Listener Mail: Hungry Like The Wolf

Of course, we always appreciate feedback to recent episodes. If you have something interesting to add to a topic we've talked about, or a correction you need to make, whatever, just send it on our way that is contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Let's see rob. I think I'm going to kick things off today with this message from Adam, which was a response to our Vault episodes on throwing.

for the transfer of force momentum. When I go to throw a disc during a game, the motion I use is more analogous to a whip motion, starting at my step, moving through my hips, and being released by my arm. During this action, I notice, when I've thrown properly that the tips of my fingers feel the most force and

can even bruise. I believe that this whip like motion is also present in the animal kingdom many places, and your discussion, which I listened to during a game, made me think of my anatomical structure in a way I hadn't before. Please keep doing what you're doing. You've gotten me through many day long trips and have kept my mind active with respect to Adam, well, thank you, Adam. I'm a little perplexed though, about the idea that you're

listening during a game like you can. I guess maybe in disc golf, can that be kind of a solitary game where you don't need to communicate.

the pole. And when I played, there was like an arrangement of hanging chains that function kind of like the net in a basketball hoop, except I guess it was different because what the chains would do is if you hit the chains with your with your disc, the disc would just kind of drop down into the hole, like it would absorb the energy and the thing would fall down. It was an elegant system. I liked that design.

them that I remember. But you know, occasionally there's just something that else that just wanders through the scene that bears rumination from Herzog, like like just a stray dog in the street, that sort of thing.

This means that direction isn't decided by the individual, but rather their mother. In the case we studied, the snail shell direction was genetically decided, with right handed being recessive and left handed being dominant, but it was the genetics of the mother that started the spiral. This means that you kind of a snail that is genetically left handed have a right handed shell because their mother had right handed genes, who potentially would have a left handed shell

themselves based on their mother's genetics. I think it's a pretty interesting thing to think about and thought i'd share. Also, I was thinking about possible topics for discussion, and I've got a couple. First, the witching hour aka the Devil's Hour. This is something that was brought to my attention recently. The thing is, I distinctly remember that hour starting at midnight, but it seems right now it's more commonly assumed to

be three am. I have clear memories of old cartoons featuring a clock striking twelve when supernatural events begin to happen, as well as poems and the like. I had also always associated this with the general belief that the veil keeping ghosts, fairies and the like out of our world is thinnest in the place between and midnight, marking the time version of this being the point between one day and the next. This could be a topic you might look into, or perhaps even the idea of a place

between and its association with magical happenings. That being more cultural, I have another more science you might look into, the circadian rhythm, and in particular in things like plants. It seems everything has something like that rhythm, and there has been some research into plants related to the effectiveness of using herbicides based on the time of day it is applied. Many of these could be a good topic for a future episode, or at least lead due to something to

discuss anyway. Love the podcast. It makes my forty minute commute to work so much more bearable. Thanks Matt oh, this is fabulous. Yeah, there's some wonderful suggestions in here and now the whole mention of the cut off points for various things like the Witching Hour reminds me of something I just learned about that I was not aware of. I'm not a huge April Fool's Day fan. I think

it can be, but it almost always isn't. And I was watching the first episode of the latest season of the BBC series Ghosts, and which is a fabulous series if anyone out there hasn't seen it, but they have an episode that deals with April Fool's Day and they mention that you don't want to carry out your April Fool's Day gag after midday. This is apparently the tradition in the UK that if you carry out an April Fool's Day prank after midday, you are the fool and

you have stepped out of line. And I have to say I like that. I like the idea of taking a holiday that it's not even a holiday, it's sort of a holiday. Taking an April Fool's Day, a day I already don't care for, and let's just go ahead and cut it in half. Let's just go out in a half fifty percent less of that. Maybe in time we can work it down to like just twenty five

percent of the day can be utilized. Now I would have a question about that, which is, okay, let's assume you work all of your April Fools into the witching hour, Like you're only allowed to do April Fools pranks between three and four am on the on the night of April first. So part of what I hate about April Fool's Day these days is the asynchronous nature of how

pranks are propagated in the age of the Internet. So, like you post an article that's an April Fool's joke that a lot of these are not even funny to begin with, but imagine it is funny and you get to, you know, read it on the morning of April first.

It's usually still on the internet after that. And so I think most of these pranks, which are largely online in one way or another these days, there would be asynchronous reception of the prank, even if the prank is you know, sort of quote published during the allowed time.

