Listener Mail: Halloween Hangover 2024

They're not actually pigs. We discovered in the end that they're more closely related to whales and hippopotamuses, maybe making them even more strange. But they have a lot of pig like features. And in fact, over the weekend I got to go to one of America's great museums. I was at the Field Museum in Chicago, and I came across an antilidant skull. The skull was massive, amazing, awe inspiring.

It had cheek flanges going out to you. You can't imagine until you see it how far these cheekbones pop out. I was thinking of them like outriggers on a canoe.

are earth in formations in an area called Rathkron. Specifically, they are linear earthworks said to have been gouged from the earth by a magical wild bore from the other

world muk being Gaelic for pig. The bore is said to have leapt from the depths of Owenegat, also called the Gate of Hell, and the Cave of the Cats, which is fairly close by the Cave is one of those wonderfully spooky but inconspicuous entrances to the fairy other world, and itself said to be the physical home of the Morrigan and one of, if not the most important places pertaining to the origins of Sawen. I got to climb into the cave with a local archaeologist a couple of

years back. It was pretty metal. For context, both of these landscape features are set within a wider area, featuring some two hundred and forty archaeological monuments in a six kilometer square area. It is wild. I've attached a drone in provided to me by the aforementioned archaeologist, so that you can see what I mean. I will also attach

a photo from inside the cave, although you can't see much. Finally, I wrote an article on the place and some of the conservation efforts ongoing with local farmers and then folks. If you want to look up Matt's article about this, it is from April of this year and the article is called how to Sustainably Farm on Ancient Monuments and so the Matt's article is about the competing concerns of the preservation of archaeological sites, many of which are just

earth and mounds. So it's not like Great Stoneworks, but like the mound, the pile up of the earth is the site, and then the grazing needs of local cattle and sheep farmers.

wrote a note pertaining to clay and clay infrastructure. I wonder if this was in the series we did on mud where we ended up talking about mud brick construction. That sounds right to me. But anyway, Matt goes on to say, quote specifically old drainage tile in crop fields. In this email, I mentioned that the old tiles were fit together in just such a way that water could get through to drain I don't know why I said that, because it's wrong. The water enters the tiles through the

porous surface of the constructed clay material. Okay, so good job, good job catching yourself on that mat. But also thank you for the email. And yeah, this is really interesting. I knew nothing about one got to the Gate to Hell or the Cave of Cats, So I'm gonna have to look that up, learn more about it, and maybe it will come back on the show.

while the haveolinas are permanent residents. We tend to see them moving up and down our hill in the spring and fall. It lacks precision, but we often talk about change of seasons when they come through. What they have taken to is coming down the hill, walking halfway around the house on a wood porch, then jumping down four feet off the end, and where they continue down the hill. For some reason, they like doing it very early in the morning. I refer to it as the devil's hoof

beats going to see the neighbors. Not that we're so angelic, We're just dull, just part of life out here, like the midsummer mule deer bucks that sleep under the front porch in the middle of the day. Happy bat Week, y'all, Lindsey and I had to look this up. Yes, that week is indeed October twenty fourth through the thirty first. I don't think we've ever celebrated on the show before. Maybe we should do that next year. We're ginerally just

distracted with all the Halloween shenan against. But if you want to learn more about bat Week, go to batweek dot org.

out there. There are these wild pig like animals. And if you think that they are not as threatening or as metal as wild pigs, maybe they're not, I don't know, as aggressive. Maybe they're more curious and cue. But they do eat the scariest looking cactuses you have ever seen. So like, you'll look at a cactus and not only do you not want to touch it, you don't want

to get within ten feet of it. The spines are just unreal and the and as so like prickly pears and cactus, these little pig like animals will just walk right up to them and just chomp them up. It goes straight into the mouth.

It is of a man in a very well animated pig mask in a black and white film with scary teeth, you know, the long pig nose, snout, and it's so it's like a person in a costume, but it's also a very articulated piece of puppetry on the skull of the costume. The mouth opens and closes, the tongue wags and lashes out, and I was like, what is this from? Well,

I looked up like coshan danceer. So it is a nineteen oh seven film that's like four or five minutes long that is capturing something that was a popular stage performance. I think a vaudeville performance in which a person in a large pig costume with this puppet head pesters a woman who first is trying to she's trying to have a picnic. I think, like she's eating some food and the pig guy in a suit is he's in a tuxedo.

