Guess what, Mango, what's that will? So, of course, the rock band Queen is known for hits like Don't Stop Me Now and another one Bites the Dust, but their guitarist, Brian May, is also known for something else. Are you ready for this? He's a bonafide astro physicist. Mango, an astro freakin physicist.
You know, I think I had actually heard that before, But also I don't know anything beyond that one line, kind of like, did you know Mick Jagger started at the London School of Economics, Like yeah, but I don't know anything beyond that.
Yeah, And both of those things are true. But let's actually let's keep this one about Brian's. Before Queen made it big, he was in the midst of his doctoral research. This was at the Imperial College of London and he was studying something called zodiacal dust, or the zodiacal cloud specifically, and he was trying to understand how it moved through space.
So, uh, what is zadiical dust?
Well, unlike Brian, I'm not an astrophysicist in addition to my day job. But as far as I understand it, it's a cloud made up of dust from asteroids and commets.
So kind of like the cloud of dust that follows Pigpen around on the peanuts, like a big dust cloud.
He is one hundred percent like that mango. I'm sure there's zero difference at all. But you know, Brian was actually far enough along in his studies that he submitted his research to his advisor. But in what ended up being a stroke of luck for music fans, his advisor was like, you know what, this isn't ready. You need to go back and do a little bit more work.
And at that point, Queen was starting to take off, so Brian was just like, no, thanks, I'll do this band thing instead, and he left his academ program after that.
You know, you hear about people reaching a crossroads in their lives, but like that feels so insane, right Like Option today is like spend years in a lab analyzing space dust, or Option B is tour the world, playing in front of millions of screaming.
Fans crazy, right.
As rewarding his lab work might be. You know, you can't blame someone for choosing Option.
B, you know, and they're the band.
Whenever we play the game, which band do you wish you could have seen touring in their original form and Creed is always is well, it's always the band that my wife Georgia picks, but they would be way up there for me. But anyway, amazing band. So it's a very very cool, cool story. But here's the cool thing. He actually kind of managed to have it both ways.
Like he didn't quit his studies completely. He never lost interest in space and while he was on tour he'd take other musicians outside and give them little presentations about the night sky. And May said later that it's a natural fit. In fact, he said, maybe it's kind of romantic spirit to make music that's over into curiosity about the universe. He even composed a Queen B side called thirty nine, and this was about space travel and the theory of relativity. But there was that nagging matter of
the doctoral degree that he never earned. And so in the two thousands, when Queen wasn't super active anymore, May heard from an old friend. It was the famous UK astronomer and TV host Patrick Moore who told him he should go back and finish that PhD. And first May was skeptical so much time had passed, but then he started mentioning Moore's idea offhandedly, like in these little interviews, and word must have gotten around because one day he
gets a call from someone at Imperial College. They invite him back to the program, picks up his research, and in two thousand and seven he successfully submits his dissertation. It was titled a Survey of radial Velocities in the Zodiacal dust Cloud, which that sounds legit to me, and so that means he is actually sir doctor Brian May.
Sir doctor, sounds very impressive.
That's right, sir doctor.
Well, as you might have guessed, today on the show, we're discovering side hustles of the rich and famous. I don't mean boring celebrity tequila brands or ho home luxury fashion deals. I am talking about a philosopher who wrote operas, a nineteenth century author who created a precursor to Pinterest, and an iconic musician who is also a childbirth expert. So let's dive in.
Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and is always I'm here with my good friend Mangesh hot Ticketter and over there on the booth launching his own scuba certification business. I didn't see this when coming Mango, I didn't guess he'd be doing this. This is our PALIN producer, Dylan Fagan. Not what I would have expected from a podcast producer. But I guess that's kind of the theme of today's episode.
I think it's because we start every episode by saying, let's dive in.
I think, man, I didn't even think about that. You're right.
So, speaking of which, let's dive in to a side hustle of one Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain, who, of course was the author of books like the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. But what many people don't know is that he was also an inventor. He invented an adjustable strapped titaned garments, and a memorization game. But his most successful invention by far was a scrap book.
You mean, like an album for keeping photos and newspaper clippings and stuff like that.
M hmm, exactly that. So, back in the late eighteen hundreds, scrap booking was this pretty common practice for anyone who wanted to collect or archive written material, and this was something Clemens was really really into. Apparently he'd spend his sundays collecting clippings of articles he'd written, book reviews, drawings, cartoons, photos, letters,
anything that caught his fancy. The problem was scrap books that were available at the time just had plain blank pages, so you had to glue items into them one at a time, and Clemens was not into it. He got tired of his blue drying out and ruining his scrap book sessions. And you know how running out of glue can totally ruin a sunday for you, right.
