Anthology of Horror, Volume 1

your mind in the most cranium popping ways imaginable. It's a science based stroll through the world of horror, anthology, television and cinema, The Twilight Zone, the Night Gallery, Tales from the Crypt Tree, House of Horror, and more So, stake around bloodsuckers and find out which episodes they picked and what sorts of scientific subjects they were able to suck from their Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey you, welcome to

Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And as you can tell from our delightful intro there by a couple of colleagues of ours, we'll just assume it was delightful. It was. They sounded delighted. They sounded delighted there, but they always even the most even in the most inopportune of times. Well, it comes down to the things they delight in, I suppose. But

but what they told you is correct. We're gonna be talking about horror anthologies today and then we're gonna we're gonna ring some science from their their desiccated corpses. That sounds like great fun to me. But Robert, So, by horror anthology, you mean like TV shows where say it's it's horror themed and it's not the same characters every episode.

We're we're not so much talking about like Monster of the Week episode on the episodes on the X Files are buffy, right, And we're also not talking about them from modern version of this that you see with American horror story where each season it's a different story. No, we're talking about the likes of the Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, Tales from the Crypt, uh, the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror

personal favorite of mine. Yeah, shows of shows of this nature where each episode is a self contained story or sometimes a pair of stories, or a short story and a like a sliver of a little extra on there. But they're they're self contained. They're they're essentially horror short

horror fiction that has been translated generally for television. But then of course you also see uh, cinematic installments of these shows as well, where you'll have a feature league length film that consists of say three, four, maybe five different short horror segments. Oh yeah, maybe we can do Maybe we can include movies like that in the future.

I think we just did TV shows this time. Yeah, there are a few, a few kind of branch out into film a little bit um And of course, of course we'd be remiss we don't end up talking about any of these episodes. But Black Mirror, I think is one of the finer examples of horror at times more sci fi, but really most of those episodes are pretty terrifying. I think you could make an argument that Black Mirror

is a horror anthology television series. Now, Robert, I'm a little at a disadvantage in this episode because you have seen far more of these types of shows than I have. I'm I'm big on Simpson's tree House of Horror, but I've actually seen pretty I've seen no Tales from the Dark Side, I think, no Night Gallery. I've actually not

seen all that much Twilight Zone. A few episodes you know, here and there, and The only full Tales from the crypt episode I've actually seen that I remember is deeply inappropriate one with Tim Curry, who is the most wonderful actor ever in in all of acting his three but it's just too grotesque to even talk about. Well, as we'll get into, that description can go for just about every Tales from the Cryptos like great actors and sometimes

great filmmakers, but kind of a deplorable story. Um. Yeah, if if I've seen a lot of her anthology TV sit shows, it's because I watched a lot of Sci Fi Channel and syndicated cable back in the nineties. I guess you could say it was my my teacher mother secret lover U to reference the Triosa far Um, But yeah, I watched like stuff like Ni Gallery, Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, both new and old. I think on the original Sci Fi Channel watch Tales from the Dark Side in like

Syndication on Sunday afternoons. It always felt like a particularly unholy place for it to be. Well, you know what I do expect to find if we get into If I go back and start watching shows like this is I bet I will recognize things from when I was kid, and we would go on a trip and like stay in a motel or something like that. And of course they always had all the channels we didn't get at home, so they had the sci Fi channel and I just

tuned into whatever in the hotel. And so occasionally I'll see some crazy movie now and realize I saw a piece of it as a child on vacation with my family in a hotel. Well, I didn't have ready access to Tales from the Crypt. I would what would happen is occasionally that on HBO was on HBO. It was

really one of the original original HBO programs. But to watch it, since we were not HBO subscribers, I had to either hit it and just mainline it during HBO preview weekends, or more often watched them half scrambled because I could. It would be like it would be kind of like pizza colored scrambled versions of it, or sometimes you know, it would just become black and white. So there are some episodes of Tales in the Crypt when I go back and watch them now and I'm like, oh,

I had no idea. For instance, I had no idea that would Tim Curry playing a female character, because clearly the first time I watched it. It was too scrambled for me to tell well in that episode. That's kind of a mercy, I think. But wow, it's amazing the things people will will put up with in the search for for a story that they're into, you know, like

like the idea. I always think it's funny that, you know, people watch like theater bootlegged videos that, like somebody will record a movie with the camcorder inside a theater and people will watch that. That's kind of look terrible, but I don't. I mean people you're they're hungry for it. They want that movie. And I guess you were like that too, watching through through all the static and weird

color variations. Yeah, that was how you got to watch it. Um. Yeah, So to today's episode for any long time listeners to stuff to plow your mind. This is essentially the same concept as the three Creepy Pasta episodes that I did with Christian where we would pick a creepy pasta stories and sort of squeeze the science out of them. And I have to say, we we squeezed all the science out of Creepy Pasta. I don't think there's there's much left. So this feels like the next logical place to uh,

to start squeezing horror anthologies. Well, I say, let's get right into our first selection of the day. All right. Uh, my selection here for our first one is a Question of Fear. And this is this is one of my favorite episodes of Rod Serling's Night Gallery, his horror anthology series that ran from nineteen ninety three. Uh, and then of course just eternally on the Sci Fi Channel during the during the nineties. Is this a picture of Leslie Nielsen with an eye patch and a mustache? I'm looking

at Yes. This episode starred um Leslie Nielsen as Colonel Dennis Malloy and it also starred actor Fritz Weaver as Dr Mazzi. Weaver is terrific and this as well, I mean, Nielsen is great. And this this is the pre name could gun Nielsen. This is the serious actor Nielsen. Oh, he was that way for a long time. What movie did I just watch recently where he plays a straight character? I can't remember right now, But of course he was

in Forbidden Planet, was he? Yeah, you don't remember. He was like the main he was the commander astronaut and Forbidden Planets, I mean Forbidden planets. Great, it's not great for the astronaut characters who as usual or just like some stiff white dudes. Well you could say that Leslie Neilson was also one of those those stiff yeah white dudes for sure. Um, he's kind of like put him

in the same category as Peter Graves, you know. Uh and and like Peter Graves and was later used to terrific effect in comedy as such as in the Airplane movies and the Naked Gun movies. Uh. And in this he's he's pretty great because he plays just a very um, just a very hard cold character. This colone only plays he's a fearless mercenary. Uh that has you know, just been in multiple wars and even after World War two

is over, you know, he couldn't get enough. So it just continually works as a mercenary and kind of Lee Marvin type. Yeah, very much, very much a Lee Marvin type character here also reminds me a lot of the kind of character that, say, um, Lee van Cliff would

have played. Oh yeah, okay, so in this episode, it starts off with a gentleman's club and here is Colonel Malloy, uh, you know, talking it up with the other gentleman there, and one of the gentleman there, Dr Mazzi, played by Fritz Weaver, starts talking about an episode at a haunted house, some sort of an encounter with a haunted house where it was just too terrifying for anyone to survive, and

of course the fearless colonel here. He starts talking about just how fearless he is and how fear is a disease. He says, I'm careful, but I am incapable of fear. Okay, So this leads to a bet, as of apparently tends to happen in stuffy gentleman's clubs. Momzy says that he bets he cannot survive one night in this haunted mansion without being scared to death. And uh, and he puts

ten dollars on the line. Yeah, that's a load of cash, and so of course our mercenaries up for it to prove how fearless he is and to uh and to to get a nice pay day. He says, of course I'll do it, so uh. And that's one of the fabulous things about this episode. It's basically a two person show. It's just just Weaver and Nielsen so, and you don't even see Weaver again physically. He only appears on a

television set. So what happens is that Malloy braves the ghost effects in the house, you know, all these smoke and mirror effects that seem intended to scare him out of his pay day. He definitely fires a few rounds and does some obvious special effects. Uh. And just the audience is clear that they're special effects, or it's obvious within the story that they're special effects. I think a

little of both, especially the modern viewers. Uh. The effects aren't like outright tear double, but anything they're lacking I think actually enhances this aspect of the episode. So it's like supposed to be visible to Malloyd that it's fake, right, or certainly after he's through, you know, emptying his gun into it, he's like, oh, you're this is in real. Um. I dealt with the problem the way I deal with

all my problems. I attempted to murder it, uh, and then I saw that it wasn't anything to be afraid of. So uh. He eventually, though, he settles into bed, he has a little coffee for some reason, and then he says, all right, I'm just gonna go to bed, and when I wake up, I'm gonna be ten thousand dollars Richard dreaming of mounting ghost heads on this wall. Right. But then the second he settles in, iron bar snap into place over him, and a pendulum starts descending from the ceiling,

and he still refuses to give into the fear. He's like, yells, all right, Mamsy, you can do this, you can kill me, but you're not gonna win because look at me, still not afraid, not afraid to die. And uh. And so he ends up going to sleep, and when he wakes up, he makes himself breakfast and Mazy communicates with him via a live TV train ends mission and he reveals the following.

First of all, Malloy apparently encountered Mazzi's pianist father in Italy during the Second World War, where he tortured him for information, pouring gasoline over his hands and setting them on fire. WHOA, So, as you can imagine Mazzi's for to find Malloy and to break him. You burn my daddy's hands, I'll get you for this, right Yeah, So now we know it's a revenge piece. So Mazzi reveals at this point that he is a biochemist, one of the greatest biochemists in the field, and is highly respected

UH in the realm of biochemical warfare. And he says that he and his colleague recently discovered a way to convert a complex enzyme in the human body into that

of an earthworm. And by injecting this, he says, quote, the bones of the body disintegrate without affecting the nervous system or the vital organs, until the victim is as near as can be an earthworm able to move on its belly, but without vertebrae, unable to stand, able to feed, able to pass waste matter, but unable to use its arms and legs except to assist with a slithering motion in the manner of an earthworm. I can't help but notice this sounds like a better and more interesting version

of a movie I don't like to talk about. Yes, I have long thought about this. We've had a couple of movies that have come out over the past ten years in which a deranged scientist wants to turn somebody into a creature of some sort, generally a lesser invertebrate. And and I find that all of those men like that. The concept is initially revolting and appealing, but then you

realize it's not really dealt with in any depth. It's only rolled out to to revolt the audience, whereas in this episode, I feel like it is it is leveled in a in a very intelligent way. Uh so, so yeah, to continue going. Malloy initially doubts this. He's like, you're you're full of it, but Mazi tells him, oh, well, why don't you look in the cellar and see what became of my colleague and says that he was a large man, but now he's reduced to something like a slug.

