Listener Mail: Leave it to Birgit

on in Now. We do have an announcement at the top of today's episode, which is that this is going to be an all new listener Mail episode. But Rob and I are going to be out for several days this week, so we will be running some vault episodes. So I believe Tuesday and Thursday's core episodes are going to be from the vault, and Friday's going to be a weird house cinema rewind that's right.

with one of the food related uses. So Jacob says, Hi, longtime listener, first time emailer, just finished listening to parts one and two of The Remarkable Beaver series and thought I knew exactly what you were going to talk about when you mentioned castorium and food, but I was wrong. Have you ever had blue Moon ice cream? Jacob provides a link. Maybe you've had Superman ice cream. The blue

part of Superman ice cream is traditionally blue moon. It's popular in the upper midwest of the US and has a flavor profile that is difficult for most to discern. Some speculate that this blue moon ice cream's flavor was originally derived using castorium. I'd encourage you to give it a try if you ever come across it. I quite enjoy it. Thanks for entertaining and educating me all these years. Jacob, Okay, I don't think I have had blue Moon ice cream

or Superman ice cream. Superman appears to be like a three flavor ice cream, and it's like Superman's suit colors, so it's got like blue and yellow and red. I don't know what the yellow and red flavors are. Maybe they're also derived from mammal glands, but blue moon. I have never had it all, but I like the idea. I assume from what you're saying that castorium is probably not used anymore to flavor it, but that maybe whatever flavors.

It now is attempting to recreate an original flavor which did come from beavers.

BlueMoon ice cream. I've never had Superman ice cream. I just haven't spent I don't know that I visited any of the states where it is popular, But just looking at the wiki on Superman ice cream, I see that the different colors in some of the commons of Superman ice cream, the flavors just vanilla across the board, oh for all the colors. And of course that tracks with what is sometimes described as the flavor profile of castorium and the way castorium was used as a as an

artificial flavor. Ruse, it's a natural flavor, but it's just maybe not what you might expect. Now.

This is not true. Beavers don't actually do this. Plus, the glands that hunters were harvesting from beavers for the oily substance known as castorium were not actually testicles, So this is just medieval bro science. It's like quadruple wrong.

But we discussed several real facts about beavers that might have led to this false belief, and we also discussed the general biological adaptation known as autotomy, which is not especially observed in beavers in the real world, but it's more often observed in animals like lizards, where for example, some lizards will just shed their whole tale if threatened or caught by a predator, so the tale stays behind,

wiggling to or appease the predator. You know, here's a little snack or something to keep your attention, and then the lizard with the stump on its hindquarters runs off and gets away. But in all the cases we could think of in the moment in the episode, with the possible exception of crabs, autotomy is just kind of an

automatic release of the sacrifice appendage. And we were wondering if there are any examples where the animal actually has to actively do some kind of cutting or biting or other work to sever its own body part, like in the Legend of the Beaver. The only example we could think of was I remembered how I'd seen in some documentary footage that a crab with an injured claw would actively like reach over with the other claw and cut or pull the damaged claw off and discard it now. Finally,

Jan says, love your show. You ask for examples of when animals might remove an appendage to escape a predator. I was thinking about animals that are caught in traps removing a foot or other appendage to escape the trap. Not sure if this is the type of situation you were thinking about, but it is a case of knowing they need to escape and being willing to sacrifice the body part to save the overall animal's life. Just a thought, Jan, Yeah, Jan,

that is really interesting. It didn't occur to me at all in the episode, but you're right that does happen.

I could be wrong, but I don't think zoologists or people who specialize in animal behavior would usually consider this autotomy, maybe because it is not like an anatomically facilitated behavior, Like if a mammal choose its leg off to get out of a trap, there's no natural seam for the leg to sever along, and it won't necessarily heal easily, and it certainly won't grow back like a lot of the autonomized appendages of maybe a lizard or a crustacean

or something will. So yeah, I wonder something tells me to kind of think about that differently, that maybe that's just like a desperate behavior showing the more versatile behavioral repertoire of mammals that they can just come up with all kinds of solutions, even very desperate and grizzly ones. Whether a beaver would ever do this, I have no idea.

