Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. Listener Mail. My name is Robert.
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and listener mail is the type of episode where we read back messages that we receive at the Stuff to Blow your Mind email account. If you've never gotten in touch before, now would be a great time to do it. That address is contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Whatever kind
of message you want to send is fair game. We always love feedback to recent episodes, especially if you have something interesting to add to a topic that we've talked about, if you have personal experience that's relevant to something we've discussed on the show. If you ever need to issue a correction, that's the email address to get in touch.
If you would like to suggest a topic for the future, or send movie recommendations for weird house cinema recipes you want us to try anything like that, Contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Yeah. That's also the address where you can ask to join the discord server. If you want to do that. You can find us on Facebook and Twitter. We are blow the Mind on both of those and we are spbym podcast on Instagram. Oh and if you like Weird House Cinema, go to letterbox dot com and you'll find our user name there, weird House.
All right, should we jump right into the messages?
Let's do it?
All right, So we got a bunch of responses to our series on Manta rays.
Maybe let's see.
Do you want to read this one from Jeff rob I shall.
Yes, this is Jeff with one F. We also have Jeff's with two f's. We have jeffs with three f's. Possibly, we also have jeffs with no fs, jeffs that are just completely out of f. But this is just one F.
For Jeffanie.
Yeah, but Jeff gets in touch about man rays. Also, we should flag that Jeff is going to bring up in this email pages from a book series called Animals Do the Strangest Things. This is something we've talked about in the past. It's come up on previous listener males. That was the of nineteen sixties or seventies children's animal book series that refers to mating pairs of animals as husband and wife.
Yeah, look up those pages. You can find them in your image search of choice. Yeah, all right, Jeff says the following greetings. I had the opportunity to swim with mantas off the shore of ConA, on the Big Island of Hawaii. A charter took us out at night and to snorkel in the dark water. They gave us a wacky noodle to keep a float with minimal effort, and dropped in a floating PVC rig with lights that shone
down into the water. Various plankton and tiny animals are attracted to the lights, and the mantas have learned that there will be a free dinner at that location. Shortly after our arrival, maybe half a dozen mantas quickly got organized and started performing slow, graceful backwards loops under the lights, coming within inches of us at the surface, over and over.
I had always understood somersaults to be headfirst downward flips, though it seems backwards sum results are a thing, so I wanted to clarify that the sumrsaulting behavior you mentioned is essentially backflips. I was with someone who is somewhat anxious snorkeling even in good visibility in broad daylight around normal sized fauna, so I was a little worried about her freaking out in the middle of a dark ocean
with giant sea monsters circling below us. As soon as the Mansas showed up, she erupted in a noise that I couldn't immediately identify. I wasn't sure if it was terror or delight, but thankfully it was the latter, and
she giggled almost continuously throughout the wonderful experience. I don't know if these trips are considered to be ecologically responsible, but I didn't get any pictures because they told us to keep our hands on the floating PVC bar and not to bring cameras, gloves, or anything else that might encourage us to reach out toward the rays. They warned us that even just touching them with a fingertip could remove some of their protective coating that keeps them safe
from parasites and disease. For their part, the Mantas seem completely disinterested in the human jetsum and we're not looking for a snuggle. I imagine that altering their dining plan could lead to some negative side effects, but the operation we went out with appeared to be nothing but careful and respectful. This is fascinating. This is not an experience I have had, I believe on one of our trips out to the Hawaiian Islands, my wife was going to do one of these trips with a friend and then
due to weather, it got canceled. And I certainly I'm not saying I wouldn't do it, and in fact, I'm more inclined to do it now that I have had such an awesome experience in the water with mantas during the daylight. You know, I can definitely understand, you know, once you're in them on once you're in the water with them, once you see them, this kind of giddiness overcomes you, like you know that these creatures are not a threat to you, and it's such a magical experience.
That being said, I I have never gone snorkeling at night. It's something that has long not appealed to me. But I'm willing to potentially press through my own ease to have a new experience, which I've done many times before. Otherwise I wouldn't have any new experiences.
I have no experience snorkeling at all, but I think I would be scared to death to get.
Into the dark ocean at night.
I don't know if there's a name for that specific fear. But you can't see very far in the water, so you just you don't know what's down there.
Yeah, yeah, but I will for my own part anyway. If there's like a good guide, a good good team, like leading things like that gives me a lot of confidence too. It's like this, if this person's not worried, I'm not worried, all right, Jeff continues to digress a moment. My unsolicited travel advice is that the Big Island of
Hawaii offers the most amazing diversity. Waterfalls, lava, moonscapes, steaming sulfur events, giant craters, snow covered mountains, rain forest, black green and regular sand beaches, snorkeling among beautiful, colorful fish in clear water right off of public beach, which you can walk through a lava tube and if conditions are right, you can see fresh orange lava. Going all the way to Hawaii without seeing real lava was a deal breaker
for me, so the Big Island was a requirement. You can start in town at sea level, drive up a mountain, passing through the clouds with the occasional alarming lack of visibility, then break into the clear air above the clouds to visit an observatory with amazing views of distant galaxies. I wouldn't plan on any long hikes up there, as we were winded just walking through the parking lot at that altitude.
When we got back into town on the same night, a half full water bottle that we closed at the top of the mountain was impressively crumpled, being crushed by the sea level air pressure. I agree with all this. The Big Island is indeed a special place. I've visited it only twice, once in my twenties when I had a friend who lived ont in Hawaii, and once more a few years back with family and friends. For my money. Volcano National Park alone is worth the journey, just such
an amazing land escape. But indeed there's rich and varied natural beauty there, just in spades, so highly recommended. Have the chance to go there, all right, But Jeff is not done. Jeff continues, speaking of creepiness. We were kayaking in the Cayman Islands, and the sting rays must have been accustomed to being fed, because not only did they appear as ominous moving shadows on the ocean, floor. They would also sometimes follow us or head straight for us.
