Listener Mail: The Flood

your episode on sinkholes. While not actually a sinkhole. The episode reminded me of an event that happened while I was living in the loop in downtown Chicago. I was in law school at the time and in turning at a law firm on Whacker Drive. I had an office with a window overlooking the Chicago River. Pretty sweet for a young intern. One day, I was watching as a crew were driving pilings basically giant logs into the river

bed next to the Kinsei Bridge. I could feel the reverberation of the pounding even up in the high rise where I was located. Suddenly everyone started running around like something bad had happened. Looking toward the water, I could see what was causing the chaos, a giant whirlpool had appeared right where they were pounding the pilings. Within minutes, the area was surrounded by fire trucks and emergency vehicles.

Then helicopters appeared. After a period of time, a voice came over the emergency system in the building and announced that there had been ordered an evacuation of the loop and that we had to leave the building. Going downstairs, I walked out into what I can only describe as a calm version of a Godzilla movie. The streets were filled with people and police and firemen were directing everyone

to leave the loop immediately. They had called in the L train cars and just started piling everyone into them and sending them outside of the loop. I ended up on the South side of Chicago, and I eventually made it to a friend's house and was unable to returned to my apartment for several days. It ends up that what had occurred was one of the pilings pierced through the roof of an abandoned subway line. The water immediately started rushing in and sucked the piling through the hole.

The hole then started expanding, and the Chicago River was effectively draining through the hole and filling the entire underground rail system, and the reason for the evacuations the sub basements of the high rise buildings in the loop. The fire department was concerned that they were going to lose integrity of the sub basements for buildings like the Sears Tower, and like dominoes, they would topple over. They tried everything to cover the whole, but the force of the water

was too strong. At one point they had put divers in the water with a large metal plate, but even that got sucked through and almost killed one of the divers. Finally, they were able to block the hole with a quick drawing cement that is used in underwater construction. This gave them enough time to put permanent covers over the whole, and they were finally able let everyone back into the loop. This lasted for three or four days, and the damage

cost almost two billion dollars. The humorous side of the story is that while they call it the Great Chicago Flood of nine two, it was a flood with no visible water. There is also a humorous story about why they call it the Great Leak. It ends up that floods are not covered under insurance, but leaks are so they tried to classify it as a leak for insurance purposes. And then he links to a wiki for the event and a link to a Chicago Tribune article from which

has some black and white pictures. So, and then finally Thomas says, I hope this blows your mind. Well, that definitely did. I was not aware of this event. Yeah, yeah, I mean neither. This is this is all new to me, the great leak. I like it, though, I mean I'm not in favor of great leaks occurring and causing property damage, but it's it's a fascinating little bit of history that

I had somehow missed out on. What really scary part to me is imagining being a dive or sent down to try to cap the league while it's still suctioning water through it. Yeah. It's like urban cave diving or something. Yeah, yeah, but with a drain at the bottom. All right, here's another one. This one comes to us from Eric. Greetings,

My good sirs. I just listened to part one of your episode on sinkholes, where you speculate about the reason heaven always seems to be in the sky whereas hell always seems to be under the Earth, and I have a theory to contribute. It's because of gravity. Ancient people didn't understand gravity the way we do, and they could easily observe its effects on the surface of the Earth.

And so it makes sense to me that Heaven would be above where humans cannot go freely, if at all, whereas Hell would be below, where unwise or unlucky humans can end up whether they want to or not. In short, you must drive to reach Heaven, but must drive not to end up in Hell, which seems to me like both literally and metaphorically sound. What do you think about that, Joe, Oh, yeah,

I think that kind of makes sense. I mean, another way I would put it is that I think some ancient ideas of hell as a place of punishment evolved from a sort of afterlife concept that is more generally

the grave. I talked about this some with Bard Irmin when when he was a guest on the podcast last year, and he wrote a whole book about the evolution of at least the Jewish and Greco Roman and Christian beliefs about heaven and hell, and there I think the the older ideas is that in most cultures of the region, there was no like reward or punishment in the afterlife

early on. The earlier beliefs are just that when you die, you go to this place that might be called something like sheol, which is like the gray if if there is any life after death, it's just this kind of like shadow of your former existence where nothing much happens and it's kind of gloomy and boring. Or maybe there's no afterlife at all. You're just in the ground, and over time that translates more into the afterlife you don't want.

