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Hey you, Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. Listener mail. My name is Robert Lamb.
And my name is Joe McCormick and it is Monday, the day of each week we read back messages from the Stuff to Blow your Mind mail box, mail bag email address it is contact at stuff to Blow your
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All right now, now we got the business out of the way. Yeah, let's let's let's start getting into that mailbag.
All right. Well, maybe I'm gonna kick things off with some responses to our series on mud, Rob, do you mind if I do this? One? From Lee Go for it, lisays, greetings, Rob, Joe, and JJ. Your recent episodes on mud reminded me of a couple of things from my childhood growing up in rural Virginia. We had mud daubers. Oh yeah, we talked about these in the episodes.
Robbie.
You revealed the fact that I don't think I knew this before, that these are parasitic wasps. The mud daubers like they fill up their little mud sarcophag guy with with like paralyzed dead spiders for their young defeat.
On yep, they got to bring the meat back for the young.
Well, Lee says, we often knocked the nests off the underside of our porch and the rafters of our shed. Several times during the summers, we'd have a couple of fresh nests where the mud was still soft and damp. They were constructed in courses not unlike a mud version of three D printing. Interesting. I remember dismantling these nests on occasion and separating out some of the sedated spiders that had been imprisoned. While they did not revive, they did move around some. I love the way Lee is
just painting a supervillain origin story flashback. It's like the Joker as a child, you know, poking at paralyzed wasps. Anyway, another, he's not hurting the spiders here. Yes, I should have said spiders.
Yeah, he's just observing, observing what the wasps have wrought.
That's right, that's curiosity, that's nature. Another mud construction we often saw were the chimneys built by crayfish in our yard. They were in everyday occurrence during the summer since we had a drainage creek in our yard. And then Lee attaches a link to an article. I actually got very interested in this, so I was looking for articles as well.
I dug up a post on an Ohio State University blog maintained by a professor named Joe Boggs that seems to have a lot to do with like gardening and stuff, but it is covering the topic of these burrowing crayfish chimneys and rob I've attached a couple of pictures in the document here for you to look at. So they yeah, some people call them chimneys. They kind of look like little mud volcano mounds.
Yeah. Yeah, I've definitely seen these before out and about. They instantly recognize them. They stand out in the landscape.
I don't think I would recognized that this was made by a crayfish. So, according to bogs you find crayfish chimneys like this in kind of surprising locations, like I would expect you'd see it on the banks of a stream, like right there where the water is. But apparently they can pop up in the middle of fields as long as those fields are like poorly drained areas with a high water table. Boggs writes quote. Burrowing crayfish in Ohio belong to one of two genera in the family Cambaridi
Cambaras and Phalliccambarus. These land lobsters are sometimes referred to as terrestrial crayfish, owing to their lack of a direct connection to bodies of water. However, just like their aquatic cousins, these crayfish use gills to extract oxygen from water. Unlike their water soaked cousins, burrowing crayfish spend most of their lives on land, so that's curious. They breathe water, but
they live on land. How does that work? Well, Apparently, even though they're not living in the water, they access water for the purpose of breathing, of obtaining oxygen by digging down to the ground water. And that's why they make these burrows in poorly drained areas, places with a high water table. So these grayfish make these muddy burrows. They dig them out with their claws and pile up the mud around the entrances, and they usually leave their
burrows at night to forage for food. They're omnivorous, so the menu includes basically whatever you got plant or animal, living or dead. Whatever they can eat. And Boggs describes how these chimneys can dry in the sun and become very hard and brick like, which proves a big problem when you hit one with a lawnmower.
Oh oh, man, I bet yeah. I've never been in a position to do that, but this is fascinating, the whole idea about them. They are living on the land but having to go down and find water in order to breathe. They're basically reverse dolphins.
That's great, yeah, reverse yeah, reverse marine mammals. Anyway, Lee says You're mention of safety films put me in mind of the old driver's education films we were shown in the classroom. Looking online, I found a couple of websites as well as the Internet archive where some of these can be found. And then Lee attaches some links along with a trigger warning as some of these included pretty
gruesome crash footage. And then Lee says, I don't know when exactly they stopped showing these films, but they were alive and well when I was in high school Driver's ED in the late seventies. Always look forward to the next topic on tap from the Stuff to Blow your mind team, Thank you sincerely, Lee. Well, thanks for the message, Lee, I remember some incredibly cheesy videos that we had to
watch when I was in Driver's Ed. Also, the strange thing is I remember like there were more films about the dangers of drinking and driving than there were about like how to drive a car. And I was just like, okay, So like, assuming I'm not planning on drinking and driving anyway, I could be getting a lot more out of this class. M.