It's the worst.
In eighteen seventy three, he was tired of his sundays being ruined and he patented his very own self adhering scrap book. This is a book that came with a thin layer of glue pre applied to every single page. You just dampen the glue one page at a time and then layer on all your clippings.
And so were people like into this.
Yeah, it was like super super popular. The book came in various styles, like different leather or cloth bindings, and different sizes for all your scrap booking needs. By eighteen eighty five, Clements had actually made around fifty thousand dollars from sales of the scrap books, which is the equivalent of about two million dollars today. To put that in perspective, he'd earned around two hundred thousand dollars from his writing, which by that point included Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.
So goodness.
Anyway, the scrap booking thing had taken off. But there was just one problem. The scrap books turned out to be terrible for preservation. If unused ADISA got wet or exposed to humidity, the pages would actually stick together and they would ruin whatever was on them. So eventually other people developed better scrap book technology, but Clemens version actually was kind of the most popular one for about thirty years.
Oh that's wild. I was actually looking the other day.
I like, it really is wild how you can now make virtual scrap books just on your phone. These days, kids can just be so lazy about it, you know.
Yeah, I mean I guess a lot of people still do it the old fashioned way, which people find satisfying for some reason, just arranging pieces of paper and photos on a page. And maybe that's just because so many aspects of our life are virtual today. Speaking of which will we are so lucky because today's episode of Part Time Genius is brought to you by Saley, a new eSIM service app by the creators of Nord VPN, who are, if you know the show, a group that I really
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God, I'm so.
Glad that rickshaw driver finally drove you home, or you'd still be stuck in India.
Yeah, I definitely would anyway.
All right, So to our side hustles for our next fact, we're traveling back to eighteenth century Europe, where Enlightenment era writers and philosophers were busily debating hot topics at the time. We're talking topics like political theory, individuality, you know, the role of religion and society. And one of the leading philosophers involved in all of this was the guy we
remember from our high school philosophy class, Jean Jacques Rousseau. Now, he wrote several influential books that you probably haven't read but may remember reading about. Examples would be discourse on the origin of inequality and of course the Social Contract.
Yeah you know me, well, I have not read those.
Well, his books are considered classics in Western philosophy. But Russo actually liked to present himself professionally, not as a writer or even a philosopher, but as a music copyist, which is exactly what it sounds. He got paid to copy sheet music, and believe it or not, it's still a job. Although these days music copyists use software to prepare sheet music for individual instrument It is based on
a composer's master score. Now, back in Rousseau's day, of course, this was all done by hand, so it was incredibly time consuming and very exacting work, which I guess is also a true philosophy, right, that's very true. But you know, Rousseau's love of music went well beyond copying other people's scores. In seventeen fifty two, he wrote his own one act opera.
It was called The Village Soothsayer. It's about a young couple who run into a series of problems when they each think the other is being unfaithful, so they have to consult the you guessed it, Village Soothsayer to clear things up. And Rousseau wrote the libretto and composed the music, which wasn't very common then. In fact, sourtss say he was the first person potentially to have done this.
That is so crazy and what a weird detail. So was this opera a hit?
Yeah, well, I mean it's not considered a masterpiece today, but it was one of the most popular operas of the time. I was first performed in the court of King Louis the fifteenth, who liked it so much that the next day he's posedly wandered around singing one of the arias, of course, very off key, and the opera was even performed at his grandson's wedding in seventeen seventy. The grandson was the future Louis the sixteenth, whose wife
Marie Antoinette, is another huge fan of Rousseau's opera. Later, she even played at Heroin in a private performance for friends and her own one hundred and twenty seat theater at Versailles.
That is so funny. I had no idea. Well, I'm glad you mentioned Mary Antoinette because there's actually a nice little thread here, because we're going from let the meat cake to someone who loved to make cakes, and that is Emily Dickinson. Now, Dickinson was famously an introvert, even reclusive, but aside from being a star on the page. The other place she felt very comfortable was in the kitchen. She'd often send cakes and breads to her friends and
her family. She was also known to lower baskets of treats from an upstairs window down to the neighborhood kids, who apparently were big fans of her gingerbread. But what is also cool is that Dickinson would use the backs of her recipes and cake wrappers to draft her poems. For example, a draft of The Things That Can Never Come Back was written on the back of a coconut cake recipe.
