Listener Mail: Gates of Heck

the Stargazer in the Well. Jim rights, Robert, Joe, and Seth when you mentioned well astronomy and refresher for those who it may have been a bit with the episode. We we talked in that episode about the long standing belief that a person could stand at the bottom of a well or at the bottom of a toll hollowed out tower, and for some reason this would allow them to see the stars in the daytime. We decided that there doesn't seem to be any dents. That's actually true,

but for some reason a lot of people thought that. Anyway, Jim says, when you mentioned well astronomy, I was sure you'd tell my favorite well astronomy story. How Aratasthanes measured the size of the Earth using a well. The well at Saini in Egypt, and Saini is the place Uh also at other times known as as one Uh. Saini in Egypt is on the tropic of Cancer. At noon on the summer solstice, if one looks into a well at sain E, one sees a reflection of the Sun

at the bottom, since it's directly overhead. Eratasthanes measured the angle of a shadow cast by a vertical rod in Alexandria. Assuming parallel rays of light from the sun, he could easily determine the arc on a circle from Saini to Alexandria. Then, with knowledge of the distance between the two places, he could calculate the size of the Earth. His results were within about one percent of the actual size. I wonder how he felt when he realized that the Earth was

so much larger than their known parts. Students in different schools could replicate this with the flagpoles at their schools. All that would be needed are two schools several hundred miles north or south of each other, that is, mostly on the same longitude. They would measure the angle of the shadow cast by their flagpoles when the sun is at its highest in the sky. By comparing the angles and with knowledge of the distance between the two schools,

they should be able to reproduce similar results. Jim in New Jersey. Uh, yeah, Jim, this is a great story. And this is one of my favorite stories of somebody figuring out figuring out something way before you might imagine they had the tools to do so. So this is an ancient Greek figure correctly calculating the size of the Earth just by looking at shadows cast by objects under

the sun. Yeah, very interesting. Speaking of that Star Gazer and Well episode, we had at least one person to reach out and say, say, oh, did you guys cover that because it was mentioned on the Josh Brolin Amazon sci fi Western series Outer Range. And this apparently like the episode of Outer Range that came out that week that there's a character who has a bit where they're um, they're referencing the story of you know, astronomer falling down

a well because they're looking up at the at the sky. Um. But the funny thing is that my wife and I are watching this series, but we were not current on it, so we had not actually gotten to that episode yet it just happened to be I guess a weird one of those weird accidents where we happened to be covering this topic just as it is referenced on a major television show. I didn't even know what that show was,

so I had no idea. Yeah, it's a it's it's interesting, it's got some weird music, and Will Patton plays a like a crazy rancher guy, and there's a lot of fun in it. So I would recommend it on on the two counts nice. All right, Here is one that comes to us from who is from Steve. Steve is talking about the world Turtle. Just a shout out and thank you for the delightful Monster Fact episode called Tortara a Pokemon. I have long been enamored with turtles, turtle myths,

and turtle hybrid monsters. My son is the same age as yours, and I enjoyed listening to your Pokemon expert speak. He did an excellent job. Thank you. I'll pass it on to him. I was so glad you mentioned that the turtle hybrid from the original Avatar the Last Airbender anime. You guys covered all the main turtle bases and even referenced a few that are new to me. These legends reminded me of my favorite passage from Stephen Hawkings classic

A Brief History of Time. A well known scientists, some say it was Bertrand Russell once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth the orbits around the Sun, and how the Sun in turn orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said, what you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a

giant tortoise. The scientists gave a superior smile before applying, what is the tortoise standing on? You're very clever, young man, very clever, said the old lady. But it's it's turtles all the way down. Amusing as this story is, I feel it bears repeating that many of these stories and legends might have been intended to function metaphorically rather than

be accepted as literal truths. The examples you shared involved a broad spectrum of visualizations, ranging from poetic conceptualization to the kind of good, clean imaginative fun one can experience reading a science fiction novel or a translation of an ancient mythological story. All of these forms have the potential to take one momentarily out of the mundane into the realm of possibility. Even in the natural world. It takes inspiration in an magination to develop theories which can be

tested as useful or misleading explanations of existential phenomenon. Your inclusion and celebration of both kinds of thought is what really set stuffed about your mind apart. May you live long and podcast ever more. Steve Turtles all the way down, you know, going back to the story about Bertrand Russell or whoever it was, I years ago started making jokes saying X all the way down on the podcast, and

