Listener Mail: A Whistle of Worth

your Mind dot com. If you ever want to get in touch to share something interesting, if you have feedback on a recent episode, or if you just want to say hi, tell us your thoughts about the show or anything else, get in touch contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. We have a bunch of messages in response to our series about whistling, and I think we should kick right off with this message from Joe. Rob Do you mind if I read this one? Go for it? Okay, this is Joe, just Jo, not like me.

I've got any on there. So Joe says hello and good day. I was whistling while listening to Whistling Part one until you mentioned that you'd cover some of the superstitions about whistling. It just so happens that a lot of Southeast Asians believe that whistling attracts unwanted attention from supernatural beings, especially since it's currently the seventh Lunar Month a k a. Ghost Month. Although you've done many spooky episodes, I don't think I've ever heard the Hungry Ghost month

mentioned on the podcast. In case you haven't heard about it, let me give you a short introduction. The seventh Lunar month is when the gates of hell are opened and ghosts are allowed to roam the earth for thirty days. Spirits wander the mortal realm in search of entertainment and sustenance. This month is considered pretty inauspicious, and people in places like Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan will often avoid being outside at night for fear of running a foul of mischievous spirits.

Throughout the month, it's not uncommon to see offerings of food placed by the side of the road for hungry ghost ease. It's only polite that pedestrians avoid stepping over these offerings or getting too close to them, as this might disrupt any feasting spirits. Malaysia and Singapore also have a tradition of setting up stages where performers are hired

to sing and act for their invisible floaties. For this reason, the first few rows of chairs in the audience of any such stage are to be left empty in case these supernatural friend does want to take a seat and enjoy their foray back into the mortal world. Some places only celebrate the Hungry Ghost Festival, which is the fifteen of the seventh month. It's the twelfth of August. It's a day when food, jawsticks, paper money, prayers, and rituals

are offered up to appease the restless roaming spirits. It's also common to see lights and candles placed on the side of the roads, as it is believed to help guide the spirits back into Hell. There are a slew of superstitions related to Ghost Month. Loud sounds like whistle ling are believed to attract spirits. It has always been discouraged in Southeast Asia, but even more so during this spooky month. Other superstitions include not looking back over your

shoulder to see if someone is yelling your name. This is because daois slash Buddhists believe that there's a tiny invisible flame on each shoulder and on your head, creating a triangle of fire. This protects you from spooky encounters. But if you turn your head and look back over your shoulder, you will extinguish one of the flames and this will open you up to hauntings slash ghostly things. Despite the spookiness of the whole month, Valentine's Day is

celebrated on the seventh day of the seventh month. This day, known as cheese c, is about the tail of the cow herd and the weaver girl. They had a forbidden romance and were cast opposite sides of the Heavenly River. But every year on Cheese c a bridge of magpies forms over the river and allows the lovers to reunite for a brief moment. Mont Anyway, Ghost Month in two lasts until August. Until then, whistling, especially at night, is not encouraged. Less to lost ghost follow you home and

take up residence in your abode. Stay spooky and stay safe, live along and prosper. Joe. Uh wow, what a wonderful email. Thank you so much, Joe, that that was fantastic. Yeah, those are some close encounters of the spooky kind for sure. Yeah, we've I guess we we've spoken a little bit about hungry ghosts in the past, but yeah, we've never talking We've never spoken about about this month. So yeah, this is a wonderful email. This is exactly the kind of

of stuff I love to hear from the listeners. Now, I guess this episode won't come out until after the Hungry Ghost Festival, which Joe says is going to be on the twelfth of August, But you still got the rest of the month to to to play around on the spooky side. True, and hey, on August twelve, the Weird House Cinema is just, by happenstance, going to be a really cool Taiwanese magical fantasy adventure film. Yeah, all right, here's another one. This one comes to us from Phil

