Listener Mail: Sky Raisins

don't know. I never actually I never planned that part. It just kind of comes out one way or the other. And there's no telling why. This is he as you am me and we are all together, all right, Let's get right into the message. This first one is about the episode we did on the Speaking Sword, the sentient talking weapon of mythology or are you ready rob Let's do it? Okay? It comes from Ahmed. Ahmed says, hey, Robert and Joe. Actually Ahmed has written in before, but

he clarifies some thing at the beginning. He says Ahmed again pronunciation Note it's Ahmed the Pakistani way, not Ahmed the Arab way. Though, of course you had no way of knowing that. Well, Thanks Ahmed, and yeah, as a side note, anybody who wants to write in in the future, if you've got pronunciation notes on your name or pronouns or whatever whatever would help us identify you better, but

please include them. Yes, Ahmed writes, Your recent episodes about personality imbued weapons and weapons technologies made me think about the peungen arrows and Tonga device of Korean archery. These were an ingenious pair that worked together to give medieval Korean archers an advantage in firepower. The peongen was a small bolt like arrow whose sizement that for equivalent propulsion it went faster and further than a typical large arrow.

But how do you use such a small arrow without having it flopping around between the drawn bowstring and the bow handle. This is where the tonga came in. Essentially a longitudinally hut bamboo tube held by the archer in the bow handle hand. This arrow guide let users support and aim their peungen at full draw before releasing, so kind of like a kind of like a a half pipe rifle barrel for an arrow. That was my editorializing.

Ahmed goes on and added benefit was that in an arrow when picking up the enemy's volleys and firing them back with standard practice, rival archers without an overdraw device like the Tonga found Peongan uselessly short. Oh that's great. Yeah, so the enemy picks it up and it's like it's too puny to fit between the bow and the draw string. Continuing, I think Korean archery would make for a good topic

for stuff to blow your mind. There's a ton of fascinating history and culture, and it's a subject with reverberations to the current day, as evidenced by South Korea's domination of Olympic archery. Anyways, keep up the great work, Ahmed. Huh, Well,

you know that this this is all wonderful. I didn't really know anything about Korean archery, but I have thought in the past that archery in general would be a great topic for us to explore because you see all these different cultural variations on a different innovations that were often game changing innovations on the battlefield. So and then, of course we could also potentially just get into the basic physics of the activity. We did cover the addle

addle on, right, we did. Yeah, so we kind of did. We kind of did the like the introductory chapter to a series that we just haven't quite got around to doing. It's been a while, but I recall some of the papers we looked at for the Addle Addle did some rough comparisons between like the the uh, the pros and cons basically of the addleaddle versus the bows that would come later or or in some cases before. But anyway, hey,

thanks for the email. All right, here's another one. We heard from a lot of people regarding our Mirrors series, which which is great. We we knew this would be the case since we all have experience with mirrors, and if you happen to have not had any experience of the mirrors, then hopefully our episodes turns you onto mirrors. And you've just been really blown away by what this technology can do. You're like, I gotta try one of these things. I'm hoping we can leverage this into a

sponsorship from mirror Box. It's you know, that mirror subscription service. Is this the thing? This is actually a thing, not making this? I mean it would be great, right for people who just can't stop smashing mirrors? Yeah? Yeah, alright, So Samantha Rites, Hello Robin Joe, I listened with interest to your recent podcasts The Invention of the Mirror, Part four, on Joe's question of why mirrors seem to be associated

with some form of local superstition. My hypothesis is that any kind of reflection of oneself, whether physical or figurative, tends to be a transcendental experience. It is odd, almost jarring when we first catch sight of ourselves, such as when a baby sees there there again, not there again, reflection on a shiny toy, or a dog barks at a glass door. The early forms of reflections, being distorted and imperfect yet recognizable, might have heightened that sense of surrealism.