Knowing that they are not interested in eating your face is one thing, but it's still deeply disturbing when something huge you thought was a boulder or a patch of coral starts charging at you from a completely different plane of existence. In the Sea of Cortes, we saw mobular rays leaping out of the water with such frequency that
we almost got bored with them. They are much smaller than giant mantas, so the splashdowns are not exactly thunderous, but apparently at some times of the year, great schools of rays will launch out of the water, all at the same time. I observe that they continue to flap their wings as they shoot through the air, which is both charming and a little bit funny. Maybe one day the atmosphere will be thick enough for them to really
take off. Oh, we can only hope for fun. I have included the chapters on rays and remoras from fish do the Strangest things. The advice about dragging your feet to avoid stingrays has stuck with me for life, although given the accuracy of some of the information in those books,
I'm not sure if this is actually good intel. Oh and in case no one else mentions that, if you're in the market for weird house space mantas, you might want to check out the Roger Korman movie Lords of the Deep from nineteen eighty nine, the golden year of the underwater monster movie. Although maybe not, because if I recall correctly, it's kind of boring.
I tried to watch it one time and remember almost nothing about it except that it had the flavor of one of those grunge era Canadian TV shows Are You Afraid of the Dark sets?
Yeah, this is one of the titles where my nineteen eighty nine underwater sci fi enthusiasm starts to peter out a bit. So I've never actually seen it, but I remember loving the VHS cover back when I was a kid. I included it here for you to look at, Joe, along with a couple of screen caps of the alien manta in question with enormous glowing red eyes.
But the manta's wings don't really look like wings.
Instead, it just looks like.
A huge severed bunny head with it. It's like the ears flopping out to the side. It's like white fur bunny with red eyes.
I guess it does kind of look like a demonic bunny, like some sort of dark bunny god from Watershipped Down. Anyway, Jeff says, thanks for your series on these particularly fascinating creatures. They are quite astoundingly graceful and soothing to encounter, assuming you're not a copa pod all right.
As Jeff mentioned, he attached some pages from Fish to the Strangest Things. One is about the Remorra that's called the hitch Hiker, and another is called the Flying Saucer that's about sting rays and manta rays.
I love how the remora here seems to have a googly eye. Yeah, he's like I'm about to go stick my head to a shark.
Yeah.
I can't read the full selections here, but maybe I'll read just from the Remorra chapter again to get a flavor of the wonderful cadence of this riding. It says the Hitchhiker. The Remora can travel for thousands of miles beneath the sea without swimming. He has a wonderful way of getting around. He just catches a ride on a bigger fish. The Remora holds on with the top of his head. The top of his head is flat, there is a suction cap on it. With this cap he
can quickly fasten on to another fish. He cannot fall off unless he wants to. The Remora rides on sharks so much he is often called a shark sucker. Sometimes many Remoras will ride on the same shark at the same time, but Remoras will ride on almost any.
Big fish as beautiful as there's a poetry to it.
There are so many things that are just kind of tickling about the writing style of these books. But I think we may have mentioned this in the last one, that there's this constant feeling of light moralism about it, like a little it's not the standard way of talking about nature. There are constantly little gentle judgments being passed.
Yeah. Like, there's a one of the pages that you shared here as a titled the Flying Saucers, and it's about rays, and it begins with rays are strange looking fish, which I mean that seems a little rude. There's a picture of a human child looking at them with a look of astonishment on his face, and you know, the rays might well say, you know, child, you are a strange looking mammal. Most mammals don't look like you at.
All, especially with the way this child is drawn with the weird spiny fingers. It looks like a gill Man hand there.
Well, you know the artist was strong fish all day and then had to suddenly switch back to humans and yeah, it's jarring.
Okay.
We also got some shorter messages about our Manta ray series. This one comes from Danny. She says we went to sting ray City off the coast of Grand Cayman. When feeding them, you hold the raw squid in your fist like an ice cream cone, very loosely. Okay, the ray swims over your hand and hoovers it up. My stepdad was holding his too tightly and the ray nipped the skin between his thumb and pointer finger. It was like a pinch between the bony plates that took a bit
of skin with it. Only person I know of who's actually been bitten by a ray lol, feel free to use Danny. Yeah, I understand that the sting ray is somewhat different than the mobulid rays that you know. Mobulid rays, from what I understand, are not ever going to bite you, but maybe a stingray can do this a little bit more likely, and the stingray is also a little bit something you have to be more cautious of because it has the tailbarb.
All right, another quick one here. This one comes to us from Greg. This is in response to this is
part of our like Manta Week Shenanigans. I did a Monster Fact episode on mantas and Dungeons and Dragons, talking about the different ways that mantas have been invoked in Dungeons and Dragons and how it reflects sort of earlier attitudes about mantas that you see in pre Dungeons and Dragons fiction, you know, pulp fiction and fantasy and so forth, and everything that was in the zeitgeist that kind of
impacted the way that they were presented. So Greg writes, you forgot a couple aside from the exits that you'les, this is one that's like sometimes a vampire that pops up in Dungeons and Dragons, And so Greg includes a link to information on the Cloaker and the Lurker and says both date back to the First Attention Monster Manual nineteen seventy seven and cover the fear that mantas will wrap you up and smother you with those big creepy wings.
And yes, Greg, you were absolutely correct. I did manage to leave these two off that they basically line up with some of the other monsters that I discussed there, But it's good enough for me. I should probably go back and record a part two to Manta Rays of Dungeons and Dragons.
I was looking at these, and the cloaker appears to be not only mantiforms but also literally cloak formed, like it takes the shape of a cloak that you might pick up and put on because you think it's just a discarded piece of clothing, but it's actually a monster that wraps around you and eats you.
