Listener Mail: Week Sauce

note here. Adam, who is a rabbi, wrote in with a shorter message about the history of the Sabbath observance and public Torah readings in the ancient Near East, and he mentioned that his rabbinical thesis was actually on the subject of how space colonization might affect the observance of the Sabbath week. And obviously that's right up our alley. We were very interested in that subject, so he wrote in again to share more. So Adam says, Hey, Joe

and Rob, thank you for the fantastic show. I've been listening for years now. I'm thrilled to hear you're interested in the topic of my rabbinical thesis. It's called Eyes on the Horizon, Theological and Hallockic challenges to the first Jewish settlers on the moon, Mars and beyond. I have always been very scientifically minded, even as a rabbi in rabbinical school, we needed to write a thesis before ordination.

One day, while sitting in class, I had an epiphany, what would a Jewish prayer book look like for future exo Jews living on Mars. I reached out to friends and colleagues and pose the question. I asked what blessings they may recite? For instance, in Judaism, a blessing is a formula accidence that makes a moment or ritual holy. Before eating an apple, for example, I may say, blessed are you Eternal, our God, ruler of the universe, creator of the fruit of the tree. So I asked what

blessing someone on Mars may recite? Is there a blessing for landing on a new celestial body, etcetera. Before I found a thesis referee, I had been turned down by several professors. The first one said, quote, Judaism doesn't exist off planet. That's not a thesis. Judaism is the relationship between God, Israel and the Earth. I eventually found someone

who agreed to advise me my thesis. Referee, being an expert in Jewish halaca, which is Jewish law put forth by the rabbis throughout the centuries, recommended bringing in that aspect. So half of my thesis became a theological exploration of whether Judaism can exist off planet and what theological complications might arise by trying to live Jewishly off planet. My second half focused on how one could follow Jewish law, particularly concerning the issue of Jewish time off planet at all.

One main thought experiment, for example, is the Hallockic issue of the quote lost traveler. It is as follows. Suppose you are a religious Jew who is traveling through the wilderness. You realize that you have lost track of the day, so you don't know when Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, will begin. Jewish law stipulates you must count six twenty four hour periods from the moment you lost track. The seventh hour period is to be your Shabbat. You must say the

proper blessings one says on Shabbat. That way you fulfill the commandment of keeping the Shabbat. However, you still cannot violate the actual Shabbat even if you don't know which day it will actually be, So you must remain in a state of pseudo Shabbat at all times until you have once again found civilization. That means you cannot do anything that counts as something forbidden on Shabbat. You may only do that which keeps you alive or helps you

travel towards civilization once again. Thus, to apply to the context of Jews living off planet, if one has difficulty determining what day of the week it is, whether that means you must follow the time on Earth or the time of a Martian society, must that religious to remain in a state of pseudo Shabbat on Mars. Finally, Adam attaches a link to a PDF of his thesis so that we can take a look. Maybe we will in the future, and then says all the best, Adam, but yeah,

thanks so much, Adam. Fascinating. I love it. Yeah, this is exactly what we were hoping we would We would hear back from people on Yeah, this is this is fascinating. I mean, I think questions like this are actually really interesting from the religious point of view, even if you're not actually going to be applying them to say, living off planet. I mean, we're probably not going to be

living off planet in our lifetimes. But it's very interesting from a religious point of view because it forces you to ask questions about, like, what is really the spirit of the law or of this requirement within my religion?

So if like something, you know, normally you can just follow the law as written, but if the circumstances of your environment change so that so such that it's not really possible to follow the law as written, say, if you're on a different planet and the law depends on time periods that are contingent on the length of the day on Earth or something like that, then it forces you to ask, Okay, well, then what is the law really about? What is the law trying to get me

to do? And how could I most closely replicate that, uh in a scenario where the law as strictly written can't apply. Yeah. Yeah, And and also just the sort of general theme of what what happens when you have a given religion and new uh cosmological information presents itself, you know, and this is always fun to discuss, you know, in many cases Uh, nothing changes, and maybe nothing has to change because certainly, like you said, we don't have

people living in space. But then you have some curious examples, like you know, some of the some details from from Hindu mythology, where you had mythological entities based upon um, you know, observable cosmological uh properties, and then as is not knowledge of those things changed. So too, then did did the structure of the mythological entities change? What do you mean by like certain observations of heavenly like the

moon and the sun and things. Um. Yeah, well, I think the the example I'm drawing on we discussed in our eclipse episode of years back, where you had in different interpretations of what was happening with um I can't recall off and it was a solar or lunar or both. Um. But as as a Hindu understanding of what, uh you know what what the observable phenomena happened to be changed? Uh. Then instead of like separating that from the mythological model, Uh,

they updated the mythological model, which I was found very interesting. Anyway, fun episodes as I recall, so go back and listen to those if anyone is interested. Yeah, I think those may have been my first ever episodes on the show. Oh okay a while back then, Yeah, alright, this next time when comes to us from Jolt, Hi, Robert and Joe, just writing to chime in on the topic of connections between the names of days and markets has brought up

in the recent Listener Mail episode. In my native tongue, Hungarian, the word used for Sunday literally means market day. The pronunciation itself changed from the original word for market uh this is would be with vassah to now being vas not uh market day, but the meaning is still there.