Phil right soon and says Hi, Robert and Joe. From the moment I saw the topic of this week's episodes, I knew that I would want to write in. Whistling is something that has been very near and dear to me for a long time. I first learned to make

a single monotone sound when I was seven. I thought I was doing it wrong for a little while, and that's why I was monotone because my grandfather always used to whistle by pulling his lower jaw in and rounding his lips almost like he was about to play a flute. I believe he would also suck air in to make in the noise rather than expel it, but don't quote me on that. I was always fascinated by this method

and never managed to replicate it myself. Apart from wishing to chime in with this bit about my grandfather's irregular technique, I also wanted to bring up something with regards to my own whistling. I am physically tongue tied. I have encountered one other person in my life that is tongue tied, and they claimed to not be able to whistle because of it. I, on the other hand, love to whistle.

I do it constantly and can even employ a bit of vibrato and possibly something that resembles double tonguing for really fast sections. It is a great way for me to quote unquote sing songs with female vocals or no vocals at all. Whistling is something I think I am quite good at. However, based on this one other person, I am curious why I can whistle with my tongue tied down to the bottom of my mouth but she couldn't.

I'm also afraid that should I ever get my tongue tie cut so that I can actually do things normal people can the like lick an ice cream cone or blow bubbles with bubble gum, it will have an adverse effect on this thing that I love. However, maybe it won't. Don't know and too afraid to try. Thank you for all of the episodes. You guys were the first podcast show that I ever listened to. I obviously haven't stopped and have no intention to do so anytime soon. All

the best, phil ps. Some of my favorite songs to whistle Think of Me from Phantom of the Opera sung by Sarah Brightman, Ship to Wreck by Florence and the Machine. I love that song. That's that goes on a lot on my playlists. Oh, I don't know that one, and I know think of Me. I know Phantom Breathe by Michelle Branch and Been Not Break by Vitamin String Quartet,

a string quartet cover of a dashboard confessional song. I am also trying to teach myself the Whistling Caruso by Andrew Bird from the end of the movie The Muppets. This is proving to be challenging. Andrew Bird is a is a mighty whistling musician. Some another listener got in touch about Andrew Bird songs that have whistling, A number

of them, a lot of them do oh yeah. By the way, I just in case anybody out there was as confused as me at first, I I was not familiar with the idea of uh with the idea of tongue tie as an actual physical condition in the mouth. It's I'd always heard tongue tied as like a metaphorical expression, meaning like not knowing what to say. But tongue tie is a real physical condition, also known as ankleo glossia

and it. According to the Mayo Clinics page on it, it's basically a condition that restricts the tongue's range of motion. Quote with tongue tie and unusually short, thick, or tight band of tissue, the lingual frenulum tethers the bottom of the tongue's tip to the floor of the mouth, so it may interfere with breastfeeding. Someone who has tongue tie

might have difficulty sticking out his or her tongue. Tongue tie can also affect the way a child eats, speaks, or swallows and it also says that sometimes this condition might require surgical procedures for correction, but other times it doesn't cause enough problems, so it's just left how it is.

All right, Well, thanks for writing in Phil. Okay, here's a message from Randy reporting from Mexico saying that that they just finished our part three of our whistling series and says, quote, you were mentioning the idea of whistling is a form of contempt and that it might have been a practice in olden days. I think we were talking about those papers saying that like in the English theater, for example, you would whistle to show like I don't

like what is being said. Oh. In fact, that also goes back to Roman times, the idea that there would be shepherd whistles in the audience if they didn't like what a speaker was saying. And I guess we were saying that it didn't We hadn't encountered that in American culture. You know, if an audience whistles, that usually seems to be a sign of approval rather than disapproval. It's like, yeah,

keep going, but a very thunderous supplies exactly. But Randy says, well, let me take you once again to Mexico, where you can still hear disapproving whistles among crowds alongside booing. It usually mimics the way you would cuss at someone. Picture the equivalent of an fu in Spanish, and then that is transposed to whistling. And then Randy shares video of a cockatoo demon straighting what this sounds like? So it is the yeah, So it is the straight up Spanish

