Listener Mail: The Quickening

It is about our episode on the Dissolver of Worlds, the the Universal Solvent or the Alcahest from the History of Alchemy, And Nathan writes, Dear Robert and Joe, I recently listened to your episode Dissolver of World's about the search for a universal solvent. It reminded me of an old time radio show I used to listen to called Lights Out. In the episode oxy Chloride X, a disgruntled chemistry student creates a chemical compound which eats through anything.

As soon as it's created, it begins dissolving the chemistry lab and eating through the ground below. Over the remainder of the story, the whole caused by the chemical grows larger both in depth and diameter, wreaking havoc worldwide. People even become terrified that it will eat through the entire earth. I won't spoil the ending, but here's a link where you can listen to it and find out for yourselves. And Nathan links to a couple of versions of this

old radio show. Um, I'd be interested to hear you talk about other science fiction old time radio shows in the same vein of your anthology of horror episodes around Halloween. This is a good idea, Nathan says. Secondly, in the same episode Dissolver of Worlds, you talked about an alchemist who believed everything in the universe was made of water

that was yonda Pista van Helmont. I wonder if this was at all influenced by a similar hypothesis from the Greek philosopher theories of Melitas, who lived in the sixth century b c. Thanks for continuing to teach me about the world and the weird. Best wishes, Nathan. Well, thanks, Nathan. Yeah, this was a great email. So several things here. First of all, I remember in that book I was reading

by Lawrence Prince, you pay about the history of alchemy. Uh, the author did mention theories of melitas in the context of talking about Van Helmont's idea that at bottom, all substances were made of water, just water in different forms. But I don't know if you specified whether van Helmont got that idea from theilies or not. But it wouldn't surprise me because obviously alchemists were usually very concerned with

the thoughts of the natural philosophers of antiquity. On top of that, you mentioned this oxy chloride X episode, and I have to say that Seth also brought up the same episode to me. We were talking about this, I think one day when we were sitting around waiting to record one of these episodes, and so, so maybe we can get a clip of one of these radio shows to play for you right now, CC Barrier, I've CC so and he mocks a chloride Oh good, good, you're

working out just as I plan. Who's there? Who's that working there? Professor? What do you do it? And after all my warnings, you're just in time, professor, Yes, just in time to have you thrown out of the university. What are you doing there? What is this messive equipment? It's my miracle miracle. What are you talking about? My miracle? Insane? Take it apart, all of it at once. Listen to it bubbling. A beautiful sound, isn't it, Professor? Get apart, empty outter a talk? No, I got to wait. Are

you mad? Turn out the burners, all right, I'll turn them off, for it's no see where you are do it? Put down that aid. I'll smash the bottle on your head. If you touch anything on the table, no, don't throw it. Put the bottle of as down, stewart, please, my experiment, my miracle, bubbling and boiling and stewing. It will work, Professor, It's got to work. But but what is it? I told him, I create something that no other man has I told him, and I will, Professor, you hear me,

I will. But what a solvent? A solvent more powerful than anything the world has ever known? What do you mean? What are you talking about? I never actually listened to this in full, but I'm gonna have to follow up and do that after, after we're done today. And I love your idea about covering old radio dramas like sci fi and horror radio dramas for for some kind of

October content. I think that's fantastic. I will say, I actually don't know all that much old time radio drama, but I have a good friend who is really into that stuff, and he sent me several things to listen to last year, one of which was a great Orson Wells performance of the classic story The Hitchhiker, which was

eventually made into a Twilight Zone episode. Maybe I had to hear that in um in school at one point, now that you mentioned it, because I was about to say I don't really think I've heard much in the way of of old timey radio shows either outside of you know, some familiarity with war the Worlds and uh, you know, and some of the some of the classics, you know, like they the old like the Shadow and Shadow. Yeah, but it stands to reason there's some good stuff mixed

in there. Yeah, so maybe we should have a look. I think there was some really good radio drama on the Colgate Hour alongside Roy Donk and stuff like that. But also, um, there was a really good one my friend sent me that was an old horror radio drama called ghost Hunt that was from a show called Suspense that was about a radio host who if it was made today, I guess it'd be a podcaster who was like broadcasting from a haunted house that he's trying to