You know, I got another fun fact, Mango. It's that I love coconut cake. So we're gonna we're gonna do We're doing ten facts in this episode. I I love coconut cake.
Well I am so so on it, but I'm glad you like it. If you want to make Dickinson's cake, you can actually find the recipe online and it looks pretty good, especially when you compare it to her black cake, which is an age fruitcake that involves nineteen eggs, five pounds of raisins, two pounds of butter, and a half pint of brandy. When this thing was done. It weighed more than twenty pounds. It was like an oven roaster.
Wow, tell me she wasn't lowering that down in a basket like It feels like you'd get in trouble if you bunk a kin on the head with something like that.
Yeah, I mean, apparently it was a special occasion cake, but it's still being made today. Since twenty fifteen, a team at Harvard's Houghton Library, which has the world's largest Dickinson archive, has been making the black cake in honor of her birthday. It's pretty fitting because during her lifetime, Dickinson was better known as a baker than a writer.
In her obituary, her sister in law wrote that though few people knew Emily personally, quote, there are many homes into which her dainty treasures of fruit and flowers and almost ambrosial dishes for the sick and well were constantly sent. That will forever miss those dainty traces of her unselfish devotion.
That's actually really sweet.
All right, we have to take a quick break, but when we come back, I'm going to tell you all about an actor who's a real clown, I believe it or not. Actually mean that as a compliment, So don't go anywhere.
Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where we're counting down nine side hustles of the rich and famous and one fact about Will and coconut cake. Before the break, you said you were going to tell us about an actor who's a clown, and you know, I know people hate clowns. They think they're terrifying. I kind of don't have an opinion on this, Like I remembering they were fun and silly as a kid. I kind of want to hold
onto that feeling. And I don't really like watch horror movies or things about serial killers, which I guess is where some of that fear comes from. But I'm curious about you, Will. Do you have a big fear of clowns.
I don't have a fear of clowns, and I used to not really have strong feelings about them, but you know what, it kind of changed for me. It's sort of like people who get super into like cosplay or something like that. While it's not something that I'm into, I actually really love that people love to do it, you know, like it's just kind of fun to watch
people who get so passionate about a thing. And I feel like most of the time, people that really get into the clown thing, like to want to be a clown, are doing it because maybe for some reason, like since they were a kid, they always wanted to do that, or at least that's what I assume.
So yeah, I don't know.
I'm kind of a fan of the fact that they exist.
Yeah, I mean I feel like like people who want to be clowns, like want to make kids happy in hospitals and stuff like that is how I think about it.
But yeah, exactly, I don't want one in my house, but yeah, I love that they exist. So anyway, one person who really loves clowns is the actor David R.
Quett.
When that seems no surprise, it feels on brand for him, but he was a huge Boso the Clown fan as a kid. He'd run around pretending to be Boso the way other kids might pretend to be Spider Man or some other superhero. And recently he made it official he is Boso the Clown. Like, officially Boso the Clown.
What does that mean exactly, Well.
You buy the rights to the character.
It took him about fifteen years of togoiations, but in twenty twenty one, Arquette became the owner of Bozo the Clown, which means not only can he sell or make a movie about him, but Arquette can play Bozo himself, which he does and to make sure he's doing the character justice, he even studied with a renowned Russian clown teacher.
That is incredible, and he spent fifteen years of negotiation.
Yeah, it takes a while, he negotiating a clown thing.
I didn't realize that was standard. So what does that mean if anyone else wants to play Boso like, they have to go through David Arquette.
I mean, yeah, technically, it's just like any other character protected by IP law. But what I love about this story is that Arquette seems really sincere about his motivation.
It's not a money grab here.
So when the deal closed, he told the press that he wanted to use his influence and resources to revive Boso in popular culture. He said, Boso represents a world of love, light and laughter, something we can all use more of right now.
And he's not wrong about that.
And in twenty twenty two, for the first time ever, a black woman stepped into those big red shoes. It was a performer named Jessica Harrison took on the role of Joso, the female version of Boza Jo. Soo I love it Joso. Yeah yeah, okay.