Yeah. I mean, as I discussed in that Monster Fact episode. You know, you have like the cloak of the Manta Ray, which is a pretty famous Dungeons and Dragons magical item. But if you go back to that first monster manual, there are stats for like the man to ray and information about how it will stain you and also swallow
you holes. So then that's just supposed to be a straight up Manta ray and not these various mnemonic fantasy variants that you know, lean into the idea that that array could be some sort of a horrendously dangerous creature.
Come on, now, Gary, you know better than that.
I mean, it was the seventies. We were, as we discussed in our Manta Ray episodes, like we were beginning to wake up in the West to the fact that that Manda's were not our enemy.
Are there stats in the Monster manual for the panda bear like that it'll bite your bite your legs off?
And that's a great question. I don't I don't know if I've ever looked at the stats for a panda, but I bet there are panda stats. Yeah. If if not in some of those original monster manuals, then certainly by the time they came around to like Karratur there. You know, there have to be some some panda stats in there somewhere to look it up.
Chaotic evil creature. Okay, This next message is from Ben. Ben says, Hi, Robert and Joe. In today's episode, part three on Manta Rays, you described the hypothesis that Manta's developed their large brains to generate heat and that their intelligence is a side effect.
Yeah.
No, this is, to be clear, something that is not known for sure, but it is a possibility explored in one of the papers we looked at that because the design of the mantray's brain case is good at retaining heat in cold water. It could be that that is actually the characteristic that was selected for in the evolution
of the manta brain. And then as a side effect, it's like, oh, it just happens to be now that these are much smarter than your average fish, because, yeah, the manterrays show a kind of intelligence that is generally not seen in other fish. Ben continues, this immediately made me think of Deep Blue Sea nineteen.
Ninety nine, a movie we've covered on Weird House.
Yeah.
Yeah.
In this classic shark action movie, after the shark attacks seem to be very well planned and organized, the character doctor Susan McAllister admits that she illegally genetically modified the sharks to give them bigger brains so they could harvest more magic shark juice to treat Alzheimer's disease, and that the side effect of that was smarter sharks. Yeah, because if you recall the plot of this movie is they make genetically modified sharks as a source of something for pharmaceuticals.
So Ben says, those smarter sharks then wreak utter havoc and kill everyone in a cold systematic and planned out way. The way the Good Doctor phrases it in the movie and the way you guys phrase the Mantarey brain hypothesis were delightfully similar.
Ben, Yeah, this is a great point. Yeah, I totally forgot about this detail Deep Blue Sea when we were recording our Manta episodes.
Another Deep Blue Sea connection is so if this actually is what happened with Mantas again, it was to fight off the cold. You may recall that obsession with cold and ice is a major plot point in that movie as well, because Russell Franklin, the character played by Samuel L. Jackson, is you might recall, terrified of ice. He's like giving a speech about how ice is like it's got a mind of its own and it'll come to get you. He's giving that speech right when he gets eaten by shark.
Oh wow, I forgot what he was talking about that. I mainly remember just that horrifying and shocking moment when he gets taken out. Yeah, best moment in the film.
All right, rob let's see you want to do this one from Larry about skating.
Yeah, Larry writes in and says, hey, guys, thank you for the recent episode on the invention of the roller skate. I've recently gotten back into it. Have you seen this dance skating music video in case you don't want to click a link in an email. The song is Gold by Chet Faker or maybe it's Fokker. I'm not sure. I'm not familiar with this artist, so my apologies. So I got that wrong.
Yeah, I don't know anything about this musical artist. But the choreography, yeah, it's interesting. So it's like the video is three roller skaters coming at you out of the darkness to skate to dance as the camera continually glides away along a dark road at nights, Like the camera is constantly pulling back along this dark road and the skaters are constantly coming towards you while they're dancing. I think kind of dancing Queen on roller skates meets David Lynch's Lost Highway.
Yeah, yeah, it's really it's a cool video, but it's yeah, it's not necessarily super happy fun times, more like phantoms of skating on the open road. But the song sounds pretty cool and I looked it up and it's directed by the music videos directed by Hiro Murray, who is direct did episodes of several great recent TV shows. It's only a matter of time till this guy directs a feature film of note, I imagine. Anyway, Larry continues here and says, the music video is a bit surreal, so
I figured you'd find it interesting. The skaters in the video remind me of the dancing Muses and Bodicelli's The Three Graces, and to a lesser degree, the sirens from O Brother where Art thou Ah? Would you do an episode on the Three Muses or other personifications of inspiration? I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on how the trope came about and why these depictions seem to celebrate or worn against the allure of creative pursuits. Thanks for the excellent show, Barry.
Now, I know we've discussed the Muses in a segment in some previous episode, but I don't remember why or what the context was. But yeah, they could be their own topic, I'm.
Sure, yeah, yeah, some of them back if we've had them on the show before. The Muses are always welcome. That's stuff to blow your mind.
Thank you, Larry.
Okay, I think we're going to move on to some responses to the episodes that I did a few weeks back with Annie Reese and Lauren Vogelbaum, the hosts of the food podcast Saver. We called that series food Storage Mad Science. It was all about weird transformations and reactions that foods can undergo while just sitting around in storage. And we ended up talking a lot in the second part of that series about more dramatic things like unintentional fermentation,
explosions and even spontaneous combustion in food. But for the first episode there we focused largely on looking for a scientific explanation for a memory of mine in which a tray of baked pasta ate holes in a sheet of aluminum foil while it was sitting in the fridge. I was like, what was that? And we did find the answer. The answer turned out to be bizarre and fascinating and
led in a bunch of different directions. But the short version is, if you leave a salty web mass of food like a bunch of baked pasta, in contact with two different metals, like say a steel pan and a sheet of aluminum foil, and you have them in the right configuration where like the foil is touching where they're both touching the food and the foil is in contact with the pan around the edges and then also touching the food, you can accidentally create what's called a galvanic cell,
in other words, a simple battery. So the holes in the aluminum were actually being they were the aluminum was the anode and a simple battery, and it was being eaten away by the electric flow there.