In truth, we never get to lay eyes on ourselves the way we lie lay eyes on every other object in the physical world. Reflections are a way of understanding what others see when they lay eyes upon us, and is essentially a not out of body, out of body experience, since we are finally inhabiting a viewpoint that cannot belong

to us naturally. Similarly, when we do a figurative self reflection, we are asked to step out of ourselves, inhabiting the viewpoints of others to reflect on our own actions as a bystander. It's very interesting that in this same podcast, Rob mentions cameras and photographs in the same breath as mirrors. I didn't catch what was the exact connection drawn, but some older folk where I am do not like profiles

of themselves taken. There's an old superstition about capturing someone's essence with camera on film, and I believe it stems from the same discomfort of being able to see in self, not as a reflection as in mirrors, but now in a two dimensional portable film where obstensibly like like, some

part of one's likeness is preserved. If you believe that your likeness forms a part of your being, than to have your likeness preserved in another medium may lead some to believe that some part of their being has also been detached along with it. And if you believe that being is a finite quantity, then the natural conclusion is that one has somehow lost some portion of one's being

with each photo taken. Mirrors reflect, and photos capture. Perhaps their associated superstitions remind us how infrequently we got to see ourselves in the past. Oh thanks Samantha. Yeah, very

thoughtful email. A lot of a lot of cool stuff here. Yeah, yeah, I think that's that's all all very valid and um and and again it's it's interesting how you if you you read uh boorheads, if you read his his poem on mirrors, which I know I keep mentioning, uh, but if if you read it in full, it's like he manages to encapsulate all of these various, um, you know,

twisting ideas about mirrors and reflection. Uh you know what what they mean, what they seem to mean, how they how they impact our cognition and are how we envision ourselves and others. It's it's it's wonderful stuff. But but it does just come down to the fact that mirrors are inherently weird and they turn our world on end, truly, and and in that vein Okay, I'm gonna go straight

into this next message from Simon. All Right, Simon says, Hi, gents, have just been listening to your series on mirrors and was wondering if you missed an interesting question. Why do mirrors only reverse the reflection on the horizontal plane relative to your head? Why is it not reversed on the

vertical plane. There was a thought that it was due to your eyes being on a horizontal plane, but if you close one eye, the image is still reverse, and if you tilt your head sideways, it's still reversed on the horizontal plane relative to your head. I mean, I don't know the answer, but I'd love to hear you guys discuss it. Thanks and keep up the good work. I love the podcast, Simon. Okay, so this is something I have definitely wondered about before, and it can be

really difficult to reason your way through this. I actually already tried to answer this email once on last week's Listener Mail episode, but then I was not satisfied with how I explained it, so I cut that out and I'm trying again. This is my second run on this, and it's my best attempt to clarify the answer to

this question. So, first of all, I would argue that the clearest way to understand what a mirror is doing to your image is to start by just ignoring the concept of left and right and only think about objective directions within a reference frame. So I'll try to illustrate that. I'll give you something to picture in your head. Imagine you are standing facing a mirror or that is mounted on a wall directly to the north of you. So when you look into that mirror, you are facing straight

to the north. Your back is facing directly to the south. Now, if you're in this situation and you raise your left arms straight out to the side, which cardinal direction is it pointing? That would be west right. And now if you imagine looking at your reflection, which direction is your reflection pointing also to the west? Same for your other arm. If you raise it up to the to your side and you point to the east, your reflection also points to the east. Now, notice that the same thing is

true on the vertical plane as well. Your head is pointing up, your feet are pointing down, and the same thing is true of your reflection. The head is up, the feet are down. But now imagine this, take a step toward the mirror, and here you can actually see the first time in this thought experiment, that the directionality of your reflected image actually does the opposite of what you did within the reference frame around you. You took a step to the north, and your reflection took a

step to the south. So the real direction that is reversed in a mirror is not along the horizontal plane or the vertical plane, but it is along the z axis the plane of depth or the plane of distance from the mirror surface. A mirror inverts the order of objects moving away from its surface. So what does this mean for your reflection in a mirror. Well, the best way that I've seen this put is that maybe you should think about your reflection in a mirror not as

reversed from left to right, but as inside out. That's almost quite literally what it is. The inside is the outside in terms of the depth dimension. Okay, so that gets you halfway there, because that gives you a clearer picture of what a mirror is actually doing to your image. But the question still remains of why, when we look at this inside out version of ourselves, why does it seem to be reversed horizontally but not vertically. Why is that the way our brain makes sense of what we're

