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Hey, it's your old wizard leathery lifeguard Ali Ward, dozing under an umbrella while I should be making sure you're not drowning. And I'm here for a little slice of a minisode for your ologies appetite this week. Why Ward, Why Well, this is a shorty around the longest day of the year for a few reasons. Number one, I'm working on a two part Mars episode for next week that's just going to blow your rocket boosters right off.
And number two, and this is a little crazy and exciting, but I'm shooting a brand new science show for a very cool network. And I'm shooting like sixteen hour days. Like I wake up at five am, rush just at get home at eight pm, rush to bed. I have been wearing mismatched socks for two weeks, just plucked from my clean, lonely socks bag and I'm pretty much like snorting way protein instead of having dinner because there's just
not time. So I'm putting this together to give myself a little bit more time to work on next week's episode because it's going to be so good, and also because y'all, I love summer. I love it so much. We just had the longest day of the year. It's officially summer. And even as a summer goth in like head to toe black secondhand wool garments as a teen, I loved summer.
I loved it.
Cobalt twilight at nine pm, iced tea, sweating on a porch, barbecue smoke, family reunions, and bonus points for getting out of California to see weird bugs in to hear charming accents. I just always loved it. So this week's minnesot is all about some obscure summer disciplines and if there are any of the peau your interests, tell me, tweet me whatever, and maybe I can hunt down an ologists to go
further into one of these topics. But think of this episode like a variety sampler pack, like little cereals, and I'll await you're hollering, and maybe we can make one or two happen if you really love them. So now before we dive in, just a really big thanks to all the patrons for making the show possible. I pay the wonderful Stephen Ray Morris to edit it. I couldn't
do it without him, are you? And thank you to everyone who decks themselves out in ologies wares from ologiesmerch dot com and get yourself a dang tank top for summer, or like a twenty dollars T shirt in any color, maybe a dad hat to keep the broiling sun off of your face. Now it supports the podcast and also it helps you find other ologites in the wild, maybe for a summer romance. You can also spread the word of about the podcast just by tweeting or gramming, or
you can rate a review. Make sure you're subscribed, because sometimes iTunes just will unsubscribe you from things. It happens to me all the time. And also, as you know, I'm a giant sappy creep and I love reading your very sweet reviews. And you know, I didn't know you
could review vas Stitcher until like yesterday. So for this minisode, I'm in a shout out so so so many Sara Saws, who wrote if Lynn Manuel's Twitter feed was a science podcast, This podcast, which features interviews with ologists in a wide variety of fields, is a bright spot in a world that can be a bit cynical about expertise and knowledge.
It's highly informative, a great resource for finding out more about all kinds of fields, and inspires me to work hard, learn more, and not be afraid to start by asking a dumb question. Thank you so much. What a comparison, dude, So thank you for leaving those reviews. I read them and they make me so happy on days when I'm tired and I have not washed my hair, which is a lot of the days. Okay, ayist toology. Is this a real word? No, it's not. It's an entirely fictitious word.
I just made up using the Latin aista, meaning summer, the study of summer. It doesn't exist, so straight out of the gate, I just served you up a big, heaping bag of horse shit, and I'm sorry. Another word I considered fabricating that doesn't exist, and I looked it up is hydro polemology. That would be a great word for this episode because it would mean the study of water fighting. Okay, just in trying to find out if that was a real word, it led me down this
rabbit hole. Is there a study of water fights? Please say there is. There's not. But I did find out that in Poland they have it tradition called wet Monday,
and it involves soaking each other just mercilessly. Now, according to Wikipedia, boys throw water over girls and then they spank them with pussy willows, or they sneak into girls' homes at daybreak and throw containers of water over them while they're still in bed, and then the screaming girls would often be dragged to a nearby river or pond for another drenching. Sometimes a girl would be carried out still in her bed before bed and girl were thrown
into the water. Particularly attractive girls could be expected to be soaked repeatedly during the day. This somewhat horrific and very soggy tradition is known as smigus dingis and evidently, and thankfully it seems to have evolved into a more OMNo sexual affair involving little boys and girls soaking each other and according to my getting sucked into a YouTube vortex of adults running from other adults, slashing buckets in the street, and children armed like tiny hydro militias super
soaking the fuck out of each other. It's a pretty popular thing. So I was looking at YouTube videos of all these weird Polish water fights, and then it led me to remember if a hydro polymologist was a job. I have interviewed literally the top master of this field, and I totally forgot about it. So this season on Innovation Nation for CBS, I flew to Atlanta to meet a guy named Lonnie Johnson. He is a mechanical and nuclear engineer. He worked for the Air Force and NASA's
Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He worked on the Galileo mission to Jupiter, the Saturn Cassini mission, the Mars Observer project. He's like a serial inventor, total genius. He has been since his youth. But among his creations the super soaker. He invented the
super soaker. So one day in the early eighties he thought, I want if my daughter could just smoke these neighborhood jabbronis in a water fight, and when your dad is a rocket scientist, what results is a PBC pipe water gun with an empty Pepsi two liter as a fuel tank. He tried it in his bathroom. It shot across the room and he was like, well, dang, I believe I've invented something very legendary. And so a few patents and like decades later, the dude has made very minimum seventy
three million dollars off of this invention. How many patents do you have?