And this is something called galvanic corrosion.
Wow, electric pasta Okay, yeah.
The electric pasta acid test is what was happening in my fridge.
Yeah.
So several listeners got in touch with emails to varying degrees about that. The first one is from Matthew, subject line Galvazania very good.
That's good. That's even better, Matthew.
Says, I'm sending you my semi yearly email in regards to your recent episodes with the Savor ladies. I was a restaurant chef for years and encountered melted foil a few times, always discounting it with Wow, that acid really reacts with aluminum. I never considered that electricity was a factor in my current career. I am an aluminum welder
in a shop making boats for a DoD contractor. I can't seem to escape my Viking heritage and ended up making military boats, unlike Naglfar, that is the ship from Norse mythology made out of toenails, I think toenails and fingernails.
Maybe.
Unlike Naglfar, these vehicles are almost entirely aluminum and are finished with a coating of specifically non reactive paint. You guessed it, it's green that covers the entire exterior of the boat save for two small areas on the bottom. These spots are where the anodes are attached chunks of metal alloy mostly lead I think, that are more reactive
than the aluminum of the boat. These sacrificial bricks lose their ions faster during the natural galvanization process that occurs all the time, but especially quickly when the boats are used in salty water. Being in a circuit with the hull, they corrode away instead of the aluminum and are replaced yearly. And even bigger threat is the boat's own electrical system.
Unlike cars and trucks, where the electronic components are grounded to the chassis, the whole electrical system is self contained. If a ground wire happens to detach and come in contact with the hull, the galvanic corrosion process gets supercharged. I'm told that only a few weeks in salty water with a grounded hull could be devastating. A reminder that I am not a nautical electrician. I am a welder, so my understanding is limited and probably flawed. Thank you
for the wonderful show. It's been at the top of the list for a decade. Weird House suggestion The Barbarians nineteen eighty seven. Twin beefcakes with bronx accents fight against magic forces, a dragon, and each other to free their adopted mother and save their small tribe. It actually has a few references to classical literature.
Thrown in and amazing costumes.
Matthew, Well, Matthew, thanks for adding on the subject of galvanic corrosion. Yeah, so certainly this is a case in all kinds of different construction and manufacturing processes. But also I had the same reaction as you when I first saw the melted aluminum foil not melted, you know, the corroded aluminum foil. I didn't know what it was, but I just assumed, I guess maybe something reaction with the
acid or something. Aluminum can react with acid, but this is a much more powerful and faster process when you accidentally make the food battery. So beware the food battery, folks.
Now, as for the Barbarians, I keep coming back to the Barbarians. So every few years I get excited about the idea of this movie, because I mean, look at you got like, not one, but two. You got twin Barbarian beefcakes in the Barbarian Brothers. You've got Richard Lynch as the main villain. You've got Michael Berryman in there as a sidekick of Stogie character. And even the great Georgia Eastman pops up at some point or another.
The personable George Eastman.
Yeah, yeah, wow.
And it's directed by Ruggero Diodado, director of nineteen eighties Cannibal Holocaust. So there are, you know, some great connections there. But every time I've sat down to watch it, it's the Barbarian Brothers themselves who throw me off.
Really, So, I've had this movie on disc for years and have still never watched it. I keep thinking, at some point I'm going to get there, because I love a leather diaper Barbarian movie. But haven't made it to this one. I've actually watched Your Hunter from the Future three or four times since I've had the Barbarians, and I've never made time for the Barbarians.
Yeah, and I can only speak to my own experience here, and this has been my experience thus far. Certainly my opinions can change on films, but every time, Yeah, it's the Barbarian brothers that really throw me off. It's like they're two charismatic. There's an effortless charm to these two guys, and I do not like it. I mean, I love a fun peplum beefcake movie, but me personally, I prefer it when there's a either a a believable stoicism to
the central muscle man. So think of Arnold and the first Conan movie Conan the Barbarian Yeah, or certain Hercules actors have managed to pull this off as well. You know, there's like the thinking, cerebral Beefcake. And then also you have plenty of examples where you have a very green awkwardness to your lead because, as is sometimes the case, you know, you would just have a bodybuilder plucked off the street and given a starring role in a motion picture.
Yeah, or like Red Brown and Your Hunter from the Future, just kind of what is going on here?
I don't know. I don't know what this scenees about. I'm just doing it.
So I like both of those vibes. But these two, the Barbarian brothers, they just they just felt they almost take to it naturally, and I don't. I don't love their vast but that's just me. There are a number of fun elements of the film where I mentioned the costumes and certainly other folks involved in the production. So maybe I should really press on and give it a third or fourth chance.
Here, maybe I'll actually watch it this time, or maybe I'll just watch.
Your again, Yours World.
Oh wait, but I have a question about your your categorization of beefcake barbarian leads. Where does Jorge Rivera from Conquest fit in?
Absolutely solid? Yeah, okay, he's great. Yeah, I easily watch another film in which he is a Barbarian or anything else. Yeah, he's a lot of fun. Really, I'm struggling to think of anyone who's actually failed the Peplham beefcake test here for me, but these these guys did that. They bothiled it.
What about Reg Park in the Hercules and the Haunted World. How'd you feel about him?
Was he he's great?
Oh?
Okay cool?
I liked him too, but he was he was charismatic?
Yeah, yeah, like he was. He was somewhere between like a really great stoicism and maybe a little like green awkwardness, though it is hard to judge sometimes in these films where things are dubbed as well. But yeah, I thought he was great. Yeah to Lou for Igno in the Hercules movie we watched him, which he played Loue frign I love that so so yeah. I can't think of anyone else who felt like a fumble.
For me, sweetheart, Lou, all right, you want to do this? Next message from Tanner, This is partially in response to the food, but also some other things.