stay in all night. Yeah, I mean, it's it's kind of interesting how you look at these old radio shows and you see similar efforts to kind of do the same thing, to reinvent the same thing in the podcast Realm Today. Um. And then of course I think British listeners, people who have listened to British radio would easily chime in and say, well, yeah, we've been listening to to uh to audio narrations auto audio versions of various works

for years. I mean, they're uh, I'm I'm reminded, especially of the precursors to certain television shows that came out, like I know, there's you know or who audio dramas, and I think there was like a hobbit audio drama stuff like that. But but also, but before you got the TV show The Mighty Bush, the Mighty Bousch was a radio program. Before Chris Morris put out his excellent dark comedy Jam. He put out Blue Jam, which is uh, this kind of ambient electronic music slash dark comedy mash

up that works really well. And there are other examples of that kind of thing is that you can find too. Huh. Okay, well, I can't promise anything, but Nathan, I think this is a great idea. Rob and I will have to mull it over and uh and see what we think come October. All right, here's another bit of alchemy. A listener mail David writes in and responding to our discussion of the dissolver of Worlds, brings up the topic of black holes. Quote.

If you mix anything with a black hole, it'll break everything down to the most elemental components, and eventually you will only have pure energy leftover Hawking radiation. Hear me out if I try to imagine how a universal solvent would work and what a jar of black holes would look like to me, at least they seem like they

would both be identical. Black holes would reduce everything is mentioned, but also gravity would cause it to eat through any kind of jar and fall to the ground, where there would just be a hole going through the earth until the black hole and Earth find a gravitational equilibrium, and anything unfortunate to mix with the black hole would further be reduced. Always enjoy your insight and helping me think

of things. Differently and making new connections to David actually thought while we were recording this episode about like what would be the closest thing to the idea of the universal solvent, And maybe you could say that a black hole is a kind of universal solvent. So David's on the same frequency here, but I'm not sure. Actually, uh, it'd be interested for you know, listeners with physics knowledge

to write in about this. I'm not sure that if you had a tiny, tiny black hole in a jar, that it would actually eat through the jar, because I recall reading some coverage of um people having concerns that the large Hadron collider at CERN would create tiny black holes and that these would just sort of turn into that universal acid they would eat up the whole world, and the response to that being that no, actually, if you work out the physics on the creation of a

microscopic black hole, that what it tends to do is actually just like dissipate. I don't know that for sure, but I've read stuff along those lines, so maybe we can revisit that in the future. All right. The next bit of listener mail is in response to the first of our Star Wars Alien Necropsy episodes, but as we're recording this listener mail episode, only the first one of those has aired, right, so I'm sure we've got a lot more alien stuff coming in. All right, This comes

from Nick. Nick says, Hi, guys, I love your most recent podcast on the alien morphology seen in the Star Wars movies and franchises. When you were both talking about space faring organisms and how they could possibly evolve in the vacuum of space, it got me thinking what if amino acids could be collected in places called lagrange points, or points where the gravitational pull between two bodies allows

for objects to remain in place. In fact, the Sun and Earth have five different lagrange points that are used for satellites to remain put while using very little fuel. In theory, these areas would be present throughout the galaxy and could act as a collector of amino acids and

eventually become a nursery for space faring organisms. Additionally, it could be theorized that dark matter could also have the same effect, as we know that dark matter has a gravitational pull, but since we don't know what comprises dark matter, may or may not be suitable for life forms to live in just a thought. Thanks for the great podcast,

and I look forward to hearing more episodes. Nick. Well, Nick, I'm not sure if what you say is viable or not, but I like the idea of stuff just collecting in the lagrange points, kind of like in the Sargasso Sea, right, there's currents all around it and things just kind of

drift into that still point in the middle. Yeah. Absolutely, And speaking of sargasm the Weed of Deceit, we also heard from Jenna, who wrote writes in and says, while listening to your Sargasm C episode, I was reminded that z frank did a true facts video on frog Fish. If you haven't already seen it, you should. It's delightful. Here's the link, um, Yeah, and then the link is to one of these z franc Um YouTube videos, which

