Listener Mail: Dirge for the Assassins

Let's see Rob, I think I'm going to kick things off today with one of these messages. In response to our series on dust, Let's do it So. One of the things we talked about in part five of that series was about dust storms and about the threat dust storms to machinery and vehicles. You don't want to drive in a dust storm, but you also just don't want to get too much dust into your vehicle, engine and stuff. And Thatcher writes in on that topic, Thatcher says, Hello,

he talked about dust damaging vehicles. In your part five episode, I wanted to add that dust can clog air intake filters very quickly. My friend was a first responder on nine to eleven and when he drove his truck home afterward, he noticed that it had reduced power and wasn't and just wasn't performing the way it usually does. When he checked the air intake filter to the engine, it was completely clogged with concrete dust from the twin towers. I

wonder if any other listeners have had similar experiences. Thank you for a wonderful show. I've been listening for many, many years, and I look forward to each episode every week.

the way it activates cheap mode for sunset photography. You don't have to have nice equipment or much skill. You don't have to be on the shore or at altitude. Just point your phone west at Golden Hour with an appealingly shaped something silhouetted in the foreground, and for a spectacular photo with a brilliant orange background. Turns a quick snap of a telephone pole or a corner convenience store

into frameable art and other dusty news. I've always thought the Sandman was an explanation for the gross sand in your eyes when you wake up. I also wanted to thank you for opening up old memories of Dragonslayer. Unlike some of the other eighties movies, you've featured. I hadn't thought much of it since those endless summers of HBO

couch time. I haven't played YouTube clips of favorite scenes, hunted down the soundtrack, imdbat, which actor played the wizard, etc. Those memories were all locked away, waiting to be reactivated by your show. The moments that immediately jumped into my mind were telling the horrible baby dragons devouring the sacrifice, the hero levitating the egg, thus proving he actually did have access to real magic, the half second of partial nudity during the reveal scene at the pond, smashing the

amulet for the win. What I definitely didn't process back then was the parallel between the old Wizards sizing up the value of the remainder of his life and the dragon doing the same, putting their energy into the generation to come. Jeff continues here he says time is a relentless B word. This is the longer of the two B words. I'll let you figure out the rest, just

being just out of an abundance of caution. We don't even get flagged or labeled with anything on any of the podcast publication systems without due reason.

I've always been allergic to musicals. However, after watching the delightful Ladies movie on your recommendation, I've since read all of the original L. Frank Baum Oz books, as well as some of his other works. The movie had the benefit of being based on the second and third OZ books, which I thought were the best. They aren't exactly great literature, but they are fun reads, and it's fascinating trying to figure out what was going on in BAM's mind as

he wrote them. He led an interesting life and had interesting friends. What was he trying to tell the children? The running dialogue he had with his fans, and the preface of each book was almost as entertaining as the stories themselves. After a while, Bomb got sick of writing about Oz. He wrote other sorts of stories, but they didn't sell as well. He tried Oz books with different protagonists, but the kids constantly bombarded him with letters saying, that's nice,

but what our Dorothy and Toto up to. He seemed increasingly exasperated as the series went on, but kept a sense of humor about it. Sometimes he would drop Dorothy and other fan favorites into an unrelated story, the same way Marvel editors used to try to punch up sales by adding Wolverine to a given title. Oh, I mean now I'm excited about Wolverine and Oz. So someone's done it. Someone's done it, I'm sure, so write in and tell us about it. The fan interaction reminded me of old

school comic book letters pages. Bomb's books actually had a lot of shared DNA with comics, including crossovers, shared universes, and retcons. The explanation for why Toto didn't speak in the first book when other mundane animals gained the ability to talk in Oz gave me one of the better laughs in the series.

The original story of the Tin Woodsmen and his ramifications are most horrible in a fun way. One king would punish subjects by having two people cut in half lengthwise and the mismatched parts sewn together. Both beings retained their sense of self and let a miserable existence in control of only one half of their body, with the other's thoughts intruding upon their own. There are also more beasts who fling their own heads at our heroes. Lots of

monster fact material in those books. Good to know. Thanks again for continuing to direct us to new piles of weirdness to explore.

the leading ladies. That sort of thing. I don't know, it's just, uh, it's that's how it goes.

So Steve wrote in and said, Hi, Robin Joe, it's been a while, but in listening to your Sandman discussions from the very dust, I remember to question I never found an answer to in my childhood. When I was a little boy, the first time I woke up with eye crust in the corners of my eyes, I asked my mom, is this sand Is this why people used to talk about the sand Man? She did not know. I still wonder if there's a connection to the myth or folk tale. Then Steve provides a link and asks

if we can confirm or dismiss his hypothesis. Steve, I doubt we can settle this one for you, But you and Jeff are thinking on the same frequency. Okay, Rob, do you mind if I read this message from Luisa?