All Right, Tanner writes in and says, hey, gang, First off, love the pod and yet to find another podcast that synthesizes history, culture, philosophy, and information the way you do. I'm always surprised by the connections you make to seemingly disparate topics, and Weirdhouse has turned me on to so many strange and delightful movies. I watched The Wickerman Blind
per your recommendation and what it alighted was. I'm curious how differently an audience member from nineteen seventy three and today might view the townsfolk given changes in popular opinion towards sex and organized religion.
I've thought about that before.
While The Wickerman is still one of my favorite movies and I think it hits very hard today, I do have to wonder if it hit quite differently when it came out, just given the change in the cultural landscape.
Yeah. Yeah, It's always a fun exercise to just try and imagine how the immediate intended audience viewed something versus how we look at it now. And you know, I think it's an essential exercise to play with with many of these older films, you know, and sort of certainly enjoy it from where you're standing, But yeah, try and time travel as well, and try and put yourself in the in the shoes and slippers of the original of the original audience members. Anyway, they continue. I love the
most recent episode on food storage. Your guest host made a great addition, and then as an aside, they knowe Robin Annie's weird House on Congo is a favorite of mine. So yes, Annie Reese also guest starred on Weird House Cinema a while back, and we talked about the fabulous film that is Congo.
Tim Curry in the role of a Lifetime There.
Yes, yeah, a lot of great, great performances in that film. Really fun. But anyway, they continue and say episodes about food are always a favorite in that vein. I have a couple of things I'd like to share. I work in the composites industry, building carbon fiber parts for aircraft, and galvanic corrosion is a major consideration in how parts
are designed and manufactured. Carbon fiber is conductive and when it's in contact with some metals, chiefly aluminum, it acts as an anode that corrodes the metal, and since it's bad business to have your aircraft eating itself, manufacturing steps are added to prevent galvanic corrosions, such as adding a barrier like fiberglass or epoxy between the two materials, or
using a more combatible metal like titanium. On the topic of fermented foods, during lockdown, my dad made his own kombucha, and my most salient memory of this endeavor was of the yeast colony called a Scobie which I only just learned as an acronym for symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast. I just learned that for the first time as well. I did not know that either that grew in the kombucha jug. It was a round, slimy, pallid tortilla that I remember being distinctly skin like in a way I
found deeply unsettling. To get the carbonation, the kombucha had to be kept in these pressure safe flip top bottles. I don't know if it is just par for the course and a homemade kombucha. The fruit pulp was a contributing factor, I think, but whenever we opened the bottle, the contents exploded out in a champagne like fountain that got everywhere, so we had to open future bottles over the sink. The kombucha, for its part, was pretty tasty.
After my dad lost interest in making more, he emptied the jug into the grass, where the scoby dried out into something like those dried pig ears who give to dogs. Ugh, Joe, am, I mistaken. You made your own kombucha for a while.
Right now, I've never made kombucha. You've done a home fermenting. I've made Sauer kraut and kimchi and all that, but I've never made kombucha.
Oh Okay, yes, okay, I'm thinking about your kimchi and sour kraft making.
Okay, no visible scoby in a pot of kimchi.
Okay. Yeah, and I've never made either. I haven't made kombucha either, but I do love a good kombucha.
Yeah, I'm not a super fan, but I've enjoyed it when I've had it.
All Right, They continue here getting into movies and says it's fitting that the Warriors made it into rewind since my recommendation is basically the Warriors we have at home. Home is Italy. I present to you nineteen ninety the Bronx Warriors. My pitch to you is just this scene.
Okay, So I went and looked up the scene. It begins with a guy sitting at a drum kit playing a drum solo in an empty parking lot by the water somewhere in New York. There is a dead body impaled on a stake by the water. Then about ten thousand motorcycles rolled in, and you got all your different biker varieties. You got some leather bikers with Ramon's haircuts.
You got some Nazi bikers, you got some just weird kind of classic tattoo bikers, some hair metal bikers in there also, and then one guy who looks like Steve Earl, not Steve Earl in nineteen eighty whatever, Steve Earl now.
And then a bunch of dudes.
In hilarious suits haul up in classic cars. They're wearing kind of I don't know what you call this, like a cross between kind of seventies Italian style suits and then nineteen twenties or thirties gangster suits.
Yeah. Yeah, they could decide if they're going for classic gangsters or like seventies pimps. And it's some lay and somewhere in between.
Yeah, am I Dillinger or disc And so they have a face off and they're I don't know, they're arguing about something.
I didn't follow the dialogue.
But then what somebody opens up a car and is that Fred Williamson in there right at the end?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I believe he's in this. Yeah.
I only got a quick look, but I think it's him. So I'm interested in this. It is strongly Italian flavored.
Yes, this film's great, So m S T three K fans will recognize it because it was featured on MST three K, But it's pretty great in its own ride. It's directed by Mzog Castellari, who we've talked about in the show before it stars. You want to talk about a green beefcake hunk. Mark Gregory is in this. He's pretty great. I've seen him in some other things as well.
He was in a tremendously bad Adam and Eve movie in which he plays Adam of course nice and then elsewhere in this film, in addition to Fred Williamson, you also have Vic Morrow, and you also have George Eastman once more. So it's a real treat and it has some great actual New York locals. It makes visiting New York City's Roosevelt Island an extra special treat because that's where Give Memory serves, That's where the finale takes place.
Isn't it weird? How many coincidental overlaps there are between the last two emails, like both talked about the topic of galvanic corrosion by sharing experience working in heavy transportation manufacturing, and then both emails turned to a recommendation of an Italian beef Man action movie from the eighties with the recommendation involving the word bronx.
Yeah, we need to keep this in mind the next time there's an effort on the part of our work bosses to be like, we need to figure out who is the listener for stuff to build your mind. Will say, well, let's break it down for you. They make ships or airplanes or composite pieces. They're into food, and they like a very particular sort of nineteen seventies or nineteen eighties Italian.