So our next side hustle involves a Grammy Award winning musician and fashion icon, Erica Badu, and in addition to being a truly visionary artist, she is also a certified doula, which is, of course, someone trained to support parents through childbirth. Yeah, it's true. Badou has said that she became interested in the concept after the birth of her oldest son. This was in nineteen ninety seven. She started out by attending
some friends' births. Then she found out not only was she good at this, but she found it really fulfilling, so she pursued formal training and earned her certificate in two thousand and one. Now, doulas aren't technically medical professionals, but there's plenty of research showing that their support leads to better outcomes for parents for newborns.
Mm hm.
And you know, I don't know that there's ever been a research study on this detail specifically, but I have to assume that if ericabi Do is one of the first people you see when you enter this world, you're pretty much going to be super cool when you grow up.
Yeah, that feels very scientific and reasonable. Badu said she's assisted with at least fifty berths by now. Her clients include Diana Taylor Summer Walker, among many others. But this is my favorite detail hands down. She calls her doula service but doula.
Oh yeah, that's why she did it.
That's amazing. I didn't see that one coming, but it's so obvious.
When you see it.
All right.
Well, another celebrity involved in births, but I have a very different species is the author Beatrix Potter. She wrote and illustrated The Tale of Peter Rabbit and so many other great children's books. But get this, she was also a sheep breeder. Specifically, she raised Herdwick sheep, which is a very old breed indigenous to the Lake District in the north of England. Now, actually, let me pull up this photo. Isn't this like a super cute sheep?
Oh my gosh, that is so cute And it kind of looks like it's smiling.
I know that's just how their mouths are, but it earned them the nickname the smiley Sheep. Now, more importantly, These sheep are designed for harsh northern weather, and their wool is actually so thick and coarse they can survive being buried in the snow.
So did Beatrix Potter grow up on a farm? Like I'm realizing now, I actually don't know much about her life.
You know, I didn't either, But no, she didn't. She grew up in London, but her family was from northern England and they often spent summers there, so she always felt connected to the region. She bought her first farm in the Lake District in nineteen oh five and eventually moved up there and married a local lawyer. She and her husband bought many more farms over the years, eventually including sheep farms.
So threw her hands on work. Learning from local experts.
She really got to know the Herdwick and that's when she started to breed them, and after a while her sheep started to win prizes, so in nineteen forty three she was even elected the first female president of the Herdwick Sheep Breeders Association. She unfortunately died a few months later before she could take office, but her sheep live on today.
She left fifteen.
Working farms and more than four thousand acres of land to England's National Trust with the stipulation that these farmers continue raising the herdwick. So as a result, many people credit Potter with saving this hyper local breed.
That is actually kind of an incredible legacy. So, yeah, are these farms still raising herdwickes?
They very much are.
Many of Potter's properties are still working farms, and many are open to visitors too. So if you want to see the cutest sheep in the world, just head to England's Lake District and think of Beatrix Potter.
As a kid, when I was like two or three, I used to warn my dad I was so worried that he would go to work because he'd get caught by farmer Brown or whatever Peter rabbit was caught from.
Of course, yeah, that's pretty great.
So my last fact involves a very different artist, the surrealist Salvador Dolly. He is best known for his paintings and slightly less best known for his experiments in fashion, architecture, and film, but his biggest side quest was book illustrations. In fact, he illustrated over one hundred books during his lifetime.
Some of the titles are more surprising than others. You've got Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, don Quixote, Faust, but also a special edition of the Bible, and Shakespeare's Macbeth, which I had no idea about.
Yeah, I mean, with the witches and everything, that one actually seems perfect for the Dolly treatment.
Yeah.
I actually found a New York Times review of Dolly's illustrated Macbeth, which was published in nineteen forty six. One drawing is described like this quote. There appears a box from whose keyhole blood gushes into a bowl, also containing a dismembered human finger, a skeleton wearing a robe with a grinning rubbery mouth in the middle, and a woman part octopus from whose head sprout various kitchen utensils.
I mean, I have to bet that sounds very Dolly. I'm not sure if it sounds like McBeth, though, And unless I'm remembering that play wrong.
I love that we're more scared of clowns than we are solved for Dolly.
Yeah, it's true, that's true.
But the review goes on to say that Dolly's only loosely resemble Shakespeare's story, that the pictures hint at quote another and rather darker story, which is kind of fascinating in its own right. It's like he drew what Macbeth felt like to him instead of doing the usual thing where the illustrations present a very faithful depiction of whatever's described in the text.
I mean, plus, in this case, the author wasn't alive to complain, so so Dolly could really let his imagination run wild here.