looking at. I think the answer to this is that the image seems to be reversed along the horizontal plane because our bodies are horizontally symmetrical, and thus we have a concept of handedness only along the horizontal plane. Uh So, to to see the difference here, try to imagine a creature that is vertically symmetrical, but not horizontally symmetrical. And for simplicity's sake, to do this, really all you have to do is imagine a human, but a human that

travels everywhere by levitating in the air on their side. Okay, So they never stand upright on the ground. They float sideways in the air, so such that if they lift out their right hand, their right hand points towards the ground, and if they lift up their left hand, their left hand points towards the sky. Can you picture this, I'm picturing. It's weird, but I'm picturing, okay. So think about how this would be affected by the inside out reflection this

person sees in a mirror. If this sideways levitating human looked into a mirror, their handedness would be reversed, not on the horizontal plane, but on the vertical plane. So they're floating sideways. If they reach out with their right hand, which is pointing down, their reflection would reach out with its left hand, which would be pointing down, and vice versa. So in the end, I think this is the best

way to make sense of it. The fact that we perceive ourselves as horizontally reversed but not vertically reversed in a mirror is because our bodies are horizontally symmetrical on each side, and thus we have a horizontal concept of handedness. It's not really about the mirror, but about the orientations of our bodies and how our concept of handedness works. Now that I've taken two runs at that, I hope that it at least provides some clarity on the issue.

That's my my best attempt. I don't know. I think it works. I think it works all right. Here's another one that comes to us from Matt. Good day, gentlemen, enjoyed still and enjoying the Mirror series. Quick thought on what it's likely the most irrelevant part of the recent episodes. Don't knock the beef tea too hard? How did thee come up? Stand up for beef tea? Oh? I remember it was because we talked about UM Eustace fun lie Big, who was the inventor of the silvering process for mirrors.

Because remember we talked about how UM going into the nineteenth century, a lot of the mirrors that were made in these factories were made with a mercury tin amalgam that had mercury content. That was Oh, we didn't even bring this up in the episodes. So we talked about how the mercury tin amalgam was hazardous to the health of the workers and the mirror shops that made the

looking glass. But also I was reading about how antique mirrors can sometimes just in somebody's house give them mercury poisoning, like if the mercury starts leaching out of the the amalgam at the back of the mirror. But anyway, von Lee Big was responsible for coming up with UM some innovations in the in the process that allowed the chemical reaction to deposit a thin layer of silver. I think now a lot of mirrors are also made with aluminum,

but some are still made with this silver process. Uh, this layer of silver on the back of the glass that led to or was the precursor for the the mirror making process that is still used in some places today. But another thing that used as fondly Big did was

he was really into UM. He was really into the idea of like preserving nutrition from meats and and maximizing nutrition in agriculture and things like that, and so he had he played some role in the creation of these meat extract things that I think eventually gave rise to like the Oxo beef boullion type packets that would be used in making something in the episode we called beef tea, but would probably more appetizingly be called beef broth. Yes, and so so this is what Matt is referring to.

Matt can take these quote. It might be some of the stereotypical British heritage coming out here, but a little hot beef tea broth really goes pretty well with a biscuit. Also, it can be a nice change from chicken broth when sick bovril oxo packets. It's a world of options. This might seem ridiculous to many, but different strokes for different folks, you know, keep on keeping on, Matt. Oh thanks, Matt. Well, yeah,