Film cinema italianissimo. Yeah, all right, Robie, ready to get into some weird house cinema responses. Sure, let's okay, I'm gonna do this. First one from Daniel. This is subject line digital data on tape, and this is in response to the Weird House Cinema episode that I did with JJ about the movie Deer Skin. So Daniel says, greeting's
Joe Robert and in this case also JJ. Posway, I was listening to your Weird House Cinema episode on Deer Skin and really perked up once you went off on a tangent about the digital camcorder using cassette tapes and how quaint. That idea seemed so rob This is a whole tangent we got into in the movie because there's there's a character who is given a camcorder and he is told that it is digital because you can't be digital. Digital is tops, but he has to keep buying these
little tapes to put in it. And we were confused by that, or at least I was so confused by that, because I was like, I thought digital would mean it's like recording to a little card or something, not to a tape. I don't know, but maybe I think that just revealed that I didn't actually understand what digital means when it comes to the idea of like how the information is stored and stuff.
Oh wow, So is it like a straight up cassette tape or is it more like these like weird tapes that you would put into computers to store information on.
Well, I think it's like the latter.
But Daniel's email I think will also help explain, Daniel says. Historically, storing digital information on tape has been quite common, particularly in the European microcomputer market of the nineteen eighties and parts of the nineties, for systems such as the Commodore sixty four and ZX Spectrum. I have no personal experience with these machines, but as I understand it, the data was stored on these tapes as analog audio signals, which
were then interpreted as binary data by the machines. This was a very slow process and also so prone to error, with the tradeoff of it being much cheaper to produce than other formats. DAT or digital audio tape cassettes were also used in the music industry from the mid eighties to two thousands, but unlike the aforementioned microcomputer tapes, these stored innately digital information. Looking into this topic also sent me down quite a rabbit hole on the distinction between
analog versus digital storage. I had always assumed that DAT and also floppy disks and traditional hard drives given their magnetic discs, were considered analog storage, but that was evidently not the case. It all seems to come down to the nuances in how the signals are being read or transmitted, and also factoring in the technical distinction between the concepts of format and medium. Going on a bit of a tangent here myself, but there have been some numerous other
inventive ways of distributing digital information. One of the most fascinating for me was hearing about software being and submitted via radio broadcasting. Thought this was fascinating, Daniel says. As an example, in the nineteen eighties, the Yugoslavian radio show Ventilator two two would broadcast signals for various software that listeners could record on tape, which could then be read by the type of computer it was made for. Best regards, Daniel, WHOA.
I mean that's like a kind of wireless internet before that existed, right, Yeah, you could download software that was coded into a series of I don't know, sounds, beeps and boops. I guess that would code onto the tape that you're recording on and then would be report would be executable.
I'd never heard of that before. That's really interesting, crazy. Yeah, when you get into some of these it's fun when these technology questions come up about things that we see in these films. I remember diving into somewhat bowling scoring technology in that elevator movie that we watched, The Lift.
Oh that's right, Yeah, is that a Dutch elevator movie.
Yeah, yeah, Haunted Elevator.
All right. This next one comes to us from Andrea. It is titled Invitation to Hell. This is not an in self an invitation for us to go to Hell. It is a response to our Weird House Cinema episode on the Wes Craven film, Invitation to Hell. Andrea writes, Hi, Robert and Joe, I've only written to you once before. You won't remember, but rob was deeply skeptical that I once had a cat who could count. But I was prompted to write again by your latest episode of Weird House,
Invitation to Hell. It's true. I do not remember this. I mean, I guess I vaguely remember it now that you mention it. I mean, I don't know. I'm not gonna doubt cats maybe they can count.
But let's hear her out.
Okay, okay, anyway for the counting cats aside, She writes first, regarding the Wizard of Oz's popularity being bolstered by TV. You guys are too young to probably know this, but before cable and DVDs, when I was a little kid in the sixties and seventies, the Wizard of Oz was not the kind of old movie you could catch on your local UHF channel on a random weekend afternoon. It was shown on network TV in primetime, and unless my memory is faulty, only once a year, making it an event.
Lots of people looked forward greatly to their infrequent opportunity to see it. That doesn't explain why someone in the TV industry originally picked the not originally a blockbuster film to be an event, of course, but it explains how it became a movie that everybody knew and a lot
of people loved. This is a great point, and I'm glad that she points it out, because I feel like a lot of the TV movies that I think back on, I think there were cases where I have a strong memory of watching a theatrical film released in primetime as a special event. I want to say that Aliens was given and that treatment at one point with some expanded scenes and all.
Edited for TV.
I guess, yeah, but with added footage like the footage with the gun sentries and so forth. I remember watching that on network television. But still other shows. Still, other movies were movies that were just shown all the time at various times of days, such as the Beast Master movie or Clash of the Titans, or even the movie we're going to be covering on tomorrow's Weird House Cinema Willy Wonk and the Chocolate Factory. I asked my wife. I was like, Hey, I'm going to rewatch this for work.
Do you want to watch it with me? And she's like, no, I watched that a million times when I was a kid because it was just on all the time. So it's good to be reminded that, yes, there are these cases where a theatrical film featured on network television. It
was a big deal event, it was an event. It was appointment television, if you will anyway, She continues and says, but onto my real reason for reaching out, I'm hoping you are one of your Weird House listeners can help me find the source of a made for TV movie scene that has haunted me for half a century. I think I saw it when I was between the ages of nine or eleven, so in the ballpark of seventy
two through seventy four. I am almost certain it was a TV movie rather than say, an episode of Night Gallery or a theatrical film, and I think the plot involved witchcraft or the Devil or both. The scene in question involved a shed or basement with rows of dusty canning jars, except they contained human eyeballs. At the time, my family had a washer in our apartment, but the
clothes dryer was down in the scruffy, unfinished basement. My mom used to make me run down to the basement and put the laundry in and out of the dryer. I also had a grandmother who made pickles and did lots of other canning, so he had rats of dusty canning jars in the basement too. You see where this
is going. For a good year after I saw the scene on TV, every time I had to go down to the scary basement, I walked by the shelves of canning jars with my head cranked firmly in the opposite direction, because to look upon them surely meant that they would contain human body parts. If this rings any bells for the made for TV horrorficionados among weird house cinema listeners, I would love to know what the probably terrible movie was so I could seek it out and watch it again.