I imagine a lot of you have seen. These are these are like documentary footage, but with somebody else, uh putting in this uh, this over the top narration, and I think usually there's some some real facts in there, but also a bunch of comedic facts. Yeah, it's it's basically comedy narration over over nature documentary footage. I mean, in the same kind of vein. It's a different person doing it, but the same kind of vein is the

much UH celebrated honey Badger viral video years ago. UH. And in this case, it's talking about frog fish and at one point brings up the sargassum frog fish. Uh. The narrator, I guess this is the Z Frank guy. I was not familiar with this channel before, but I've seen videos like this, and he points out that they eat each other, and he says, it's kind of a crappy life because they hang out in this seaweed that they look like, and so it's kind of like if

lions looked like couches, like that analogy. But one thing I noticed is that the narrator doesn't just make comedy points. A lot of what he does is he's just talking about a fish and then suddenly the fish will like bite another thing's head off, and he'll just start laughing. In a way. It's kind of reminiscent of the narration we get at the beginning of that the blood water is a doctor Z which of course we we discussed

uh around the same time on Weird House Cinema. Partially related to this, I have to say that there's there's a wonderful video that I've watched way too many times where it's it's footage from a documentary. Here he's hosted by Brian Cox, not the the actor, but the the

the astrophysicist, wonderful science communicator. Uh, taking nothing away from him, but in this video someone has dubbed over it doing a Brian Cox impersonation, and it's hilarious because he's because he's saying stuff like you might think this is Earth, but it's not, it's Mars or something something that effect is just like way out there, um, astounding. So I don't know. So sometimes these sorts of gimmicks can work

really well. All right, let's let's move on to a little Weird House Cinema listener mail while we're at it. Sounds great. Let's see do you want to take this one from Katie or should I? Um? I I can take this one, so Katie writes, Hi, Rob and Joe, I love your show, and Weird House Cinema just makes it even better. I'm actually listening to an episode right now. I know you mostly do adult movies um and she means movies for grown ups. There um or green movies,

not especially game films, not not especially aimed at children. Um. But she continues, but you did do the e Walk movies once, which I loved, so I thought I might suggest two movies for younger viewers that you may or may not be familiar with. The first, and probably the stranger of the two, is The five Thousand Fingers of Dr t NTE, which I believe has something to do with Dr Seuss. And uh, and she is correct on this.

This was a Doctor SEUs was involved in this. I think it would ended up being not not a project that that anyone involved in it was particularly happy with. But this did come up in my research about like weird films from previous decades. Anyway, Uh, they I haven't seen it, but our our listener has, and they continue quote. I remember watching this a number of times with my best friend as a kid and loving it, even though it is very strange and at times a little scary.

At some point in college I found a DVD copy and so have seen it at least once as an adult, but that was years ago. I keep meaning to show it to my kids, but I haven't had a chance yet. It's about a boy who is resisting his piano lessons, and somehow, maybe through a dream, gets taken to a strange world or castle run by Dr to Willaker as a prisoner. There are many other children being forced to play the piano there, and then he has to escape. This may not be exactly right, but it's as much

as I can remember. Plot wise, this sounds similar to a goose Bumps book that I recall when they're one about a sinister piano teacher. Well, you know, certainly the way that we we think of our piano teachers sometimes can can can lean towards the villainus, so it makes sense anyway. They continue the second movie, The Return to Oz, maybe a little two main stream, but I love it

still today and it is definitely a little strange. It is sort of a mash up of the Next to Oz books and has some delightful new characters and several genuinely creepy moments, including an old time asylum and a witch who takes off her head. I have shared this with my kids as well. It was a sixth grade class I taught years ago. Although at times they were a little worried, they were hooked. Anyway, Thank you so

much for all the wonderful listening. I don't have much time right now to watch movies, so weird how cinema is my portal into the strange b movie world. Thanks Katie. Uh So, I've never seen all of Return to Oz, but this is one that people have told me multiple times I should watch and that they thought I would love. And so I've seen some clips from it. I recall it has some creepy pumpkinheads in it. Uh oh yeah,

people with wheels skates for hands. It's uh. I think I saw it when I was younger, and it does have a lot of weird stuff in it, and um uh, you know it's and it's got It's got a pretty decent cast too. It's got some interesting connections there. So Dorothy played by Ferusa Bulk it is yep, and uh, let's see who else is that. Gene marsh is in it. Um uh. Brian Henson does a voice, so it's it's interesting. It might be the sort of film to consider. Is

it in two mainstream? I don't know. We've we sometimes asked that question about things we're considering for Weird House, because we don't have a firm definition of what exactly a weird house cinema selection is I know there's at least one very mainstream children's movie that I have I've been kicking around the idea of doing, but I haven't quite pulled the trigger on yet. I'd say the criteria

for weird house inclusion or not super solid. I mean, we don't have hard boundaries, but but yeah, well, I guess we do tend to the more obscure. But you know, I don't know. We did a Star Wars movie. I mean it was He Walks, but that's about as mainstream as you can get. True true. All right, So this next message came to us from James. This is a follow up email he I think wrote in the last