It becomes associated with a place of punishment after death, whereas there's some kind of other existence in some other place if you're being rewarded, and that could be a uh, that could be a temporal afterlife in which at some point you are resurrected bodily from the grave to your reward, or it could be as in the like the Greek view, the Platonic view, a place where the immaterial soul goes after death. Yeah, yeah, I think that that sounds sounds reasonable.

I also, I guess have to to come back to this idea that just the idea of beings or voices originating from places that cannot be reached by humans or are not easily reached by humans, really resonates with us. So certainly that you know that can apply to the sky and to the cosmos above, you know, the visible uh universe, but also the unseen world beneath the earth mountain tops, but also um interior spaces like the hollows

of volcanoes. I'm instantly reminded of the uh uh the the documentary, the Herza documentary that we we recently watched on the volcanoes talking about the where they're talking to the individual who had gone to the volcano and uh and had like met with being with a with a

being from the interior, that sort of thing. Yeah, But despite all that, I mean, I also very much can see the intuitive logic of what Eric here is saying that, like if if they're if you're sorting afterlives or other planes of existence into a good place that is good to get too, but hard to get to, in a bad place that is easy to get to and painful. Yeah,

the the updown trajectory seems quite clear there. I wonder if they're I've never run across it, but I wonder if there is a culture that has an inversion of that or perhaps some sort of fantasy treatment that intentionally goes through the sort of world building exercise of inverting that of having you have to work to earn your place in the ground in the world below, but if you, you know, just live a careless lifestyle, then you'll eventually float free and be lost to the uh you know,

the cosmic horrors above, the lay and the Morlocks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They never any reversal of that. That That would be interesting. They well, it's need how the the other Way and the Morlocks were both horrible fates in their own way, right, Yeah, all right, Well that was just half of Eric's uh that I don't want to skip over the praise section of the email. Uh, he writes, Anyway, just a thought

I had while listening, and I wanted to share. I've been listening to the podcast for ages, not only since before Christian left, but before Joe and Christian joined, and I've rarely missed an episode. I was disappointed when the Invention podcast stopped being its own thing, but I'm pleased that you've kept the spirit of it going with your periodic Invention episodes, and I've really enjoyed the little artifact shorts and Weird House Cinema. Keep up the great work

and thank you for the excellent content. Farewell and stay safe Eric. Thanks Eric. Yeah. Oh and you know, speaking of Christian we had mentioned Christians Kickstarter recently on the show for Corridor Magazine. That kicks or was successful. So Corridor Magazine is going to be a real thing. It's going to be a reality in the months ahead. When they have like a date and or website announced, I'll share it with everybody, probably in the listener mail episode.

That is excellent news. Everybody keep an eye out if horror, weird fiction is your thing. All right, it looks like the mail bot is coming forth with more um hellish content for us here Joe, Yeah, more afterlife stuff. So this comes from Rachel. Rachel says, Hi, guys, I've been listening to your show for many years now, and I really enjoyed the things you discuss. Some of the stuff

is a bit over my head, but fun to listen to. Nonetheless, as a former neuroscience major in college and future neurologist in medical school currently, especially like the brain related episodes. I've also got a soft spot for the monster episodes as a fan of horror Anyway, the reason for this email isn't related to any of that, as you might have guessed by the subject line. What I'm really writing

for is to ask this. A while ago, one of you mentioned a companion to Dante's Divine Comedy, or maybe just the Inferno. I can't remember that. Gave good footnotes and such for understanding the context of the time, but I can't recall which episode it was in, so I can't go back and check. Do you remember which author translator you recommended? From a quick Internet search, it sounds like maybe the one by Mark musa Is is a good start. I'm not sure if either of you guys

had other thoughts. It'll probably be quite some time before i'll actually get around to reading it. I've got a whole shelf full of untouched books that I've collected while in school and haven't had time for, but I'm hoping to get to it someday. Thanks Rachel, Well, Rachel, I'm I'm no Dante scholars, so I don't have extensive opinions. I haven't surveyed like a lot of different translations, but I can tell you the ones I've read and and

my thoughts on them. So when I read The Divine Comedy last year, I read, uh, the The Inferno translation by the American poet Robert Pinsky, and that translation has some in to no it's with it that are pretty good. For the Purgatorio and the Paradiso actually used two different translations, combining the translations and the notes there. One was the additions of the Purgatorio and the Parody so by Jean and Robert Hollander. I think Gene Hollander was a poet.