He's like, hey, give me some of that food, and he keeps trying to get the food from her, and she's like, no, leave me alone. And then eventually she rips the the pig man's clothes off and then the pig looks humiliated and embarrassed, and then the pig man and the woman suddenly all is well, and then they just do a dance number that goes on for most of the runtime of the film.

He was like, yeah, they really did this upright. There's also a colorized version of it out there that somehow is even creepier because I think one of the things about it is that, you know, it's this old footage of a very you know, very convincing and you know, technically, you know, well crafted and performed puppet slash suit effect. And there's something about it being an old picture that makes it feel like you're not watching a costume, but

you're watching some sort of actual beast, you know. So, yeah, it's a lot of fun. If you haven't seen it.

twenty first century joker. Like, what is it about. Occasionally you get these little things or it doesn't look one hundred years old, it looks like something that was supposed to be creepy from last year.

horror films. You know how you know, there's often stuff in those those pictures, sites and sounds or themes that it hit a lot harder than you might expect when you go back into say the nineteen thirties and look at films, and you know, part of that is just like, even if you know better, even if you know about, like you know, the pre code cinema and some of the things that they some of the elements that they had him play there, there's something in your mind that

kind of just assumes that going backward through cinematic history. From now, things are going to get tamer and more innocent or something. I don't know, Like none of it makes logical sense, but I still will sometimes surprise myself when I pull something up from an old picture and I'm like, oh, wow, that does hit really hard. I guess it's probably some sort of modernity bias or I don't know, but maybe there's kind of like a you know, a line graph that peaks in the in the nineteen

eighties or something. In terms of my mind, you know, where if anything is actually you know, effective before or after that period by a significant number of decades, then I'm amazed by it.

the yeah, the interesting thing to look into. Yeah, Jeff says, finally, as a result of the closing song on the Pixies album Bossa Nova, I always associate Havelina's with a mellow sunset over the warm red rocks of Arizona, with Kim

Deal's angelic voice echoing in the breeze. And then Jeff includes a link to the song have Alena by the Pixies, which most of the lyrics are just saying the word Havelena a million times, but it does say walking in the breeze on the planes of Old Sagona, Arizona, among the trees, so maybe it was inspired by watching Havelena's root around. But then, finally, Jeff says, I have a hard time thinking of them as savage, demonic beasts, but then again, I've never had a family of them tear

up my garden. Hope this message wasn't too a booring Jeff, No, Jeff, not boring at all. Thank you.

But yes, Bebop and rock Steady, I too always have to look up to to remind myself which one is which. And Bebop is the pig or boor Man, the Boorman mutant. Rock Steady is the Rhino mutant.

guys on the first level. I don't recall pretty early on.

human hybrid. But we see similar things in like Spider Man, Like Rhino is always like seems to be considered a lower tier villain in the Spider Man universe, but like in reality, like dude, that was, I don't think he's part rhino, but he has like some sort of a suit that makes him part rhino. Like, that's pretty, that's pretty intimidating. That would be quite a fight.

traits we ascribed to pigs. They appeared in episodes from the original series Journey to Babbel and Whom the Gods Destroy Love October for all the Halloween content. Jim, well, thank you. Jim so so based on this, I didn't know this, and I looked up some images rob first in our outline for you to look at. Here I found images of the Tellertes from some later series. I think the main source of the images you're looking at now is from Enterprise, in which these guys remind me

of like Peter Jackson's version of Tolkien's Dwarves. They look kind of rough and grumpy, but also like loyal friends, you know, good guys, and they are they look like they're all voiced by John Reyes Davies Now, on the other hand, I found an image of the Tellerites from the original series. Horrifying. Looks like a mask that is meant to be understood as a mask, not as skin like it would be worn by the killer in a nineteen eighty two slasher movie called Slaughterhouse. But I guess

it is not supposed to be a mask. It looks like this is the face. So there's shaggy hair, shaggy beard, pink skin, upturned pig like nose, and then empty dark eye sockets without eyeballs in them.