phrase that is the equivalent of the English FU. But it's like whistled in the same way that I demonstrated in one of our whistling episodes that I could sort of whistle the phrase, um, hello, nice to meet you, and people would basically be able to know what I was saying, or at least a lot of a lot of people might be able to figure it out just by the intonation of the whistling Uh. You can do the same thing with vulgar phrases. So, according to Randy,

this happens in in unhappy Mexican audiences. Alright, This next one comes to us from Jamie Oh an important bit of context. The subject line of this one is the strange death of whistling Scotland all right, well, Jamie writes, Dear Robert and Joe, thank you as always for the stimulating podcast. I've been greatly enjoying your series on whistling, and while hearing about the decline of whistled languages around the world, I thought, when was the last time I

heard someone whistle a jaunty tune? When I was young, whistling was, if not ubiquitous, at least common enough to hear on a daily basis, especially amongst jobs whose practitioners move around a lot during the day, with periods of intermittent in forced slackness. Builders, plasterers, joiners, that kind of thing. Maybe that time is now occupied by playing with one's phone and whistling is yet another casualty of the smartphone revolution.

Or I may be wrong and there is a whole genre of whistling TikTok in an aside by this episode, have you ever thought of doing an episode on the world's most difficult language? Of course, language difficulty is a subjective concept and depends upon the native language of the learner. That said, is someone who has learned French, Japanese and Arabic and had to go at Russian and Scottish Gaelic. I would say that the latter was actually the hardest.

I wonder what would be the optimum combination of difficult features from various languages. The system of tents in aspects of English, the Hansi ideograms of Chinese, the extensive tones of Vietnamese, the challenging voiced glottal stop of Arabic or Hebrew, or the clicks of various Southern African languages might be fun to play around. Keep up the good work, Jamie, Yeah,

that's a really interesting idea. I mean, I know different languages have different things that present problems that I don't know if this is true, but I mean I've heard it characterized that one of the most difficult things about learning English, uh is the lack of regularity in in the way like uh, grammar and word forms, work and stuff.

English is sort of a highly chaotic and irregular language, whereas I think with other things it would be Yeah, you'd have to learn, like if you're not already familiar with tonal languages. I'm sure learning a tonal language from only a non tonal background has got to be incredibly hard. But yeah, this is a great idea. Certainly we'd love to We're all would love to come back and do a linguistic episodes, so it might be an area to

consider for the future. Okay, we got one message that was about story machines from Trey and this one, this one legitimately made me laugh out loud. So remember how in the previous that we were talking about when you feed stuff into the story machine that makes it put out not really something that's not really a story, like the ones that instead turned into ads for books or something,

And this was one of those. So Trey says, Hi, Rob, Seth, and Joe I work at a staffing company and I'm also a big fan of stuff to blow your mind. I used the story machine dot net generator to make a mock ad. The title was part time Jobs, eight hour shifts. The prompt was we have good paying part time jobs. Below is what the robot wrote, we have good paying part time jobs. I get paid thirteen dollars

an hour. My husband gets paid twelve dollars an hour, but our hours are cut back to eight hours a day. We are only paid for eight hours. We are only paid for the hours we work. We are not paid for the hours we are off. We are only paid for the hours we are working. We are only paid for the hours we are at our job. We're only paid for the hours we are working. We're only paid for the hours we were at our job. We are only paid for the hours we were at our job.