Yeah, you know, I don't remember what I watched in drivers at I simply watched something, but I haven't seen a lot of these, Like basically, the only safety films I've seen, aside from of course, Shake Hands with Danger and what the aforementioned a forklift driver claus have been the ones that have been featured as short sun Mystery Science Theater three thousand in the past, and maybe a few riff tracks here and there.
There's one I remember very vividly that is about how even if you are old and you think that you can handle your liquor because you've been drinking for many years, you still are impaired after you drink. So it showed a guy like drinking alcohol and then getting on a golf cart and then driving the golf cart off the golf pathway. Again, I think like most of the people in this class were like fifteen.
So yeah, that's some confusing messaging. I shouldn't like. Maybe that needs to be in a video aimed at like older drivers or golfers. I don't know. All right, here's another mud one. This one comes to us from Eric. Eric says, Hi, Robin Joe, great episodes on mud and mud related stuff. Regarding Arnold, one thing that occurred to me years ago was not so much weather the mud
we're talking about predator. By the way, of course, not so much whether the mud would have hidden him from the predator, but whether the predator's infrared vision would actually work very well to detect warm blooded organisms in a sweltering Central American jungle. What kind of temperature resolution does the predator's vision have. Can he easily distinguish between the ninety five degree ground and the ninety nine degree human? I guess he can, because he did, right.
This is a great question.
Yeah, and this is one that you know. I didn't do a lot of deep, deep research into this, and I didn't rewatch the sequence, but one of the ride ups that I was looking at was alluding to the fact that, Okay, the predator has natural infrared vision, but it is not as focused and he had those some of those technological filters we see, or about him better adapting his already inhuman vision for this specialized terrestrial environment. Yeah.
I don't know exactly how the math would work out, but I very much see Eric's point here. So they specify in the movie that the predator comes to the Central American jungle, which is going to be very hot and very humid, So he's coming to a place with high heat and high humidity. And they say that he only comes in the hottest years. So that seems kind of backwards, right, Wouldn't it be easier for him to hunt to going to like the coldest place that humans are.
I mean, I guess he's not really here for an easy time, though he's supposed to be. This the Challenge super Warrior game Hunter, right. Yeah, so he's drawn to places like the jungle daring, you know, some sort of a war environment. He's drawn to nineteen ninety No, I'm sorry, nineteen ninety seven Los Angeles. That was the future of Los Angeles as presented in the nineteen ninety film Predator two.
Predator two, I recall they put like some kind of color filter on that film that makes it look like it's one hundred and forty eight degrees fahrenheit in Los Angeles. Yeah, Like the sides of the buildings are vaguely red. Yeah.
I mean, I'm not sure how it actually matched up to the summer of ninety seven off hand, but I mean, we were living in a pretty hot summer right now, So I guess they're just predators out there NonStop. Yeah, it may be too hot for him, Predator drops into Phoenix and it's just like, I don't know, I just don't know if I can do this. I quit.
Yeah.
Anyway, Eric continues related to mud pots and mud volcanoes. I thought you might be interested to hear about the only known moving mudpot in the world, located in California's Imperial Valley, just north of Mexicali. Over the last few years, this mud pot has traveled several miles, endangering an important
highway and a rail line. A possible cause is that a hot spring deep underground is located under a large rock plate that is slowly shifting due to the frequent earthquakes in the area, So the spring is pushing hot mud up at an angle that is gradually changing. The area is rife with geothermal activity, including several geothermal power generators and a burgeoning lithium and rare earth mud extraction industry.
I think this is referring to the same moving mud puddle that we talked about in was it the last Listener Mail episode? I'm not sure, but in a recent one, but yeah, I mean, I guess it would have to be the same one, since there seems to only be one moving mud puddle. So this is the nyland in Ila and d mud puddle. Again, look that up if you haven't seen it.