Unfortunately she passed away just the other year, um, but I think she did the translation and her husband, Robert, who is a Dante scholar or medieval literature scholar, did the did the notes. But then also for the Purgatorio and parody, so we kind of read them concurrently with the John Chardie translation and footnotes, and in my experience, we really liked the Gene Hollander translation, but chartis footnotes were the most accessible, and sometimes they were they were

rather funny. They were good footnotes if you really don't know anything and and just want to understand what's being talked about in the poem at a at a pretty basic level. The Hollander translation has great notes, but they go deep. That seems more like a good resource for scholars or something. Is just pages and pages of notes on every canto. Awesome. Yeah, that that does sound like like really good, good additions to to look to. For my own part. I did uh Inferno and Purgatory via

the Robert M. Durling translations illustrated by Robert Turner. I found those to be excellent. I I read those as part of a college class on on Dante. I had I forget that the professor's name, but I have was at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and there is this um, this fabulous Dante teacher, and he was this kind of shortish Italian American man, and so he had he had a wonderful accent, and he had this just

real enthusiasm for Dante. And I remember him talking about how he was going to dresses Dante for Halloween, and I asked him if he was going to have the pas? Is it peace on the forehead as in Purgatory that one has to work off? Oh? Yes, yes, the angel carve seven pas into Dante the pilgrim's forehead, and there each each time he goes up one level of the Mountain of Purgatory, one of the peas is erased because he's been purged of that one of the seven sins. Yeah.

So so I asked him he's gonna have the peas on his forehead and he says, no, I'm in heaven. You know, of course he's not going to go as the as the infernal or the Purgatory Dante. He's the Heavenly Dante. Um. But speaking of heaven. When I read these, um, Durling and Turner had not put out their Paradiso yet. I believe it's out there. It's probably been out for like fifteen years at this point. But but I really

enjoyed those. But I also had it was also had the benefit of being in a class and having a really cool teacher, so I think he had some supplemental information that he gave to us as well. Um. I I feel like it's definitely a text that if you can have the original Italian like in an opposing page, like many of these do, and I think I think

Darlings did. It's it's cool, but you know, to get even if you don't know Italian or not learning Italian, it's neat to kind of pick out some of the words, and it suspect actually neet with some of the demon names, because I've noticed some additions do a full translation of the demon names and others leave them um with their sort of fantastic sounding names like scarmiglion um you know, and you don't you don't necessarily want that translated into whatever.

I forget what Scarnigleon's calling him evil claws or what evil clause or you know, or or pig nose or whatever the case may be. But having those of those rich, you know, Italian names, this is wonderful. Yeah, So anyway, I recommend all the ones I used, I think they're good.

But but I would say, if you're looking for good succinct footnotes, I think maybe the John Chardi translation is the best to go with, just because the footnotes are so accessible and so and it was a good translation to he actually tries to do the rhyme, which some of the other one must focus on less. But I also really love Geene Hollander's translation. I don't know, So I don't know. Just take your pick from the following, but but I will emphasize yet again, like if you

are interested in reading the Divine comedy. It is not going to make a lick of sense unless you get some good footnotes to go along with it. Like it, it is just crammed with with medieval like church politics and and Tuscan Italian politics and and rest references to recent history and the centuries previous. Yeah. Yeah, it is not going to make the slightest bit of sense to you unless you you get an addition that has some good footnotes and you can explain what all the references

to proper nouns and all that are about. Absolutely all right, here's another one. This comes to us from Shanny. Shanny writes then and says, hi, too interesting notes about keys from my culture of origin, Orthodox Judaism. I'm no longer observant, but I am pretty enmeshed in the community because of my very religious family. Number One, there is a Jewish law the prohibits carrying anything outside of your home on

the sad, including your house keys. As a loophole, some people have their keys set in jewelry or accessories such as a bracelet, um, a broad brooch, or a belt, because if the keys are part of your attire, it

is permissible to wear outside. Number two there is a Jewish custom that before the first Sabbath after Passover, remembering how the Jews were freed from Egypt and then wandered homeless around the desert for forty years, many women will place a key into their chola dough before baking it as a uh segula, loosely defined good omen to always have a home to live in. I'm not sure where

this tradition originated. I have a feeling that it is based on an old Christian Easter tradition of forming bread to look like a cross, but I haven't found anything to substantiate that. I love your podcast, especially when it somehow tries different cultures. I'm sorry, I think it's supposed to be ties different cultures and histories together best shiny. I also like it when it does that. Thank you, Seanny. Yeah,