And indeed, earlier in the episode, when when Leslie Nilsen's character is looking around the mansion, one of the things he encounters is this unexplained trail of slime through the cellar. Uh, and there's this it's it's it's it's a legitimately creepy moment and certainly seems a little different from the uh the ghost effects that are thrown at him. So then he tells Molloy. Massy tells Mooy that the transformation is going to take time, but that he's going to go

down in medical history, and there's no stopping it. He said, you can after you leave here, you can tell the police, you can go to a specialist. But first of all, the specialists probably won't believe you, and even if they do, they're not going to be able to help you because this cannot be reversed. Wait, so at this point he's done something to Malloy. He's like injected him or something. That's what he claims. Yes, em Malloyd calls his bluff, but but he's already beginning to give in the fear.

Massy tells him, Uh, look, you should just wanted to check your inside forearm. I believe that is you'll find an injection point. We drugged your coffee, and I snuck in and injected you while you were asleep. And and if you still don't believe me, then go into the seller. Go into the seller and see what my colleague became. And at this point he's like really working Malloy up. And Molloy begins to move towards the seller and he sees the trail of slime this time, uh, you know,

working through the hallways and descending into the cellar. And then he turns around and he tells Mazzi that he still isn't that there's no way mass is gonna win, that that that that he Malloy is going to win, and then he shoots himself with his own gun. And at this point, um Mazzi uh admits he says, actually I win because there's nothing in the seller that's pretty good. Yeah, I mean I this is just my retelling of it. So certainly the episode itself is a is a finer

version of the tail than my synopsis here. I love the Uh. It's a common thing, apparently in horror to just talk to people through TVs. I'm thinking about those saw movies And isn't there a segment in Creep Show where somebody talks to somebody through a TV? Yes, I believe it is actually Leslie Nielsen. I think so, in the bit where Ted Danson and I can't remember the other actor's name, where they're buried up to their necks in the surf in the sandy, and Leslie Nielsen's like, moaha, ha,

I'll talk to you through a TV. Yeah, that's a that's a nice connection between this episode and Creep Show horror anthology film, which, incidentally enough Fritz Weaver is also in in the crate segment. He plays the professor. Uh. That works with how Hobrook's character. Oh okay, and he's fabulous in that as well, like he's he really should go down as more of a horror anthology legend. Well, I I got to see this episode. This is pretty creepy just hearing you describe it. Yeah, it creeped me out.

Then it still creeps me out now even though there's no actual transformation, it's described so well. It's a it's set up so well that you don't even care like it it It doesn't deflate the horror of it when

when you have this final twist at the end. But this, uh yeah, particularly this concept of transformation into an earthworm, I feel like there is a lot of dread here and it and uh and I'd like to know discuss a little bit why uh we feel that sense of dread when we imagine being turned into what is essentially a noble organism, uh, the earthwork. Now, I can think of quite a few culturally common body transformation or deterioration phobias. People have phobias about loss of teeth. That's a common

when people have nightmares about losing their teeth. Uh, there's like the penis retraction phobia. You know, people have genital deterioration fears, but I've never heard of bone disappearance phobia before. That's a new one. Uh, it's it's a great one. Though.

There's actually an episode of The Ray Bradberry Theater from the eighties which has a similar plot line, in which I believe Eugene Levy plays an individual who goes to a doctor for some sort of skeletal issue and he like removes his skeleton and reduces him to a like essentially an invertebrate. Oh so he like becomes a human jellyfish basically. So perhaps it's not explored enough the the

bone removal or disintegration um sub genre body horror. Well, Robert, I assume you're going to tell me something about the science of earthworms, right, Yeah, this gave me a good excuse to look into the science of earthworms. And I have to apologize to earthworms and humans who have been transformed into them, because you know, we could do a whole episode just on the importance of earthworms and the

evolution of earthworms. That's probably true of any of the subjects we discuss in this episode that we could probably expand them into a whole episode of their own. Yeah, if we were. If I was a little more of a grown up about it and was and didn't want to just use these things as an excuse to talk

about night gallery. Um the so yeah, the uh, we're talking about the annelids here from the analytic phylum, which includes all the segmented worms such as earthworms, leeches, and a whole host of polychete marine worms such as the bristle worm, which I recently got to see on a vacation in Costa Rica in the tide pools. Yeah. Um, what do they look like? Are they bristly? They are bristly And if you touch them, especially with a five year old touches them, uh, they will they will sting you.

But the child was fine. It was a friend of my son's. Okay, yeah, he was fine. He got that. But he did get to have a very up close and personal experience with with the bristleworm. Um. So, the this particular phylum contains more than nine thousand species and six thousand species of earthworm. They live everywhere except Antarctica, and there are even bioluminescent earthworms. Oh I don't think I knew that. Uh yeah, I found a couple of great sources on them, in particular Dr Frank Anderson and

Dr Samuel James. They did a blog post at Biomedical Central titled the Evolution of Earthworms. So earthworms are fabulous, their their ecosystem engineers working, draining, aerating the soil. I feel like nowadays most people realize that, hey, have you've got worms living in your garden? Earthworms, they're they're doing the Lord's work. That's good. But what did we not always realize that worms were good for the soil? Well,

it seems like we didn't. I mean, you can look back to the writings of say Aristotle, who referred to them as the intestines of the earth, which is in many ways true. It seems like a good thing, right, you don't want to not have intestines. But but apparently before Charles Darwin came along with his interest in earthworms, there was this idea, at least in the Western world, at least in in Europe, in Britain specifically, that earthworms were kind of a pest in your garden, that they

weren't really doing anything get them out of there. By the way, Dr Anderson and James. One of the things they discussed in their their article is that roughly one third of the earthworms species in North America were introduced for Europe or Asia, and some were introduced into northern forests which had been free of earthworms since the end of the Last Ice Age roughly eleven thousand years ago. Oh wow, I've never thought about that, the way um like the soil fauna has to recover after areas have

been covered by glaciers. I guess yeah. I believe we've touched on this in the past on the show. Maybe it was a very old episode about the idea of of earthworms being brought in by by colonial forces from the from the Old World into the New World. Anyway, But earthworms, there are a lot of them out there. The largest is the giant African earthworm. Uh. It's typically typically reaches fifty four inches or one point thirty six ms in length, but its record length is twenty two

ft or six point seven ms. What. Yeah, Now, even this species before anyone pictures like a full Leslie Nielsen transformed earthworm, Uh, this species was still the giant here was still less than an inch in diameter. Uh so nothing that could scare a man to deathness seller that makes me wonder what are the upper limits of Like how how filament like an organism can be. Like at some point you would think that the strains of moving something that long and that thin would want to rip

it apart or something. I guess that's why, because you see them remaining so thin, you don't see them reaching sandworm or gravoid size. So Anderson and James that they believe that the ancestor of all living earthworms probably lived over two hundred nine million years ago, making earthworms about

as old as mammals and dinosaurs. They based this estimate on DNA sequencing as well as the fossil record, which they said, you know, ultimately doesn't tell us a lot regarding earthworms, but it does give us leech cocoon fossils from the late Triassic two one million years ago, so,

which presents a minimum age for leeches and earthworms. But the idea of a human becoming an earthworm, the loss of our vertebrate status, I think it terrifies us because it also, you know, it reduces us to the activities mentioned by dr MASI right, moving, eating, producing waste, and these are all things we do naturally. But but we tend to focus on all the other aspects of our human existence. I mean, sometimes to the point where we want to reject our inner worm. You'd say, I think

generally bones are pretty important to our lives. Yeah, I agree with that. We we need our bones. But but but also just the idea that the worm doesn't do anything else, I mean does a lot. Again, but to the sort of the human perspective, digging around in a garden and not knowing what the earthworms are doing, all it seems to do is just food goes in one end, poop comes out the other. It crawls around. It is like just the stripped everything more interesting away from the

certainly the human experience and the mammalian experience as well. Well. Yeah, I mean a common feature of body horror. You know, long before we had David Cronenberg, we had older strains of body horror, the kind of horror that's based not saying a monster chasing you, but in the transformation of

yourself into something you don't like or recognize. I mean that the most common version of that is say reduction to what people would consider a lower strata of animal existence, you know, being made into a beast that's less than human. Oh yeah, I mean I can't help but think, of course of Offcas, the metamorphosis. Yeah uh though, of course

that that beast like he was turned into. I think the term directly translated into translates into something like vermin, but it's often interpreted as like a you know, a cockroach or something like that. But yeah, he the weird thing there is he retains all of his mental faculties. You know, he has full sentience. He's just said his body transformed. I absolutely love that story. That is. I think that is the only horror story that I've actually

read in a foreign language. I read it in German class. Yeah, yeah, what was it like in German? It was. It was a cool experience. I've since forgotten any you know, smidge of German that it was. That was that Reading that story in German was the absolute peak of my, my, my, my German language reading ability. Well, it sounds like a good peak to climb before committing to the valley forever.