I don't. I didn't mean to knock beef tea. I think we were just making fun of what the words sounded like. Yeah, and certainly various broths can be quite satisfying if it's said, if it's a good meaty broth, or if you're you know, you're going with like a veggie broth or something. Um. Yeah, so so many uh so, so many options there, though, I do wonder are we talking when we're talking about a biscuit here? What specifically are we talking about something on the sweeter end or

something more uh savory? Oh yeah, so if this is by the British definition, I think a biscuit would be what Americans might call a cookie or a cracker. Yeah. I don't know, but certainly I can easily agree with the value of dipping a sort of savory baked good into some sort of hardy broth. Uh that that sounds delicious? Oh yeah, okay. The next message comes to us from Diana. Diana says, Hello, Robin Joe, thank you for providing infinite questions for my kids to ask while we're driving. We

all enjoy the show. But to the cats, I have three cats, and while I don't know if they recognize themselves in the mirror, they clearly know how mirrors work, just like venus. I think that might be referring to the rogueby Venus. Uh. They often scope out others in the mirror and from around corners. Then when they move to pounce, they will run around the corners and not into the mirror, so they seem to understand reflections. Also, if their prey makes eye contact through the mirror, they'll

break off the attack. By prey, I mean humans, lady, the elderly dog, or each other. Maybe a sky raisin. Thanks for everything, including the car conversations. Have a great day, Diana. Diana, I did not know what a sky raisin was. I looked it up. I think that means a fly. Oh okay, that's that's maybe sort of cat speech. Yeah, that might be kind of a loll cat dialect thing. But the sky raising like it's a fly meaning a treat that comes from the air. Yeah. Yeah, this is fascinating though.

Hearing more about uh, cat owners and and pet owners in general, and how they're observing their pets, engaging or not engaging with mirrors. Uh that the I love this, the little the little predators making use of the reflections. Yeah, all right. We have heard from more folks regarding our weird house cinema episodes. Uh this one, next, next one comes to us from Dalen. I believe I have that right, um. Dalen writes, Hello there, I was wondering how y'all would

rank the Star Wars movies. Popped in my head to ask because the way you describe some Weird House Movies makes me, uh think that Episodes eight and Episodes nine fit the bill for interestingly bad movies. I hope you're doing at least pretty okay. I like how Dalin's just like needling us with this thing. Could you talk about ranking the Star Wars movies? Well, let's see, so ranking the Star Wars movies, So ranking films, I don't know.

It's one of those things that can certainly be fun and I engage in sometimes that I tend to approach it a very subjectively, like I'm I'm not trying to to to be you know, very objective, like this is what the universe thinks of and should think of these films. It's just not how I approach films in general. And then also you you don't you don't coerce with your opinions about and the And I totally understand the movies

that I like are not necessarily the movies other people like. Uh, and then the movies that I like today are not necessarily the movies I'm gonna like tomorrow. Like that's the other part of it. So if I just counting the main films, this is the order I would go in right now. Based on my current relationship with the Star Wars films, I'd go Return Revenge, Empire, Clones, Last Jedi, Uh, New Hope, Phantom, Menace, Force Awakens, uh, and then the Rise of Skywalk I respect your autonomy that some of

those orderings are strange to me, but I respect it. Yeah, I mean, like I said, some of it, this is not where I would have been years ago. For instance, An Attack of the Clones was never my favorite Star Wars film. Um. In fact, when it came out, I remember being very vocal about problems I had with it. But my son loves it and has watched it multiple times, so it's kind of rubbed off on me, like I can't I can't dislike this film that he likes so much.

And then I'll also have to throw in that the Clone Wars animated series builds upon those movies so much and and adds so much more to them that like you can sort of retroactively go back and find more things to enjoy those films, or at least I could. Uh. So Yeah, it's very subjective, but ultimately I love Star Wars movies. All these Star Wars movies had something for me, Like even though I put Rise of Skywalker last on the list. I think it still had some very solid

elements to it as well. It has some great light saber battle, so you know, at the end of the day, I like that more than most things. Yeah, I also so much like you, Rob, I uh, I feel like I used to rank things like movies and and albums and stuff like that more in my head. I would make lists of my favorites of things, and now I find that a really almost kind of painful activity to attempt. But I want to be a good sport and play along,

um so, so I'll try to do mine. Dallan. So my rankings, I think would have to split into sort of an upper compartment and a lower compartment in which completely different rules apply to the two different compartments. So I think it would probably go something like this. Also, I think my my upper level ordering and going to have a lot of surprises. You know. As much as it might pain me that this is true, I'd say

it probably conforms to general critical consensus. So I'd go definitely Empire Strikes Back first, then the original Star Wars, then Return of the Jedi. Then I'd go the Last Jedi, and then after those four. At this point, the list becomes much more certain, because I think all four of the ones I just named our movies that I feel are just solidly good, and I can compare them in some way that's comprehensible. After this, it becomes unclear to

me how I should compare the movies. But my initial read was to go something like Revenge of the Sith, Force Awakens, Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Rise of Skywalker.