I always like the the MPR April Fool's Day gags, But you know, it's it's a rare occurrence that I actually enjoy one of these things. But to your point, if you cut it down to like three in between three and four am, on one hand, great limiting it to just like that one hour or so, But then you're pushing it all into like the wee morning hours. Maybe that's going to inspire like even worse practical jokes you're gonna get It's gonna be, you know, trying to

wake people up and so forth. I don't know, they just need to get rid of.

hoaxes perpetrated by humans. We looked at some scientific sources that investigated the issue and concluded that more likely than not, they probably do occur naturally, and at least I was somewhat persuaded by that. But Jim expressed a few reasons for skepticism about whether rat kings do occur in nature. First of all, he just mentioned that in his many years of work, has you know, looked, he has found the lots and lots of rat nests, but has never

come across anything like a ratking. But he also mentioned that and here's a slightly grizzly detail coming. Here's a warning that when a rat is caught by the tail in a trap, it will often sever its own tail to escape, in Jim's experience, presumably gnawing the tail off. So you know you could extrapolate from that that if rat kings were to occur in nature with live rats, you would wonder why they don't gnaw their tails off

and escape. Now, I thought that was interesting information. I don't know if that's decisive one way or another, especially about the rat biting its own tail off. But I asked in the episode whether Jim was talking about the same species that has been observed in alleged natural rat kings, because if you recall from that episode, basically the supposedly natural rat kings all feature Rattus ratus, commonly known as the black rat, rather than any other species like Ratus norvegicus.

So Jim writes, I wrote to you about ratkings and forgot to mention the species we were controlling. My apologies, and yes it is Ratus ratus. And he goes on to say that Ratus ratus is a serious pest in Australia, that Ratus norvegicus is also in all Australia but is mainly found in coastal areas, and that Australia also has several native species of rats, but those are threatened due to introduced species such as foxes and cats. And the

introduced rats. So thank you for the update, Jim. And yeah, I would still say that the severing of the tail when trapped does seem to be relevant information to plug into the likelihood calculation there though. Another thing I would comment on is, you know, Jim, you were saying that you've never come across a ratking, and it may just be that, even if they do occur in nature, maybe they're just very rare, so you can see lots of

rats nest and never see one. But another thing I would comment on is that almost all alleged ratkings come from places with very cold winter weather. The sources we were reading about them and mentioned this, So usually there are places on the north end of continental Europe like Germany, Poland, Estonia and places like that. And Jim, I wonder if where you are in Australia, I think you said you

were in the area of Canberra. I wonder whether that would have cold enough winters to create rat kings if rat kings are indeed created in nature.

into the email. Jasper has pasted the logo here for this band that does indeed contain a grotesque rat king.

just a coincidence. But remember in the episode we talked about the history of the term rat king and how the book chapter that we talked about documented that the earliest uses of rat king all apparently referred to this old and venerable rat who was like loyally served by the other rats in his nest, you know, perhaps even sometimes perching on a throne made of twisted tails. But then somehow, over time the concept of a rat King became kingless and became throneless. There was no longer a

king being served by the other rats. It was just the rats with the twisted tails. Though again, I would be surprised if that connection is what the band had in mind. It seems more likely, I don't know, you know, it's metal, it's probably just more like whoa, that's a gruesome image.

your mind. Discord and if you would like to join it, you just need to email us and we'll send you the link anyway, Taylor says, it is a quick comment here per the synth Wave Conversation on the recent Listener Mail episode. I'm not old enough to have particular nostalgic ties to this kind of music, but I really dig it. Nonetheless, that said, I am old enough to have grown up with a lot of eight to sixteen bit video game tracks that gave me an early appreciation for synth music

in general. And that's a great point. I mean, yeah, video game music has also influenced and created whole genres of electronic music.

you were talking about notable alien buddy cops. I thought I would bring to your attention one of my favorite movies of the genre, The Hidden It is gory, suspenseful, and I believe would fit right in weird house cinema. Also, I wanted to say hello, see you later, keep up the good work. Cheers Fernando, well Fernando, thank you, hello back, and thank you for getting in touch. I looked up the trailer to this and this does look quite quite

amusing there. So it looks like a cop movie, sort of a cop movie variation on Invasion of the Body Snatchers. So an Earthling gets possessed. Everybody's like, I've known him for years, you know, he's he's my neighbor. He's a nice guy. So why is it that he is now robbing banks and looting pawn shops like the replicant. The alien replicants are just doing crimes, and it seems that only an odd couple of mismatched cops can stop them,

and one of those cops is Kyle McLaughlin. The other weird thing is that it appears to have at least two, maybe more cast members from Twin Peaks. M Yeah, yeah, so of course there's coll MacLaughlin, agent Cooper. He plays one of the cops here, but one of the bad guys from Twin Peaks seems to be one of the alien crime doers.

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