Yeah, and if clocks can me out of trees, it certainly seems like one of Macbeth's witches can be an octopus.
That is, that is very very true.
All right, Well, let's wrap up with a classic celebrity side hustle, which is the restaurant. How many celebrities have started restaurants. The Wallberg Brothers have Wallburgers. Yeah, good stuff, Right, you've been to Wallburger's.
No, I just know it.
Oh, you just like saying it? I get it? All right.
Well, Eminem of course has mom Spaghetti. John bon Jovi has jbj Soul Kitchen, just to name a few. But I'd argue that fewer as involved in theirs as the late great heavyweight boxer Jack Dempsey, who opened his place simply called Jack Dempsey's in Midtown Manhattan. This was in nineteen thirty five, he'd retired from the Ring. Of course, now,
Dempsey's served classic mid twentieth century food. You got steak, liverwear sandwiches, chicken a La King, shrimp cocktail, and something called Jack's Delight, which the menu described as quote Virginia ham with eggs and cream.
I have no idea what that is, but that's what it was.
I feel like my arteries are clogging just hearing you read off these. Yeah.
I don't think any of these were low fat, but it was just a different way of eating back then. But the food must have been okay because the restaurant stayed open for almost forty years.
Wow.
Dempsey was a fixture there. He would be.
Hanging out, signing autographs, chatting with the patrons. And it seems that one of the things he was proudest of after all those boxing titles, was his cheesecake recipe. In fact, in nineteen seventy three, when New York magazine chose the city's best cheesecakes and Dempsey's wasn't included, he wrote a letter to the editor defending its honor. He added that the late President of France, Charles de Gaul loved Dempsey's cheesecake so much he had shipped it to Paris several times a year.
I mean that's kind of high praise, right, Like, yeah, if someone like the President of France is ordering it, they come from a lad for this series, Like, it's not free of desserts or anything. So do we know where Dempsey's famous cheesecake recipe actually comes from?
Well to answer that question, we have to look to another New York magazine cheesecake round up. This one was from nineteen ninety nine. Brooklyn Diner's cheesecake took the number one spot, and the owner of that restaurant claimed he got his recipe from his aunts, who ran a hotel and the Catskills.
Now.
According to him, Dempsey used to visit this hotel when he was training and also got his hands on the cheesecake recipe, which he copied for his restaurant. Now, Dempsey's closed in nineteen seventy four and Jack Dempsey died in nineteen eighty three, so he could not confirm nor deny this. But the good news is Brooklyn Diner is still around and still has a cheesecake on the menu, but it
now comes with strawberries and Valroona chocolate fudge. Jack Dempsey might not know what that is, but I'd like to think he'd enjoy it.
Yeah, I'm sure he would well will. Since you introduced me to these adorable British sheep, I think you deserve today's trophy, and you know what, I'm gonna throw in a slice of New York cheesecake as well.
Oh thanks, I'll split it with you. That's the cheesecake, not the trophy. Yeah, fair enough. Well that does it for today. Remember we love hearing from listeners, So if you have a question or idea for the show, or if you just want to shower us with compliments, you can give us a call at three O two four oh five five nine two five. That's three O two four oh five five nine two five. You can also send us an email at high Geniuses at gmail dot com.
That's Hi Geniuses at gmail dot com, and come hang out with us.
On Instagram and Blue Sky. We're at part time genius. There's no excuse for not coming on and hanging out with us. So this episode was written by the wonderful Marissa Brown. Thank you so much, Marissa. We will be back next week with another new episode and in the meantime from Will, Dylan, Gabe, Mary, and myself. Thank you so much for listening. Part Time Genius is a production
of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. It is hosted by my good pal Will Pearson, who I've known for almost three decades now. That is insane to me. I'm the other co host, Mangeshatikular aka Mango. Our producer is Mary Phillips Sandy. She's actually a super producer. I'm going to fix that in post. Our writer is Gabe Lucier, who I've also known for like a decade at this point, maybe more. Dylan Fagan
is in the booth. He is always dressed up, always cheering us on, and always ready to hit record and then mix the show after he does a great job. I also want to shout out the executive producers from iHeart my good pals Katrina and Norvel and Ali Perry. We have social media support from Calypso Rallis. If you like our videos, that is all Calypso's hand. For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio.
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Tune in wherever you listen to your favorite shows. That's it from us here at part time Genius, Thank you so much for listening