And Eric continues once more. Also related to your mention of Dracula on the Moon, have you ever encountered the webcomic Doctor mc ninja. It's weird and funny enough that it might just strike your fancy. There is one issue season question Mark, in which Doctor mc ninja battles Dracula, who has a base on the moon. Incidentally, would vampires
be affected by exposure to vacuum? I don't think they need to breathe, and thus they wouldn't risk rupturing their lungs, and if they are exposed slowly, any gases in their bodies would dissipate, so they would not swell up. Also, I've never heard the verb to vamp before. Is that common parlance whether or not? I love it and I am going to use it from now on. Thanks again for your great work, Eric.
Thanks for the message. Eric, I thought vamp was a verb, and not just in the musical sense. You know, when you bite somebody turn them into a vampire, that's vamping them, right?
Yeah?
Sure, I don't think I made that up.
Also, known as dracking. I guess you could track. Yes, yeah, maybe, I don't know, just throwing that out there. I'm not familiar with doctor mc ninja, but anything with Dracula on a moon base sounds good. As for the rule of vampires in space, well, a lot of great minds have have tackled this topic. But I guess a lot of it comes down to exactly what your slice of the vampire myth or you know, some sort of speculative biology is going to.
Be very important. Question does Blade need to breathe oxygen? I think he does? Doesn't he?
I believe so. I've never I don't remember ever seeing anything that indicated he didn't.
No day walkers on the moon, but perhaps full undead.
All right, what sounds like we're already venturing into weird house territory here. Do we have any weird House listener mail to read?
Why? Yes, we have several here. Oh, I'm going to read this one from Carrie. Carrie says Robin Joe. I've gotten a bit behind on my listening, and I've just finished the fourth episode on mud. You mentioned science fic treatments of mud, but I don't think you mentioned X the unknown and I wondered if you were aware of it. It's a nineteen fifty six British movie that is all
about the mud. It's said in rural Scotland, and the premise is that a large, deep crack appears suddenly in the ground, and soon a huge, sentient, radioactive mass of mud, a true mud monster comes and goes in and out of the hole. It feeds on radioactive elements and grows significantly every time it encounters some. Its nightly forays are in search of food, and it causes death and destruction along its path. Oh wow, I'm already seeing some parallels
to the burrowing crayfish here. You know, mound of mud comes out of the earth, nocturnal foraging. Yeah, omnivorous carry goes on. A scientist has to figure out a way to defeat the monster before it can reach a nuclear power plant and grow large enough to begin to take over the world. I like the movie and feel it's weird house cinema material, But even if you don't use it, you should check it out out before if you haven't. If you haven't seen it, thanks for the great work, Carrie. Well,
thank you, Carrie. I think you neglected to mention that this is a Hammer film.
Always a good sign.
Yeah. It was written by Jimmy Sangster, the same guy who wrote the original Hammer Dracula in nineteen fifty eight, with Christopher Lee as DrAk and Peter Cushing is Van Helsing. Also same guy wrote the nineteen fifty nine Hammer Mummy, which starred Christopher Lee as the Mummy and Peter Cushing as I don't know, some British guy who is opposed by the Mummy, but that one is more notable to
me as a poster than as a film. The fifty nine Mummy has a really great poster where like a police officer is shining a flashlight at the Mummy's back and it pierces through the Mummy as if it were a shadow.
That's a great poster. I'm not even looking at it right now, and I can I remember it clearly in my mind.
It's hanging next to me on the wall right now. Speaking of posters, extually unknown, I looked up the poster. It has a very unusual looking poster. I don't feel like the color scheme makes a lot of sense. It's like a red, white and blue color scheme. I just that's that's not the palette for a horror poster.
Hmmm, yeah, I know what you mean. And I think this is when like the title doesn't really get give me much to go on. It certainly doesn't say anything about in mud. There's nothing on the on the poster that really calls out to me. I had to look this one up. It sounds like it was at some point going to be a quarter Mass picture.
Yeah.
This is like a whole, you know, franchise of films about Professor Bernard quarter Mass, and I haven't seen most of them, and I haven't seen them the TV series, but quarter Mass in the Pit from sixty seven is great. So at some point it would be interesting to come in and watch either a quarter Mass film or one of these sort of related films in this genre. Rob.
I have to note because I think I spent my entire life saying quarter but when I zoom in on the word, it appears it is quator mass.
It's quator mass.
Oh my goodness, quator Mass. I mean I've said quarter Mass probably a million times.
Yep. I've just been seeing that Invisible are in there full time? Okay, quator Mass in the Pit. If you will I will get it right if if we do one of these films speaking of British franchises and mud monsters.