Listener Mail episode. It was the one where he told us about all those turbographics sixteen names, including the racing RPG, which is still just that was just clanging around in my head like a big copper kettle. Uh that that you would like go to different towns and talk to people and like talking I don't know, have a random encounters for racing. That just sounds amazing. But anyway, he also said he was seeking out a copy of Frogs or I think maybe he'd already gotten one, and so

he writes again. James says, Wow, thanks so much for reading my letter in the latest Listener mail segment. That totally made my day, and I look forward to showing it off to my brother, who shares most of the same memories. I think he's talking about the terbographic sixteen. James says, I just finished watching Frogs last night. Between the shots attempting to make geckos appear menacing and the horrific acting, it elicited plenty of laughter and was well

worth the four dollar eBay purchase. I'm glad you brought this odd little Jim to my attention. And then James attaches a photo I suppose of his copy of Frogs sitting on a table. I guess this is in his house, but it's next to a gecko that I can tell if that's like a plastic fake gecko or a real that looks real that looks like a real gecko. Uh. And then behind the gecko, yeah, I guess this looks like a gecko habitat sort of. There's like a place with like a water bowl and things be strange if

that was fake. And then behind it there's a bunch of art, and one of the pieces of art has this like cool looking gecko with sunglasses. Is this GEX from those Gets video games? You remember these things? I don't know. It looks like it's a Frogger poster based on the term above it, so maybe it was like a latter day Frogger video game poster. I'm I'm almost certain this character here is GEX. I mean, you should

google Gets if you don't. I don't. I never play these games myself, but somehow I knew about them, and maybe friends I knew had them. GEX is a lizard game adventure hero who like makes wise cracks about TV. He's like a stand up comedian geck action hero, and it looks a little Pucci. Yeah, yeah, yeah, very Pucci. Actually he's got sunglasses and they definitely pouchified him by

ten percent. So he'll jump on a big mushroom or something and then say, this reminds me of when the fawns jumped over the shark or I don't know, I just made that up, but he he like, he makes jokes about pop culture in a video game, which I think was innovative at the time. Okay, yeah, I'm not not really familiar with him. But but speaking of Frogs, you know who else like the Frog's episode? My mom? Yeah,

I think she can really. Yeah, she tends to skip the Weird House sent in the episodes, but she was telling me it's like I saw the Frogs one and I saw that had Sam Elliott discussed in it. So I listened to it and it was a lot of fun. So who doesn't like Sam Elliott? Yeah, she has not seen the movie, but she expressed an interest in seeing it after having listened to the episode, So there you go. I briefly brought up the idea of my wife that maybe I could give a copy of Frogs to my

mom for Mother's Day, but that was shot down. Apparently that's not Mother's Day material that that particular movie. I guess not. Hey, do you mind if I do this? Next message also about Weird House Cinema from Mike. Here go for it, alright, So let's see. Mike writes in to say he he enjoyed our Weird House Cinema on silent movies, and he talks about appreciating that we discussed the importance of live music to accompany silent films back

in the original time. Like. He shares a story of when he was in college, he went to see the movie Intolerance from nineteen sixteen and says it was It was accompanied by piano, and he says it was a lovely experience. He says the pianist was like a conduit between the audience and the film part of and separate from both simultaneously. But then he shares a personally anecdote, I wanted to read this part. Sometime after the showing

slash performance of Intolerance. I mentioned it to my grandmother and was treated to a story that I hold dear. As a young woman in Rochester, New Hampshire, she played the piano for silent movies at the local theater. As she accompanied a film one night, her attention drifted. She was surprised when the audience started to laugh. No one had laughed at that film before. After a moment, she realized that everyone was laughing because she was playing a

jaunty polka during a somber funeral scene. Never wanted to mind what people thought about her, she kept on playing, bringing it back to a more appropriate tune. I love this story because it captures both my grandmother's personality and a particular movie going experience specific to the Silent Era. Thanks for all you do, Mike. I've never considered this before, that you just have like a like a like a