this is really interesting. I love rituals like this like the Another thing that I like when they come together are the intersections of religious beliefs, rules and prohibitions sort of interacting with the practicalities of life as we see explained, especially in your first point there, Rob, do you'll do you'll ever get holl of bread? Um? I guess we do. I'm not remembering it offhand, um, but I think we have. Yeah, there's some some places in town that make good. Yeah,

it's good. I am. I'm very much in favor of bread. Um. I wonder have we ever done an episode that really goes into any bit of Hebraic ritual. I mean, obviously we've dealt with like the Ark of the Covenant and all that, but any trying to come up in technology based invention episodes. Yeah, I feel like it's come up a good bit here and there. Maybe I'm just blinking. I can only remember the arc all of a sudden,

so it's kind of all consuming like that. We had a great piece of listener mails sometimes last year when we did a couple of episodes about pointing that involved the yawd, the little pointer stick with the finger on it used for reading the Torah. That's right. Yeah, that's that. That was a really good one. Okay, all right now I feel better, Okay, Um, But yeah, I would like if there any other topics of that nature, uh that that we could be covering. Yeah, we'll have to let

us know, listeners. All right. This next message is about chemistry. It refers back to our episode on heavy water, but also a subsequent listener mail and it is from Brett who has written in before. Brett says hello Robert and Joe. I hope you were both doing well, and has treated you kindly thus far. It's Brett again. I recently wrote in about die chloro methane or d c M for organic synthesis and the Christmas tree ornament which you read.

Thank you. During that listener mail, another listener wrote in about heavy water her and it was then I realized I missed that podcast and had to go back, so pardon the late response. Deuturated water has a great history and thank you for sharing it. As an organic chemist, people in my field rely on the properties of deuterium daily, not just for incorporation into potential active ingredients which you mentioned, but also for for solvent to characterize our compounds that

we synthesize. Let me explain. I mentioned that chemists use nuclear magnetic resonance or n MR to help provide us with information about the type of carbon hydrogen bonds that our compounds possess. The NMR is so finely tuned that it detects the presence of these carbon hydrogen bonds with great accuracy and precision reproducible, but in order to obtain a spectra for the most part, we use deuturated solvents, which all derive from heavy water. Deuturated solvents such as chloroform, methanol,

and dimethyl soul. Fox side allow the NMR to lock and shim and I look that up. I didn't know what that was, but that is a term in in UH, the nuclear magnetic resonance to lock and shim based on the carbon deuterium bond, allowing the instrument to focus on the small amount of material we are concerned with. If the solvent did not contain deuterium and only hydrogen, then the solvent would drown out the signal for our compounds because of how many more molecules of solvent there would

be compared to our material. And then Brett says, maybe you know about the mole the m o L. I don't know much about it. I think that is that is a measure used in chemistry of like the number of elementary particles in a sample. Or I think it's the number of elementary particles that are equal to like a certain number of grams of carbon or something um but I'm no expert on that, but so I obviously don't know a lot about it. Um Brett goes on.

We also use a deuterated solvent to help us understand the mechanism of reaction, how a reaction might proceed by change by exchanging a hydrogen for a deuterium adom which when using n m R the carbon deuterium bond would not be present. Amazing how we can obtain information on something we cannot see, and how we rely on instruments to help us figure out what we're doing. Thanks again

for always providing great fodder for the mind. Tritium topic anytime soon, Best Brett, Tritium, of course, being the even heavier hydrogen. You know, we were talking mainly about deuterium in that episode, which is hydrogen that's got a one neutron in the nucleus where it normally would have no neutrons. Tritium has two neutrons and and it gets it gets

really hairy. Yeah, I've I've mined a lot of it in No Man's sky before I forget what it's for und because I've been I haven't played it in about a month, but I look forward to picking him back up it kind of. I think it's ultimately you know, it's not the most educational games, but it's a it's a pretty tame one to play with my son around and let him play it some and it will hopefully educate him about some of these elements. Maybe not like

what their actual purposes are, but the names of them are. Yeah, just like the names will sink in and the abbreviations will sink in. Like that's that's more than I had in video games at his age. So yeah, same here. Great, So yeah, maybe we go to even heavier hydrogen, will do something on tridium, and then we can do what's beyond heavy heavy hydrogen, like like death hydrogen or thrash hydrogen,

rash hydrogen, symphonic death hydrogen. That sounds good, all right. Um, you know, we also receive some weird house Cinema listener mails here, so we'll we'll dig into these a little bit. Uh. And and I have to say that Carney the mail butt has been very excited, um, because you know he's he's very much into the idea of Champion combat. Uh. This first one comes to us from Jim and New Jersey, who of course is a is a regular listener mail