Thanks again, guys for all your wonderful content.
Andrea, I don't know off the top of my head what this movie would be, but I would love to help you out Andrea, I feel like we could make this emission and maybe maybe other listeners can chime in, somebody out there, this is ringing a bell for.
You right in.
Yeah, and I love the memories that she shared of the unfinished basement reminds me of two different basements. One was a basement of my aunt's house, and this was the time when my family was living in that house, and you had to go down like these long stairs, wooden stairs, into this unfinished basement where there was still a heap of coal in one corner from that wing.
They used coal, so it was this big coal heap, and then there were various chests and jars and some of the also a lot of camel crickets down there. And then there was at least one jar of water that was open and it had like a drowned camel cricket in it that had like stuff growing around it. Still firmly fixed in my mind. And then then many many years later, when I was in my like in my twenties, I believe I was living in this house in Atlanta that also had an unfinished basement, and that
was where the washer and dryer were. So you'd go down there and you'd have to wash your stuff then transfer over to the dryer, and you would just pray that you wouldn't drop your underwear onto the floor down there, because it was just dust. It was dirt, and there would be no picking it back up again. So there were like different underwears from different people that lived in the house or had previously lived in the house, that were just abandoned down there. And I guess they're still
there because I think this house has not changed. It's one of the few houses in the particular neighborhood that I lived in that has not changed at all.
Oh Man, years ago, Rachel and I lived in the house in Atlanta that had a I mean, the kitchen was basically like held onto the back of the house with staples. It was like literally sagging off. And then underneath that, in an unfinished basement, was where we had to do laundry. And yeah, just like you're saying that the laundry basement was like a set from the Bronx Warriors,
It's just you didn't want to go down there. And there would be funny times where, like, you know, we'd be in the middle of watching a horror movie and Rachel would be like, oh, I need to change the launcher, I need to flip.
Them around there. Can you come down with me?
So, listeners, if you have unfinished basement scenes that you would like to set for us right in, we would legitimately love to experience them as well. But anyway, as far as this movie goes, yeah, I don't know what this could be either. I got excited when you mentioned Night Gallery and I was like, oh, I think there's actually an episode of Nine Galleries titled Eyeballs, and I believe Steven Spielberg directed it. But I don't remember what was in that, and I don't know if there were
ever jars of Eyeball Night Gallery. So yeah, this is the sort of challenge that I'm willing to accept. Okay.
Next message is from Gary, subject line, I watched Invitation to.
Hell on TV in the eighties.
Yes, Gary, says, Hi, there, your episode on Invitation to Hell took me back in the nineteen eighties. In New Zealand, there was a regular slot on Sunday Night TV aptly called the Sunday Night Horrors, when a horror movie would be broadcast, just the right thing to help you with
your anxiety about going back to work the next day. Yeah, Gary says, I used to watch these regularly as a young teenager sitting in the dark being petrified by classics like Poltergeist, Halloween, the Omen American Werewolf in London, and because there are a finite number of big horror movies, the memorable Invitation to Hell, which I think I would
have watched in nineteen eighty five. For some reason, whilst most of these straight to TV horror movies have been erased from my memory, Invitation to Hell has always stuck with me, forever, scarring me into being highly suspicious of any country club like institutions I have encountered since because of the chance that they might be hiding an infernal portal to the underworld. Thanks for the trip down memory lane. Cheers, Gary.
Oh thanks Gary, I really enjoyed hearing that. And I had to look up Sunday Night Horrors and assuming this is the same one, and I'm reading this on stuff dot co dot Nz, there's an article about it, because I was wondering it's like the sounds like there might have been a horror host. Indeed, it seems like there was count Robulus ouppears to have been the host or was one of the hosts. I'm not sure at least maybe they only had one host, but Count Robulus is
definitely in the mix. And this character was seemingly played by a former Prime Minister of New Zealand. All right, that is this is a rabbit hole. I was not prepared to go down. More information is required, but I can't research it in real time as we record an episode.
Yeah, we'll have to bookmark that for later. Okay, Rob, you want to read any more of these weird House messages, take your pick?
All right, let's see. Oh yeah, here's one from Paul Hi Robin Joe. This is my second time writing about weird house cinema. Last time it was regarding Danger Diabolic, which I loved. This time i'm writing with a recommendation. Are you familiar with the Quatermass series made in England in the late fifties. Quartermass two is a dark, serious movie dealing with an alien infiltration with Cold War overtones. I think it would make a fine Weird House episode.
As always, looking forward to your next episode, Paul. Well, Paul, thanks for writing it. I've only seen one Quartermass episode, and that's a quarter Mass and the Pit, which I loved. This was one that I saw on TV I forget what channel, and I was really just enraptured by it on the whole. I think it is really good effects, but you know, effects that are maybe going to not hold up to at the time modern expectations of sci fi movie effects. But the story is so good and
so haunting and just so well executed. And Joe, didn't you have a film from this series kind of bouncing around as a possibility at one point.
Yeah, I've been meaning to look at one called The Quatermass Experiment.
I'll add this is also a series. I used to read this in my head as quarter Mass. Yeah, so if I if I'm mistakenly say quarter Mass now or in the future, that is why.