I think it's like a fan creation that's, you know, mostly just for fun. But I included a link for it in our our our slack here Joe for you to glance at. Here. I was, I don't know if I'm actually going to buy this thing, because I don't know that anyone else in my family besides me would find it amusing. But I love these illustrations that it's apparently in Latin, and you have these suitably strange medieval illustrations of things like Pikachu and Mew two and so forth.

with castorium, translated as beaver shout. Now, I'm not sure if it's something that is actually commercially available anywhere or if it's just reached only traditionally prepared. I suspect the latter based on the sorts of images that were had come up for me when I start looking around for it.

For instance, there'll be a picture of somebody clearly in the state of preparing beaver shalt with a bottle of vodka and some other bottle with what's clearly supposed to be castor glands in the bottom of a like a jar of vodka or something. So we heard back from Emil on this. Emil writes, and it says, Hi, my name is Emil. I'm a Finish expat residing in Norway. Thank you for your varying and often surprisingly interesting deep dives into topics concerning the natural world. I have greatly

enjoyed your series on the humble beaver. You're mentioning of the dreaded beaver shout brought a compartmentalized core memory back to life. Eight or nine years ago, a friend of mine took a sabbatical year as a teacher in the northern Swedish municipality of Jacquesmanc. In this area, beaver hunting

is still practiced to some extent. An avid hunter and imbiber of strong spirits himself, my friend took it upon himself to concoct baverhoot by infusing a bottle of cheap vodka with the glands from a beaver he unfortunately killed while hunting there he brought this bottle, with the glands still present, back home, where we, of course couldn't resist the dare to try some for ourselves during a night of drinks, barbecuing and pretend machismo, as meetings with childhood

friends seemed to always go. The sight of the glands in that very bottle is still etched into my retness, resembling shriveled up testicles in an otherwise clear, slightly amber colored liquid. The smell is difficult to describe, somewhat reminiscent of old leather and fir tree. The drink was served in a shot glass, and I was advised not to think too hard about my task, and I more or less went for it in one go. The first impression was that of any shot of cheap distilled liquor. A

few seconds later the taste hit me again. This is hard to described. The closest analogy would be chewing on fur tree sap in worn leather, and following this up with smelling a rug of rubbing alcohol. Although much more pungent than either, the oily nature of the drink seemed to cover the whole esophagus, and the taste lingered for close to an hour. Even though I tried to wash

away the taste with every liquid available. After the taste eventually subsided in, the smell still seemed to be present on my breath for the remainder of the night, bringing me close to gagging with every exhalation. In all my days of eating and drinking exotic food and drinks, nothing comes close to the pungent nature of this unholy concoction.

I have since come to wonder if my friend, with his at best questionable knowledge of beaver and natoby, had harvested the anal glands by mistake, although I choose to believe it really was the intended glands present in the bottle. So in other words, one out of five stars as a gastronomical experience, but certainly memorable. Once again, thank you for all that you do. Best regards emil PS. We

also willed some beaver meat the same night. This was surprisingly mellow, reminiscent of rabbit, and really quite pleasant.