then I noticed other people too. And I don't know if that's just a coincidence or if I picked up on other people just using that as a meme without realizing it. But yeah, now probably people have heard a joke of that format or that phrase turned into a meme without understanding what the origin is. You know, they've heard somebody say, oh, it's uh, you know, it's it's TikTok all the way down or something crabs all the way down, something like that. But that is that is

the origin of that phrase. There's also a subtle angle to that story that I really like, which is that it illustrates the way that uh, having a ready made phrase in your language for something can easily uh cause you to to sort of skip over assessing the logical consistency of what you're talking about, because to say the phrase all the way down means going all the way to the bottom. But this is used in the sentence to cause you to, uh, just don't worry about the bottom,

you know, alright. This next message is in response to our series called Fire from the Rocks. These were episodes about naturally fueled flames, things like coal seam fires and natural gas field fires and auto igniting minerals and and things like that. So this is from Daniel. Daniel says, Hi, my name is Daniel. I'm a forty seven year old radio broadcast or of twenty years in Australia. I listened to all your shows and loved the stuff on Burning Mountain.

I was there in n for a family holiday when I was thirteen. Image attached. I'm the kid with the striped shirt. It was a weird moonlike ominous atmosphere which stunk of sulfur. I would love to shoot part of a sci fi movie there, anyway, keep it up and I love the show. Cheers, Daniel, and so Robbie attached this photo for you to look at. But Daniel, in the photo, I see you're actually walking around on the ground on the bar patch, and I think, I don't

know if you're allowed to do that today. But there is an observation deck in the more recent photos I've seen, which leads me to believe that at least the park is trying to get people to stay up on the deck rather than walking on the scalded area. Uh. And I wonder if you were walking on the bear patch, the sculpted area, like, how hot was the ground or was it any hotter than than the the you know, the part that still had grass on it. All right, here's another one. This one comes to us from Nabil

and it is titled The Gates of Hell. Hi, Robert and Joe, your recent episodes on long burning fires reminded me of an existing fire located in Turkmenistan in the Kharkom Desert. A fiery crater about sixty nine meters two six feet in diameter and thirty deep, has been burning since nineteen The Darvaza gas Crater, also known as the Gates of Hell, is a burning natural gas field collapsed

into a cavern near dar Vasa, Turkmenistan. It is believed that Soviet geologists intentionally set it on fire in nineteen seventy one to prevent the spread of methane gas, and it is thought to have been burning continuously ever since. It was estimated that the gas would burn out within a few weeks, but it has instead continued to burn for more than fifty years and is expected to keep on burning. Images of this fiery crater are worth looking up. I have attached some below, and then yes, slow and

behold some wonderful images of this crater. I imagine that a lot of you out there have probably seen these before. They frequently pop up in like image galleries of of impressive sites around the world, um nabile and ins and out there by saying, big fan of the show, I really enjoy the wide array of topics covered, especially such topics that wouldn't usually get attention elsewhere. Keep up the

great work. Yeah, thanks Nabile. Yeah, this is a really interesting site, and I'm sure it looks even cooler in the dark. I think, yeah, it seems too okay. I guess next Well, after this next message, we're gonna be getting into weird house cinema, but this one will form a nice bridge. So Drew writes in about the Fire from the Rocks episodes, subject line Centralia, pop Culture, missed connection, Drew says, Hi, Rob and Joe, longtime listener, first time writer.

I love the mix of topic that you guys cover and how you incorporate research, history, mythology, and pop culture. I wanted to point out another film or video game reference related to the town of Centralia, Pennsylvania. Centralia is said to be a partial inspiration for the town in the video game series and later film Silent Hill. The games started as a horror suspense series, similar to the

first couple of Resident Evil games. Not sure if it's too recent or mainstream a movie for a Weird House Cinema episode, but could be an interesting one to tackle in the future. Appreciate all you do with the pod. Thank you, Drew. Oh, I mean it is Christoph gonz I'd love to talk about the Gons at some point

on the show this. This is funny because I have a very very specific memory, a lucid memory about someone thinking, uh, Silent Hill was weird, because I saw this in the theater with a friend of mine when it came out, and a girl in the theater near me answered her telephone while the movie was playing, and what I remember her saying was in a very East Tennessee accent. She was like, she was like, I'm in a movie. Yeah,

it's weird, it's weird. I remembered having some fun weird elements, and it had a great pyramid head in it, so yeah. I I have not thought about that film and a while. I haven't played one of those games that forever, but I remember really loving Silent Hill too, especially and being