Sunday as the designated day for markets, goes back at least to the first King of Hungary and to the introduction of Christianity in the eleventh century, but it's still very much a cultural reality today with markets being held almost exclusively on Sundays, especially in the form of various pop up markets in the countryside and in villages. Thank you for the great show. I feel like we're seeing major themes emerge there. There are like three main branches

of day naming conventions. One is naming them with numbers, so they go first day, second day, third day. The other is naming them in relationship to a market day. So you have a day that's called market day, and then others are named like I don't know, first from market, second from market something like that. And then the third is naming them after celestial bodies. So you've got Sunday,

Moon Day and so forth. And according to that last convention, we could actually look at this next message from Jacinth who says, listen to your episodes on the seven day week, great content. My mother tongue is Tamil, which is the language of the state of Tamil Nadu in India. Here the days of the week are the names of celestial bodies. I'm gonna try these. I apologize in advance for mispronunciation, but Sunday is Nyayiru meaning the sun, Monday is Thingall

meaning the move, Tuesday is cheval meaning Mars. Wednesday is Pudan meaning Mercury, Thursday is via John meaning Jupiter, Friday is Velli meaning Venus, and Saturday is sawny meaning saturn Uh. And then Jessin says I'm an English literature graduate and generally love different language works. You learn a lot of fascinating things from various language literatures. Couldn't agree more absolutely. All right, let's move on to some weird house cinema

listener mail. This first one comes to us from Charlie Um and Charlie writes in and says, hello science boys, b O, I s I have a simple question semi related to your Beast Master two weird house episode is in Sino Man's Brendan Fraser a meat Beast. If the requirements are learns about rock music and slushing machines and teaching a young me my first Spanish phrase. Thanks Charlie X allent choice. You know, I was thinking of Encino Man while we were doing the Beast Smester two episode.

I don't think I ever actually watched in Sino Man. I think I was always a little turned off by the trailers for that one. I don't think I saw it either, I just know of it. That's one of those does he escape from a biodome like I didn't see Biodome either, So I kind of combined these into one film where in Sino Man escapes a biodome with Polly Shore, Encino Man is the unfrozen Caveman lawyer skit from sn L, but it's a whole movie of it. I guess he's not a lawyer. He becomes like a

rock and roll guy. Okay, but yeah, he's just a caveman who they unfreeze him, and here he is learning. He's putting on high top sneakers. I mean, there are other caveman in the modern day films. I wonder how robust that sub genre truly is, and how many of those we could quote classify as as meat beast pictures. I recall Brendan Fraser being pretty buff in the in the poster art for for Encino Man, so I think

he comes pretty close. I don't know if he's full on barbarian, but he's he's something, he's something in the zone. One last note here is I'm wondering why Charlie is calling us science boys because I'm reading b O. I s is, isn't that the French word meaning would wa science? Would? I don't. I don't know. Yeah, what Webstre's is saying, it's would, but Webstre's is not necessarily hip to uh slang. Okay, well, I like that we're we're we are now the science

would build a treehouse out of us? All right? What else do we have with this? Can't be the only listener man were received about Beast Master two. Oh no, it was not. Let's see. Brian wrote in to say, Hi, Robin Joe. I was listening to your Weird House Cinema episode on Beast Master two this morning during my daily walk, and as I always do when you're covering a movie I haven't seen, I began looking for stills from the

movie so I could have more context. I'd seen the original beast Smester many times as a child, and the site of the leather clad, glowing eyed meat man absolutely terrified me. I was mainly interested in seeing if this figure that haunted my nightmares returned in the sequel. He apparently does not, So, ROBBD. You are the person who knows about beast Smester one. Do you know who Brian is talking about. There's another meat man, but this one is scary. Yeah. I don't recall the name of this

if this thing even had a name. But there's a there's a wonderful sequence in the film where we're in the like the Dungeons of of the the the evil Max played by Ripped Torn and there's you know, all sorts of like evil cult shenanigans going on down there, hands reaching out of cages. It's it's wonderful scary stuff. And there is this kind of like rampaging um like muscle man with like an iron mask, and I think they've like jacked him up with some sort of nefarious

magical chemicals. Uh. So yeah, it's real, real, great nightmare stuff. I mean, we have to have to remember with beast Master two, if you haven't seen it, um, you know, this is the same mind that brought us a phantasm. So there's plenty of Yes, I'm sorry beat beast Master one. Beast Master two had nothing to do with but uh, beast Master one. Uh, this is don A Costarelli. So yeah, there's a lot of like really cool, very creative ideas in there. Uh it's not just your blueprint Barbarian film.