And so it's kind of hard for me to compare my feelings about like the prequels and the first and third Revival film because I think they they succeed and fail in extremely different ways, and the way I would express that is for me, the later sequels push the buttons on my brain much more effectively, like in Force Awakens and Rise of Skywalker, even though I rated them lower. There are plenty of moments in those sequels where I

really get caught up in the story. I feel strong emotional reactions to the characters, um like they can really make me feel something, you know, I can. I can get close to the like tears alling up, which definitely never happens for me at all in the prequels. But at the same time, I think I respect the prequels more as a kind of bold, weird realization of somebody's

genuine artistic vision, however flawed. Uh. The sequels, especially like seven and nine, feel to me more like products created by a kind of impersonal machine, a machine designed to crank out highly effective blockbuster movies. So they hit the right beats, and sometimes they even affect me emotionally. I'd like some things about the characters in them, but uh, something about them also kind of taste synthetic in a way that neither the original trilogy nor the prequels do. Um. Yeah,

so so there's something different. Like regarding seven through nine, each time I walked out of the theater thinking, wow, I really like that. That was super fun. But then seven and nine both from the age pretty poorly upon reflection. Uh. With the prequels, I have exactly the opposite pattern. Like, while I'm watching the prequels, in the moment, I'm thinking I cannot believe how bad this is, this is unreal, But then upon later reflection, I kind of feel fondly

about them. I'm like, oh, yeah, Revenge of the Sith, Yeah, I mean it is. I think one of the things about the Star Wars films that that it makes them different than other works of of of cinema is that there's so many different variations on them that come afterwards, like not only the Clone Wars stuff, but like even stuff with like physical memorabilia or say miniatures. So there's

stuff like there's there's some just wonderful designs. There's a lot of wonderful artwork that goes into those films, and sometimes like those designs get to live a life of their own, kind of separate from the film, uh you know, be it in a physical form or in a video game or some or some other treatment, sometimes by a different author, being like a novelization. So uh yeah, there's so many different ways to to spin it. Oh and I just remember since you mentioned other things as well.

I haven't seen it since the theater, but I remember I quite liked Rogue one, apart from a few moments that I found really distasteful, like the c G I carry Fisher and stuff, oh yeah, yeah, or Peter Cushing. Remember, yeah, I didn't like either of those. Uh yeah, that one was weird for me because when I watched it the first time, I mostly really enjoyed it, And the second time I watched it, I was watching with my son and he just wasn't that interested in it, and so

that kind of rubbed off of me. I'm like, well, maybe this movie is just not as fun as the other Star Wars. I don't know how I feel about it. Well yeah, well, like I was saying with my lower compartment, I mean, there are ways that like I can't keep them straight in my head, Like every time I think about them, I start reorganizing. So it just doesn't really work. Like Attack of the Clones I think, is in so many ways just a you know, if I were just trying to like write up a report card for it,

it is pretty awful. But at the same time I think like, oh, no way, Christopher Lee, and then I get excited and then I almost kind of want to go watch it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, or you take things in isolation by saying like, well, there's a whole planet of youth social insects that are building um uh super weapons, you know, like that's that's neat. That's not in every film. So yeah, and I guess films of this nature too. It's to go beyond just the use

of elements of them in other works. It's like they kind of explode in our culture, and so they're they're no longer this contained and isolated thing that can just be encountered on its own, like they're just it's all over the place. So, uh, you know, had the Star Wars films especially are I think they had they obeyed different laws compared to other franchises and and and genres

that one might try and try and judge. Now, as for the second question, uh, that was in the original one was basically like, well, are these are these weird house films? Could they be weird house films? Um, that's a harder question, in part because weird our cinema has intentionally vague um parameters, so we kind of it's kind of a gut thing with us. I guess yeah, I would hesitate to do though I don't know. I would almost feel like the prequels fit more into the weird