of insects that water tension is a key concern. Yeah, this is from that essay I've referred to numerous times on the show before, called on being the Right size by jbs hal Daane. The point is that big animals have to worry about gravity because when you fall, it can be really rough when you hit the ground, But a tiny insect falling to the ground is usually not seriously harmed, even from a great But meanwhile, if you're a very small animal like an insect, water tension can

really grab you. It can be dangerous. You know, you get wet and that's kind of like it's multiples of your own body weight clinging to you on the outside. But Richard goes on, however, humans do have to deal with the significance of water tension when gravity is countered in orbit during weightlessness. There are many popular videos of astronauts showing how they have to deal with water when

it contacts a person and objects. Very importantly, there was the case of an astronaut during a spacewalk having a water leak in his helmet. He had to carefully and quickly move to the airlock before water capillary action drove the water around his head where it could have covered his eyes, mouth, and nose. Even within gravity, this could have been a major issue, of course, so you don't have to wait for a sci fi movie to show

water tension's possible effect on people. It's happening every day in the sky above us, I suppose, referring to like in the space station. Thank you for reading my email and the great podcast, Richard. That is a good point, Richard, I'd mainly thought about you know, when I think about water in the Space Station, I think of cute little videos where astronauts are like playing, you know, they've got a cup of water and then they just let it float out in front of them in a blob and

then maybe gobble it up or something. It just sits there and it kind of clings to itself. But yes, if you were, say in an EVA suit, and some water leaks out and get stuck to the outside of your head, that can just really like kind of crawl around on your skin. You can't depend on it dripping downwards like it does when you're on Earth's surface.

the strangest non horror movies I can find. There really is an entire second episode's worth of context to be discussed with it, But the part that seemed worth mentioning for listeners interested in cinema history is actually about Yoshi. During pre production for Jurassic Parks, Spielberg was testing an advanced stop motion technique called go motion, even producing a

test scene you can watch on YouTube. They included a link here for us, and yeah, this is basically the scene where the t Rex attacks the vehicle in Jurassic Park, but it is a test footage with the with stop motion animation that's more in line with what you would expect from like Ray, Harryhausen and so forth.

the action because there's no blurring between the frames. Each frame is a sharply focused still photograph, and then you're just showing a lot of those in quick succession, whereas when you film something that's actually in continuous motion, there's blurring. And apparently go Motion had something to do with trying to recreate this effect for heightened realism.

They're beautiful and they're fun. But I think the example I used in that discussion for a movie where realism is the goal and it's achieved to great effect was Jurassic Park. I mean, in the t Rex escape scene, I don't know how you could tell that's not a real t Rex walking out of an enclosure. I mean, it looks absolutely real, and I wouldn't change anything about it. So in that particular case, in this movie, for some reason, realism is what's called for. That is the what's demanded

of the special effects team in other movies. You know, in a Sinbad movie, I don't want realistic looking skeletons. I want stop motion skeletons, but they're weird, you know, overly crisp movements.

bad movies or general oddities. Check out the Super Mario Brothers Movie nineteen ninety three or the Morton Jankle Cut, a two hour version available for free on archive dot org. Thanks for the show's, Rusty. Yeah for anyone out there who watched the Super Mario Brothers ninety three movie and was like it was. It was a lot of fun, but I just wish it were two hours long.

extended cut, but I don't know. Maybe it makes all the difference in the world more Koopa character development.

of Super Mario Brothers. And I went back in the look at some Max Headroom videos and I was like, oh, oh, oh, oh, King Koopa just has Max Headroom hair. Max Headroom has ridges of blonde hair going from front to back, just like that. So that's obviously what they were doing. They were giving him Max Headroom hair. I don't know why, but that's what they did.

I remember thinking even back then that whoever made the movie was trying to replicate the gritty New York vibe of the live action nineteen ninety Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but with none of the charm. I have to disagree with Rob that Detective Pikachu was a good movie, though my kids loved it. That the two thousand and one Final Fantasy Movie and nineteen ninety three Super Mario turned me off permanently to any video game movies.

ninjas are cool, shredders, terrifying all that. It really worked and I could. I think this is a solid view on some Mario Brothers is coming in the wake of teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and thinking well, if they can do that for the Turtles, then surely we can do something similar for Mario and Luigi.

Seth as our excellent audio producer, which he was. But let it now and henceforth be known that our current audio producer JJ has been extremely, extremely excellent from day one, and I will make sure to mention that in our sign off going forward.