Over one hundred patents.
Overall hundred, so this is just a tiny fraction of them.
There was some engineering involved in putting this whole scene together, but you know, compared to a spacecraft, is pretty simple.
So if hydro polomology were a thing, Lonnie Johnson would have another honorary degree, so says Dad Word FN podcast. Okay, so that concludes the portion on fictitious ologies involving summer onto some actual summer ologies, as discussed in the Fologies episode in October. Aque Carpetologist knows all kinds of secret
shit about pumpkins, but also about melons. Were you to encounter a melon specialist, like perhaps Zulinge, one of Shanghai's top professional watermelon experts, you could say, cue, crepatologist, tell me your melon thumping secrets. So apparently one thing to look for when you're picking a watermelonna. I'm gonna dish out some watermelon secrets. Okay, are you ready? Okay? You have to look for the patch on the underbelly of the melon. This is the light patch where it's been
in contact with the ground. That patch should be creamy yellow in color. The lighter and white air it is, it means it's not quite ripe yet. I didn't know that. Also, it should feel heavy for its size. And you know when you thump a melon in the store and you do it just to look cool before you make off with it to the checkstand, and you're like, I don't know why I did that. I don't even know what I'm listening for. I don't know what I'm doing. Okay.
According to cucrebetologists, it should have a dull, really hollow sound. Now, another thing you can do is just buy from a farmer's market and say, hey, you're a farmer, just pick me a good melon. Also, seedless watermelons were invented by a Midwestern plant specialist named ri Oj Eigsti, and nobody wanted them for decades. He was like, I.
Invented a seedless watermelon. Cute goals enjoy spitting seeds at each other. The fuck these seedless melons are? It's at folks, idiots.
He kept pedaling them and pedaling them, and then finally they began taking off in like the nineteen eighties, and according to an interview with him in the Chicago Tribune, which was conducted in his nineties, he saw seedless watermelons flourishing in a supermarket and he said to himself, Huh,
after all these years, it feels pretty good. And there's something in my soul that's like so happy that the seedless watermelon specialists got to see his invention really take off, because it was decades of him being like, how can you not want to see this watermelon? What's wrong with you? We all want them. Also, don't toss those rhines, folks. According to watermelon dot org, which is a website, you can cut them up and then you can add them to stir frize and eat them. You can also pickle
the rines. So at your next barbecue, just walk around with an empty pillowcase and start loading up on everyone's chewed up casticides and be like yemmers I'm gonna brin this up and dine on it in several months. You have my blessings. Speaking of barbecues, let's talk pyrotechnology. Wait, pyrotechnics,
isn't that? Is that fireworks? God? I hope. So when I started researching this episode, I was like, what if I had a pyrotechnologist on to talk about the bombs bursting in air and the Fourth of July displays and baseball games and sky booms and such. But I found out that fireworks people are technically pyrotechnicians, not pyrotechnologists, So firework talk will be limited to Uncle Ali telling you
don't blow your goddamn hands off this summer. Okay, just be careful and if you're drunk, let someone else explode stuff. Just sit back and watch. Don't say I never helped you. Pyrotechnologists are actually anthropologists who study chillin and grilling, barbecues, cooking with fire. But wait, what is a barbecue and why can't I spell it right? Well? It comes from the Spanish for barbicoa, which is derived from a Caribbean
word meaning a rack made of sticks. Those were used for either sleeping on like a cot or for smoking meat. Or fish above a fire. There you go. I think Americans added the qu at the end, and you can spell it either way. But let's be honest, all caps BBQ. It's the easiest. No one wants to fuck around with the Is there a C and also a Q in it to spell it bbq? I don't care. Also, there is a heated, fiery debate on the edemology of barbecue.
The first time it was recorded in English was in sixteen sixty one by Edmund Hickeringill, who was a British churchman with a shady history who was describing cannibalism in Jamaica. He wrote, samos slain and the flesh full with barbicue, wood and eat but barbecue historian, and yes that his job.
Andrew Warniz wrote a whole book on the colonist and racist origins of the word and says that hickering Gill was full of shit and he was making up tales, and that barbecue is one of America's oldest and most beloved traditions. So, going back in time a bit, humans first started to learn about fire control, maybe as far back as one point seven million years ago, but they were really getting good at it about one hundred and twenty five thousand years ago. There's the hotly talked about
cooking hypothesis. Now, this is a hypothesis that credits charring otherwise inedible starchy food with humans' ability to grow these bigger glucose hogs known as our brains. I mean, when was the last time you ate a raw potato and slayed it? Word with friends like never think about it.
Now.