So I mentioned Charles Darwin earlier. Charles Darwin, of course, the famous naturalist who gave us the theory the theory of natural selection. He was quite interested in earthworms, and in fact they were the subject of his last book, eight ones, The Formation of Vegetable Mold through the Action of Worms. And despite this, you know what makes him dry subject matter? Perhaps, Uh, it was still the most

successful book published during his lifetime. And uh and uh yeah, And according to Anderson and James, it was pretty key in changing Western views on earthworms. Uh. They were no longer soil pest. People realized they had importance and tying in without directly with our Night Gallery episode, it's it's success inspired an eight eight two Punch, which was a publication punch magazine. I guess you would call it um.

They had a cartoon that depicted worms evolving into monkeys and monkeys evolving into men in you know, kind of a spiral around a cartoon version of Charles Darwin Well. I feel like I should know the answer to this question, but I honestly don't. Are is a worm like organism at some point believed to be part of our philo genetic history? Or is or have worms always been separate

from whatever became vertebrates and eventually became us. Well, there, they've been a lot of studies over the years looking at nematodes in particular. Um Like, if you just do some searches for uh, human genetics and worms, you'll find these, uh, these articles. And I was tempted to go into those deeper here, but then realized that's it's really deserving of a of a whole episode. But but either way, I mean whether or not some type of worm is a

direct ancestor. Obviously we share common ancestry, so the question is how much do we have in common? Well, I was looking at a paper that goes into this, a bit titled Earthworm Genomes, Genes and Proteins The Rediscovery of Darwin's Worms, and this was by strussan Baum, Andre Kylie and Morgan was publishing two thousand nine in the Proceedings

of the Royal Society b SO. I I'd like to read just a section where they referenced Darwin here and in particularly the referencing that illustration I talked about with the worms transforming into monkeys. Quote. The illustration is a humorous construct, but an examination of the earthworm structure and function reveals cells and tissues and cell types with vertebrate counterparts.

Earthworms are ce limit protostomes, possessing an anatomicle and functionally differentiated alimentary canal with brush bordered absorptive epithelia, a closed blood circulation with hemoglobin in free suspension, an organized nervous system with cepholic ganglia and neuro secretary activities, a multifunctional tissue for which carbohydrate metabolism and storage properties are reminiscent of mammalian heptocytes, a series of paired tubules in each

segment with renal urine forming functions, and a systemic immune system comprising leukocite like cells. So I realized there's a lot of the very technical information there that I had to stumble through. Uh, but you know what it's basically getting down to is that, yes, we're very different from earthworms. I'm not saying that earth worms and humans are basically the same thing, but when you start looking at genetics and just sort of life itself, we're not that different.

They've got a lot of similar anatomical counterparts, some of the same stuff you'd see in mammals, and in a way you can see them as a reduced version of what we are. Right Um, and in fact, when you look at our genes. Uh. One thing that the author's pointed out here is the earthworms share something like two d and twenty genes um of their of their then catalog, that eight thousand, one hundred twenty nine gene objects with humans. And that's more than with fruit flies sixty eight genes

or nematode worms forty nine genes. Despite the importance of fruit fly and nematoed genes in human research, there's so you know, so there are a whole lot of vertebrate homologies in there. They wrote in summary that more earthworm genes are conserved between earthworms and humans. Provides anecdotal support of the original Punch Cartoons strapline quote, man is but

a worm. That's wonderful. And I like how they have fundamentally conclusively proved that you can inject somebody with an zimme and turn them into an earth No no, no no, no no, that's still pure science fiction. But but I think maybe it does lean into the idea that it is science fiction and not just pure sorcery. Like there there there is a connection. There are there is a wormy slimy trail descending through the Haunted House of Human Evolution if we dare follow it. Well, I have greatly

enjoyed following the slimy trail, Robert. Yeah, I think that's part of the fun of going after these, like sort of picking an episode from an anthology series and then just seeing what kind of science you can problicbly squeeze out of it. Um. On that note, let's take a quick break, and when we come back, I believe you have a selection for us. Thank you, thank you, thank you. All right, we're back, okay, Robert. Treehouse of Horror. Do

you have a favorite Treehouse of Horror of all time? Oh? Well, I have a I definitely have a favorite episode, yes, that I watched last night, because it has some of the best segments it has. It has the shinning oh yeah, which I referenced already in the episode. It also has Nightmare Cafeteria, the one where the you know, the all the teachers in the lunch room are turning to cannibalism and eating the children. But it also has has one

more just really stellar segment. Yes, and this is of course the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror segment Time and Punishment, one of the great Simpsons treeouse of horror shorts of all time, maybe maybe the best one ever, So I'll give you the quick rundown. Homer Simpson breaks the toaster by getting his hand jammed in it twice. Uh, the best gags ever on the show. It still makes me

laugh every time. The second time he gets his hand jammed in there, so I think Lisa's like, Dad, your hands still in there, and He's like, there's just so much fabulous screaming and sprawling about. Anyway, So toaster's broken.

He has to do some repairs. So in doing so, Homer accidentally turns the toaster into a time machine that takes him back to the Cretaceous period, and upon arriving, he recalls the advice his father gave him on his wedding night, which is, if you ever happen to travel back into the past, don't change anything, because the ripple effects through time could be disastrous. Unfortunately, of course, Homer ends up killing bugs and you know, generally messing stuff

up in the past. And so Homer comes back to the present the first time to find a kind of nineteen eighty four scenario where ned Flanders rules the earth, a kind of nineteen a diddle for if you will, and uh, it's just too good. So eventually Homer he goes back through time again to try to fix things, and every time he changes something in the past, the future changes in horrible ways. Finally, in the end he settles for a present in which things are basically normal,

but everybody has forked lizard tongues. He says like, yeah, good enough. Yeah uh. And of course this seems to be based on Ray Bradbury's short story A Sound of Thunder, which was originally published in Collier's Magazine and teen fifty two. And by the way, Robert, I think I'm to understand you have not seen the two thousand five movie version of A Sound of Thunder with Ben Kingsley and that dude with an attitude from Saving Private Ryan. No, I haven't you sent me a trailer for it? And somehow

I totally missed this movie ever even existed. It has some of the most deliciously awful c g I monsters of all time. It's you know, that kind of early two thousands c g I that at the time people just thought was amazing, and now you can't look at it without laughing. Yeah, it's it's a. It's a shame, you know. It's like, it's not like some of the stop motion animation you find in older some older horror films, like this is the Puppets. Yeah, yeah, puppets like this.

Maybe maybe you know, our taste will change, Maybe we'll look back on them in ten years and we'll love them. Right now, it's very difficult. Well, I mean I do love them, but not for the reason they were expecting people to love them. It's hilarious like reading movie reviews from the late nineties and early two thousand's where critics will say, like, well, this movie wasn't very good, but

at least it has dazzling special effects. Some people were just they're out of their minds in the late nineties and early two thousands for these c g I movies that looks so bad you cannot keep your eyes focused on them. You have to look away. I remember seeing the Spawn movie when it came out and thinking, oh, well, that that had some pretty cool looking action in it. Yeah,

and I recently like glanced back like a glant. Granted I didn't watching him full I just watched a few scenes on YouTube, and I was just really astounded at how bad the c G I was, it's it's amazing. But anyway, this movie, it takes this story. At one point there's this monster, this kind of like a baboon

velociraptor hybrid. It's just amazing. But anyway, so what what is uh the plot of A Sound of thunder ray Bradberry's original story, Well, it involves hunters traveling back through time to go on a safari through time and kill al Turannosaurus Rex. And so this time travel safari in the story is believed to be safe because scouts have gone ahead and selected an animal that was about to die anyway, so killing it shouldn't change too much about the past. But then in the story, won one of

these safari guys. I think this rich guy pay in to go on this trip. He sort of goes off script. He falls off this levitating path that they've constructed, uh, and he changes too much about the past, especially in the end by discovering that he crushed a butterfly under his boot. And so then when they return to the future, everything's weird. English words are spelled different, and a fascist politician has come to power. It's a fabulous story. I

should also point out that. I think it's the third season of the Ray Bradberry Theater had an adaptation of this that I think was actually scripted by Ray Bradberry, and I remember as being pretty good. Yeah, so do not feel like you only have that that awful c g I film to fall back on. But but isn't it interesting that probably more people have been exposed to this concept through The Simpsons then through the Ray Bradberry Theater, or certainly that the writings of Ray Bradberry. Oh, I

think that's how it often is. I mean, lots of classic sci fi stories ended up as Simpsons episodes, and that's what people primarily know them from. Just like I bet more people of roughly our generation know the Tale of the Monkeys Paw as the Twisted Claw episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark. I mean it makes sense.