Um writer. He says, Robert and Joe. In Friday's Weird House Cinema, you featured arena where you mentioned that the password to a casino was swordfish. I don't know if this is the first use of swordfish, but it appears in the Marx Brothers movie Horse Feathers as the password to a speak easy and Jim includes a clip. I went and watched this, and this is a wonderful scene. You know, the comedy of EON's past is uh, sometimes just not very funny anymore, and often the often comedy

does not translate across generations very well. But this scene is still really funny. It's great. It's uh, Groucho and is it Checo or Checho a spell like Chico? I guess Chico or Checho. Marks Um is on the inside and Grouchos on the outside, and they're they're talking through the little window in the door, and and Groucho has got like three guesses to figure out how what the password is, and he gets the hint that it's the name of a fish, and his first guess is Mary,

which made me laugh a lot. Yeah, I I haven't really seen in a bunch of Marx Brothers, um, and I'm struggling to I mean, outside of just a few bits, you know, clips here and there, Like I think they did a mirror gag that that I think everybody has seen. But but it is notable that, you know, especially for like a previous generation of filmmakers would have been even more familiar with Marx Brothers, you know, so it makes sense that we see these little nods in these films

to some of their work. There's that great scene in Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade where Sean Connery has mailed his diary to Harrison Ford in order for safe keeping because he's been captured by the Nazis, and then Harrison Ford brings it with him when he comes to rescue him. The Nazis get it, and Sean Connery says, I should have mailed it to the Macks Brothers. Oh yeah, I remember that. I haven't seen that one in forever. I need to give it another go. Okay. This next

message comes from Tend. It is also about Arena. Uh. Tend says, Dear Robert and Joe. I've been a listener of your show for years and in particularly enjoying the recent weird House Cinema episodes. The choices you featured really are my types of movies. I think that's because I appreciate seeing how well a production company, film crew, and

actors can do without having much of a budget. Even though this means the walls sometimes shake and performances are less than convincing, I love seeing those involved earnestly strain in their depictions. I had a real flutter of excitement when I saw you picked Arena to discuss, as I've watched it not so long ago with my wife and brother in law. We were very much entertained by the

varied and inventive alien designs as you described them. There was one thing I was waiting for you to point out about the movie, something I couldn't believe I had seen and so needed to rewind and pause it to confirm. As we watched. During fight scenes in the arena itself, the camera often cuts to the audience and you can see many unmoving dummies filling out the crowd. It's unbelievably badly done, looks fully ludicrous, and just made me love it more. You won't be able to watch Arena now

without seeing this, I promise. Thanks to you and your team for all your work. I'm looking forward to the future episodes. Uh. And then there's a different name at the end of this than the name at the beginning, which was Tended. I'll just stick with tend. Well. I didn't I did not notice these, um these mannequins when watching the film, too distracted by the cool aliens. But

it makes sense that they would be there. You need to fill out a stadium, or if something that looks like a stadium, you might want to plant some some fake butts in the fake seats. You know what this means is you were so riveted to the action in the center of the frame that you were not You were not even tempted to wander around with your eyes to the periphery and see who might be sitting in the audience. Another thing could be you know, at this point in the pandemic like it, we're just not used

to seeing live crowd shots anymore. So it's like, wow, that that looks right, that that must be what it's it looks like to watch sports or something with with with an audience viewing it. So this is weird. There are some shows that are they have they're used to having a live studio audience, and now they still do, but it's clearly a much reduced like people are sitting very far apart from each other and there are many fewer of them, and so when they clap, it sounds

so pathetic. You know, it sounds like five people clapping, and it's just like it would be better without any applause than every joke or line getting like a you know, a smattering of laughter from five or six people, or you know what what sounds like two people clapping in an empty hall? Is this of what it was Saturday Night Live? Do? This is this way you're referencing. No, I feel like I've I've just seen a couple of like talk shows, like late night talk shows doing something

like this. Okay, well, I guess my my only experience has been watching stuff like um like Colbert and Daily Show, which don't have they are not even pretending to have an audience. And then I kind of keep up with some of the pro wrestling, so I kind of note how different players in that sport have been reacting to

it like you have. For instance, you know, some places and in sometimes during the pandemic just having no audience at all, or to having like a completely fake audience of just people from the locker room come out and and you know, be enthusiastic. Or you have a smattering option, or you have like a high tech like fill the audience with TV screens and have people like zoom into a tend I mean, there's there's so many different approaches that have been taken, none of them perfect, but but