Another thing to mole over while waiting for your melon ryins to pickle is why historically have women been expected to cook but men handle the outdoor grilling? What the fuck? I tried to look for an answer, and I found that a cultural anthropologist, Richard Swater, has written such a book about many psychological societal mysteries on different continents. This book is aptly titled why do Men Barbecue? I found this after googling the phrase why do men barbecue? And
if I ever read that book, I'll report back. But the consensus on the web, and I did look it up, is because much of outdoor grilling just involves standing around looking busy while other people are inside fussing over jello and macaroni salad and icing down fruit platters, and also you only have to do it for one season out of the year, so you're like, sure, I'll be a
girl master. If you were to ask Yale researchers about pyrotechnology, not only would the archaeologists talk about cooking relics, but they would also point you to periods of time when we really started to make firework for us. We were glazing vessels, we were hardening weaponry, we were doing metallurgy things. So pyrotechnology so many directions to go. So when you're outside this summer gazing into a campfire, just think there are people who have been indoors writing books about your hairy,
scared relatives gazing into a campfire. One last ology on the topic of fiery summer evenings lamp puridology. What the hell is that? Ward, It's the study of fireflies, which are not flies at all. They're rather beetles with super magic butts. Do you call them fireflies or lightning books? You probably just all muttered aloud on the subway or a jogging path or into your knitting lightning pace bugs,
peenie wallies. Okay. What One researcher, Bert Vox, who was a linguistics professor at the University of Cambridge pulled ten thousand Americans and found that around forty percent say both words interchangeably, thirty percent just say firefly, and almost thirty percent say lightning bug. Meanwhile, point two percent, this is only two people and a whole study of ten thousand,
call these glowing summer cuties peeny wallies. I did not know that was a term, but next time I see one, I do know that it will be formally addressed as your honor Captain Peenie Wally.
Now.
Growing up in California, I didn't encounter a peenie Wally until I visited the East Coast of my twenties, and I freaked out. I jumped around a lawn. I was chasing them like I was four. So apparently the West Coast, and oddly just Massachusetts says firefly, the South says lightning bugs. But I want to find team Peniwally and see if those two people know each other. They must, right, So a few fun limp paradology tidbits. Firefly, larva, love to
eat snails, love them, It's weird, It's French. So how do they make their butts glow? Well, they have a light organ in their lower half. Think of it like a glow crotch, and oxygen combines with calcium and ATP, which carries energy to cells. Plus this luminescent chemical, it's called luciferin. Also, luciferin sounds evil as hell literally, and that's because it means light bringer, which the biblical lucifer
was named for. And I guess how lucifer became Satan biblically may have been because of a translation error with the Hebrew word meaning howl. But honestly, I just spent fifteen minutes on so many websites trying to figure this out, so biblical scholars correct me on this. I don't know why Satan is called lucifer, but luciferin it's not evil. It's just a raver crotch on a horny beetle flashing it to say, hey, are you my species, because let's
get it on and make snail eating babies. But I guess, in a kind of evil fact, some female fireflies mimic the mating flashes of another species and then they lure randy beetle dudes and they eat them. They're like, oh my god, we should totally get together. I would love to date you, and then they just eat them with their faces. Now. According to Wikipedia, the species is referred to as the theem fatale of fireflies, which seems a little overly dramatic, but I'll take it so with that.
It doesn't take a ssarchologist, who is a person who studies the muscular and fleshy parts of the body to tell you to go put on some spandex underpants and engage in hydro polemological warfare. Then maybe cool off with a cue cur batological snack before you feast on pyrotechnologically prepared cuisine. It's summer, you deserve it, So let me know if you want to hear more about any of
these topics. I'll see who I can track down. And thank you for having a mini listen to this eeny peenie wally of an episode, and I'll be back next week with tons of Martian gossip. Thank you Stephen Ray Morris for tossing this together just hours before it goes up to Aaron Talbert and Hannahlippo for being incredible admins to the jolly group of very curious folks on the
Ologies podcast Facebook group. Get yourself some summer gear. If you want at Ologiesmarch dot com, tag it ologies Merch in your online posts so I can repost you on merch Mondays. And thank you Shannon Feltus and Bonnie Dutch for running that merch site. Thank you, as always to the beloved summer mustachioed Stephen Ray Morris for editing. The theme song was written and performed by Nick Thorburn of
the very vacation y named band Islands. And please remember to ask all kinds of smart people all kinds of seemingly stupid questions because they secretly love it. If you're at a barbecue with someone, talk to them about beetle butts. Also, speaking of secrets, I can proudly say this is like a little bit of a humble bag that I've never peed in a pool. I was utterly shocked. I did an informal poll among friends, and most people seem to
pee in pools, even hot tubs. I was like, really, really, you guys, I love you, but I can we not pee in them? I don't know, apparently it's not that bad for you. But also like, mmm, times are tough out there, guys. Let's be kind to each other. Let's not pee in the water that goes in each other's mouths unless it's consensual. Okay either way, I love lots ask smart people to questions.
Bye bye acadermatology, homeology, cryptozoology, lithology and technology, meteorology, bartology, nathology, zeriology.
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