We're essentially talking about folk tales and myths, and these things evolved, These things change with the teller historically, and so it makes sense that they should change with the teller even today. Yeah. But so this is sort of a timeless story in a way, because it's illustrating a concept that if you've ever really thought about time travel and what it would mean if time travel into the

past could exist. If you think about it hard enough, you're likely to stumble across some version of what's come to be known in in chaos theory and meteorology and mathematics as the butterfly effect. Now, there are plenty of popular misconceptions about the butterfly effect. You heard about it

in Jurassic Park and stuff. One of the common misconceptions is that the term actually comes from Ray Bradberry's story A Sound of Thunder, Because what do we find out at the end that this guy stepped on a butterfly and he sees it on his boot and realizes, oh no, that caused these cascading effects through time and changed everything. Uh, this is not the case. That the term does not come from that story. In reality, credit can be given to the m I. T. Meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz, who

was discussing the accuracy of weather prediction models. And Lorenz found while working on meteorological computer programs that extremely tiny changes in initial inputs would lead to huge differences in predicted weather patterns over time, such that unavoidable errors in our inputs will probably always make weather fundamentally unpredictable be on to certain distance into the future. And you actually know this from your own experience. Right, you look at

today's weather forecast, it's probably pretty accurate. Tomorrow's is probably pretty accurate. You try to go seven days into the future, it's it's kind of a crapshoot. Then, in predicting, say whether a month into the future, is almost useless. And this is because even though we have very good weather prediction models at this point, their accuracy just deteriorates over time because of the amplification of tiny initial differences that

you can't ever totally eliminate. So you know, uh, you you make a tiny, tiny, you know, many many decimal places behind the zero change to some initial input in a weather prediction model, and then you run that, run that alongside something with the original input, and one day into the future they'll be pretty similar. But five days

into the future they will be dramatically different. So whatever you've got slightly wrong today, however tiny that error is, will mean you just can't predict the future in a month. And illustrate this concept, Lorenz used the image of a bird, I think a seagull or a butterfly flapping its wings, leading to changes in the weather that would create a

tornado that you wouldn't have had otherwise. Now, one thing I also want to make clear is that this is talking about the predicted movements of like specific weather patterns and events. Right when they're trying to say where rain will be at a certain time, and how the front the you know, the the air fronts will move and everything. We can, on the other hand, make some solid predictions

about whether just based on climate and statistics. For example, you can predict it is much more likely to be raining in Seattle tomorrow than it is to be raining in Death Valley tomorrow, and you you are likely to be correct based on those predictions made on on the basis of knowledge about climate and statistics. But still, if you're trying to predict far in the future with specific movements of weather patterns, you're you're gonna have a really

hard time doing it. Another misconception about the butterfly effect. I think a lot of times people interpreted exactly the wrong way. It's like the opposite of what it means. They think that it means you can identify small changes that lead to big effects in complex systems, and this is the opposite of the point about the butterfly effect.

The butterfly effect is specifically about the lack of deterministic predictability in complex systems with sensitivity to initial conditions, and the technical term for this would be deterministic non linear systems. Nonlinear systems are systems where the outputs are not directly proportional to the inputs. You know, you can slightly vary an input and get big changes in the difference of the output. So the point is not that you can see a tornado and actually trace it back to a

butterfly flapping its wings. Rather, the point is that weather systems emerge from complex interactions over time with extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, meaning that if you move far enough back in time, you could not have predicted that a tornado would emerge. It's not about predicting the future of a complex system based on tiny initial changes. It's about how complex systems are more and more unpredictable the farther

into the future you try to predict. This, of course, is one of the fundamental concepts of chaos theory, and maybe maybe we should come back and devote a full episode to this one day with special guestian Malcolm. I've never really thought to look critically at whether the way I M. Malcolm tries to apply chaos theory and Jurassic Park is a legitimate application of that theory. Maybe maybe the maybe it is, I don't know. That would would actually be fun to just to do a breakdown of

the original Jurassic Park film. Uh And it would give us more opportunity to rail against what Jurassic Park, especially the recent films, are doing the understanding of dinosaurs. I'm really into kids now whose favorite dinosaurs are fictional dinosaurs from this most recent movie, and I feel like it's a shame. Real dinosaurs are good enough. Come on, Yeah, it's like everybody they're like, Oh, it's this blue velociraptor or something. I don't know, I haven't seen it yet.

Maybe it's wonderful. I suppose I should just be played that they're interested in dinosaurs at all. But they're just so many wonderful actual species, and our current scientific understanding of them I feel like should be reflected to some extent in our fiction totally. Uh So, it's pretty widely accepted that something like the butterfly effect applies to whether I think there are actually are some who dissent and say, no, it's just you know, problems with our models or something.

But the question is would it apply to the biological history of Earth? Would stepping on a fish seventy million years ago change the present substantially? And how would it change the present? Unfortunately, this is not a question that I think has a firm scientific answer. I think this is just something people we don't know what the answer to this question is. Uh. One thing I think, though I could be wrong, is that I think stories like this often get the scale of the changes wrong. Like that.

It's interesting these stories tend to assume kind of nonsensical esthetic changes around the margins of reality. But where the broad strokes are the same, uh. You know, example would be Ned Flanders still exists, the Simpsons, the Simpsons still exist there apparently the same people. Uh. Ned Flanders is still the Simpsons, Simpsons next door neighbor, but is also the dictator of Earth, you know. And I know that's

a parody. I'm not trying to like rag on the Simpsons for that, but it's a It's a good parody because it highlights the kind of absurdity that you see in stories like this, like in a Sound of Thunder, the idea that you'd still basically have the same uh people existing in the same like candidates running for offer It's office, but a different one of the candidates one yeah, and the back to the Simpsons, like why would everything

be the same except for the tongue? Right? So, I you know, I could be wrong, but I would tend to say, just intuitively and based on you know, using the weather analogy, that butterfly effect type changes from deep into the past would result in let's say, larger amplitude changes tens of millions of years down the road, bigger, bigger amplitude changes than which candidate wins an election. Would people even exist if they did with the same individual

people even exist? I don't know. It seems kind of doubtful. There's that great scene in that episode where Homer sits on a creature emerging from the water yes um, which I love that because I feel like it kind of calls back to um paleo art in our science textbooks where you're told about the evolution of life and you see this picture of some sort of creature waddling out of the water talking about like life coming from the

sea and then becoming terrestrial. But it it can it's kind of accidentally put this idea in your mind that there was one fish. There's one creature like that, just like this is the one and if you sat on it, it would change everything. Yeah, that that kind of misconception, Like one fish got brave and it climbed out of the water, and if it hadn't done that, there never would have been uh any kind of like water to

land dwelling vertebrate transition. Yeah, I mean maybe that's part of like an American exceptionalism, right, kind of kind of you know, accidentally drained into our science like that fish. Really it was a freethinker. It really changed everything. It's the great Man theory of history. And of course we got no time for that. But hey, this story also deals to the practical effects of time travel, something that unfortunately,

again is in in the speculative realm. But at least we can offer some informed criticism even if we can't have a like, you know, a proven scientific theory about time travel. So one of the things we often point out on the show is that, of course time travel into the future is easy. In fact, you're doing it right now in more ways than in more than one, more than one way, more way than one, more ways than one anyway. You are traveling into the future, of course,

at a rate of one second per second. But beyond that, you are in fact time traveling into the future in the way that many stories imagine, meaning you're going into the future faster than other things are because of time dilation effects, You're closer to the center of gravity of Earth, so you are actually going into the future faster than objects farther away from the center of gravity of Earth

that are moving at the same velocity as you. Also, because you're moving faster, that's dilating time in a way, speeding up your travel into the future. If you get in a spaceship and travel even even faster than you will even more greatly speed up your relative travel into the future. You will get old slower than things that are not traveling with you in that fast moving spaceship.

So yeah, time travel into the future is totally real, proven feature of relativity, and it's just it's actually almost kind of easy. Um. On the other hand, we often talk about how time travel into the past is perhaps it's impossible, and if not impossible, at least very very hard. Uh, the ways in which it has done. I was I was reading a post about this, UH on Sean Carroll's blog,

The physicist Sean Carroll, Caltech physicist. He writes a lot of great, you know, popular science writing these days, and he's got a great blog. One of his posts from two thousand nine is called rules for Time Travelers, where he just says, Okay, if we were to try to make scientifically accurate time travel movies, what would happen in them? He argues that traveling into the past is difficult, it

might not be impossible. If you can do it, it would be based on what's you know, basically like bridges through space time known as closed timelike curves. And if it is possible to travel into the past, one of the things about this is that it is not possible to change the past. So you might be able to travel back in time, but you couldn't create a paradox by say, going back and killing your grandfather or whatever,

so that you never existed. In fact, act, anything you went back into the past and did, you would find was in fact already part of the past in the future that you came from that's the paradox of the whole situation, right I mean, and that, yeah, that makes it kind of weird because that seems to sort of create a paradox as well. Like it's the closed time

loop like you see in the original Terminator movie. Uh, there's a boy who exists or a person who exists only because somebody from the future was sent back in time by him to become his father. So like, how how did that closed loop get initiated? So anyway, backward time travel still generally smells rotten to me. But but Carol saying, if it's possible, if it's possible at all, you can't change the past. You you know, whatever's done is done. That just is the past, even if you

can go back. Also, another point he makes is that you can't travel back in time to before the time machine was invented. He says, you know, maybe you can travel back to a point you know, you've got a time machine later and you can travel back to when the time machine was made, but you can't travel back to the Middle Ages or something like that, because you get paradoxes again, which takes some of the fun out of our time tap travel fiction. But it also would

explain why we haven't been visited by time travelers. Oh yeah, I mean that's always a great question. Now you might be thinking, okay, but wait about wait a minute, what about like forking branches of time? You know, can't you like fork off into different branches of time? You know?

Even Sean Carroll, he he adheres to the many worlds theory of quantum mechanics, right, so he thinks that the universe is constantly branching off into different realities based on the wave function of quantum mechanical objects and events um. But but even if you accept that, there's no reason to think that traveling back into time would somehow give you access to different quantum realities. It just seems like you know, you're here, You're here, this is the one

you have access to. You can't interact with other quantum realities by def mission, you can't interact with them. That's what makes them different realities. So, unfortunately, I don't think you you know, if you don't like the your lot in life today and you want to change things, I don't think you can do it by going back and stomping on a fish or even a butterfly. Still great, episode of tree House of Horror so good, and and I do recommend that Ray brad Berry a theater episode

as well. I believe you can find the full thing on one of the video streaming sides. If you love bad movies, I also recommend the two thousand five movie. It's it's one for the c g ages. All right, Well, let's move on to another one, shall we. All Right, So, Joe, you've flown with me before, Yes, so you probably have observed that then I'm kind of a slightly nervous flyer. I like to try to be a calm, reassuring presence, trying not to raise my voice around you when we're

getting onto an airplane. Yeah, and I have to say, you know, I don't have anywhere near the difficulty that I know some people struggle with when it comes to flying. But yeah, I've I've found myself grow more anxious when it comes to flights in recent years. And I've I've been able to successfully uh manage this to to a certain degree with a little uh Zanex, a little Steve Roach and be an electronic music, maybe a little biosphere uh and and that seems to do the do the job.