I do, and also mention real quick that Susan in the Stuff to Blow your Mind discussion module, which you can join as well if you just shoot us an email we'll send to the information about how to join, points out that one of the recent seasons of Doctor Who, I think series eleven, had some sort of mud monsters running about, So so Doctor Who fans out there, we are now aware.
Doctor Who has a lot of monsters. That would be a really rich well if I knew it. But I've only seen a very little bit of Doctor Who, so I'm mostly ignorant on that.
Yeah. Same. I dip into it a little bit every now and then when I visit my wife's uncle and aunt, who were big Doctor Who fans, and I'll watch a little bit of old Doctor Who. Usually there was the really old stuff, And I'm really not up on the more recent adventures, but.
It does look like a lot of fun. Maybe maybe I'll get in there one day.
All right, here's another one. This one comes to us from Aldrin. Aldrin writes Sen and says, hi, Robert and Joe wonderful episode on Pirana Mandir loved it. I can't remember if I've ever watched this movie. As a kid, we used to watch a lot of Bollywood movies, but they were typically love romances with some drama. The horror genre was not mainstream at the time, so I probably missed this movie. Wanted to say a couple of things in general. Number one, like you mentioned, almost all of
these movies had to have a few musical numbers. Some movies even had a very feeble story and only the songs were what attracted audiences. Songs were almost never sung by the actors, but by actual solo singers. The those singers would often have very successful careers as a solo artist, singing for numerous movies. We would even have MTV type programs with just the musical sequences from the movies. Huh.
Interesting Now, the next point, Aldrin shares is interesting because we were asking for Hindi speakers to weigh in on this.
In the movie, there was something that in the subtitles kept being translated as Satan, but the religious context of the movie is Hindu and so and also I thought I heard in the in the Hindi audio people saying a word that sounded like shaitan or something like that, and so we were asking, what is the significance of this word in the cultural context, Like it probably wouldn't mean exactly the Christian Satan, So like, what is it they're talking about.
Right, And so Aldrin writes about the words chaetan. As far as I know, this means devil. I don't think it refers to Satan unless they are etymologically derived from the same thing. Chaetan is the word often used to admonish mischievous children, so its meaning is more towards devil than satan. Just wanted to point it out. Love your podcast, Keep rocking tears, Aldron.
Oh, thank you very much, Aldrin. Okay, so that makes sense, Like if you would admonish unruly children by calling them little chatans like they're being little demons, they're being a little imps, that would make sense that it means more just like a wicked creature, wicked spirit of some kind. Yeah, well, thanks again, Aldron. All right, I'm gonna finish us off today with this message from Joe also about Pirana Mandir. This is from Joe. That's just Jo not Joe, Joe
says Joe and Robert. In the Weird House episode of Piranha Mandir, you mentioned that the characters would say a line in Hindi then repeat it in English, and wondered if it was a cultural thing. In my experience, it is a bilingual slash multi lingual quirk. Malaysians speak anywhere from two to six languages, and it is not uncommon for us to say something then repeat it in several other languages for emphasis or comedic effect. The same appears
to be true in Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Oh okay, that makes sense. Oh but interestingly, Joe then pivots here to some responses to our dream Fall series. Oh nice, she says. On another note, I learned to lucid dream as a teen in order to escape frequent nightmares. However, realizing that you're in a dream and actually waking up or two vastly different things. I've gotten trapped inside my nightmares before, knowing for sure that it was not reality.
But every time I tried to wake up, I'd sit up in my bed and realize I was still asleep because of some detail that was out of sorts.
I e.
The furniture was wrong. It was the wrong bedroom. I was holding something that I don't usually bring to bed, et cetera. It usually me a few tries to actually wake up, and the sensation was like fighting through mud or trying to swim against a strong current of water. Although I dreamt less and less as I got older, and now I rarely recall my dreams, the ability to wake myself up whenever I want has proved handy a
few times. And then finally, Joe ins with a reference to the Butterfly dream poem by juang Zhou and a meme about it, which is, I don't know what do you call this meme? The guy like releasing a butterfly or gesturing toward a butterfly.
Yeah, I don't know exactly what you call it in sort of like memology, I guess, But you see this one a lot, and.