For some reason I keep getting the quater Mass Experiment. I don't know why I'm mixed up with a different British horror movie called The Earth Dyed Screaming m.
Yeah that is yeah, that's that's not a part of this franchise. But maybe part of the reason is Quater Moss in the Pit was also what fifty million years to Earth?
Oh yeah, okay, maybe yeah, they're all I'm grouping them together in my head for some reason, but I plan to come check them all out at some point. All right, I'm going to do this message from Mike about Weird House, says Dear Robert and Joe. I'm listening to the Weird House Cinema episode about Uninvited, and you were talking about favorite director cameos. You mentioned David Cronenberg. Yeah, one of my favorite directors to get in front of the camera.
Mike says.
A few years ago, I was watching Star Trek Discovery. The later seasons of the show have the crew forced to jump nine hundred or so years into the future, and the version of the Federation there had an intelligence officer named Kovich. As soon as I saw him, I thought he was giving serious Kronenberg vibes until I realized, Hey, that is David Cronenberg. He just basically shows up in several episodes dressed in a normal suit and tie and
seeming very incongruous with everything going on around him. Love the show, Thank you, Mike and Mike Attash is a screenshot where I would say Cronenberg is looking a little bit like, well, what's her name? She's She's a current judge on The Great British bakeoff pro Leath.
I think, yeah, I know the one you're talking about.
Yeah, yeah, this is the Glasses, I think, yeah, yeah.
I had heard about his role in these in the Star Trek series. This is not one of the Star Trek series I've watched, but I was tempted to when when I heard the Cronenberg shows up. Yeah, he occasionally, even fairly recently in recent years, You've seen him show up on a few different things. There's some period drama that my wife was watching and like, Cronenberg just shows up in that as well. There's little acting gigs here and there. I think it just stays busy. All right.
There's another one. This one comes to us from Chris good Day. I recently heard a podcast give a spoiler warning where they sarcastically added in case you need a spoiler warning for a forty year old movie, which I thought was odd. Since you all are very good at giving spoiler warnings, I'm really interested in what you'd have to say about them and how cultures treat them. What are spoilers? What counts as one? Why do some people
care about them more than others? Thanks for doing good work, Best wishes, Chris.
Oh, thanks Chris. That is an interesting idea, like when do spoilers matter and why? What is the logic we use to decide that it's certainly we're inconsistent about it on Weird House, and I think it's just a case to case judgment call. It's like when we're talking about a movie where I feel like the revelations that come in the plot are actually surprising and there is some amount of pleasure in being surprised by them. That's when
I throw in, like a oh, spoiler warning. A lot of the movies we talk about, you have many great things to love, but maybe a lot of the pleasure doesn't come from the the you know, surprising or inventive nature of the plot dynamics.
Yeah, I mean it's it gets a careful line to walk, because on one hand, I think it can be said that pretty much any movie is at its best if you can go in cold. But it's also unrealistic to have that expectation for every film you watch, and in part because stuff is going to be spoiled for you, obviously by promotions for the film, by the cover art for the film, or just people telling you about the film, and on top of that, some spoilers are sometimes necessary
just to get you interested in it. Like you want to see a film more X happens and you're like, yeah, I want to see a film more X happens, and then you look it up, Whereas if you didn't know X was going to happen, you might never have watched that movie to begin with.
I guess another virtue of the fact that more often we cover older movies on Weird House Cinema.
I mean we you know, we don't.
Have a rule against doing newer movies, but more often we cover older movies. That does take some of the spoiler pressure off. I feel like with movies that are a few decades old, I still will give.
A warning, you know, just for people who have never seen them.
If it's like there's a lot there are many great surprises that I want to keep intact and protect, But there's just generally less pressure with older stuff to be careful about it.
I think, yeah. And I also think when it comes to spoilers in general, intention is a big thing. So is are things being spoiled, you know, in a mean spirited way or a careless, reckless way. You know, that's that's one thing. But are spoilers being used to entice you to see something, to get you excited about something, or to prepare you for something that you might not want to see. You know, it's kind of like a
you know, trigger warning or something to that effect. You know, everyone has a different, you know, different different values and expectations along those lines. I used to to work with someone who would religiously spoil everything in a movie, like read full spoilers before she watched a film, because she didn't want to be surprised by anything, you know, And I get it. It's not not what I tend to do.
But you know, sometimes you know, certainly we we will look into movies before we select them for a weird house, to see if there's anything, you know, in particular, that we don't want to deal with, we don't want to talk about, and so you know, it pays to spoil ourselves a little bit in those cases.
I once had a literature professor, actually an English professor, who told me that he would always read the last chapter of a book first, or always wante the ending first. I don't know if he was telling the truth, but that's what he claimed, and that seemed perverse to me. But yeah, I think his explanation was, you know, he wanted to see the end first, to see to figure out how they're going to get there.
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So again, I'm not endorsing that life style. Yeah, everyone's mileage on this is going to vary, but yeah, I guess the way we tend to do it is, yeah, well, we may spoil a little bit to try and get you excited about it, but we also don't spoil as much as a modern movie trailer, which is generally made by someone who is just trying to make you see that movie at all costs,
even if they have to ruin everything. We don't actually make any money off of you seeing the films that we cover on Weird House Cinema. Our incentive is, if this is the sort of film you'd like to see, we really want you to watch it. Yeah.
I hope we're just making an entertaining, interesting and informative show. And yeah, if any movie we talk about tickles your fancy, we hope you see it.
All Right, we're going to go and close up the mail bag for today, but we'll be back in the not too distant future to cover more listener mails, lister mails that we had in the mail bag for today but didn't get to, or new listener mails that you're
going to send in in the weeks to follow. If you want to talk about current episodes, past episodes, or future episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, the Monster Fact, the artifact on amalyst Dependium, or of course, Weird House Cinema, write in we would love to hear from here.
Here's things as always 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.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.