It makes me a more pleasant flyer. It makes me more pleasant to be around when I'm flying. But so, given this reality, I couldn't help but discuss the classic Twilight Zone episode from October of nineteen. Uh, Nightmare at twenty thousand feet based, I should point out on the Richard Mathieson short story alone by Night. Isn't it great? How many of these shorts come from great short stories

by sci fi writers. Yeah. I mean we're gonna get to some that are not based on terrible stories, but but yeah, so far we've been talking about some big names here. Uh Richard Matheson, Uh what is was a legend? Um? This episode, of course is famous because it also started with him Shatner. Uh so just a quicking Oh yeah, he's he's pretty good at this. But and he was in at least a couple of Twilight Zones, maybe more. I remember there being at least another one he was in.

Yeah what was he? He was in one that had like a what was it a jukebox napkin napkin dispenser? Yeah? Why why did I think juke box it like to spit out fortunes or somethingthing to that effect. Yeah, it's like a fortune cookie Napkin Dispenser. I'm blanking on the details is not nearly the famous as this episode. So in this one, William Shatner plays a nervous flyer who witnesses a creature on the wing of the plane during flight. Um, and he has a in in the episode he has.

He's just bouncing back from a nervous breakdown a board of flight, so everyone's doubting him when he starts reporting seeing a creature on the wing of the plane. Uh, this so what what is essentially a grimlin? Though it's kind of a yetti suit. It's a combination of a yetie suit and it also kind of looks like that dog down the hall and the scene in the Shining. Yeah, it's not a great monster suit, but the episode is

so solid it somehow works. And I guess it makes sense that it would be furry if it's at such a height. You know, it's cold up there. Um, I should point out I said it's a grimlin. Well it's a pre Magwa Grimlin of a pre Gremlins and Grimlins to gremlin, not the Joe Dante kind. Right, Yeah, this is you know, essentially the folkloric creature that messes with technology, an idea that spread especially during World War Two. So if something went wrong with your airplane engine, you'd say

they're gremlins in there, right. So in this episode, the crew attempts to st date and I think they even give them a pill shatter or not the gremlin, right, they don't. Nobody sees the gremlin. They're just like, here, take this pill. Crazy person. Um. By the way, good luck trying to get any kind of sedatives out of out of the crew of your flight. That's the policy. You can't ask for them. You have to say you

see monsters and then you'll get them. Yeah. So he's raving about the creature and finally like the plane lands, he's rolled away in a straight jacket. But as he's rolled away, he sees the claw marks on the outside of the plane, the proof on the engine that the monster was tearing apart the plane. He was right all along. He's not the insane person. In fact, he's the only

sane person of course, this Uh. This this episode was also recreated in the three film Twilight Zone, the movie in which John Lithgow played the lead played the nervous flyer UH, and he's absolutely wonderful in that. Uh. And oh and by the way, George Miller of Mad Maxi directed that that segment in the film. I like the gremlin in the in the movie version. Yeah, there's the movie version. Grim one is a lot more frightening. And then also there's a Treehouse of Horror that did this

as well. When they do it with the school bus, right tear at five and a half feet Uh yeah, it's it's pretty wonderful as well, and then does a great job of delivering exactly the same story essentially, except with it's on the outside of the school bus right. Uh yeah. And then when they put barton the ambulance at the end, it follows him under the ambulance. Yes, yes, that's a nice twist, like they added it sometimes the Treehouse of Horrors, like they add a little extra element

to the existing story and it really works. So the science of this, well, uh, you know, we could probably have a really rich discussion about flying anxieties in general. We've touched on it before in our Escape Pod episode. You know, we we we trust ourselves over to the machine and the people, companies and regulations that ensure everything is working. There's a loss of agency and flying, and I feel like it's you're just you're constantly reminded or

are reminding yourself about the potential undesirable possibilities. I mean, it's it's like standing atop of mountain when you look out and you see the height that you have achieved, not through any skill of your own, but just through the technology and people surrounding it. It's like being deposited on the top of the mountains a little bit less empowering. Yeah, airplanes are are sort of great to look at it when you're thinking about fear, because they combine so many

different kinds of phobia triggers for people. Um, of course, there's just fear of like heights and stuff, you know, looking out the window and looking down that that can upset people. There is fear of an accident of the plane crashing, But there's also just a fear that has always been more salient for me whenever I've had airplane fear is mainly what it is is, Um, what do

you call it? Fear? It's a sort of a type of a variety of claustrophobia, I guess where um, not being able to leave a place when you want to. You know, the idea that like, Okay, for so many hours, I'm stuck here and I could not get off if I wanted to. Yeah, the most I can do is go through a lot of rigamar role to walk down the hallway and you can use a very difficult bathroom, uh and potentially have to wait in line. Yeah, I

guess that's the type of fear. There's also just like I know, airplanes are or a particular type of agoraphobia trigger for some people, where you know, like the fear of losing control or having a panic attack or something like that in a public place, and that itself can

trigger anxieties. And then on top of that, you've got the travel anxieties leading into it, you know, because inevitably you had to get to that airport, you had to get through security, security, and you know, maybe customs if you're on the other line, like they're they're all these other stresses added on top of it makes for you know,

a very stressful day of travel. Really, in my experience, there would be a lot of problems solved if airports would actually just play you knows music for airports yeah, instead yeah, on the TV, instead of instead of eno I don't get it. Yeah, play me something calming, just like enos music and just scenes the scenes from Legend of Unicorns drinking water. That's all I need. No goblins. So I guess the thing we should talk about is the idea that this is a nightmare at twenty feet

What what is and feet about? Right? Uh? To put this in perspective, the top of Mount Everest is twenty nine thousand and twenty eight feet above sea level. But that's also quite a bit below the Carmen line at three thirty thousand feet, which is generally considered the rough boundary between the atmosphere in space. And I say rough because it's not like the atmosphere just stops. There's more of a tapering off. Now for modern flyers such as ourselves,

we're generally working with a cruising altitude. And cruising altitude, you know, that's that's when you've achieved, you know, the altitude that you're gonna have for the main portion of your flight. You're not ascending or descending. You're just achieving an optimal altitude, optimal speed, et cetera. But it's generally going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty three

thousand feet to forty two thousand feet. So, according to the USA Today article of what is the altitude of a plane in flight, the upper limit is generally the domain of private jets because that's gonna be more about, Yeah, we want to get where we're going. Uh, you know, price isn't much of an option. But with commercial flights, everything is kind of a careful algorithm, like, how can we do this in the most cost effective way possible

and the safest way possible. But for the rest of us, Yeah, we're gonna be, you know, somewhere closer to that thirty three thousand uh foot altitude. It's gonna be this sweet spot where the air is thin enough to reduce drag but there's still enough oxygen for the engines. Plus it allows them to fly overmost weather, which is located further down in the troposphere. So we're talking about minimal turbulence,

which is exactly how I like to consume the word turbulence. Now, I would guess at normal cruising altitude because cabins have to be pressurized, Like you couldn't just like breathe the air at that height, right, Yeah, since we're flying above ten thousand feet. Airliners are are pressurized, hence those little

drop down mass for oxygen in the event of cabin depressurization. Now, of course, the Twilight Zone episode, the original one takes place in the early nineteen sixties, so it made me think,

what sort of altitudes were we talking about here? Well, I was reading Longing for the Golden Age of air Travel Be Careful what you Wish For by history professor Janet bed Narnick on the conversation, and she points out some key factors in flying during this time period, and as the title implies, why you'd be better, far better off flying now as opposed to that Golden Age, no matter how cool it looks on you know, stuff like mad Men. Yeah, but can you smoke a pipe on

a plane today? Well, yeah, these are the things people get nostalgic about. I guess if they're smokers. So she points out that prior to the introduction of jets in night a transatlantic commercial flight might last something like fifteen hours, and they had a maximum cruising altitude altitude of ten to twelve thousand feet, meaning that they couldn't fly over

bad weather. So you thought modern delays were bad, No way, basically like if the weather was bad, you just too bad to fly through it, and then it wasn't gonna happen. The then you had the propeller driven Boeing Strato Cruiser come along, for example, that could seat fifty first class passengers or one coach passengers and it could cruise at thirty two feet above most of the weather. But during its heyday, only fifty six were active in the entire world.

So that's the other thing we have to realize now, it's like the commercial flight world is just so much vaster than it was in the in previous times. Later we got the d C six and the d C seven, both pressure pressurized planes, but they had to fly at lower altitudes guess what we're talking twenty feet. So that's where we I think come back around to uh to the to the Twilight Zone episode. Uh. Here For the for these flights, turbulence was common, the engines were difficult

to maintain, and this resulted in frequent delays. Uh. So this just matches up perfectly with the Sigrid Jim idea, the Twilight Zone concern about the you know what the engines are doing, engine malfunction and turbulence, uh all happening at around twenty thousand feet. Now, I must notice in in Nightmare twenty feet that the windows on the airplane look very large compared to the windows on a plane today. You know, I didn't. I didn't look into this as much.