We got the labels one is I guess. Sometimes this guy's name is pronounced different ways. Sometimes it's Zwangzi. I've heard it juang Zhou, So you got Zwangzi or juang Zhou. And then a butterfly labeled as a butterfly, And then the bottom text is this a man? Joe finishes mud love a butterfly dreaming of being Joe. Well, thanks for the email, Joe. And you know what, this made me think? That the Butterfly Dream is one of those literary objects that I am very familiar with in principle, but not
actually in text. I don't know if I'd ever read the original text of it, so I decided to look up a translation of the original text. So the Butterfly Dream Passage attributed to a traditional Chinese author named Chuangzhou. It is from a Chinese text dating back to the
Warring States period. I think it's usually placed in the third century BCE, and the text is usually just referred to eponymously by the author's name, so it's known as the Xuangzhou or the Zwangzi, and it is a book of Taoist wisdom, containing a bunch of anecdotes and parables that demonstrate the ideal Taoist way of seeing the world.
So I wanted to start by reading the translation of the Butterfly Passage by Burton Watson, which goes like this, Once Juangzhou dreamt he was a butterfly, butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was huang Zhou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was solid and unmistakable Chuangzhou. But he didn't know if he was juang Zhou. Who had dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he
was juang Zhou. Between Juangzhou and a butterfly, there must be some distinction. This is called the transformation of things. I like that last little line that like gives some terminology. It's an interesting idea of sort of like intellectual completeness on it. Added by that sentence, I'm not sure.
Yeah, I mean, I feel like seen this form in Chinese writing before. I'm not sure exactly what to call this style, but it is familiar.
But anyway, while I was looking at the Burton Watson translation of various passages in this text, I came across another one that I thought was really interesting, And I think we may have alluded to part of to a story discussed in this passage before. Maybe when we talked about the Hundun the in the episodes we did on the Classic of Mountains and Seas.
Yes, yeah, we did talk about this a little bit. Yeah, but it's been a wha.
Well, allow me to read this passage. If you don't mind, go for it. Do not be an embody or of fame. Do not be a storehouse of schemes. Do not be an undertaker of projects. Do not be a proprietor of wisdom. Embody to the fullest what has no end, and wander where there is no trail. Hold on to all that you have received from heaven. But do not think you have gotten anything. Be empty. That is all. The perfect man uses his mind like a mirror, going after nothing,
welcoming nothing, responding but not storing. Therefore he can win out over things and not hurt himself. And then it transitions to a little narrow It says the emperor of the South Sea was called Sho, meaning briefor the emperor of the North Sea was called Who, meaning sudden, and the emperor of the Central region was called Hondun Chaos Shoe and Who. From time to time came together for a meeting in the territory of Hondun, and Hondun treated
them very generously. Shoe and Who discussed how they could repay his kindness. All men, they said, have seven openings, so they can see here, eat and breathe. But Houndun alone doesn't have any let's try boring him some every day.
I should I should jump in here for a second. And just if you're not familar with this story, the Hondun is often depicted. It's kind of this amorphous, fleshy creature. Yeah, a quadrupedal creature. So I think it helps to sort of picture something like that before we get to the actual boring of the thing.
Then the last line is every day they bored another hole, and on the seven, the day Hondun died. And so yeah, Houndun is this creature without any without a face, without any holes that they bore all the holes in him. And so I think it is supposed to be a lesson against trying to over engineer your will on the way of things, and instead you should sort of like let things be according to their nature.
Yeah, And I guess you could take this into the future and like kind of kind of like transhuman direction and be like, if someone comes along and they're like, we need more sensory inputs for human beings, well remind them of this story in which case, in which case, the poor Hundun died because they tried to they thought it needed more sensory inputs.
I think it was in the episode on the Classic of the Mountains and Seas that am I getting the name of that right? That was the name of that text I talked of it. Yeah, the illustration in the text we had of the Honduan where it looked kind of like a like a cushion with legs.
Yeah. Yeah. And also, by the way, you see this basic creature design pop up in the Marvel of the shun Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Oh okay, that's a good one. I highly recommend that one one of my favorite NCU films that has come out.
I would be tempted by any movie that has a hond doing next Predator franchise film Predator versus Hondown.
Oh, don't throw the Honduan against the against the Predator. All right, Well, we'll go and close out this episode of Listener and Mail, but we'd love to hear from everyone out there. Just a reminder that our core episodes are on Tuesdays and Thursday's Listener Mail on Monday, Short Form Artifactor, Monster Fact on Wednesdays, and on Friday. We set aside most serious concerns just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Huge thanks to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. 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.
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