You've got this, You've got the got these, these these be these the beefy men with the iron masks. There, the the crazy cool bird creatures, the winged creatures that externally digest their prey. Oh, there's a there's some a bunch of other stuff as well. You have some hags, some wonderful hag action going on. Love a hag does that have a ball like in phantasm. Uh, there's no there's no no ball, but there's a magic ring. Okay, that's quote. It's round. Yeah. But anyway, so Brian's message

is not over. Brian says, while searching for pictures from movie, I came across its poster. I thought I might have mistakenly searched for Back to the Future too instead of BE Semester two, because the posters are shockingly similar, for your consideration, And then Brian attaches h little screen captures of both posters and whoa I got that? Is that

that is worthy of a lawsuit right there? I mean that is really really close everybody's Uh, it's framed the same way, it's got a similar color scheme, it's got the car coming out of the portal and the same orientation, and the characters posted the same way. Either this is just a they're both taking part of a standard template for movie posters of the time, or or BE Semester two is uh is doing a doing a bit of a copycat job. Yeah, I mean it could be the

same artist as well. I wouldn't discount that. I didn't have time to research these and try and figure out who might have created them. Uh, but that's always a possibility. Maybe this is just how the particular artists tended to style things could be, could be, and you know, and of course movie posters are they're not always created exlo. So maybe they're uh, there's just sort of a template, you know. There's there's a format of how you were doing movie posters at the time, and a lot of

them looked like this. Maybe maybe that's the case. There are some other posters I was looking around for beast Master two. There's one that has a huge wings houser on there with his little Phantom of the Opera face plate. That one looks pretty good. Well anyway, Brian goes on and says, maybe I'm imagining things because I recently watched the Back to the Future trilogy, but I have a strong mental image of a Simpson's esque ponytailed Hollywood executive

saying time travel cars lightning high tops. Put them on the box in the hopes that beast Master two would cause a double take at the local blockbuster. Someone out knows the truth. Love the podcast and love the Weird House episodes. Please keep doing them, Brian. Now, one last thing I have to say about the speace Master two poster is that they do not include Wings Houser or Sarah Douglas on the poster. You're only seeing the heroes.

And I think that's a mistake. Yeah, I mean you have, you have some fun villains in that movie, so you might as well get him on the poster. Um. But I don't know this idea of like, yeah, you just need to turn heads of the video store. I mean that was that was a huge deal. Um. In fact, oh man, I was just thinking about this the other day.

I was in Videodrome, are are our local and our city's only video store, video rental store, and I noticed they had like a new I think a Blu Ray edition of the film The Dead Pit, which I don't know if you're familiar with this one, Joe, I've I've not actually seen. It is directed by Brett Leonard and

stars nobody in particular. But the crazy thing about it is the classic VHS and now you know, Blu Ray DVD art for this movie was this kind of Frankenstein looking dude, uh, kind of emerging from a uh it looks like a hole with the hands reaching out of it and there's like a bite behind him. And on the old VHS box I guess it was like that they must have sent this special you know, uh, the

eyes lit up. It had a little bitty like Halloween costume l e Ed I guess, sort of the predecessor to l e Ed little eyes inside, and it would light up and possibly make noises. I don't remember particularly, but the eyes definitely lit up as it so that when you were strolling through the horror section or the New Arrival section, it's like it's just shrieking for your attention. I wonder if that kind of marketing game but paid off, Like you you invest more money into complicated packaging, do

more people rented. I don't know, maybe they're like maybe they just thought, well, heck, we we picked this movie up for virtually nothing. Nobody wants to see this thing. What if we just throw a little more cash at the VHS boxer. Because I think it was also it had kind of like a ready coover as well, Um, we'll just get people excited about it. They'll just be sold on it and they'll just have to rent it.