I wonder if that's just so you can see the monster through it, or that he used an actual fuselage. Yeah. I didn't research that particular aspect of it. So but Nerik also makes some other important notes about safety at the time, because ultimately this is a film about airline safety and fear of of of bad things happening during a flight. She points out in the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties, US airlines experience at least a half dozen crashes per year, most leading to fate to the

fatalities of everyone on board. Compare that to seventeen, the safest year on record in commercial air history, zero accidental deaths in commercial passenger jets, and that's with many more flights, tremendously more flights. UH Dutch aviation consulting firm UH to seventy estimated that the fatal accident rate for large commercial passenger of flights is point zero six per million flights,

or one fatal accident for every sixteen million flights. I would suggest by that calculation that it appears gremlins are either extinct or endangered. Yeah, that would seem to be the case. Like this is ultimately a story that speaks more to an earlier age of of commercial air travel, despite the fact that every time I fly. Legitimately, every time I fly, if I look out the window and

I see the wing, I think of this Twilight Zone episode. Yeah, not that I like freak out about the possibility of an actual gremlin, but I still I can't help but think think about it. It's just always been there. But I'd like to turn to the biological element of Nightmare twenty feet. What sort of organism can actually become a factor at that altitude? Well, I mean, I know there there are bacteria that live in outs, but are there

are there large animals that fly up that high? That's a great question because we're talking about some extreme heights here, right, Um, And again, well, you know we require pressurized cabins and or masks to to survive up there. Everything has to be uh, you know, temperature, The temperature has to be carefully maintained. But evolution delivers certain bird species to these lofty heights as well, and yes, some of them can

pose grave danger to flights. These are of course referred to as bird strikes um, which which are when they occur, can be pretty pretty terrible. I've read that most bird strikes are encountered at below ten thousand feet. I've also read that most are actually occurring below three thousand feet, so I think that should give you an idea. Like most of the birds are are are operating at at lower altitudes. When you fly above the weather, you're probably

flying above the birds. So as with most things in air travel, the majority of the dangers are going to be closer to take off and landing, not at cruising altitude. Right and and again they can be pretty dangerous, especially in the event of a double bird strike, where like both engines are hit by the birds. Still, major accidents are few, but we have to consider some of the birds that do get up to some crazy heights. So I just want to run through a few of them

here before we get to the like the King of altitude. Uh, there are migrating white storks which can reach sixteen thousand feet or forty eight hundred meters. They're migrating bar tailed godwits that can that can actually reach twenty thousand feet or six thousand meters. There's the bar headed goose which can get up to twenty nine thousand feet or eight thousand, eight hundred meters. And these guys fly over the tallest mountain ranges on Earth. Why do they go up so high?

Do you know? Well, with the earlier species we're talking about, like this ends up being a part of their migration. Um. But the king of all this, the king of altitude, is definitely Ruple's vulture also known as Ruple's Griffin. We're talking a maximum altitude of eleven thousand, three hundred meters or thirty seven thousand, one hundred feet. So these are these are vultures. They're extremely keen of I you know there they have evolved to fly above it all and

uh and taking everything beneath. But they can get up to just crazy altitudes. Uh, They're just unchallenged in their ability to do so. Now. Fortunately they're found only in the South region of Central Africa. This is a belt stretching across the continent just below the Sahara. But Indeed, a bird strike entailing Ruple's vulture actually occurred over the Ivory Coast at an altitude of thirty seven thousand, one hundred feet or eleven thousand, three hundred meters on November three.

According to Serious Vulture Hits to Aircraft over the World, a two thousand report by the International Bird Strike Committee, outside temperatures were frigid, there was almost no oxygen, and yet here comes this, uh, this vulture and it hits

the plane. So that I think is one of the you know, these are some of the few examples of organisms that are actually going to be going about their normal business, like large organisms, organisms large enough to pose a potential and slim uh, you know, threat to commercial flights.

By the way, I also ran across a story from in which a Ruple's vulture escaped from a bird show in north the lack Sheer, Scotland, and her name was Gandalf and uh and after she escaped, airports in the area were put on notice and there was no evidence that she was, you know, ever recovered or anything. Fly you fools. But but it's it's like it's kind of an alarming story because it's like, oh, this bird has escaped, and it could there's a very slim chance it could

pose a danger to commercial flights in the area. But we should remind you that even with the Ruple's vulture flying around, some are out there. Flying is generally pretty safe these days. Yeah, it's far safer than driving when you break down the statistics again, commercial flying not necessarily getting in the airplane that your dentist buddy owns. Right,

we're talking about commercial flights again, seventeen safest year on record. Um, you really don't have to worry about green ones on the wing of the plane, only about the Langaliers land the plan. Speaking of late nineties c G. I right, yes, for real, man, that's a good one. I love that short story though. That was that was definitely a Stephen king Well. I think it was more of a novella, but it it definitely harkened back to some of those

Twilight Zone type scenarios. I've never read the story, but I remember seeing that on TV sometime around back when it came out, and oh man, that was one where maybe even maybe even the critics of the time, we're not wowed by the c G. I. Yeah, they were essentially like the critters, the crits from the critters movies, there were just these big c g I mouths like eating the Sky. It's a shame because the original story it is a lot of fun. I do recommend it.

I mean, don't read it on a plane, for God's sake, but uh, you know, do read it when you're on the ground. Okay, we need to take a quick break, but we will be right back with more horror, anthology science. Thank you, thank you. Alright, we're back. So what do you have for us, Joe, Well, you just did a Twilight Zone episode. I feel like I gotta do a

Twilight Zone episode they had. There's so many thoughtful episodes of the Twilight Zone, and perhaps because you know, it wasn't just pure hard it also had a lot of science fiction in it and just sort of weird fiction in general. So here is a sci fi horror episode of the Twilight Zone. This is one of the classics. You probably, I bet the majority of you out there listening already know the story here, but for those of you who don't, I've got to tell it. It is

to serve man. Uh. This is one that was written by Rod Serling based on a story by a writer named Damon Knight. It was originally aired on March second, nineteen sixty two, and it's just got a twist to put him Night Shamalan to shame. It is the best. So here's Rod Serling's teaser for the episode, respectfully submitted for your perusal. A cannement height a little over nine feet, weight in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty pounds,

origin unknown motives. Therein hangs the tale for in just a moment, we're going to ask you to shake hands figuratively with a Christopher Columbus from another galaxy and another time this is the Twilight Zone. Oh well, that's already a terrifying possibility here. So it's got a guy named Lloyd Bachner in it as he's a Canadian actor as this government cryptographer who who is tasked with decoding and alien books. So I actually I should say first aliens

show up. They're called the Cannimates. They're played by Richard Kiel, who ended up playing Kyle or Kiel Do you know how you pronounce it? I was heard Ko, but could be drastically wrong on that. He's the guy who played Jaws in the James Bond movies. He was, he was, he got yeah. Uh. And so he plays all of these aliens. They all look the same, uh and uh.

Richard keel In In like some weird head makeup, shows up on Earth and he speaks to the United Nations telepathically and he's like, Hey, we're here to help you. We're gonna solve world hunger. We're going to make we're gonna make war disappear. We're gonna solve all your problems and make life on Earth great. Don't you want that? Don't you want this free new energy source that you can, you know, power a whole country for a few dollars

a day. Don't you want all this great stuff? And people are, they're hesitant at first, but they're like, well, okay. And so Jaws brings a book with him that has like a title in these alien glyphs on the cover. He's like reading things from this book as he's promising stuff to humanity, and they get a copy. The humans grab a copy of the book and they bring it to this government cryptographer and they're like, can you decode this? Tell us what it means? And so he works on it.

He's got a colleague named Patty who works on it. Uh. It proves too difficult to decode, except that Patty decodes the title and figures out that the title is to serve Man. Well, that sounds noble and wonderful and and really works out well for us exactly, So they can't decode the rest of the book, but to serve Man and that sort of puts people at ease. They're like, Okay, well, the book there is about how to serve humankind. That

that sounds like a good thing. So people start getting on spaceships to go with Jaws to his home planet where they will be given I think that at one point they're talking about how they've even got baseball on the Cannibate's planet, uh, to go to the Basically it's like a forever vacation where everything is just going to be awesome, so that people are getting on the spaceships

to go there. And then the big twist that comes at the end is right as the main guy is about to get on the spaceship to go to the cannon it's plan in it and uh and and live out his days at the the baseball resort or whatever, Patty comes yelling at him don't get on the ship. It's a cookbook. It's so good to serve Nann. I believe the Simpsons of period this as well to a limited extent, right, how to serve mill House for dinner? Oh oh, I'm vaguely I don't remember when that which one?

I don't I can't remember which episode it was, okay, but they definitely touched on it at one point. Now, I don't want to be too literal about interpreting the science of the story, because if you really wanted to be nitpicky, you could point out a million really funny details. And its like, there's one point where to try to make sure that the aliens intentions are actually good, they hook jaws up to a to a polygraph. It's just like they give him a human polygraph to to see

if he's lying about wanting to help them. And another thing that's funny is they bring in this cryptographer to decode this alien book, but to decode it to what like cryptography usually consists of trying to decode encoded messages to ann language where you're like, you know where it will code out to some kind of script that you already understand. How would you decode an alien language when

you have nothing to start with. Yeah, and I like the idea that they could they could figure out nothing from the inside, like no content but just the title. Yeah it's great. But anyway, Okay, the main thing I wanted to talk about, ignoring all that other stuff, is the idea of aliens invading in order to eat us, or perhaps more realistically another option, just to eat earth life in general. Maybe not focused on us, but just

here to eat things. Okay, so not just to say, harvest the resources of our planet or to do something to our star, which we've discussed and you're talking about, like just just just tear into the biomass of Earth. It's a very common theme in sci fi horror, and at a glance it sort of makes sense because you think about, like, okay, so what do human invaders do when they invade a country. Well, a lot of times what they'll do is they'll just like raige your village

and take all your food. They want food, they need all your steal all your grain and stuff, and then they'll move on, or they'll land on an island, and if there's a particular flightless bird or or some sort of a turtle or tortoise that is, uh, you know, notoriously unable to defend itself and and perhaps even trusting

to a fault of humans. They might just eat them all or just every time they come back, harvest as many as they can and eat them on the ship, or just kill them and not eat them human as did the did that too. Yeah, uh yeah, that that's a little maybe maybe we don't want to think about that comparison. Uh but okay, so would they want to eat us or eat our food? I came across an interesting opinion about this. This was in a chapter from a book called Aliens, The World's Leading Scientists on the