Star Trek series where they also show up. But my family and I we watched the first season of Star Trek Prodigy, which is an animated Star Trek adventure show of you know, the for the whole family that does include a Tellwright main character as well as some supporting Tellwrite characters. So I think that was the main place where I was like oh, Tellwrights, this is a this is a whole thing. This is like part of classic track that they've brought back here.

learned that the hard way. I was three or four years old visiting a friend of my father's who lived on a farm. My dad and his friend were talking and lost track of me because I wanted to touch the piggy. I figure out how to unlatch a small gate walked into the pen and close the fence door fully behind me. It was then I realized just how big the pig was and how small I was. It

loudly snorted and charged toward me in unbridled terror. I ran parallel to the perimeter of the fence as fast as I could and began screaming in horror help while crying uncontrollably. Just as I felt the breath of the beast on the back of my neck and certain I was done for, the son in law of my dad's friend hurtled the fence and landed what must have been a remarkable flying dropkick on the pig's ribcage. He shouted

at the pig, and it ran off, snorting angrily. That dude was awesome, and he got me out of the pen fast and uninjured. I proceeded to be balled out by my father, but I did not care, as my gratitude for not having been eaten alive was much more powerful than anything he could say at that point.

about antelodonts. We got into a section about paleo art where we started talking about the you know, the difficulty for a paleo artist in figuring out what the soft tissue is of an animal looked like if the animal is only preserved by you know, fossils of the bones, how can you have an idea like how much soft tissue they had on them, how bulky to depict them? And we talked about the the the idea of shrink wrapping animals, just sort of looking at the bones and

then imagining skin stretch tight over those bones. The point being that if you're a paleo artist, it does involve usually involves some kind of guesswork or making assumptions about the soft tissue surrounding the bones, but also there are ways of using science and things we know to inform how you depict that soft tissue in the assumption you make about it, so it's not all guesses there is

some science that goes into it. But anyway, on the subject of that shrink wrapping, Robin on Discord said, just listening to Hogs of Hell Part two, I believe the shrink wrap animals you may have been thinking of was the book All Yesterdays by Conway, Kosman and Nash. They also did a fan submitted sequel, All Your Yesterdays. Blog about it here. Pretty easy to search up for more if you want so, folks, if you want to look that book up, it is again called All Yesterdays.

car away from the tracks. So, first of all, acknowledging that this is an ill advised thing to do on any active railroad tracks don't do stuff like that. But we talked about reasons for the illusion of the ghost push, the most likely being that the railroad crossing is subject to some kind of illusory slope. Maybe it appears flat or appeers sloped in one direction, but in reality is

sloped in the other direction. And this is the case with a lot of places around the world, many of which are turned into tourist attractions called things like gravity hills, where you can watch a ball appear to roll up hill. Now, in reality, they sometimes start to explain these places by saying, oh, there's some kind of gravity anomaly, there's like something buried in the hill that makes like gravity go upwards or something. In reality, in no case is there ever anything anomalous

about the gravity. Gravity is working normally. Instead, this is caused by a visual illusion where the horizon is obscured. You can't see the horizon for reference, and surrounding visual cues create a false idea of what the flat plane

relative to the Earth's gravity would be. And so this led Rob to suggest that somebody start a brewery for high gravity beers at one of these gravity Hills, but we actually did not know where the phrase high gravity with respect to beer came from, so multiple people with brewing knowledge wrote in to inform us. Let's see what Rob, Maybe, do you want to read this message from Chris?

terms such as degree, plato and bricks. He can be making all this up, and I would, but anyway to determine the amount of dissolved sugars in the warked name for beer before it has been fermented, and then checked again during and after fermentation, and it includes a link to a source of the longer explanation you can get

pretty deep into fermentation science. Of course, anyway continues. This is of particular importance because during the process of brewing it does end up determining the potential for the end alcohol by volume. So if you start with a high gravity, meaning lots of potential sugars for the yeast to convert. You can end with a higher ABV percentage, and this can be calculated by the change in specific gravity. As

the yeast convert sugars to alcohol and carbon dioxide. During fermentation, the specific gravity begins to drop closer to the reference of one point zero zero zero, which would be the specific gravity of water. There is so much more to say on this topic, but I hope this short explanation

helped clear things up. I am not familiar with any of these types of attractions that Joe had mentioned, but if any local breweries have them near, I agree with Robert, a collaboration beer slash naming must be in order.

It's not a direct measure of the alcohol content, but it is an indirect measure of the alcohol content the specific gravity of the wart and the brew later after fermentation. That specific gravity gives you an idea of how much alcohol will be in the final product. Now I mentioned we got other messages on the topic of high gravity beer. We got another one from Jeremy, and I wanted to add a few details from this. Jeremy's message cites twenty years of hobby brewing experience, so we got a real

what do you call it, an expert amateur here. One thing Jeremy points out is that quote in the past, high gravity brewing meant brewing a potent beer and diluting it with water before packaging, bottling, etc. Less water in the fermentation means you can make more beer with less fermenttor space. Generally, it was a frowned upon practice for adulterating beer. Ah, so that's a practical thing I hadn't considered.