nineteen eighty four In the plot. Dust plays a symbolic part and is all pervasive, just as much as Big Brother. The main character. Winston begins the book feeling protected by it and ends up feeling completely overwhelmed. It is everywhere, and it also represents his own unraveling. I cannot find a better literary use of dust in a plot. Yeah, I do remember a lot of references to dust. In

nineteen eighty four. I think Winston talks about his neighbor in his apartment building, Missus Parsons, having creases in her face that always looked as if dust was trapped in the creases. And it's like a detail he mentions over and over, as if it represents some kind of like decay of life itself. You know, there's just kind of

like ash and grime building up on our bodies. And there's one part where Winston thinking about sort of the general hopelessness of life under the Party and Big Brother, and he describes London as quote vast and ruinous, a city of a million dust bins. I think that's a

really striking image. It's like it selects as the defining object of a civilization, the place where waste is discarded, and it actually reminds me of those visions of the underworld of the dead and the epic of Gilgamesh, you know, the house of dust, where dust is their food and clay is their bread. But anyway, to come back to Luisa's message, Luisa says, I can, however, tell you that I used to think dust was the bane of my

domestic existence until I had German shepherds. Every time the female sheds, it's like brushing out another dog from her. I'm seriously considering buying a loom and making dog thread. Wait didn't In one of our episodes we talked about, like, you know, boutique clothing made out of dust bunnies.

love the four Dust episodes. In episode four, when you were talking about Sandman's Dust, I immediately thought about Neil gaman Sandman comic. The comic is about an entity called Dream and his realm, the Dreaming. In the early issues, he has to track down some of his tools that were stolen from him an issue three and also episode

three of the television adaptation Dreams. Bag of dream dust falls into the hands of an innocent woman who becomes helplessly addicted to the dreams and fantasies that the dream dust gives her. She ends up more or less wasting away because she wants to spend more time in the dream than in real life. It's an excellent read with some pretty disturbing imagery. Thanks for the podcast. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is the podcast I recommend to most people. Mike, Yeah,

the good good note, Mike. You know, we didn't mention the Sandman comic or the Netflix adaptation in these episodes, but both are excellent. I was. I was a fan of the comic back when I read it years ago, and I really did enjoy the Netflix adaptation as well. I thought I had a great cast, very well put together. I seem to recall that David S. Goyer is involved in that as well, has a tremendous cast.

of salt. I think that Greeks like Herodotus, who cited Egyptian mythological roots were simply overreaching and letting conjecture get

the better of them. Oh yeah. This connects to the idea that maybe the Greek gods were in some sense the same as the Egyptian gods and just different names for them, or maybe A later take on a similar view is that the idea that the Greek mythology evolved from the Egyptian mythology, which some people have proposed, and Constantinos here is saying that that is not likely the case. So he says, here is a mainstream academic view of

Greek mythology origins. In summary one, proto Indo Europeans migrated from the Russian Steps to Greece. Proto Indo European settlers were pastoralists, their economy center around cattle. Meanwhile, the indigenous Greeks were in agricultural society. We know precious little about the Proto Indo Europeans and indigenous Greeks, but the Proto

Indo European settlers brought the Greek language to Greece. Proto Indo European settlers brought their pastoral gods Zeus at All and melded them into the indigenous people's agricultural gods demmeter at All, and together they created the Olympian Pantheon. There are other non Proto Indo European and non indigenous influences on Greek mythology Parentheses, Apollo, question Mark, maybe Dionysus. The latter's origin is still controversial, but they seem more Anatolian,

maybe Cypriot or in Cretan than Egyptian. I tend to view Greek mythology as sedimentary rock with layers upon layers of development, rather than one single thing. Anyway, there does not seem to be a lot of evidence for direct imports of Egyptian myths during the early formative phases of the Greek mythos. But that is not to say that it did not happen. We just have clearer paths to

other places. Part two, Resurrecting the resurrecting god's debate. This is a reference to us bringing up the question of whether Osiris and other gods from the ancient world should be thought of as gods that die and then rise again in the way that say Jesus, or maybe some of the figures from other mystery religions would would be said to die and rise again. And Constantinos is about to bring up one of the gods of one of these mystery religions. He says, I'm surprised that your discussion

on resurrecting gods did not include Dionysus and Orpheus. Again, this is a huge subject, but I will try to just hit the high points. The god Dionysus was killed and torn apart by evil Titans. At the direction of the goddess Hera. Athena saved Dionysus's heart, and Zeus resurrects him. Orpheus may have been the name of a religious figure from northern Greece, regardless of whether he existed. Orpheus is credited as being the prophet that founded a mystery cult

centered around the resurrected Dionysus. Orphists believed that humans are born of the original sin parentheses the dust of the burnt Titans, but also have a divine spark, the soul. Long story short, be good and your soul gets to heaven the Elysian Fields. Orphism is old and foundational to Western religious traditions. In fact, the oldest surviving European written text, the fourth century BC Dirveni Papyrus, is an orphic hymn.

Many have drawn direct lines from orphism to Neoplatonism and Christianity. It is a deep rabbit hole to go down, and the case is compelling its links to Christianity. Aside, Dionysus is demonstrably one of the earliest resurrecting gods that did indeed spawn a religion centered on his resurrection. Hope you found that interesting. Thank you all for a love podcast that I cannot stop recommending to any that will listen. Cheers.

present or episodes future, your recommendations and so forth. And if you're on the fence, if you're like, I'm kind of thinking about writing into the show, but I've never done it before. I don't know if this is interesting enough, go ahead and give it a shot. We'd love to hear from you regardless, and we do. We do read everything, even if we don't read everything on listener Mail, and even though we don't respond to everything via email, we

do read it. So it's the best way to get in touch with us, the best way to share your enthusiasm in the best way to share any feedback, constructive feedback about the show itself, though, don't be shy about throwing some positive reviews and some stars our way. Wherever you get the podcast. I will remind you that listener mail airs on Mondays. In the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast, feed core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short

form episode on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside most series concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.