it's interesting to see. It's kind kind of like the listener mail earlier talking about the earnest straining, right, Sometimes that is the most interesting part. I've got an idea that I think they should do. This seems perfectly realistic

to me. I mean, so on one hand, it would seem very fake if you were to just pipe in fake laughter or fake applause at each applause line, like in a sitcom, you know, But I think you could do real electronic laughter or applause where there are a bunch of electronic viewers and they can like press a

certain button. They're watching in real time and they can press a certain but every time they want to either laugh or applaud, and that will create one sound of one person laughing or applauding, And so you get real reactions like the jokes that actually get up roorious laughter will get up roarious laughter uh organically but mediated through electronic devices. And and the ones that kind of bomb, you'll hear them bomb. That's what I think should happen. Yeah, yeah,

all right, here's another one. This one comes to us for me and Ian Rites. Even though this isn't a comedy podcast, I derived some great belly laughs from your show. You both know when to use it and when not. To better leave some songs unsung than to sing them

out of season, right, your wise and worthy singers. Anyway, I wanted to tell you, Joe that I genuinely laughed out loud by myself when you said I want to see Chewbacca fight job of the Hut from Marina episode L O L. You couldn't have picked a funnier match from Star Wars. Good Jess, Sir, peace out, Love you guys. Uh Ian from St. Louis uh Ian the Far Too Kind. But I think I am I seeing this right that

you were quoting from the Kalavla. I think right. If I'm getting this right, I think at the beginning of your your message, you're quoting a couple of lines the better to leave some songs on sung than sing them out of season. Is that not from the Kala Vla that we read in a previous episode? I think you might be right. Yeah, yeah, very very good. Uh deep deep reference there. Yeah, and yeah, Chewbacca fighting job of

the Hut. It's a good matchup there. They're probably some others we could we could really brainstorm if we set our mind to it. I don't know. Um, like a Wampa versus four Javas stacked on top of each other in a trench coat. That would be neat. But if you had a fight between Obi Wan Kenobi and Boba Fette's dad, that'd be really weird. We had that, we had that? That was that. I watched that one. That joke. Yeah, the boy and I watched the first half of Attack

of the Clones together. Um and uh and that's a pretty solid fight scene. I like that one. Okay, you've got the various Mandalorian weapons uh in in in play there against the Jedi. You've got kind of a kind of a neat fight environment. Oh here's what I think we should someday. Uh, if we're if we're feeling especially fresh, we should do an episode of invention that's basically a Boba Fette Invention special where we discuss all of his gadgets.

This we know actually did a blog post about this at smooda music dot com where I um, I kind of waxed. Uh maybe not philosophical, but I I contemplated the weapons of the Mandalorian and was thinking about like the idea of of the Mandalorian armor as being on one hand, everything is geared about fighting a Jedi, like how to best engage a Jedi and survive or even

um emerge victorious. But then also you get into this idea of their armor and their weapons being at parts of their religion, which is a fabulous topic with with parallels to the real world. You think of things like

the Sikh religion and all um. But it may got me thinking like what additional connotations might be absorbed by some of these weapons, like the idea of say, like the jet pack does the jet pack then becomes something that symbolizes not is you know, not just about escaping distance, creating distance between yourself and a JETI who's a deadly melee combatant, but also something about the spirit, you know, like the ascension of the spirit um, perhaps the fire

of the little flamethrower and the wrist like that becomes something about like the purifying flame or something. You know, Like there's so many directions you could go in with all these different details of the armor that could almost be like the iconography you encounter in a Hindu deity. Like each you know, each little detail has some sort of important meaning. Uh to those who would be you know,

a literate of those symbols. Well, if you're going to be realistic about jet packs, it would unless I've not kept up to date about what jet packs are capable of these days, it seemed like it should symbolize riding a dragon or riding a tiger, you know, something that will very likely kill you and get out of control. That that's often how it goes for the Mandalorians. But you know, it's like short term victories, I guess, is what they're they're focused on. All right, Well, the buzzer

on the mail body is going off. That means that the time is is ended for today. That's it for this episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind Listener Mail. But we'll be back next week with more listener mail, So just tune in then, uh in the meantime, definitely feel free to reach out to us, your responses to past episodes, your responses to this listener mail, uh, you know, keep the conversation going by getting in touch with us, and if you would like to listen to the show.

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