Search for Extraterrestrial Life, published in seventeen by Piccador. And this book was edited by the Iraqi British physicist Jim al Khalili. And there's a chapter in this book that was written by the British astrobiologist Louis Dartnell where he's talking about what would aliens actually want with Earth? Why

would they be interested in coming here? And he's making the case that a lot of the stuff that people usually imagine aliens would want to come here for doesn't make any sense that they want water, or they want raw minerals or something like that. He just you, oh, that's one too, with all those things. He points out, how you know that's either and that's not actually a concern for anything they would want, or they could get this more abundantly elsewhere. And so here's Dartnell's case about

whether aliens would want to eat us. So, the cells in our bodies are made of large collections of specific organic molecules. You've got proteins, which are chains of amino acids. You've got the nucleic acids like DNA and RNA, which are chains of bases and sugars, and then of course you've got the best part, the membranes and the phospholipids uh. And so in order to keep our bodies alive and working properly, we need to have steady incoming streams of

those molecular building blocks. So we eat other life forms like plants and animals in order to get them. You can't survive obviously just by like eating sand or tree bark or salt and ammonia. You need to get specific organic molecules like sugars, amino acids, and fatty acids in

order to survive. It's also true that your digestive system is specifically evolved to break down certain kinds of stuff like Earth plant matter and Earth animal flesh, and it is it has specially tailored enzymes for breaking down those molecules likely to be found in the stuff your ancestors were eating. Yeah, it's also worth our ending. You know, we eat a lot of creatures and plant life on this planet. It's easy to forget that there's a whole

lot of stuff we cannot eat. There a lot of a lot of species that are just not on the menu for us. Most of the mass of planet Earth you can't eat. I mean that. Yeah, there's a lot

of stuff you just can't get nutrition from. Even if it contains raw atoms that you might want, you know that would be useful, your body doesn't have a way to break them down properly, doesn't have the right chemical enzymes and stuff to separate out the parts that you would need or put together the parts that you would need. Your digestive system is shaped by what was available to the creatures that you evolved from. Now, Unfortunately, most other

life forms on Earth have these useful molecules. In some nutritionally available way other animals on Earth are nourishing to us because we came from a common ancestor and we share common biochemistry. So in order to get nutrition from eating us and alien would need to share our biochemistry.

And in order to do that, we would either need to share a common ancestor, and unless they're coming from somewhere else within our solar system, which seems unlikely at this point, it's not likely we would share a common ancestor, or we need to have the same biochemistry by coincidence. So what are the odds of sharing biochemistry by coincidence? Dartneil rights, well, that's certainly possible for all we know.

Perhaps our DNA based life is the only way you can make self reproducing life forms out of the chemistry available in the universe. Darkneil points out that quote, a whole variety of amino acids, sugars, and fatty molecules are actually found in certain meteor rights, having been produced by astro chemistry and outer space, and so maybe extraterrestrial life would be based on the same basic building blocks as us.

So the point there is that we haven't found life beyond Earth, but we found a lot of the chemical building blocks of life beyond Earth. Uh, and maybe our way is a common way or even the only way for the universe to put evolution in motion and create the possibility of intelligent life. But then Dartnell points out

a big complication. Quote. Simple organic molecules like amino acids and sugars can exist in two different forms, mirror images of each other, in the same way your two hands are similar shapes but can't be placed exactly on top of the other. These two versions are known as a nantiomers and it turns out that all life on Earth uses only left handed amino acids and right handed sugars, whereas non living chemistry produces even mixtures of both kinds.

So yeah, picture that what he's saying about holding your hands on top of each other. They're they're the same shape, but you can't put one on top of the other one. You have to invert one of them in order for them to match up. And with three dimensional things, that means that they're not chemically the same. Actually you can't use one for the other. And in science, this this handedness of sugars and amino acids is known as chirality. Uh, the fact that all life on Earth uses only left

handed amino acids and right handed sugars. That's known as homo chirality, and it's a fascinating mystery to people who study the chemistry of life. Why why not the other way around? Or why not both both chiralities are and presumably always have been available out there in the universe. So why did life on Earth end up using only these kinds? Why only left handed amino acids and only right handed sugars? And in fact, Dartnell points out that chirality is a good way to know that traces of

life we find, say on Mars, are actually authentic. So imagine you've got a rover on Mars and it picks up amino acids somewhere on the surface of Mars and they employ the opposite biochemical orientation, so you've got right handed amino acids. Then we could know that they were genuinely alien and not simply contamination from Earth life that we took along with us on the rover by accident. And so Dartnell writes, quote, so here's a fascinating thought.

Alien invaders could be based on exactly the same organic molecules amino acids, sugars, etcetera. But they still wouldn't gain any nutrition from eating us, as the origins of life on their own planets settled on the opposite in anti amours, we'd be mirror images of each other on a molecular level. And of course, if this applied to us, meaning we couldn't be nutritious to them, it would also apply to

our food sources. It would apply to all life on Earth, so they'd be like, oh that Earth food, I can't handle any of it. In fact, it might even be toxic to them. I was looking at a paper from in pl os one by jiang in son Um about how how bacteria are able to sort of break down right handed to mino acids, and one of the things that they talk about is how right handed amino acids

are toxic for life on Earth. And it's actually important that back to bacteria do some breaking down of these right handed amino acids, or else they would accumulate to toxic levels in the environments. Oh, man, I there has to be some hard sci fi that explores this possibility. What did aliens come here to eat us but then we poison them? Well, I mean just the idea that their reflections on a molecular level and therefore incompatible with

us or our food. Yeah well, I like that idea that like they could they could, in theory even look

exactly like us. They could have bodies that are very so they were just toxic to each other, Like contact and sharing organic molecules from each other would be poisonous, Like if it was the movie Alien Nation and you had to have like left handed food restaurants and right handed food restaurants, and there was you know, it was you know, there's certainly discrimination there, but also the fact that the each species can only eat a certain type

of matter of organic matter. Yeah well, I mean, but the thing there is that if you assume their ecosystem is their planet is also from a single common ancestor maybe it would be that all of their planet uses the opposite chirality of us, meaning that it's not just like we need different food, but every bit of life in their whole world would be toxic to us, and all the life in our world would be toxic to them.

So like in order to interact, we almost need to like you know, be be sort of sealed off in a way. Oh wow, Well see that's a wonderful sci fi concept there. So anyway, I thought that was an interesting possibility. Even if they wanted to serve man, it might the dinner might not go so well. I like that we were taking some of the anxiety out of our Twilight Zone episodes here. Don't have to be as

afraid of creatures on the wing of the plane. Don't have to be as afraid of alien civilizations coming to

our planet to cook us and eat us well. I mean, the downside of that, thinking about the incompatibility of to for biochemistries, is that you could have aliens that meant well and that didn't want to eat us, but you know, just wanted to make contact and actually be helpful, wanted to serve man in the original naive sense of the understanding, but just brought with them a bunch of molecules that are deadly to us, which brings us kind of back

to the Christopher Columbus idea, doesn't it. Well. I wouldn't say that Christopher Columbus meant well. I know that's not what you were saying. No, no, no, but just the idea that on a biological level ends up bringing death and also on a cultural level as well. Yes, like that even if Columbus had actually meant well, he wouldn't have been able to help, bringing death along with him.

All Right, I feel like we're going pretty long here, but I think we have time for just one more story, okay, And this one comes to us from Tales from the Crypt. It aired in the fifth season, episode five. This was October.

I love how most of these episodes actually aired during October something it and it was titled people who Live in Brass Hearstar's alright, So this one, this is a delight because this is one of four episodes directed by Russell McKay, the visionary director who gave us Highlander one, Highlander one and Highlander two, Highlander two, Yes, and most of the great music videos of the nineteen eighties, Total Eclipse of the Heart. That was him, Wild Boys, that

was him. How do you say his name? Malkakey It's it's I believe it's more kay. It's m u l k h y. I've never been able to pronounce that, but yeah, the the visionary behind Uh Highlander various other films. And I do mean that authentically, like there is a visual style to his work. There's an intensity that you

just you know what when you see it. A thing that I think I rediscovered this year upon going back to the first Highlander movie, and it's your insistence, is the actually the first Hilander movie is almost as bad as the second one. It's pretty bonkers. Yeah, but what we'll say that for for an upcoming episode. Oh yeah, we've still got Science of Highlander two coming out. Yes, before the year's up, that episode will finally come to fruition.

We're not joking. Yes, it's real. So this episode of Tales from the Crypt, Uh, it's like a lot of episodes. It's a wealth of just wonderful acting, talent, spectacular gore effects, a notable director, and the script that well depends on how you look at it, right, it's I mean, it's easy to take these scripts out of context and dream about what a stronger, uh you know, rewrite could have

done for it. But on the other hand, the material is the material, and the whole premise of the show is that these are retold classic horror comic shorts, you know, from the the you know, the golden age of horror comics, and they you know, tend to throw some sort of a heel character through the Ringer with the murderous or supernatural circumstances taking place. Yeah, it's generally uh, there there's some kind of nasty dude and he gets his come

up and through some kind of supernatural karma. Yeah, nasty meets nasty, and then there's a joke about it. There's not a lot of nuance. It's uh, these were horror stories essentially for for for for kids and uh, but with completely inappropriate content. Oh yeah, it was. That's the other thing. All of these stories are so inappropriate you go even going back now and watching these these episodes, like some of them are just like so cringe worthy. Uh. And I'm not sure that it's a flaw. It's like

it's kind of what you get. It's that stales from the crypt. It's it's gross, it's inappropriate. Yeah, and yet there's something wonderful about it. So this particular episode definitely brings it with the cast because this one started Bill Paxton and Brad Dorrif. That's of course Bill Paxton from Aliens the Terminator, um and uh and Brad Dorrif played Worm Tongue in the Lord of the Rings movie, was the voice of Chucky. Then it's so many fabulous films

over the years. One fell Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Yeah, that was another one of his big accomplishments. He was also in What Wise Blood I think? Oh yeah, he was in Exorcist three. Yes. Yeah, he's a fabulous character actor. So already you have some wonderful talent to work with here. Uh.