really drawn into the setting. I don't remember anything about mining in it, but I remember there being like, you know, it's a weird wizard prison under the town and you're trying to figure out how that loops into everything else and some locked doors. I actually never played any of these games, so I know a bit, but all my friends were into them at a time when I didn't have the PlayStation or whatever. I would have needed to

play this, but all my friends loved it. And uh, I know, one of the things about at least the first game, maybe some of the later ones too, is that everything's covered in fog, Like you can't and see very far ahead of you in that right, rob, like a lot of fog. And and I wonder if that's something that was originally a technological limitation that later got rhet coon into a piece of the setting for its

own purposes. Like originally, if you have fog everywhere, you don't have to do do as much render distance well when you're you know, creating the polygons in the environment. But of course I guess that turns into its own scary atmospheric thing, which works well in a horror game. And then later you could say, oh, yeah, that's because of all the fumes coming up from the ground. There's actually a coal seam fire in this town. So I

always like things like that, you know. I was actually just speaking of of ghastly leaking up from the ground and tying into our last listener mail that we read there. I was reading in Yokai Attack by Hiroko Yoda and Matt Altum, and there's a bit on one of the yokai named Koonaki Gigi, which is like the little old man in the encounter. He's like a he looks he may look like a baby, but he's an old man and if you pick him up, he grows in size

and crushes you. Um. But in in that book, the author's point to a possible explanation for this being linked to methane fumes from decomposing organic material, Like people go out on the foot into a like a really rich forest environment, they're overcome by the methane fumes and then they hallucinate. Uh, Kannaki Gigi here, that's brutal. Yeah, I haven't researched it further, so I don't know if there's

how robust that theory is. Uh, But it's a fun little yokai, like like many of the okai yokai are so much fun. Also, now that I know about this link to the Silent Hill Games, that means there's a link, a clear link between the Silent Hill Games and the film Nothing But Trouble. And I think this is how you bring the Silent Hill Games back. We haven't had a proper Silent Hill game in a while. They need to join together the Nothing but Trouble universe and the

Silent Hill Universe into one cohesive video game experience. Dan Ackroyd's next venture, pyramid Head Vodka. All right, well let's get into weird house cinema here. Here's one. This one concerns Planet of the Vampires. And I think we'd asked the question, well, what are some of the best planets surface sets ever to be featured in a science fiction film? So James writes in and says, Hi, guys, I'm going to redefine best here to best at being a set.

I nominate the generic cave set from Deep Space nine, referring to Star Trek The Space nine. Uh. The set itself is okay. It's a decent job of fiberglass and stucco for a weekly spinoff show. What it lacks in glamour, it makes up in persistence. It is the hardest working cave in show business. Every Deep Space nine episode involving anything remotely underground uses that same set. They change the lighting of what they scatter on the floor, and the camera angles, but once you see it, you can't un

see it. I never noticed when watching the original show, but when you can binge watch something you notice these things. Most sci fi does this to some extent, but I think that that set is in as many episodes as it isn't in. They do a really good job of disguising it for the first few seasons, but by the end of the show they are just adding a few alien knickknacks and some side lighting or something well, not spectacular. If we rank it on cost per entertainment unit, this

has most sets beat. Possibly the only thing to beat it in that department isn't a set but this thing. Oh and then James links to a video that I went and watched that is a massive compilation of every movie and TV show, including a lot of Star Trek episodes that use this random sci fi set piece of It's like these two metal housings with a tube in between them, and they seem to be shooting red lasers back and forth, but inside the tube. Oh wow, yes, I'm I'm looking at this now. It shows up in

the Last Starfighter. Oh yeah, Dan o'herley, he and Monster makeup going like, oh what are you doing? And then it's just that thing behind him. Yeah, it looks like we had some incredible whole TV show in there. Oh my goodness. Uh yeah, I've definitely seen this thing before, but I've never really put it together that it is showing up in other shows, including Star Trek the Next Generation.

It's crucial to defeating Zoo in the Code and Armada. Well, speaking of Star Trek TV series planet surface sets again, I don't want to be unkind because I know a lot. I know everybody loves uh Star Trek the Next Generation, and I know I would probably love it too if I made it far enough in the series. But I, as I've admitted on the show multiple times before, I sort of like tried the first season and couldn't really

get further than that. Uh. And one of the things that I found most hilarious about it was the planet surface sets, many of which to me appeared to be like what looked like a nineteen eighties like family portrait photos studio full of potted plants and just shooting people from the knees up so you don't see the pots. Yeah. Yeah, um, I don't remember the earlier the first season that much.