pianist improvising. I guess I always assumed they'd be playing from sheet music that was timed to accompany the music, right, But if they're improvising, yeah, who knows what they're going to make the movie feel like? Yeah? Or if there was some mix up with the sheet music, perhaps because you could you could imagine a scenario where you had the sheet music for a different film and it might and everything might line up well enough for a while until you get to that section where you are playing

polka music over a funeral. Yeah, that's rough, Mike. Al Right, here's another. Um. I guess this is kind of I don't know if this is weird house related or just movie related, but this one comes to us from Tom, Hi, Robert, and Joe. I just finished listening to listener mail Fire of Unknown Origins. The question came up, why does Sean Connery's character in Highlander have a Scottish accent? My take is Sean Connery's character probably learned English in Scotland if

he was from Egypt. He had to learn English somewhere else. I love the podcast. I'm a field service engineer and do a lot of windshield time. Your podcast keeps me entertained and also educates me. So time well spent. Thanks again, Tom, And yes, Tom, this is a solid theory. I mean why not. Yeah, Well, so I've I've got I've got a counter theory though. I do think this is an

interesting possibility, and I appreciate you sharing it, Tom. But one complication is that a language is not just built out of words, but actually built out of phonetic building blocks that are the sub parts of words. You know that the individual sounds you make with your mouth to make a word, and different languages build words out of

different sets of phonemes like the individual letter sounds. Often the differences are subtle enough that when we're used to one language and we learn a new one, we build the words of the new language not out of the same phonemes as a native speaker, but out of the nearest approximation of those phonemes from our own native language. So if you're an English speaker and you're trying to learn French, I think a lot of times. At first,

you're you're going to be building the sounds. You're like approximating the sounds of French words based on English phonemes. So you're saying that Sean Connery's character and Highlander Ramiers would not be speaking English with a Scottish accent. He would be speeda king English with an ancient Egyptian accent. Well,

maybe not accent, but like, I don't know. I mean, I guess if you're immersed long enough, then maybe because I'm sure he's had plenty of time to get immersed, maybe then you really do incorporate like the full range of phonemes that a native speaker if that language, would use, and then yeah, the accent is fully there. Uh So, I guess it would depend on how long he's been

speaking English. You know. One thing that it makes me wonder about, and I've probably wondered about this in the show so before, so apologies, but what is the nero plasticity of an immortal in the Highlander world? You know, because on one level, their bodies don't really change, and if and if they suffer injury like something, I don't know, sometimes it seems like they heal sometimes maybe not, but for the most part, you know, they have stayed the

same across the centuries. Yet, on the on the other hand, and yeah, and certainly I guess maybe they hold onto old ideas like the Kuragan doesn't seem to have really evolved. He hasn't really evolved that much when it comes to his you know, his moral philosophy or anything. Uh. But on the other hand, in order to survive across the centuries, you would have to have a certain amount of neuroplasticity.

You would have to you know, you'd have to be able and willing to make drastic changes in your ability to acquire new languages, new cultures, new technologies. Maybe what the quickening does is it undoes synaptic pruning so that your brain is sort of reset to a childlike state where you can have that incredibly protein neo plasticity you see in a child's brain, where a child can just

acquire languages at a rate that's unimaginable to adults. Now, this is the quickening that occurs when you be head another immortal and will assume their power, or is this the quickening thing where you're just running next to a horse. I think it'd be the beheading, so you got you have to go behead another immortal every time you want to learn a new language, or actually be able to pronounce all the dinosaur names if you haven't learned them before.

That kind of thing. Okay, makes sense. I like this theory. Yes, all right. On that note, Carney, the mail body is telling us that he has done. This is all the listener mail for today. Of course, we still have other bits of listener mail we didn't have time to get to. Uh. New listener mails coming in all the time, so keep it coming. We read all of it, even if we don't have a chance to read it all on the show.

We appreciate your your thoughts, your riffs, your suggestions for the future, your you know, occasional corrections as needed, and just in general, like your feedback, your experience with the information that we're discussing. In the meantime, if you want to listen to other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind Listener Mail, those come out on Monday, Core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Weird how cent them on Fridays and on the weekend. We have a little rerun for

you in the form of a vault episode. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact that's Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is

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