with us with feedback on this episode
or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
or just to say hello, you can email us at
contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff

(23:39):
to Blow Your Mind is a production of I Heart Radio.
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