The main thing I remember about the first season from back when I was watching all these in junior and I is that the the the the the uniforms look a lot rougher that first season. There seemed to be some huge advancements that were made in subsequence of seasons

regarding just how um authentic the costumes look like. They looked like the actors were maybe more comfortable in them, though I've also read that the the the actors were just sort of uniform universally uncomfortable in those outfits for like the whole run of the series. So I don't know. Yeah, but it comes back to something we've talked about before in the show. In your science fiction, if you've got a good looking jumpsuit, done matter, I guess how comfortable

it is. But if it looks good, a good jumpsuit, a good uniform will go a long ways towards creating this feeling of some some future society. Oh yeah, there's there's Planet of the Vampires right there. Those those uniforms that Planet of the Vampires look uh, agreedient like they they do not breathe. Those cur members are just cooking in their own juices. Now, that is a cast that had a lot of very attractive people in it, But

so this may explain it. But another thing I would say is that nobody looks like severely awkward in those uniforms, and that is that is sometimes the case with your sci fi uniforms. Uh. And I come back to Santa Claus conquers the Martians in this The Martians had these outfits, and some of the actors fill those outfits out enough,

some look a little bit awkward in them. So that's always uh something as well, especially when you're dealing with alien outfits that are basically leotard's or some other kind of you know, awkward costume that's going to ultimately make all but the fittest of of of people on the cast look a little silly. And then sometimes they're really fit acts look ridiculous in them too, So you know, nobody has ever looked awkward in a Star Trek episode.

Oh and by the way, all the all the Trekkies who are you're now composing lists of the best Next Generation episodes to send me? This has happened before, when I've admitted this on the show before that I didn't make it past the first season. I know, I know there's good next Generation stuff. I'm not denying that. I just haven't made it to it yet. So don't worry I'm not I'm not slagging your favorite. Alright, looks like we have one more Planet of the Vampires email you

want to get this one? Joe? Oh sure, this is from Jim, not Jim in New Jersey. Different Jim, this is a This is a two gym party today, Jim says, Hey, guys, I watched Planet of the Vampires over the weekend, fun weird house film. As always, I was struck in the beginning of the film how much the planet they ended on, Aura looked like Neptune in nineteen sixty five. We hadn't had fly by's yet to see what the outer planets

looked like. It would make more sense at the end of the movie when they decided to come to Earth if they were already in our Solar system their only problem Colon. Without the meteor rejector, they might have a rough time getting past the asteroid belt. Keep up the great work, and thanks for all the great weird movies, Jim. Oh, thank you Jim. And that's a question I do not know the answer to. What is the what is the actual chance of of running into a sizeable enough rock

to have a problem. Uh, if you're flying a spaceship, around in our Solar system, past past the orbit of mars Um. You know this has come up on the show before, hasn't it discussing the distance between these objects that that in many cases, like we we're dealing with with rather large distances. So yeah, I don't know that, uh that that our aliens here would have been in

tremendous risk. Though then again, I guess it would depend partially on how fast you're going, because if you're going really fast and you run into something even very tiny, that could cause major damage, right right, Yeah, I guess speed is a fact. Like it it's we're probably reading too much into it, but I guess the meteor ejector it makes it seem like maybe this is so that the the vehicle can travel at a speed uh sufficient enough to make just about anything it might run into lethal.

So um, I don't know, I'm not sure where I follow on this question. Yeah, the argus and the galley, like they run into a paint chip or a little speck of dust and it's a nuclear explosion. Yeah, So I don't know, I have to think about this could go either way on it, And then again, we've sent

plenty of unscrewed probes past the orbit of Mars. We've sent them through the asteroid belt, and I don't know of any occasions where this has been a major problem, So yeah, who knows what if the meteor ejector isn't really reject or sorry, it isn't really technology, but it's

just pure superstition. It's kind of like, uh, you know, they're being like a special piece of metal that all the sailors on a ship have to touch that protects them from evil omens and so forth there, like like what's in that plastic binocular set is actually like a pickled crows foot that a witch has put a blessing on for them. Yeah. Yeah, we don't know a lot about how their culture operates, so it's possible as well. Okay,

I think that does it for this one. All Right, we're gonna go and close it out then, but we'll be back with more listener Mail in the future, so keep it coming. Responses to today's episode of Listener Mail, responses to past episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind in Weird How Cinema, as well as recommendations for future episodes of both 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 a 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.