We're only paid for the hours we are at our job. We are only paid for the hours we were at our job. We are only paid for the hours we are at our job. We are only paid for the hours we are at our job. Wow, it kind of got stuck there, didn't got broken yet you destroyed its mind, Trey says, I think you could read the last half where it begins repeating six times the same sentence six times as a droning chant. This sounds like a creepy short story about part time workers who hate their jobs

or our zombies. Thanks Trey, that was pretty great. Um. Yeah, there's so many there's so many fun things to do with this um, with this interface. Um, and I not thought about a mock at but that's that's brilliant. Oh. This may also have been springboarding off the one in the previous listener mail that was a story about the

bank that sends its customers to hell. All right, we have a little bit of weird house cinema mail here to to look at this first first one here It comes to us from Dan the subject Plan nine, weird House. Dear Robin, Joe. I love this episode. Plan nine from Outer Space, along with Halloween three Season of The Witch are two movies that I think we're custom made for weird house cinema. I loved hearing Joe's personal story about he and his wife fell in love after watching Plan

nine on a bootleg VHS tape in high school. I first saw Plan nine from Outer Space in college on Turner Classic Movies late at night. This was after I had seen Tim Burton's ed Wood, which is one of my favorite movies, and I, of course had heard about how it was consistently ranked as the worst movie ever made, so I was curious to see what it was like. Is it really that bad? I remember thinking that while yes, the acting is terrible, the dialogue doesn't make any sense,

and it's and is overwritten and clumsy. Something over there, but I'll be over here. Nothing matches. The effects and set design are so cheap, the airplane cockpit, but I was still charmed and somewhat entertained by it certainly not the worst movie I had ever seen, which begs the question something I thought you might go into a more discussion. If Plan nine from Outer Space is really the worst

movie ever made? Why do so many people still find it fascinating, entertaining, fun to talk about, and his referenced in other forms of media. Shouldn't the worst movie ever?

Maybe something no one ever remembers is boring, is grossly cynical and a commercial sense fun fact, Plan nine has never been on IMDBs bottom one d. I also wondered if maybe the Criswell predicts scene at the beginning and whenever he went on the Tonight Show was what Conan O'Brien was parading on his original late night show with the recurring segment in the year two thousand where he

and a guest made ridiculous predictions about the future. Finally, are you familiar with the song Plan nine Channel seven by the British punk proto goth band The Damned, which, according to lead singer Dave Vanian, was was written about Vampira link here and they include the link and then Dan finishes everything up by saying thank you for the countless hours of podcasting about the strange and the unusual. Future.

Podcasts such as these will affect you in the future, my friends, because that is where we will be spending the rest of our lives. Uh. That song by the Damned is great Channel nine with shades of Grade too Close but two worlds Away, Plan nine her Domain, too close but two worlds away. Yeah. I don't think I was familiar with this track, but I just I just gave it a quick listen, and uh, yeah, like the vibe here. But regarding the whole like worst movie ever made? Thing,

I have heard people say that about Plan nine. I I don't know. Well, I hesitate to say this because it is a podcast and somebody might surface a clip

of me saying the opposite. But I think I think I usually shy away from things like the worst movie ever made, unless I'm just trying to be funny, because I mean, obviously, not only are things like that subjective, I mean, of course, but that seems like a weird thing to even try to say from your own personal point of view, because, uh, the badness of a movie encompasses so many different ways of thinking about a movie. Yeah, so, like,

what would you really be looking for? Does it mean like the movie that made you the most unhappy by watching, or you know, it's it's hard to figure out what that even really means. Yeah, the worst can cover a lot of ground. And I can think of various examples of films that I'm I might think of as the worst in the sense that I do not like them. Yeah, and and then they're ms that I can't even tell you that I don't like them because I don't remember them.

And perhaps those are the worst because yeah, as as Dan alluded to, like the unmemorable films, films they don't move you one way or another, like, those are probably the worst. Those are ones where you just have lost hours of time in your life that you'll never get back, whereas something like Plan nine from Outer Space. I mean, it's it's it's a riot, it's it's fun to watch. It's I find movies like this thought provoking in ways that that that quote unquote intelligent films sometimes are not.