That makes sense. So you brew a you make a stronger brew Initially and then dilute it with water to end up with your final beer. But I guess if you want to, you know, really serve up one of these strong doubles or triples or whatever, these days, you just don't really dilute it. But it could go back to an older practice of making more efficient use of brewing space. Jeremy also gives some more details about the relationship between the different gravity measurements through the brewing process.

So Jeremy says there are three key terms. There's original gravity, which is quote a measurement of the fermentable and unfermentable substances in the wart before fermentation. Original gravity is a measure of the potential alcohol content of the beer. Specific gravity is quote a measurement of the relative density of the wart or must compared to water. And then final gravity is quote a measurement of the wart after fermentation.

Comparing original gravity to final gravity can determine the exact alcohol content of the beer. Alcohol content is limited by the ability of the yeast to survive its own waste, which are alcohol and carbon dioxide. The remainder is sugar and thus and thus the sweetness of the final product also called maltiness best, Jeremy, So thank you Jeremy, and again thank you to everyone who wrote in about high gravity beer.

simply do not have the stomach for movie gore. Thankfully, Weird House Cinema offers great insight into horror cinema without upsetting my sleep. As for Joe's recent question of whether or not an ancient language expert is able to translate original text directly into English, the answer is yes. Several years ago, I had the good fortune of attending a tour of the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures

at the University of Chicago. The tour was led by doctor Christopher Woods, professor of Sumerian and former director of the Institute. In the Egyptian Gallery, doctor Woods stopped before a replica cast from the original Rosetta Stone and began reading the text to us. I was surprised and asked if he memorized portions, and he said no. I learned to read the languages for my work. It is not often you get to hang out with people who read dead languages on the fly. I was impressed be well.

Daniel ps. Yes, the ISAC was formerly known as the Oriental Institute the Founders, which inspired Indiana Jones, according to local legend.

directly from the book onto a computer. And that struck me as funny because I imagined that even an expert, even the person with the most knowledge of these languages, would probably need to use some reference materials and look some stuff up. But it was just going straight from one to the other, like total fluency. And so maybe I was wrong. Maybe the experts in these languages really can go that straight off the page.

Fractured Fairy Tales fame. It is in nineteen fifty threes the five Thousand Fingers of Doctor t Think low budget Wizard of Oz combined with Alice in Wonderland, but with LSD and minions. A crazy wizard kidnaps five hundred children and forces them to play his giant piano. No metaphor there. I am well into retirement, Yet a week doesn't go

by that this line doesn't run through my brain. At some point said line is delivered about halfway through this clip, and then she attaches a clip for us to watch. I did watch it, and I love the colors. This is a great looking film from the fifties. It's in color,

of course, and it looks like an absolute hoot. But I will say in this one clip, the constant kind of like boing boying honk sound effects are proving difficult to get through, and so I'm wondering how much of that is in the movie or or if it's just this scene. If it's just the scene, I think I could survive it.

it in the not too distant future here, all right. Finally, to end things on a Halloween note, I guess we're gonna read one last one from our discord server. This is from Adam. Adam says, listen to a bunch of rocky ericson today for the first time. Incredible. That's the second musician I've gotten into from y'all's recommendations on Weird House, the first being Nursed with Wound. I don't know in

what context I reckon to Nurse with Wound. We were probably talking about music for a film that was very like Noisy in Cacophonus or something. But anyway, Adam says, in return, I'd like to recommend the album songs from the recently deceased by the Frankenstein Drag Queens from Planet thirteen horror punk with three different tracks inspired by films featured on Weird House. Uh.

thanks for the recommendation. I'll check them out.

they're at the light. I've been listening to a lot of Messer Chops, if I'm saying that correctly, during this Halloween season. It was a lot of fun to play in the car, play in the house, and so forth. So I will reiterate that recommendation for anyone out there who wants a little spooky surf music in their life. All right, So that's going to be it for this episode of Stuff to blow your mind. Listener, mail, but

keep it coming. We'd love to hear from y'all. If you have additional thoughts on Halloween episodes, pre Halloween episodes or post Halloween episodes, it's all good. Just right in. We'll have that email addressed for you here in just a second. What else can we drive home here? Let's see. If you're on Instagram, we are STBYM podcast. You can follow us there if you want to join the discord. We'll shoot you that link if you send us an

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