They play brothers, Billy and Virgil. Billy is a mean spirited slime bag fresh out of prison, a performance by Paxton that reminds me a lot of his vampire character in Uh Near Dark, you know, just just a bad person, and his brother is essentially Lenny from Steinbeck's of Mice and Men, so they have that kind of relationship. Billy talks Virgil into an ice cream factory high school, which

goes all wrong. They're gonna steal a bunch of ice cream, They're gonna steal some money from a safe, but they end up just murdering some people instead, and as a fallback plan, they go after the ice cream truck driver who originally turned Billy in for stealing from the company, a man by the name of Mr Bird, and Mr Bird is played by veteran character actor Michael Lerner, Oh, the producer from Barton Fink. Yeah, he was nominated for an actor for that role. He's tremendous and he's he's

great in this too, like everybody's great in this. But here's the twist, here's the grotesque tales from the crypt twist. Mr Bird turns out to be two men conjoined twins, and the episodes grizzly payoff is that while the brothers succeed in killing one of the twins, they shoot him. He's shot in the head with a shotgun. When he emerges through a beated curtain, it turns out there the

other one lives and he gets his vengeance. The final shot of the episode, after he's killed the brothers shows the surviving Mr Bird twins sitting in his ice cream truck making his rounds with his decaying twin hunched over in the back seat. And this is I didn't even touch on some of the just truly bizarre elements of

this episode. For instance, Billy Bill Paxon's character totally does not need to have a butter eating addiction butter, and he's like eating sticks of butter throughout the whole film for no reason. With no payoff, like he already had a pretty good, you know trope character. Here Bill, you know, Bill Paxton is playing a slime ball. It's wonderful he was born for this role, and you're throw in the

butter for some reason. There's also a part where Virgil is reading a comic book and it is Predator versus Jesse James, which doesn't I have no problem with. I love it, but it's just such a random element to throw in us the original Cowboys versus Aliens. It really was. Yeah, I would love to see it. Uh it's give me Jesse James versus Predator. Uh So The science question here, though, of course, is could this happen? If one conjoined twin were to die, would the other one be able to

live on in this grotesque? Grotesque manner? So to begin with, I do have to point out again that Tales from the Crypt is pretty far from any sort of fair or reasonable portrayal of joined twins or just humanity in general. The show and the comics they're based on, they tended to have a real freak show vibe concerning any sort of deformation, birth defect, mutilation, or even just something is routine.

Is identical twins. You know, everything was played for weird, everything was played for grotesque, and the stereotypes are pretty broad and grotesque too. So you don't go to Tales from the Crypt to think about how to model thinking about medical conditions. No, not not at all, and yet that's kind of what we're doing in this this segment.

So here we go. So scientifically, conjoined twins are monozygotic twins who were joined at some region of their bodies, and the details depend on exactly where the conjunction is situated. So the exact cause of conjoined twins isn't fully understood, but a major theory here is that the fertilized egg is going to split into a monozygotic set of twins, but it doesn't fully separate and they remain connected. So the bird twins here are represented as terada catadidama conjoined twins.

These are lower body conjunctions and more specifically, they are pyg pagus twins, meaning they're back to back joined at the rump. So this accounts for roughly nine I've also read seventeen percent of conjoined twins, but don't let that number foe you. That still means that they're extremely rare occurrences. UM. These individuals. They commonly share the gluteal region, terminal spine,

and lower gastro intestinal, urological and reproductive tracks. So surgical separation of conjoined twins in general, it ranges from simple to near impossible, depending on the conjunction. In many cases, it's a highly risky surgery with potentially fatal outcomes for both patients. However, successful separations of phygo pagus conjoined twins have occurred, and uh, you know, with various cases presented

in medical literature. Uh. And the cases of separation do tend to be presented in medical literature like these are these are generally, you know, the more certainly, the more complicated. UM separations are exactly the kind of thing you're gonna find written up in a journal. But a separation is not what we see in this episode of Tales from the Crypt one twin is killed via shotgun blast of the head, and the other continues to live, dragging him around while he kills off the two brothers and then

continues his ice cream rounds. Could this happen? Uh? Well, broadly speaking, no, yah, And I don't think that should come to anybody's surprise given it again, this is tales from the crypt. Dr Eric Stratch a pediatric surgeon at the University of Maryland Hospital for Children. He actually covered the matter in the Esquire article how to separate a conjoint twin on his deathbed. Yeah, he was interviewed or

interview segment was used in that article. He did not write it, but he pointed out that once one twins heart stops beating, the blood stops pumping, and the vessels dilate, then the living twin will essentially bleed into the dead twin. And this will happen quickly if the physical connection between the two is large enough, but with smaller cases there

will be an infection in a matter of hours. And in these cases it's technically possible that surgical separate separation could save the living twin, but he didn't think it had ever been attempted. Again, in many cases, separation might not even be possible under ideal conditions, much less like an emergency UH intervention scenario. So while we may be able to accept the idea that they're surviving, bird twin murders his brother's killers, the idea that he goes on

to drive the ice cream truck around. Seems a bit of a stretch, now, Robert, I see you've attached a panel from a comic, so that this one was based on I guess something that was told in the comics before it was on the show. Yeah, this one was definitely based on a comic. Those comics managed to come up with some really gross stuff that that became only grosser when it was translated to HBO. Yeah, that the comics were big about, like the just the visual visceral horror,

and the show did a great job of of portraying that. Yeah. This this panel that I found from it, which which is easy to find if you do just a Google search for for the title of this episode, which was also the title of the comics people who Live in Brass Horses. Uh. Yeah, you just see the the ice cream truck driver climbing out of the back of the truck and he just has this this rotting corpse attached

to the back of him with flies buzzing around it. Uh. It's it's horrifying, grotesque, insensitive, everything you would expect from the tales from the crypt Robert, and you're reading about the actual uh, like the surgeries involved here and stuff. Do you get the sense that, um, that medical science is making a lot of progress in in how to help conjoined twins, especially in cases where they do need to be separated. Yeah, I mean it seems to be the case. But at the same time, it's like so

many of these cases they are they're different. Each one has its own individual challenges, and they's rare. It's rare. Uh, And you know when it, when it does pop up, they're also going to be a lot of arguments potentially

about is this the thing to do? Is is this is this the morally correct um medical intervention if there is such a risk to both patients, Because there are some heartbreaking accounts in the literature where an attempt is made to separate to conjoin twins and they simply both die, they don't neither one actually survives the surgery. Right. Well, I mean, I guess I was specifically thinking of cases where it is medically necessary in order to save them

or or create better health outcomes to separate them. I mean, I don't think we should just assume that all can joined twins naturally want to be separated. Yeah, Basically, it comes down to just the complexity of the of the connection. Like if if the connection is is smaller and more simple, and then it can actually be a pretty safe procedure as I understand it. Um then there are just other cases where it is going to be kind of like

the malin everest of surgical intervention. And and yet sometimes depending on the situation, it may be something that has to be done. This is yet another thing that I think I might deserve a deeper look sometime in the future. Oh yeah, absolutely, we've only just we've we've only we've barely brushed the surface of of twins and certainly conjoined twins.

And obviously there's a lot of a lot of fascinating information out there about you know, the lives that led by actual conjoined twins and not the you know, the cartoonish examples that we see in like Tales in the crypt which sadly it tends to be. This is the kind of thing that tends to be one's first introduction

to conjoined twins. In the same way that unless you have identical twins in your classroom growing up, and if you're not encountering them in your life, your first example to to identical twins is likely going to be some sort of weird horror show. Example, when you're five and you watched Dead Ringers. Well, let's hope not, but certainly you can watch The Simpsons, right, The Simpsons had the Treehouse of Horror where evil Twin was separated from him

and his living in the attic. I wonder, I mean, is the belief in evil twins actually a fairly common thing or does everybody understand that's not real? I hope everyone understands that. I mean, I have friends with with twins, and um and I I've talked to them a little bit about just you know, to the point where they

just want to avoid any like creepy twin content. I don't don't blame them, um but I basically I think comes down more to the to us untwinned individuals where we see this, we see two identical individuals, and we think of there's all the potential self exploration, like what if I were two people? What would that mean? Would have one represented my best qualities and one my my

you know, my my my my darker qualities. And of course meanwhile, these twins are are two separate people were just trying to live their lives and we're staring at them, trying to gaze down our own navel or write a grotesque horror story. Yeah. The the looker, the person who looks at another is the real monster, you know, because they always want to make monsters out of people who are just people. Yeah, all right, So there you have it, Uh,

Anthology of Horror, Volume one. Because if everyone liked this, maybe we'll do it again next year. Maybe this will be our new Halloween thing. Uh. And if it is, what would you like us to cover? I guess this means before then, I'm gonna have to go back and watch some some horror anthology series I am. I am

under exposed at this point. I had a hard enough time picking just the ones that I did today, though I guess I'd never run out of Treehouse of Horror episodes to pick tree Yeah, Treehouse tends to be a nice like overview of great anthology works in places. Other times, of course, they're parioding featurely linked films. I think Twilight Zone and Outer Limits, Black Mirror. These are great places to look to tales from the crypt little bit harder. I ran into a lot of dead ends and bad

puns before I decided to uh to talk about this one. Well, it is a forest of dead ends and bad puns, as I'm to understand. All right, Well, hey, everybody out there, you have a year to catch up on higher anthologies as well, and to suggest episodes from those anthologies you'd like us to consider covering in the future. In the meantime, check out stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is our our mothership. That's where we'll find all the episodes.

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