You know, uh, there's uh. That's one of the things that keeps coming, it keeps pulling me back to them, is that almost it's almost like the gaps, the flaws and these pictures, they they give you room to to to think creatively about them, to try and stitch together that which is not well connected and so forth. Yeah,

totally agree with all of that. I would say that I think Plan not people might be tempted to say Plan nine is the worst movie ever made in a way that I think what they mean is like it's the worst, It's like the most remarkably interestingly bad movie ever made. They're saying it's like notable for its badness in the sense, not like execrable because of its badness. Yeah, I mean, ultimately it's it's lovingly bad, like you can embrace the quote unquote badness of Plan nine from outer space.

Uh it's uh yeah, there are there are plenty of films that if you actually had to come up with a list of like what are the worst? Like what are I mean? That would just be an unpleasant experience to even try and put together that list of films, because there's some real dogs out there. Yeah, I do remember. So I have long been a person who, you know, my friends knew I loved bad movies, and they would sometimes ask me like, well, what's the worst worst, not

the best, worst, but worst worst you've ever seen? I probably wouldn't still stick by this, but for a long time I said my answer was a movie called Beaks, which is a Spanish horror movie by Renee Cardona Jr. That's a rip off of Hitchcock's The Birds, but I remember that in a really like unique and profound way

causing intense physical and psychic pain. Uh. I think because of a soundtrack issues like the I record It's been forever since I've seen it, but the remember the soundtrack was like one excruciating, droning high synthesizer note held down for for minutes at a time. Yeah. Yeah, I haven't seen the film in question, but I can imagine where there's a negative sonic experience that tied up with it

that you could certainly a case could be made. I was watching it with some friends and I remember at one point I was like, in such misery I literally like rolled out of my chair onto the floor. But to consider the IMDb bottom one ranking, like, if you go to that page and I'm looking at it right now, there's some tremendously fun stuff on here. There's there's stuff like Santa Claus versus the Martians. Uh oh what else we have? Troll too is on here, hob Goblins, um,

lots of stuff. A battle Battlefield Earth Is is pretty high or low ranking on the list. Yeah, the movies that get featured on these things. Again, there there's obviously no like unified objective criteria on which to judge these things.

But the movies that get identified as the worst of all time tend to be maybe not because they're actually the worst, but because they're the worst in the most notable ways, meaning they're especially entertainingly bad, or they were like, uh, notorious in some way like very high profile, uh like big budget flops or something. Yeah, yeah, I mean, and to be clear, there are definitely some films on here that I absolutely will not say and you're not having nuts.

You're not gonna get me to sit down for super Babies baby Geniuses too. Yeah, but you know, there's there's plenty of There's there's some other stuff I on here. I could be talked into, Like, you know, I don't know that I necessarily need to see in the name of the King of Dungeon Siege Tail Theater. Goodness, it's got Burt Reynolds in it. Oh, that's right. It had an impressive castor But anyway, yes. To come back to Plan nine, I would say Plan nine from Outer Space

definitely not the worst movie ever made. Uh and and and really ultimately a very fun film and not a boring film at all, and not a dull moment in that film. Okay, one last message from Lawrence. This one also has to do with Plan nine from Outer Space. I asked people with the experience in the film industry. I had this this idea that it seems like even bad movies these days generally don't have the level of technical incompetence that you see in a lot of bad

movies of you know, the fifties or sixties. Uh, the way that, for example, in in Plan nine from Matter Space, they're just like mismatched day night shots. It cuts randomly back and forth between them, or that uh you know bell Bella Legos, he walks out of frame and then he supposedly gets hit by a car, but he's just standing there and you see his shadow falling into frame,

not moving. So my idea was, like, movie, there's still tons of bad movies these days, but there's like a baseline level of professionalism in the film industry that usually seems to prevent stuff like that. From happening anymore, and that bad movies these days tend to be more failures of creative imagination. Um, but I was wondering. Okay, people

with experience, what do you think about this? Lawrence says, your recent episode on Plan nine from Outer Space was a treat on the topic of modern bad movies not having technical mistakes. I will chime in with and agree and disagree. I don't know how mainstream Plan nine would have been at the time, but I can think of some recent micro budget direct to streaming movies available alongside