And I want to say there was at least one other film from the time period that did something like this with a light up eye but yeah, you know, of course you don't see that anymore. And I was so anyway, I was disappointed a little bit when I saw it there on the shelf of Video Drone and it didn't have light up eyes. And I think even commented to the guy working there, It's like, oh, man, it doesn't have light up eyes. Don't you remember the

light up eyes? And he said no. It's funny how often we come back to talking about VHS boxes that we remember from walking through the video store as a kid. I feel like this is a this is a recurring theme, Like didn't we get into one time the Jason Goes to Hell video video box cover? Um? I think, so what was special about that one? Well, it's just really eye catching. It's it's like a metal looking Jason mask that's got this demon snake coming out of one of

its holes. It's just gross looking and that fitting for that movie. Uh well, you know, I just looked up a bloody disgusting article the coolest and most Unique car VHS boxes reminded me of Dead Pit. It also reminds me that, oh, the the VHS box for Metamorphosis, which I believe was George Eastman's Uh, This is the film he directed and wrote. I haven't seen this one either, but it had some sort of light up eye scenario.

And then this rings the bell as well. Do you remember a Fright Night Part two VHS box It was shaped like a casket. Oh yeah, yeah, I'm looking it up. Well, you may have been planted a false memory, because when you said that, I was like, oh, yeah, that does seem familiar. I just looked up pictures of it and I was like, actually, I don't think I've ever seen this, so your enthusiasm is infectious. It it made me remember

things I've never seen. Well, I'm not even saying this casket thing pop up on eBay, but I was curious. I was like, how much are these things going for? But uh, maybe they're just too rare literally priceless. M all right, more beast Master. This one comes to us from Brad. Hello, gentlemen. I apologize if I am the thousandth person to write in about this, but just in case I'm not, I had a thought as to why

Jackie may have reacted the way she did to Dars Ferrets. Now, remember this is a thing from the movie where the character played by Carrie were she she sees Mark singers ferrets, and she reacts as if there's some kind of like, uh, fantasy creature, like an animal unknown in the real world, like a unicorn or something. But they're just ferrets, ferrets

or earth animals. Brad continues. See, ferrets are actually not native to California and also have been deemed too invasive of a species to allow them as pets, So ferrets are actually illegal in California. I have heard that special arrangements can be made to get one that is declaude to prevent predation on other critters and uh descented, meaning they remove the scent glands I believe to make finding mates and therefore breeding more difficult if they were to

get out in the wild. But I'm not sure if these rumors are true. Coincidentally, Darr actually commits a federal crime by giving them to Jackie that one pair could have designated California wildlife had they been a breeding pair. L O L. Brad, very good note, Brad, thank you, and yeah, this does bring to bind the controversy about ferrets in the Big Lebowski, you know, where Walter clarifies that you're not allowed to have an animal like that

in California. Oh yeah, that's right. Wouldn't it be funny if that's where the interrogation when when Mark Singer gets arrested by the police. Uh, if that's where the interrogation went, it's like I need to know about these ferrets. How do you get them into the state? And that becomes the central plot. Yeah, okay. One last message. This comes from Alan and it is about the Green Bays Vampire and the song about green stamps. Alan says, greetings England

and thanks for the fascinating show. I am having trouble believing that trading stamps are so forgotten that adult people don't even know what they were. Here. Green Shield stamps were given out by supermarkets, so many stamps for each pound spent, and I remember sticking them into books for my parents. Then full books could be taken into the Green Shield shop and spent like money on goods out of their catalog. You can imagine the piles of books necessary as the big co Ops stamps fill a whole

page and is worth one pt thirty three pence. The US blue Chip stamp is worth one quote mill, which I take to be a tenth of ascent. I believe when the stamps went obsolete, the stores continued just selling for cash and still exist under the name Argos All the Best Alan or maybe maybe that's Argo A R G O S. And then Alan attaches pictures of the

green shield stamps. It's funny. After I saw these, I had a memory of within the past year, um, some of my in laws going through a relatives possessions and finding a bunch of these in a box. And I didn't know what they were, all right. I was doing a little searching in the background, and I just want to let everybody know that I did find on eBay um an old entry, well not that old from January, uh, the Ultra Rare Fright Night, Part two VHS in the

Coffin presentation pack. It went for three and eighty dollars. Whoa, Yeah, so that's a serious collector's item there, maybe literally worth its weight in gold. Yeah yeah, all right, Well, we're gonna go ahead and call it there. But we'd love to hear from everyone if you have responses to any of these listener mails right in, let us know. Let's keep a conversation rolling. If you have anything you want to add regarding previous episodes of the show Stuff to

Blow Your Mind or Weird House. Uh thoughts about potential future episodes, Uh, right in and let us know if you have memories of particular weird v A chess tapes from from VHS rental stores of old. Yes, definitely, right in and tell us all about that. Send us pictures

if you have them. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of listener Mail, they come out on Monday's We do Artifact on Wednesday at short Form Core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind Tuesdays and Thursdays, and on Fridays we do Weird How Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious matters and just discuss a weird film. 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 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,