house cinema universe than the sequels do. Yeah, so the the e Walk movies, we did do any Walk movie and uh, and I think that was that was the right balance. So, yeah, it's weird. It's hard to On one hand, it's hard to actually actually just you know, come up with a list of keywords and boxes that need to be checked off for what kind of films

we're going to cover on Weird Out Cinema. But on the other hand, you can actually turn to keywords and try and figure out what kind of films we do on Weird Old Cinema because we actually had a listener named Matt to do this on our discord. Um this is what Matt wrote. Matt says, I know it was mentioned that Deep Blue Sea was the deepest and bluest episode yet, but which episode has been the weird housiest.

Across the thirty seven episodes so far, there have been two thousand, six d fifty one unique plot key words associated with the films. On IMDb, the top keywords are as follows and so um. I'm not gonna read the full list, but the number one and and again this is of a few episodes ago. The number one is murder. No, I hate murder, true, but think of like all most of the great works of of literature and film, they

do have a murder in them. So if you're just going to say does this film contain murder, the answer is generally yes. Um uh The second keyword is psychotronic film, which which I found interesting. I think this is because somebody, at some point, or maybe multiple people have taken films that are covered in Michael Weldon's Psychatronic Film Guides and has then tagged all of those in IMDb. Well this makes sense, yeah, yeah, because our tastes often match up

with with films that are chronicled in those books. Um uh. Though, on the other hand, there are plenty of film that are that are at least mentioned, that are chronicled in the Psychotronic film books that wouldn't really be the sorts of films we would cover, but there does seem to be significant overlap there. Sure. The third keyword independent film alright makes sense, especial if we were dealing with a lot of B movies. The fourth one is monster, which

totally works. I would have thought that would be number one. Yeah. The next three are blood, corpse, and violence. Uh and does makes sense. I mean, we've already we already have murder and monster in there. These these are just going to occur. Um. But then the next one is fun too. The next one is bare chested mail, but I think that's just from that keyword appearing one thousand times in

the meta of Frogs referring to Sam Elliott. Yeah. Perhaps, but now I can't say, like, shortly after this, we did um Cannibal Apocalypse, and then what does John Saxon do? Whips his shirt off, just completely shirtless and several things. I'm like, well, there it is. There's the bare chested mail that helps define a weird out cinema selection. You can tell he wanted to show off that he was in great shape in his fifties. Yeah he was. I think he was in his forties, his forties, Sorry, but

but yeah, he was in great shape. But anyway, Matt finished this up by saying, you get yourself a psychotronic independent film with some bloody murder and a bare chested mail, and you've got yourself a winner. Well the numbers don't lie. Yeah, well, isn't been so low? Uh, he's pretty bare chested in some of those later Star Wars. Coming back to our previous discussion, so what what what what this is a what are what are we coming back to? We're coming

back to the Star Wars? And remember, isn't that like he's bare chested, you know at least yeah, I forget which movies, but people may like, a, really, he's wearing that weird looking cumberbun thing, or yeah, yeah he's got he's looks like he's wearing like luchador pants where they have him like cinched up above the navel. Yeah cool, All right, Well, I guess we're gonna go and close it out there, but we would we'd love to hear from everybody. Um, yeah, just a reminder, it is a

pretty small operation here. It is Joe and myself, we're you know, researching all of this, recording all these and then Seth is our our fabulous producer, and without him we wouldn't be able to pull this off. But yeah, we depend on all of you to write in as well. Let us know what you think about the content we're putting out. Let us, you know, chime in with your suggestions,

with your corrections, with your tips for the future. What what sort of episodes you'd like to hear as well as your your your professional or just daily experience with the various topics we cover In the meantime, if you would like to listen to other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, you can find core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the Stuff to Blow your Own podcast feed Weird House Cinnamon on Friday's, Artifact on Wednesday, and more listener mail on Monday's Big Thanks as always to

our audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, if you would like to suggest topic for the future, or just if you want to get in touch and say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.