actual studio fare, which contained glaring technical problems. It feels rarer, though, and with anyone able to create basic effects from their computer, the line between poorly executed and error seems blurry. Case in point, any Neil Breen movie, that's that's a great example, Rob. I don't know if you're familiar with Neil, but I was not familiar with him until looking at this email. I pulled up his IMDb page, and that's a that's a rabbit hole. Maybe for us one day, maybe not

for the show. They're they're they're sort of recent, but yeah, he has a movie called I Am Here Now, in which Neil Breen is sort of a an all around filmmaker, kind of an ed Edward D. Wood Jr. Sort of guy, and that he writes, directs and produces his own stuff. Uh, and it's for example, he really likes, I think, to make movies where he plays like a hacker, you know. So he does a movie called Double Down where he's like, I can hack into any computer in the world anytime

with only a cell phone. But he just like sits around in the desert eating tunic cans mostly, and it's they're they're very bad. Yeah, the modern bad filmmaker is is kind of hard to define. I mean, you have you have some some standouts. You have stuff like like Bird Dimic, you have The Room. Those are great examples of more recent bad films. But yeah, the times it's

a lot more difficult. Like, um, I saw the first film that Glenn Danzig directed, Veratica, came out in twenty nineteen, and I wanted it to be worse than it was in a way that was entertaining, and um it was. It was just very lukewarm for me, Like it wasn't what wasn't enough in in any direction. So I don't know, maybe he will get better or worse because you are neither hot nor cold, I will spew you out of my mouth. Yeah, Like I've got to end up having

some sort of reaction other than boredom with these things. Uh. Yeah, it comes comes back to something we often talk about, like, well, like why why do we select the films we select for weird al cinema? There's they very greatly in in genre and scope and budget and time period. But there's there's something there's at least that one thing about the

film that's interesting. So you've got to have like that one performance or that one plot element, right, There's got to be something there that is that is sparking curiosity and desire. But anyway, Lawrence, I do agree with you that, Yeah, it becomes more difficult to sort out this thing I was talking about when you take into account just truly amateur movies like Neil Breen movies you know that are not really being made by professionals. Oh and then finally,

Lawrence says. Lawrence says he was doing some he was messing around some with the story machines thing, and he wanted to share a couple one This one I thought was actually extremely haunting. So the title he gave it here is flat Land, which is also the name of a novel. Did you ever read flat Land? Rob? Oh? You know, I don't think I ever did. I'm familiar

with it by reputation, but that's about it. It's a It's a geometrical satirical novel that was by a guy named Edwin Abbott that I read when I was in high school and I thought it was very interesting. Uh So I haven't revisited it since then, but high school me was impressed. So this story goes title flat Land. A door is graffitied on a wall. It's just a drawing, but when you press on the drawing, it opens. The door is a jar and you can see the inside.

It's a dark and dusty room. There's a single bed in the corner. There's a chair and a desk. There's a broken window, and there's a man in the bed. He's sick, he's dying. The man in the bed A is you bum bum bom? Yeah, we're straight up two thousand and one. I love it. Oh, I thought you no offense. I thought for a second you were doing the theme from Independence Day. How does that relate? I don't know, but it's good. I should have gone bum

bum bum bom. Oh dude, Well that's a pretty good one, Lawrence. That's pretty good. Yes, all right, Well, I think we're going to close up the mail bag for today. But this has been fun and we'll be back next week to discuss some more listener mails, so keep it coming. Well, we'll continue to have some stuff coming about whistling. Uh we're not cinema episodes, some upcoming episodes of note uh so yeah, right in, right in about old episodes anything,

it's Eric game. In the meantime, Yes, Listener mail publishes on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. We have our core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. On Wednesdays we do Artifact or Monster Factor. On Friday. Well, that's when we set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird film. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio

producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of i heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.